> It would be nice if you could provide an example
For me personally the main source of unhappiness is error messages. In C I can say
if (!(f = open(name, "r"))) die(name);
where die is a tiny function that prints name, followed by whatever strerror has to say to the subject, formatted in the usual fashion. One line, done with it. The obvious, conventional Python equivalent is four lines long because both try: and except: insist on a line of their own. Since I cannot tell Python to produce succinct unixy error messages instead of rambling stack traces I have to catch and examine more or less every plausible exception. Some exceptions I can deal with close to the base level of my call stack in a butt-ugly fourty-line catch-all clause but a large proportion of my syscalls end up taking three lines extra each. I know it's a trivial problem, but I agree with pg you tend to get the more productive the more of your actual application logic you can see.
> I do a lot of coding in common lisp
We did experiment with clisp a while back; it turned out not to be a natural fit for problems that involve a lot of pathname, datetime, and stat info manipulation. If there was a reasonably modern Lisp that let me say things like (localtime (nth 9 (stat "/foo"))) I would go looking for it this very afternoon.
> Since I cannot tell Python to produce succinct unixy error messages instead of rambling stack traces
`sys.excepthook` is how you can do that.
Without:
x = {}
def f():
print(x['foo'])
f()
# ...
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "stack.py", line 6, in <module>
f()
File "stack.py", line 4, in f
print(x['foo'])
KeyError: 'foo'
With:
import sys
def short_err(exc_type, exc, tb):
sys.stderr.write("error: tracebacks too long\n")
sys.excepthook=short_err
x = {}
def f():
print(x['foo'])
f()
#...
error: tracebacks too long
So don't worry about catching exceptions if you're just printing errors.
I second that, for what it's worth. Everybody complains about the lack of women in computer science. Every now and then some clumsy dork prances by and runs a batch of softcore porn slides with his Ruby talk so we have someone to use as a scapegoat. Actually, though, it's not really the occasional high-profile fuckup that keeps women out of coding. It's the constant rain of low-profile casual dismissiveness.
I do not join a community that keeps telling me more or less daily people with my chromosomes don't really belong and everything was better when you didn't run into my kind all the time. Even if I knew that very few of them actually dislike me; that even the really boorish ones are mostly just harmless losers trying to hide their insecurity: I just wouldn't feel welcome.
He thinks he is talking about sex, but there are some important point he overlooks. Most people would usually want their button pressed by members of the other sex. Most people naturally close to you (parents, siblings, cousins) would be out of the question as pushers of your button.
Also, over millions and millions of years, certain aspects of hominine reproduction (large heads, long gestation times, preposterously long childhood, staggering maternal mortality) and simple statistics would have conspired to make women very, very picky about when and by whom they want to press their buttons. At the same time they would have conspired to make men want their buttons pressed as often as possible, and by pretty much any girl with a neck pulse.
The availability of people of the desired sex willing to press your button would be your default main source of serenity and self-respect. It would take experience and hard work for you to create other sources of fulfillment for yourself. It would be natural for immature, stupid, or bitter people to spend enormous amounts of energy trying to control access to other people's buttons.
If you could press your neighbor's button without risk of adverse side effects (killing months of their productivity, having them lose one of their four of five shots at producing healthy offspring, making them die in childbirth) offering someone to pleasure of a press of their button would be as harmless as offering them the pleasure of a smile, or of a glass of drink. There would be certain rules of etiquette, but there wouldn't usually be much debilitating drama.
Very well put, except for the largely inexplicable penultimate paragraph, and except in that Deleuze and Guattari aren't really worth your while. Thanks much for posting this.
They seem to be reasonably well known in Europe, thanks mostly to Negri. A number of my biologist/geneticist friends have read them, but that may be coincidence. I, personally, find them irritating.
I can't think of too many things less hacker-like than "today we try very hard to be funny in a really formulaic way because that's what everybody else does".
I agree that there is such a thing as a lame, formulaic April Fool's story. So, let's raise the bar. Only upvote April Fool's stories that have an interesting twist to them. Don't upvote lame April Fool's submissions.
Speak for yourself. Clearly many people do find the jokes worthwhile or amusing, otherwise they wouldn't be voting for them. If you do not, then that's fine, but I don't see why this difference transcends the HN voting system more than any other.
I can understand how some might feel this is turning HN into reddit, but have a little faith - it's only for one day.
April Fools' stories are like lolcats. If you saw one of them for every fifty or so sites you visited they'd be kinda cute; if you see them ABSOLUTELY EVERYWHERE they're just really stupid spam. Also, most of them are a lot less funny than the originator believes; it's almost as if there were an annual blonde joke festival.
I think it would be nice if there was ONE aggregator without any April Fools' crap on it. If you want April Fools' stories you do know where to find them.
The idea that people other than Americans are real consumers with real money to spend is inherently funny; the idea that it might make good business sense to not put gratuitous hurdles between them and your checkout is practically hysterical. It's not like the US has an external trade deficit larger than the GDP of Taiwan or anything.
Not every aspect of this is easy, true, but that's no reason not to tackle the ones that are. It's trivial to simply not require a state or a postcode or try to verify a phone no if the user selects a country other than the US.
There should be a library for this. We have libraries that can handle the insanely capricious details of DST for all countries and subnational entities on the planet; we should have no problem providing one list of states and two regular expressions per nation.
(I know it's more or less impossible to reliably catch (e.g.) invalid UK postcodes, but we wouldn't have to. We'd mainly want to catch obvious typos without making things needlessly hard for customers overseas.)
Like it or not, Eric S Raymond is to the hacker community what Louis Althusser is to French philosophers. Or Stanley Aronowitz to pomo sociology. Or Mark Foley to the Republican caucus. Or Crystal Gail Mangum to feminist bloggers. Every time an outsider first realizes how this guy was universally accepted as one of our leaders once we've taken a collective kick in the gut. The sooner people forget about this clown the better.
Your parent is an unsupported personal insult, you're not wrong about that, but if it discourages others from advertising esr essays it's legitimate and meaningful.
Your post is also an unsupported personal insult and you also feel that's enough justification, that I shouldn't read anything by ESR solely because you don't like him, and you are also being upvoted for it.
For me personally the main source of unhappiness is error messages. In C I can say
if (!(f = open(name, "r"))) die(name);
where die is a tiny function that prints name, followed by whatever strerror has to say to the subject, formatted in the usual fashion. One line, done with it. The obvious, conventional Python equivalent is four lines long because both try: and except: insist on a line of their own. Since I cannot tell Python to produce succinct unixy error messages instead of rambling stack traces I have to catch and examine more or less every plausible exception. Some exceptions I can deal with close to the base level of my call stack in a butt-ugly fourty-line catch-all clause but a large proportion of my syscalls end up taking three lines extra each. I know it's a trivial problem, but I agree with pg you tend to get the more productive the more of your actual application logic you can see.
> I do a lot of coding in common lisp
We did experiment with clisp a while back; it turned out not to be a natural fit for problems that involve a lot of pathname, datetime, and stat info manipulation. If there was a reasonably modern Lisp that let me say things like (localtime (nth 9 (stat "/foo"))) I would go looking for it this very afternoon.