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I don't understand why anyone would want to publish anything, but perhaps that's because I don't need a "reputation".

I also don't understand why anyone would ever want to get a PhD, which is just a manner of exchanging almost free labor for a nearly worthless piece of paper. It's like a participation trophy at this point for people that are not homo economici.


> I don't understand why anyone would want to publish anything

Why do research if you don't publish it? It's like running a farm and letting the food rot in the fields every year, nobody eating it. The value of knowledge is sharing it with others.

In a history of technology and science I read, the author pointed out that likely there have been many discoveries that, because they weren't shared outside the village, are lost to time (including because of a lack of widespread literacy). You might add the arts to that - how many great stories were lost?


I am doing a PhD (by publication, self-funded) because I want to improve how we are decarbonising home heating in the UK, and one target audience is academics, and those papers also support communications with policy makers and industry. As I have made clear to my supervisors the PhD would be a nice bauble side-effect of this climate fixing work.


links2 is still a work horse in 2025 for occasional debugging.


I know of links and have used it, but I don't think I've ever used links2.

Am I correct to assume that links2 is more of the same/better?

(Also: Your comment seems perfectly sane, but it was already marked as "flagged" by the time I saw it 18 minutes after it was submitted. I vouched for it.

But I wonder: Whose ruffles did you panty in order for your comments to land this way?)


> Am I correct to assume that links2 is more of the same/better?

Most distributions install links2 as links.

> But I wonder: Whose ruffles did you panty in order for your comments to land this way?)

I don't know, but most people on voting based forums don't like what I have to say, even though I am almost always right. For example, when I say that Linux is an operating system using a software development methodology from the 1970s, that hurts some people's feelings. Similarly, when I say that I use Linux, because I am poor (read: not a decabillionaire), not because it's good (Mac/Windows are obviously even worse), that just rubs people the wrong way. So, ultimately, it's because most people are political and stupid in nature.

I think almost everything sucks relative to my standards, which is only natural, because I am engineer and I only exist to fix broken shit.


Naw you'll have to email dang and ask him they have a auto system, I got auto shadow banned once and had to email them, they said I didn't do anything wrong and then restored all my comments. I went like 3 months thinking nobody liked my comments enough to give me an up point. Worth reaching out about their auto mod is sensitive


FOMO is the only reason people attend conferences, which is why I visited a few to figure out whether I was missing out on anything.

Speaking at a conference? Same story. You do it, because it's for "personal development", until it's pointless.

Conferences have n00bs and PMs, not the experts, because they don't need to learn anything anymore.


> Conferences have n00bs and PMs, not the experts, because they don't need to learn anything anymore.

The real experts never stop learning.

Some of them go to conferences because that's one of the few times in the year they can hang out with each other, and find out what their community is up to.


actually, the primary reason to go to conferences is networking. meeting people, make connections. you go to talks that interest you so you can meet people that share your interest.

same for giving presentations. you give presentations to promote an idea or work, to share something you have learned, to contribute to the community, and again, for networking.

fomo? not at all. personal development? that's a bonus, but not the motivation.


You can solve the versioning problem on your GitHub page by using Nix.


Delimited continuations as a programming construct were somewhat of interest when I learned about them, but not even my university discussed them.

I don't think I ever had a colleague that even ever heard of the concept, let alone applied it. Of the "smart people", they typically only have heard of plain continuations, if you are lucky.

The debugger in Racket was useful when I used it years ago.

Unfortunately, it's kind of difficult to beat an entire planet cranking out libraries in other languages as many interesting programs are written for an ecosystem; if 90% of your project is building FFIs to make something work, perhaps you can better just choose the language of fools dun jour.

I don't think Scheme is the most academic language, today. Such honor would go to a language supporting a computable version of homotopy types, which I would guess only 1000 people in the world would be capable of using assuming production grade implementations (of which none exist).


> I don't think I ever had a colleague that even ever heard of the concept, let alone applied it. Of the "smart people", they typically only have heard of plain continuations, if you are lucky.

I have a similar picture so far in my work experience. Basically, none of my coworkers ever touched a lispy language. If I said words like "continuation", "environment of a closure", "continuation-passing style" or "macros and metaprogramming", I would get blank stares. Or if I complained about that lambdas in Python are stunted things, they would not understand, because they were only familiar with mainstream OOP and every noun a class paradigm and wouldn't get the ideas where to use lambdas or even inner/nested functions.

This kind of stuff is definitely not part of the usual CS curriculum at universities here (Germany). And of course even more pure fantasy to imagine that to be taught in any boot camps or other higher schools than universities.

Well, maybe some day I will work with people, who have this knowledge, and maaaaybe together we can make something happen employing the ideas and such a language, that implements these concepts well. Or even just work with people, who know FP and have explored building things with it, like I did.


Delimited continuations are quite similar to effect systems that seem to be getting a lot of interest lately. So who knows, maybe they will become more mainstream in the future.


back in the day when we wrote enterprise bullshit in common lisp (!), we had put together a proof of concept where we used delimited continuations to write business processes.

business processes were written in basically full common lisp with very few limitations, and with a few extra primitives to use (and 10x slower due to being interpreted, but that didn't matter at all). when a process reached a point where it was waiting for some external event (e.g. displaying a GUI for a user and waiting for their feedback, or sleeping until a deadline), then it got serialized into the (SQL) database.

it was pretty cool! when a user logged in, there was a list of processes waiting for him that he could click to see and interact with. all this with the transactional guarantees of the sql backend because the business objects were also stored in the same database.

https://github.com/hu-dwim/hu.dwim.delico was the continuation lib, hu.dwim.perec was the object relational mapper, and hu.dwim.serializer was used to turn CL objects into SQL blobs (with some properties extracted as reified SQL schema elements to be able to search for the suspended processes).


The only goal of such ridiculous standards is to act as a form of vendor lock-in for vendors implementing those standards; the vendors get to say to governments that it is a standard and the sellers of the standards also get some money.

Any system designed picking such standards is basically betraying their client.

I think, if you want to annoy these people maximally, you should write an annotated version of the standard in a mathematical formal language.

I read the table constraints, which try to do something simple, but it's written in the most convoluted way possible.

I think I considered ASN.1 for a system once, but rejected it because of more modern technically superior system.

If the parser for something like ASN.1 doesn't fit in 80 lines of Haskell, perhaps you just shouldn't use it.

I don't know who these assholes are that say "Sure, let's make things slow and buggy, since we all hail Satan after all".


Either it wasn't a design goal or they are stupid. Why don't you tell us?

The right way this would work is via a systemd service and then it should be instant.


Now, add inotify and a systemd user service and you would be getting somewhere. Also packaged versions of that exist already.

So, you created a square wheel, instead of a NASA wheel.


Someone else's environment? That should never happen. You should get your own user account and that's it.


Sometimes we need to use service accounts, so while you do have your own account all the interesting things happen in svc_foo which you cannot add your .files.


I don’t even get an account on someone else’s server. There’s no need for me to log in anywhere unless it’s an exceptional situation.


This doesn't make sense.

You said you were already using someone else's environment.

You can't later say that you don't.

Whether or not shell access makes sense depends on what you are doing, but a well written application server running in a cloud environment doesn't need any remote shell account.

It's just that approximately zero typical monolithic web applications meet that level of quality and given that 90% of "developers" are clueless, often they can convince management that being stupid is OK.


They do get to work on someone else's server, they do not get a separate account on that server. There client would be not happy to have them mess around with the environment.


By definition, it the client Alice gives contractor Mallory access to user account alice, that's worse than giving them an account called mallory.

Accounts are basically free. Not having accounts; that's expensive.


They specifically mentioned service accounts. If they’re given an user account to login as, they still might have to get into and use the service account, and its environment, from there. If the whole purpose was to get into the service account, and the service account is already setup for remote debug, then the client might prefer to skip the creation of the practically useless user account.


That's still not professional, but then again 99.9% of companies aren't.


Could you help me understand what assumptions about the access method you have in place that make this seem unprofessional?

Let's assume they need access to the full service account environment for the work, which means they need to login or run commands as the service account.

This is a bit outside my domain, so this is a genuine question. I've worked on single user and embedded systems where this isn't possible, so I find the "unprofessional" statement very naive.


Instead of trash, reimplementing rm (to only really delete after some time or depending on resource usage or to shred of you are paranoid if the goal is to really delete something) or using zfs makes much more sense.


I can't imagine a scenario where I would want to reimplement rm just for this.


[flagged]


https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Instead of being rude to a fellow human making an inoffensive remark, you could’ve spent your words being kind and describing the scenario you claim exists. For all you know, maybe they did ask ChatGPT and were unconvinced by the answer.

As a side note, I don’t even understand how your swipe would make sense. If anything, needing ChatGPT is what demonstrates a lack of imagination (having the latter you don’t need the former).


What makes you think I need ChatGPT, since I just wondered whether ChatGPT was as stupid, since obviously I do know why that would be useful?


The idea of changing what 'rm' does sets off all of my "foot-gun" alarm bells


How is this better?


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