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

See what Hacker News looked like on the day you joined

bemmu.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 105 posts

Re: See what Hacker News looked like on the day you joined

#81

Post by jdavis703 »

dilap wrote: post #71
jimmaswell wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use long variable names all the time and it's never actually made the code harder to follow. You generally parse a whole word as a shape rather than one letter at a time anyway once you know the word, so effectively the only difference is a bit more horizontal space. If someone grew up using whole words as variables in math I doubt they'd find single characters easier to work with. For programming, using characters…

I'll just say this definitely doesn't agree with my experience, though it's certainly the kind of thing that might differ from person to person, brain to brain. Here's one thought experiment: imagine variables get longer and longer and longer. Clearly, at some point, they become so long that they're much more unwieldy to work with. Now it's just a question of, as they get shorter, when do the gains start to become in…

In the kinds of jobs I've gotten, I spend more time reading code than writing code. As such long variable names are very helpful as I have less information I need to commit into my mental working memory.

Re: See what Hacker News looked like on the day you joined

#82

Post by thomasmarcelis »

vorg wrote: post #76
jimmaswell wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use long variable names all the time and it's never actually made the code harder to follow. You generally parse a whole word as a shape rather than one letter at a time anyway once you know the word, so effectively the only difference is a bit more horizontal space. If someone grew up using whole words as variables in math I doubt they'd find single characters easier to work with. For programming, using characters…

I doubt anyone can really parse grails.plugin.searchable.internal.compass.mapping.SearchableGrailsDomainClassCompassClassMapperFactory [1] as a shape. [1] https://github.com/gpc/searchable/blob/master/src/java/grail...

It does say a lot about what it is

Re: See what Hacker News looked like on the day you joined

#84

Post by dilap »

jdavis703 wrote: post #81
dilap wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll just say this definitely doesn't agree with my experience, though it's certainly the kind of thing that might differ from person to person, brain to brain. Here's one thought experiment: imagine variables get longer and longer and longer. Clearly, at some point, they become so long that they're much more unwieldy to work with. Now it's just a question of, as they get shorter, when do the gains start to become in…

In the kinds of jobs I've gotten, I spend more time reading code than writing code. As such long variable names are very helpful as I have less information I need to commit into my mental working memory.

It's definitely a trade-off, that's why the idea of ideographic variables is so interesting.

Re: See what Hacker News looked like on the day you joined

#85

Post by cookiecaper »

hga wrote: post #34

I joined 8 years ago, and the topic selection is not markedly different in nature, which I find remarkable. Then again, there's a reason I'm still here and not e.g. Slashdot, which I started following even earlier.

Yeah, same here. Except for a couple of stories, the front page from when I joined in 2008 easily could've been the front page today.

Re: See what Hacker News looked like on the day you joined

#86

Post by kevinbowman »

kevinbowman wrote: post #54
tomkwok wrote: post #5

View page source. $(function () { var 火 = new Firebase("https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/"); var ໆ = "http://news.ycombinator.com/"; $("#誤").hide(); $("form").submit(function () { 火.child("v0/user/" + $("#username").val()).on("value", function(結果) { var 人 = 結果.val(); if (人 && 人.created) { var 時 = new Date(人.created * 1e3); var YYYYMMDDhhmmss = 時.toISOString().slice(0,19).replace(/[-T:]/g,""); var ꜛ = "https://web.a…

Heh, that's cool :) However, it makes my Firefox crash about a second after the page loads :( I feel a bug report coming on, after checking the latest nightly build...

Latest nightly doesn't show the problem. Go firefox!

Re: See what Hacker News looked like on the day you joined

#88

Post by McElroy »

jdavis703 wrote: post #81
dilap wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll just say this definitely doesn't agree with my experience, though it's certainly the kind of thing that might differ from person to person, brain to brain. Here's one thought experiment: imagine variables get longer and longer and longer. Clearly, at some point, they become so long that they're much more unwieldy to work with. Now it's just a question of, as they get shorter, when do the gains start to become in…

In the kinds of jobs I've gotten, I spend more time reading code than writing code. As such long variable names are very helpful as I have less information I need to commit into my mental working memory.

Even when reading code you wrote yourself, long variable names can be immensely helpful.

I was working on some code today which I wrote a couple of months ago and came across some fields in a struct I had made, two of the fields were named like something_d_foo and something_d_bar (with something, foo and bar being strings which I've replaced in this comment). These names describe a relationship of something to foo and bar. When I read the name I had given it, I thought these were the somethings DISCONNECTED from their foos and bars but a comment I had written beside each of them informed me that they were the DEFAULT somethings of the foos and bars. I promptly renamed the fields as something_default_foo and something_default_bar.

Re: See what Hacker News looked like on the day you joined

#89

Post by icelancer »

vidarh wrote: post #74
DonQuixote1000 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My bet is independently. Spanish also has the same expression and I bet lots of other languages do too.

The Spanish and English dual meaning both comes from latin, so the similarity in other languages with influence from latin does not provide any evidence in support of this idea developing independently (nor does it provide evidence against it). Looking up the Chinese etymology seems to imply both the Latin and Chinese probably came to have the dual use for the same reason (agriculture leading to equating labour with…

Large crop yields = good thing. Seems like a reasonable connection.

Re: See what Hacker News looked like on the day you joined

#90

Post by jzelinskie »

jrockway wrote: post #64

8 years! It was still called "Startup News" back then. The front page when I joined looks very much like it does today -- a few articles about Google (6!), some startup-y articles, some politics, some business-y articles, some pure programming articles, etc. A good mix, but things are still pretty good today. I remember exactly why I joined, incidentally. With increasing regularity, /r/programming was making me very…

What anime community do you use now? r/anime was always terrible. I've "outgrown" 4chan, but /a/ is still the best community I know of. I mostly just do my own thing and talk to my few friends who also watch.
Post reply on HN