lysdexic @ lysdexic @programming.dev

Posts

65

Comments

357

Joined

2 yr. ago

Are you going to post links to all Wikipedia articles here?

What problem do you have with Wikipedia?

I found that it was worth sharing this list of IP protocols because more often than not developers are only faced with two of them, TCP and UDP, but there are over a hundred of IP protocols, most of which are never discussed or see the light of day. One I find particularly interesting is UDP-lite.

Ergonomic keyboards are not a result of “the size of the keyboard”, but the shape.

I apologize for the mistake. Even though I referred to size, what I had in mind was geometry/layout.

Without any real studies on it mentioned so far you’re relying on gut feeling and logic here.

Are there actually any studies suggesting that ergonomic keyboards prevent RSI? As far as I could gather, there's a correlation between higher RSI incidence and keyboard usage, but nothing suggests ergonomic keyboards lead to a lower incidence of RSI.

Wouldn’t wrist position be considered part of your overall posture?

There are far more factors determining wrist position than the size of the keyboard, and only a very small fraction of all keyboard users end up developing any form of issue.

Moreover, I'd wager that the number of people enduring bad laptop keyboards greatly outnumber those developing any kind of RSI issue, let alone those who feel strongly enough to buy ergonomic keyboards.

It would be interesting to see how many ergonomic keyboards end up being snakeoil preying on people with more disposable money than good judgement.

Upgrading a major C++ compiler version was never free in my experience, but even when working in a codebase with ~2M LOC the upgrade (e.g. 14 -> 17) was something that could be prepared in a set of feature branches by one person over the span of one, maybe two weeks.

That greatly depends on your project, what dependencies it has, and what's involved in the migration. For example, I recall a previous project I worked on that experienced a considerable amount of non-trivial issues when upgrading to C++14 due to unforeseeable curve balls. One of them was caused by a third-party dependency toggling constexpr versions of its member functions only on C++14, which caused a bunch of obscure linker errors as old symbols were no longer available.

Walter Bright has fairly odious political opinions;

I fail to see the relevance of what personal opinions and beliefs he may or may not have. You're making it sound like the goal is not to improve a language ir fix issues, but to take something away from a person just because you disagree with their political opinions. That's hardly good use of anyone's time, and sounds terribly petty behavior.

I wish I had that much free time to be able to waste it being so vindictive about such trifling issues.

Which languages have you invested/migrated to, only to find that “political stunts” had a “negative impact” on your planned development?

I don't waste my time with meaningless irrelevant stuff. Either a tech stack serves it's purpose, or it doesn't. I don't have enough free time to waste it trying to cancel others.

I'm partial for the Royal Kludge RK84 for no particular reason other than it's one of the rare small form factor keyboards that has USB passthrough. It's a godsend if you use a USB security key, and it also helps if you need to plug in additional devices such as a USB headset.

If keychron had any model that supported USB passthrough, I'd update my recommendation.

I’d go with an ergonomic one to avoid pain on the outside of the wrists.

I might be totally wrong, but I firmly believe these ergonomic risk factors are not the root cause of these health problems, and instead they are indirect factors that are correlated with fundamental problems affecting a person's activity.

For example, tennis elbow isn't caused by a particular model of a tennis racket, nor is jumper's knee caused by a shoe model. Interestingly, I stumbled upon a post somewhere in the past that pointed out that Emacs users had a higher incidence of repetitive strain injuries than vi users. One of the most basic treatments of RSI is a combination of working on the patient's overall posture and rest, regardless of keyboard format.

If you're experiencing wrist pain due to keyboard usage, the time you spend typing is a far more important factor than what keyboard model you're using.

From the blog post, it sounds like the underlying motivation is not tied to technical aspects but control over the language. If I had invested any of my personal time onboarding onto D and migrated any of my projects to D, I would be concerned about the negative impact these political stunts have on the tech stack.

I would rarely hear about Dlang in my circles and bubbles.

That's hardly a measure of relevance or technical merit. There's a lot of artificial hype being created around some new projects that have a very tenuous correspondence to their technical merits or problems they actually solve, and social network chatter is hardly a factor in assessing technical merits.

Push notifications that aren’t specifically topically opted into get blocked so fast on my phone. I have no patience for wasting my time earning someone else advertising dollars.

I agree. The article also points out this fact. Quoting the article:

Another challenge is that irrelevant or unwelcomed pushes risk having the user disable notifications, uninstall apps, or start ignoring them due to low usefulness. This results in a permanent loss of a channel for sharing timely, useful information, leading to reduced app usage. Unfortunately, as Twitter found, most recommendation engines take a myopic view, over-optimizing on immediate user responses at the cost of long-term satisfaction.

Personally, this problem is so pervasive that I kind of developed a pavlovian reflex to notification dialogs to cancel all without thinking about it.

I’m not saying this guy’s experience isn’t valid, just that there is something else going on here whether it’s a changing job market that hasn’t caught up with me yet or soft skills or that market or outdated skill set or what.

The blogger described his career path as "After more than a decade of sitting behind a single company's desk, my CV looks bleak." That doesn't sound like someone who was mindful of their career path.

I also don't think the blogger is completely honest or factual with regards to the job interview process. The blogger claims that "Nowadays, you have to pass through several layers of random and arbitrary screening in order to even get invited to the even more grueling in-person interviews." As someone who somewhat recently switched roles, my personal experience is not the same. The bulk of recruiting processes start with a phone screening to verify that you really exist and have basic social skills, but technical screenings follow right after. Some organizations do pride themselves in having close to a dozen interview rounds, but you are expected to prove your worth in each and every single interview round you're pulled into it.

The truth of the matter is that as labor supply is increasing, you have to do more than show up in a meeting to get a job offer. Not having a degree is also a red herring because that's effectively irrelevant for the bulk of the development positions out there.

There's however a critical factor that I feel everyone should have in mind: the bulk of IT services/consultancy recruiters out there might post job ads but they actually have zero positions to fill. The blogger briefly mention those without appearing to connect the dots when they mention "Mr X was very impressed with your skills, however, we don't have any opening for you right now". Odds are they really really do not have a opening, and they just forced you to go through tests and assessments just so that they could add another entry in their database.

And that’s how software development became just another profession.

I don't think that's a healthy way of framing things. Software development was always, from the very start, just another profession. What changed in the last decade or so was a) supply and demand in the job market, b) the quality of the pool of workers searching for jobs. Companies still look for developers, and most still pay handsomely well, but the hiring bar is currently met only by those who are far more experienced and/or paid attention to their career growth. You still see companies hiring people straight out of bootcamps, but they come out of the bootcamp pipeline with proper portfolios and they hit the ground running without requiring that much training or onboarding.

In contrast, the blogger states that "After more than a decade of sitting behind a single company's desk, my CV looks bleak." A decade is a very long time to stay idle by without updating their skills, isn't it?

I saw this phenomenon throughout the past decade in the hiring loops I was involved. In the demand peak I already saw a few developers with over a decade of experience interviewing for senior positions that started their interviews already defeated and broken, complaining that in their last roles they just went with the flow and never bothered to do anything relevant with their career. They claimed they could fit the role and do whatever needed to be done, but the truth of the matter is that that's true for each and every single developer called for a technical review. We needed to have some assurance that we were hiring the best candidate for the job, and these developers with a long experience of "sitting behind a single company's desk" gave us nothing to work with. So why would we hire them over those who could show off something?

There are a few coding conventions and style guides for C#:

• .NET C# Coding Style
• .NET Framework design guidelines
• C# at Google Style Guide

In Java, your objects start lowercase, so if you see uppercase, its a static call.

Not really, that's just the way a specific coding style was specified. You're free to refactor all your projects to follow any other coding style if you really want to, and your programs will continue to work just fine.

my point was that I was able to find answers for everything else before I had to resort to posting a question.

That's not a SO problem per se. Some projects do use SO as their semi-official customer support channel, but in general posting a question on SO is not supposed to be better than posting a question on Reddit: you get what you paid for.

As a rule of thumb, I would say that recursion should never be used in place of a for loop.

If you don't know what you're doing with a recursive function then you risk pushing stuff to your call stack proportionally to the number of items you want to iterate over.

If your collection and/or the size of the stuff you're pushing to the stack is large enough, your app will crash.

If you know enough to avoid growing the call stack then you know enough to not rely on third parties to figure out if you need an iteration of recursion.

I think you're succumbing to the belief that if a solution isn't perfect then it doesn't work. That's not how things work. You can have incremental improvements that replace a big problem with a smaller problem, and a smaller problem is easier to solve.

Also, StackOverflow already suffers from old and stale replies for years, and that's not hurting the site. Oddly enough, that's a problem that's mitigated with the way that data is queried,and that's handled quite well with large language models.

They’ve not been closed as duplicates or anything, just no answers.

This suggests your questions are a factor. Perhaps the topic is too niche? Perhaps the questions are too specialized?

Recently I gave SO a try with a tricky but low-hanging fruit question, and the problem I faced was the exact opposite of yours: I received too many comments and answers. The problem was that 99% of those replying were clearly clueless newbies and seemed to be piling on to try to farm reputation points. Some of them were even not reading the question at all, using a strawmen of sorts to dump the answer they had, and even presenting code snippets that were broken.

I don’t have an account there because of that reputation, and why would I now that I have access to chatgpt?

I think StackOverflow is rolling out a GPT-based service that generates answers to your questions based on SO's data.

You need to train ChatGPT to get it to output decent results. SO seems to be working to do that for you.