It's the association. Things vary in value to us depending the brand it portrays. This is why people pay $150 for Nike shoes despite them being made by the same kids in the same sweatshop as the $10 Primark runners.
It's also why initiatives like ReiserFS died after its creator turned out to be a murderer.
As humans we're always looking for things that align with our values and "tribe". Maybe it shouldn't be that way and we should judge each product purely on its merits but for most of us it's just how we are.
People still use Eric Gill's fonts (sexually abused his kids), they put on plays by Oscar Wilde (who was definitely a sex tourist and the descriptions in letters makes it fairly clear the boys were underage), several murderers are admired for their works: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20170517-can-you-separat...
I would not want to work with this guy, but using his code is not the same. I suspect if ReiserFs had been more successful it would have been forked rather than died after the murder conviction.
THis guy also sounds like he has severe mental health problems or is trolling: "I am physically the most disgusting form of existence that ever lived, I am so ugly people vomit when they merely see me. I can't even buy a prostitute no matter how much I would pay."
Yeah I really doubt the "can't get a prostitute" thing. And I really would recommend him to get one tbh. Not having had sex well into your 20s takes a toll on most guys' confidence and becomes something you look up to too much. Just doing it that way takes the pressure off and make you realise it's not the huge thing you thought it was. Been there and done that :)
IMO there's nothing bad about seeing one. People make sex out to be a bigger thing than it is. Most of the sex workers I know also enjoy the work.
Reading a bit their LRS wiki made me think that it's another case of a perhaps very good programmer but with some kind of mental disorder, which certainly modify how I would approach their software (trustworthiness, long term evolution and support...).
Not only that, but also hating on memory safety (for no reason at all) is just dumb. Most of his software is just simple projects, except maybe this, it's definitely not something I'd use in my day to day life.
My opinion on him is the same as my opinion on Terry Davis (if he would contribute to Linux (or other FOSS projects, instead of making his own useless TempleOS), he would leave a way better legacy)
I agree with your sentiment - and I apologize, I've since revised my comment.
Hating on memory safety as a concept is pretty cognitively dissonant for a programmer (and in this case [& many others], cognitive dissonance is a sign of some underlying mental illness). Memory safety is something a programmer should strive to achieve 100%.
Not only that, but static typing is absolutely unrelated to memory safety. (How can you even compare these two concepts???)
Depends on the use case, while you care about it when writing software for use on modern systems, low level programming on something where you can have unrestricted access to, for example, all of its 1024 bytes of address space at once can be fun too
But of course appreciating this doesn't equal "hating memory safety"
He's conflating memory safety with languages that provide memory safety (by which I think he means Rust, as that's another thing listed in his "disliked" things list) - that's what I feel is the dumbest about this. For me, this seems like the most of his code is riddled with use-after-free, double-free, not freeing etc. bugs. He may be intelligent, but if his intelligence goes to no use (besides making random C side projects..), it is not worth it. Also he claims he was a member of Mensa, no comment on that one.
Can someone tell me what’s going on here? This very post including the comments appeared on HN two days as well. I thought I was getting crazy but Google confirms.
If a post doesn't get much attention, there's a small chance of it getting a boost a few days later. If this happens, the timestamps are all adjusted to make it look like it was just posted.
The remark about reflection for the Go implementation surprised me. I always treated the generated code as a black box, but occasionally saw their diffs, and assumed the byte blobs to be for clever generated marshalling. If not, what are they used for?
They are the protobuf descriptors, which is basically the protobuf encoded version of the protobuf files. They can be optional and many plugins have options to exclude that part from the generated code. Generally, they're useful for the Server Reflection feature of gRPC and it's used for runtime reflection.
Since rsc frequents HN: I’d like to thank you for all the work you’ve put into this great language. Peak HN hype cycle I decided to pick up Go and never regretted it. Thank you.
Ah, I remember 2017’s HN where the mere word “Go” in the title made posts skyrocket to 498 points. In 2024 the title should’ve contained “Rust” for the same outcome. Quite curious what will be required in 2031.
This briefly mentions something I’ve seen during work and never dared to explore: the various public (RDS) snapshots. Oh boy, some people either use very realistic test datasets or they accidentally made things public that shouldn’t be at all.
I can't think of any use case where one would want an rds snapshot (and many other AWS resources) to be public. Why offering that possibility in the first place?
Note that this is not necessarily a great thing to overuse. Also note that the article is 10 years old.
Relying on such upgrades sort of introduces a dark and fuzzy part of the API. Go’s http pkg is a notorious one, with how a http.ResponseWriter can also be a Flusher and Hijacker and I don’t know what else. If you in your middleware want to wrap it, you need to implement those interfaces as well, or the functionality is lost. But they’re not part of the “visible” API, they’re type assertions buried deep in the standard library, good luck with that. For this reason Go 1.20 introduced the http.ResponseController.
For functionality like that[1] I would have expected them to fallback to `bufio.Peek` if the `fs.File` is not an `io.Seeker`. Sure, it's a bit slower, but it would just work. If someone implements custom `fs.File`, then it's up to them implementing any additional interface that allows better performance.
It's the same idea as `io.Copy` trying to use first `io.WriterTo` or `io.ReaderFrom` if implemented, and then falling back to a manual copy.
The thought process should be: First try to ask for an interface that has all methods you require (that's like the whole point of an interface). If you can't do that, then try to work with the methods you have, and then mention that performance can be improved if additional interfaces are implemented. Only if when you can't do that, you fail with a runtime error complaining about missing methods you didn't ask for in the interface signature.
I might be missing some reason that prevents them from using `bufio.Peek` though.
If you never encountered this you never created your own ResponseWriter, or you did it and inadvertently broke its Flushing, Pushing and Hijacking capabilities. It’s not more complicated than this.
As a Dutchman the endless list of apparent “Dutch” things never ceases to surprise me. Uncles, courage, ovens, double, going, etc., and a new one to my list: rolls. And none of them means any good.
Actually, a lot of these pejoratives are from the 19th century. By the 17th century, the word "Dutch" had begun to solidify its meaning around the Netherlands.
This mainly stems from a time when tensions between the British and Dutch were at their peak, due to competition.
As a new resident, I also find it surprising! It's a shame that most of the substitutions seem to be negative however. Lots of really great stuff and people in NL <3
Why is that important? The guy surely has controversial opinions but you’re not supporting them by importing his rasteriser, is it?
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