Monospace fonts slow you down. https://x.com/efortis/status/1501988964198191113
I’d say this is more of an argument against camelCase (which does indeed suck in terms of legibility, especially compared to the much_more_readable_snake_case).
Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?
31–40 of 100 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?
#32Software as a team sport usually produces both poor software and a poor team experience.
Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?
#33Clouds are a scam and are designed for: - fools who can't do simple math or read fine print ("have no idea how much 20 $2 per hour instances pumping data at 10 mbit/second add up in a month, and OMG that data is not free when i already pay for the instance?!". And besides they give me a whopping $100,000 credit - that will last eternity!") - corporate tricksters ("if we don't invest into our hardware and buy AWS inst…
Doubt anyone would disagree on that, except those who are very new to the industry.
Just like banks, insurances companies and sorts are pure scam, but that's totally different topic.
Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?
#34Monospace fonts slow you down. https://x.com/efortis/status/1501988964198191113
I’d say this is more of an argument against camelCase (which does indeed suck in terms of legibility, especially compared to the much_more_readable_snake_case).
That font in particular yes, but proportional fonts are faster to read.
I think anyone can notice it if they try. BTW, there is a study suggesting we start reading noticing the shape of the word envelope. If that's the case, that could be one reason
Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?
#35We could have kept social rules outside of the CPU and made sure the machines were unintelligible.
We should have kept the machines blind and retained social control between people and families.
Once we allowed machine code to be intelligible, we poured control of services, governments and speech into machines.
Truly free speech in a CPU became synonymous with the concept of a virus. And real free speech has followed, programmed rules on an electronic device are socially silencing people.
The concept of a virus, outlawed one of the best uses computers could have provided, maintaining speech globally.
Now we are racing to the bottom, to put the rules of society into a machine. Then lock society out of the machine, with a few holding all the keys to the computing kingdom.
Slavery to machines, as enjoyable as it is, will eventually become nonsensical.
As power becomes centralized, all the new moves will be made by those outside the system.
So I think that CPUs should be running unintelligible code, and LLMs are a baby step towards that.
Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?
#36Heh. This thread is like an invitation to get downvoted. I'll bite: Using const for all variables in JavaScript is moronic. It's a trend that should have been killed with prejudice in the crib. If you want type safety, use another language. Use let for variables and const for actual constants. Words have meanings. The const statement wasn't created so developers could litter their code with it to show how cool they a…
This is a highly bizarre take. Do you also object to text types being referred to as strings when they're not actually rope? Because if it's the misleading naming convention, then you have to be consistent in your argument.
Constants are a way to give magic numbers a meaningful name, and at the same time guarantee some minimal form of type safety by instructing the compiler/VM/Linter that they're not allowed to be mutated.
Also, I don't think I've seen any JavaScript tutorial teach anyone to use var for YEARS, it's really just let and const.
Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?
#37I have two, at least. 1. Personal names are not generic strings, any more than Dates are numbers or Money is a floating point value. Name, as in a person's given and family name, or whatever, should be a type in every standard library, with behaviors appropriate for the semantics of a Name, language, and country. Yes there are lots of conflicting international differences. We've managed to handle languages and calend…
I love that first point and I wish it was something that was applied even further to other pieces of data - integers and floats are intended for mathematical operations and so to make database row identifiers integers always seemed strange to me.
Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?
#38Software as a team sport usually produces both poor software and a poor team experience.
I'd say this is mostly due to the fact that building software in many companies is largely a social activity, and there's an interesting intersection of personalities and motivation that ultimately disincentivizes building good quality software
Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?
#39We could have kept social rules outside of the CPU and made sure the machines were unintelligible. We should have kept the machines blind and retained social control between people and families. Once we allowed machine code to be intelligible, we poured control of services, governments and speech into machines. Truly free speech in a CPU became synonymous with the concept of a virus. And real free speech has followed…
I see the consistency in your thoughts. I disagree as to the root cause, and thus the course of action required to correct the situation.
You can take $5 out of a wallet, and buy something, and not risk the rest of your cash, or your other assets.
You can't do that with a computer. You can't tell a program to only run a program for X purpose, or X seconds, etc... because the Operating System has a gaping hole in its design. All of them share that hole.
Thus we can't just run our own web sites, nobody wants to risk their unsafe computers going to them.
Thus we're forced into walled gardens.
Thus we lose the war for general purpose computing, and democracy.
We need to take back control of our computers.
Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?
#40I'd almost always rather build something than use a 3rd party service. I understand it, I run it, and I don't have to deal with 3rd party's changes, performance problems, or downtime. Also, less bugs related to data consistency.
Is this really an unpopular opinion? I would think most developers would rather develop a solution themselves than rely on a third party library or solution. The problem is speed and cost will never be in favor of a homegrown solution.
In some smaller startups I've been in, they seem allergic to building anything they can just buy and call via an api despite the problems that might cause - it's another level of tech debt imo.