Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

But yak shaving is fun (2019)

parksb.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 100 posts

Re: But yak shaving is fun (2019)

#41

Post by chorizo »

thimabi wrote: post #19

I always liked yak shaving, but avoided it because I knew it came with costs and tradeoffs. More recently, with the help of AI, I’ve been doing lots of it, as the costs and tradeoffs have greatly diminished. In fact, I’ve learned that building my own tools and frameworks, when done properly, comes with huge performance benefits and helps me understand the problems I’m trying to solve much more deeply. There has never…

Downside: Code is not mature; can have edge cases, bugs and security issues. Likely limited config options without hardcoding features

Upside: Only the features you actually need. Likely fewer dependencies. You know exactly what your yak looks like under the fur.

Re: But yak shaving is fun (2019)

#42

Post by nosioptar »

yakkomajuri wrote: post #33

I love this. My very own static site generator, Teeny [1], is going on five years now. It's 350 lines of hand-written JS and has powered all my blogs and personal websites for years. It currently powers https://yakko.dev . I added plugins this year which made it really powerful and allows me to keep the core small. [1] https://github.com/yakkomajuri/teeny

Markdown to html was a fun project. I wrote a tool like pandoc, with far fewer features, for school about 10 years ago.

I needed pandoc, but the internet and electricity were both out, so I built my own in a race against my dying ebay laptop battery.

Re: But yak shaving is fun (2019)

#44

Post by pyrolistical »

I’ve been yak shaving the interfaces not the implementation.

I used ai to convert c headers into in nice zig code. Then I link to the library.

It’s cheap to use zig translate-c to convert c headers but the output isn’t nice.

You can give ai c++ source which usually has more documentation than the compromised flat c header. It allows you to do a better zig port. Zig greatly cuts down the noise in c headers as everything needs to have long prefix for namespacing. But in zig we can just nest things properly.

We can introduce intermediate layers to use proper tagged unions and distinguish ?T, *T, [*]T

Re: But yak shaving is fun (2019)

#45

Post by chaoticmass »

When I was in highschool I started writing a game in Qbasic. Along the way, I wanted it to have a console (like Quake) where you could enter commands and modify the game as you were running it. This lead me to create a scripting engine in Qbasic, and long story short, I’ve been on a yak shaving epic quest now for almost 30 years now. No game, but I have a hybrid C / Lua game engine/general purpose application platform. Still tinkering and still no end in sight. I’m having fun though!

Re: But yak shaving is fun (2019)

#46

Post by rzzzt »

zem wrote: post #32

the version I learnt the phrase from had the end of the chain as - oh we should paint it - we need a paintbrush - I hear yak hair makes the best paintbrushes - here I am, shaving a yak made more sense than the examples given in the op

Internet Search Thing now tells me sable (for soft brushes) and hog hair (for wire-like brushes) is the best hair for this purpose. Oxen occasionally show up. Yaks nowhere to be found.

Coincidentally, this is also the first time I'm hearing about sable.

Re: But yak shaving is fun (2019)

#47

Post by argee »

danielrmay wrote: post #16

Yak-shaving-shaming puts limits on the creativity of talented engineers by constraining them to existing patterns and practices or building on top of abstractions, and practically, that results in engineers and teams with less breadth. In an applied software world that's exploded in framework and library complexity in recent years, I think there are always going to be yaks in dire need of a shave.

This is one of the reasons I’ve never liked the aphorism "make it work, make it right, make it fast." By the time you get to the last point, say, having used Electron to build your graphing calculator, it is far too late to magically make it fast, like trying to make a Boeing 787 into a Cessna.

Re: But yak shaving is fun (2019)

#49

Post by Xirdus »

> This blog doesn’t use a static site generator or framework like Jekyll, Hugo, or Gatsby.

I guess that's why the blog name stays on screen and covers the text when I scroll down, with fully transparent background so it doesn't even cover the article text, it blends with it which distracts my eyes a little too much. If it was any other blog post I'd be certain it's a bug, but here I'm not sure if it isn't intentional, and one of those customization a ready-made software wouldn't let them do.

Re: But yak shaving is fun (2019)

#50

Post by keybored »

dan_sbl wrote: post #5

This feels like what is really splitting the programming community right now- those that have typically enjoyed the journey, and those that just want to be at the destination as soon as possible.

Speaking of things that I don’t buy. Metaphorically yesterday this site would gatekeep over enjoying the process of coding itself. People who merely programmed for a 200KUSD paycheck, pphew, disgusting.

Made a post about how you learned to touch type? Or improved something keyboard-related? “I don’t think that typing code was ever the bottlenck”.[1] Now we’re supposed to be grateful for non-deterministic code completion, ah it saves us millions of keystrokes a year.

Some will cry Goomba Fallacy. Yeah of course. Could be that many lurker accounts started posting more, displacing the gatekeeper typist hackers. Now it’s all of a sudden an even split. Huh.

The OP was not about AI. But thankfully there was a top-level meta comment to drag us down into that pit.

[1] The non sequitur of it all is a separate topic

Post reply on HN