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Kinda a Big Announcement

joelonsoftware.com

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Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#101

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

bena wrote: post #69
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #11

> Where are the flying cars? Understanding why we don't have flying cars will tell you how the entire world works. It turns out that "progress" has nothing to do with "want", and more to do with need, availability, and timing. > They lack the structure to make the data they contain readily accessed programatically, so step one is miserable screen scraping and data cleanup. That’s where a lot of people give up. > We t…

All of those address the issue from the other side. If I'm aware of the Semantic Web, agree with their conclusions, and wish to do so, I can make my site Semantic. That's true. And if I wanted to publish data and make sure others could access it, I would. It's not required however. And if I want to make my data only accessible through my portal, I have a vested interest in making my site as anti-Semantic as possible.…

That's quite a fatalistic point of view for a non-technical problem. But who cares if scraping is involved? You can still use all the technologies I listed.

Looking at Hash.ai's product roadmap, it looks like they're building a "Splunk for simulations". And probably their big value-add, besides just a flashy tool, is going to be collecting and curating data. But they probably realize how much time and money it takes to constantly curate all that data. So probably what they are doing is building the tools so that individuals can curate their own data, by using a scraping tool, a transform tool, a load tool, etc. And if they want that data to be more useful within their own ecosystem, it would make sense to make all that data semantic, so that data from one customer is composeable for another customer. The more taxonomies and semantic relationships that are built over time would just make the whole dataset more intelligent over time. Enabling customers to build graphs of graphs would turn them into the world's premier crowd-sourced and curated data warehouse, netting them a trillion dollar valuation in 10 years, without ever charging a single person for access, or paying for anything but infrastructure and a couple devs.

Or maybe it's something else, I dunno.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#102

Post by xdennis »

dsjoerg wrote: post #68
arduinomancer wrote: post #53

> some things (like handing a file upload, or centering) that were, shockingly, still just as randomly difficult as they were in VBScript twenty years ago. I don't get why the "centering is hard" trope is still being repeated in 2021. I'm a recent new grad front end dev and have never had issues with this. Hasn't it been years at this point since flex-box became standard?

Google doesn't seem to think it's standard: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=how+to+... Do you accept this as relevant evidence about what is standard? (Or would a different search be better?)

I don't understand why this is downvoted. It doesn't look like top results for "how to center html element" show the flexbox method. My example of "center vertically css" also doesn't show the flexbox method.

The first result recommends the ol' "top:50%; transform:translateY(-50%)". [1]

The second result shows the padding method, the line-height method and the translateY method again. [2]

The third result is a complete guide asking you questions three layers deep about what you want to do and gives you the personalised answer for the scenario. [3]

I gave up afterwards.

But the point is people are still learning old ways of doing it. Should they read a guide to modern CSS? Yes, but we all know searching and clicking on the first result is easier.

[1] https://www.w3schools.com/howto/howto_css_center-vertical.as...

[2] https://www.w3schools.com/css/css_align.asp

[3]: https://css-tricks.com/centering-css-complete-guide/

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#103

Post by necovek »

twic wrote: post #52
necovek wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, Google returning SO answers for something that is exactly not what I am looking for instead of language/library reference documentation as it used to is one the most annoying things for me as a developer today. Though I think that's mostly on Google "optimizing" my queries by dumbing them down. As an example, try looking for "python setattr" in your search engine of choice, and look for python.org docum…

The third hit for me is https://docs.python.org/3/library/functions.html Maybe Googlebot is reading this thread.

Remember that Google is not showing the results the same way to everyone. Maybe others near me are more likely to click on the SO response so I get that one ranked higher, and less likely to click on the reference documentation, so I get targeted the same way.

Maybe if I let Google learn my patterns instead of disabling all the tracking I can, it'd give me better results.

FWIW, I get similar results with DDG, but Google wins hands-down on non-English searches.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#105

Post by WorldMaker »

shadowgovt wrote: post #56
CodeGlitch wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I love about stack overflow is that you don't just get the answer to your question (usually) but the top rated answers also include the "whys". Meaning you get to expand your understanding of the domain in question. People who write stack overflow answers really are the unsung heroes of the open source world.

This highlights something I believe to be a deeper truth about programming in general: the whys matter, sometimes more than the hows. So much of programming is patterns that exist for extremely arbitrary reasons (note: not acausal reasons, just reasons that are unimportant to the immediate problem domain one is trying to solve, or perhaps important in a way one doesn't yet know). Knowing those reasons can give you so…

> This isn't a problem Apple's software stack saw so often

Apple had the exact same component object model problems which is why it took the long way around discovering exactly the right way to deal with it and eventually gave up and bought NeXTStep. Objective-C exists in large parts to solve the same problems that COM does! It also has a reference counting component memory model and a component message model designed to handle compiler name-mangling issues.

> closed-source binary blobs that could expose objects

Component systems aren't just for closed source, though. They are also for deployment management and trying to solve problems where multiple apps from different teams need to interact and trying to avoid strong coupling to allow better flexibility/resiliency.

Even in Open Source there have been plenty of COM-like projects. Gnome 2 built a lot of early things on Bonobo which was pretty directly a COM clone. Since then things have migrated to D-Bus, and while D-Bus is not a COM clone in the way that Bonobo was, it is still there to solve a lot of the same coupling problems so that individual apps can communicate without directly depending on one another. D-Bus just takes more of a publish/subscribe approach than an object model for components that more directly communicate.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#106

Post by jmspring »

"They lack the structure to make the data they contain readily accessed programatically, so step one is miserable screen scraping and data cleanup. That’s where a lot of people give up."

I've been contemplating the idea of curated data and data provenance. Some data sources are easy to use but some as mentioned need clean up and thus you run into the question of original source vs. "cleaned up".

Curated data where the original source is linked, any tools/scripts used to clean it up (harder when manual intervention is needed), are also included. Maybe even a pipeline setup where original + tools = cleaned outcome is a thought.

It's a pipe dream and many data sources are still too unstructured for such automation.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#107

Post by omaranto »

philovivero wrote: post #40
exhilaration wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting, I'm on Hacker News almost every day and have benefited enormously from Stack Overflow yet I have no idea what you're talking about or who Monica Cellio is. My guess is that the vast majority of their users haven't either. I only mention this because seemingly major events in online communities don't always have the impact that people involved or following closely think they do.

Yep. Same. Read HN at least 2-3x/wk and use Stack Overflow and a bunch of their related sub-sites about the same frequency. No clue who this is or what the event is referring to. (Nor do I want to gain any clue)

> (Nor do I want to gain any clue)

OK! Duly noted.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#108

Post by soulofmischief »

svachalek wrote: post #67
arduinomancer wrote: post #53

> some things (like handing a file upload, or centering) that were, shockingly, still just as randomly difficult as they were in VBScript twenty years ago. I don't get why the "centering is hard" trope is still being repeated in 2021. I'm a recent new grad front end dev and have never had issues with this. Hasn't it been years at this point since flex-box became standard?

Standard? I'd be happy if 10% of my interview candidates could do a flex layout.

Hiring? :)

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#109

Post by a1369209993 »

jamesmontalvo3 wrote: post #66
a1369209993 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is a perfect match on a SO question, but then the answer is "Actually, you don't want to do that thing you asked about, here is a different solution for your specific scenario". That describes seemingly every Stack Overflow question I've found in the past four years. SO is basically useless for anything advanced enough to need SO.

Perhaps there’s a point at which you become advanced enough to not need SO. I’m certainly not there after a decade of software development. Do I have to dig a bit sometimes and go beyond the first few results on google? Sure. And if that doesn’t work I submit a question. I normally get an answer fairly quickly.

> Perhaps there's a point at which you become advanced enough to not need [something like] SO.

Not really, no, which is why it's so infuriating when people ruin it with "How do I do X?" "You aren't supposed to do X, here let me tell you how to Y instead.". The HTML/regex Zalgo rant at least had some style, even if it was utterly useless at answering the question.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#110

Post by Spooky23 »

neogodless wrote: post #25
tdeck wrote: post #13

> almost anyone I talk to is too young to imagine The Days Before Stack Overflow, when the bookstore had an entire wall of Java and the way you picked a Rich Text Editor was going to Barnes and Noble and browsing through printed books for an hour, in the Rich Text Editor Component shelf. I remember the "Days Before Stack Overflow" and Joel is giving himself a bit too much credit here. Before SO, when I googled a prob…

The contrast from bookstore to single site Q&A is exaggerated, but I was around before Stack Overflow. The problem was not just that there wasn't a single (popular, highly active) site, and not just that you had to sift through search results. It's that if you didn't find your answer, you didn't know for sure where to post your problem, and actually expect to get answers. You might post it on a personal blog or forum…

Google was a miracle in 2001. By 2008, ExpertSexChange and others had SEOd the blogs and phpBBs off the first page.
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