This is amazing, almost amazing as the website of the man who wrote it: https://www.songworm.com/index.html - "I wrote the generator for these pages in Macintosh Common Lisp."

I'm going to write a scifi story, the plot?

The lisp path won, Lispus instead of Linux, and we had AGI in 1997 due to code elegance.

https://xkcd.com/224/

He does not.

https://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html

> One day in Spring 1989, I was sitting out on the Lucid porch with some of the hackers, and someone asked me why I thought people believed C and Unix were better than Lisp. I jokingly answered, "because, well, worse is better." We laughed over it for a while as I tried to make up an argument for why something clearly lousy could be good.

He then wrote Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big (https://www.dreamsongs.com/WIB.html) for his EuroPAL keynote speech

> JWZ excerpted the worse-is-better sections [from Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big] and sent them to his friends at CMU, who sent them to their friends at Bell Labs, who sent them to their friends everywhere.

The excerpt: https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html

How do you know how many points the other comments got?

Interestingly, I think this is one of the cases where both the "For context…" comment and yours add important context for the parent comment that some readers may be not familiar with. Although that second one serves this purpose better, not because of the subject but because it's more directly informative.

If you mean stock vanilla php: none. If you mean Hack, Meta’s PHP dialect which is internally just called “PHP” colloquially: a lot. Basically everything that responds to a public HTTP request, both for APIs and for the website. And since Meta is a lot less “service-oriented” than some companies, a lot more application logic happens in the web server process than you might expect.

Backend services in languages other than Hack do exist, of course. When I left Meta (then called Facebook) in 2019, they were almost exclusively in C++. Now I don’t know for sure but I think Rust is gaining a lot of popularity for non-Hack stuff.

The entire website is still a PHP-like derivative language (with an optimizing compiler, etc). Backend services are largely C++.

Well “hack”, but the same idea

I think the problem with Slashdot was that "Funny" was higher rated than "Interesting" or "Insightful", and it made the site a clown circus.

I'm not against memes and jokes, I like them. But I also like some actual intelligent discussion in between.

And that's why right now I visit Hacker News and it's been many years since I used Slashdot.

Because people agreed with you? Why is that a problem?

I always thought that moderation is a little high handed. Instead, individuals should choose what they see or don't see via a local filter that they've trained over time. I used to filter spam out of my email inbox that way, it worked pretty good.

You talk about it as if doesn't exist anymore. If you're not aware, it still exists.

Slashdot allowed you to configure scoring, so you could assign 0 or even negative points to 'funny'.

This seems like a relatively bad approach in general. An even more minimalist bicycle can just be your legs, depends on whether you really need a bicycle at all. A more minimalist pair of shoes would be sandals, or even more minimalist is just going barefoot and building callouses on your soles. You also don't really need to look stylish, so a more minimalist set of clothing can just be a sheet that you wrap around yourself. I don't find this to be a useful line of thinking.

or perhaps, from a space and utility perpective, a cargo trike? I don't think a bike could handle a desk, even a foldable/collapsed one from ikea, whereas a cargo trike probably could.

I mean you could technically balance a sheet of plywood on your back on a bicycle, but it seems like it would become impractical at any speed above 30mph just due to aerodynamic...uh...lift.

I can virtually guarantee that the amount of people getting annoyed at being flashbanged by HN is larger than the amount of people that would complain about a dark mode.

For users without an account you just stick to prefers-color-scheme. For users with an account you add a setting 'disable dark mode'

Dark Reader has autodetection so those users won't be a problem either.

And if you really wanna keep to the identity of the site, the top bar doesn't even really need a color swap.

It really is less of a conundrum than you think.

> You need to add controls, as some people would like it set up differently than their OS.

The Browser also has controls. Good Browsers let you set your browser-wide choice differently from your OS-wide choice. Great Browsers let you pick per-site overrides directly, as a standard user setting in a consistent location in browser controls. I realize a lot of UX designers have come to much prefer the "add more controls" approach over the "teach a person to fish" / understand how your OS and browser controls work as the user of the site approach. I realize why a lot of UX designers will always prefer that approach, because teaching people is hard and it is easier to cut complaints off at the pass than answer complaints with "use your browser's settings".

But seriously, it should be fine to release a dark mode in 2025 that only responds to `prefers-color-scheme: dark` and leaves it to users to understand their OS and Browser tools. It irks me a lot more when sites like Wikipedia and Bing and Google ignore `prefers-color-scheme: dark` by default and makes you dig for some dumb website-specific control (that's in a different place on every website) just to set it to whatever they call "System default" that means "trust the Browser's prefers-color-scheme, I know what I'm doing". UX designers have taken something that should be natural and automatic and made it more complex and more confusing just because a small handful of users complain that they don't understand their OS and Browser Settings tools.

And how would you propose running Greasemonkey on a mobile browser?

The web was like that for about the first 10 minutes. In 1996, the "modern" web accepted that web pages were almost always going to incorporate appearance and made it sane by standardising CSS.

I believe HN's HTML structure is simple enough to overwrite with custom CSS on the browser end.

Comments by people with more points to their name are (or at least used to be) promoted higher, which naturally leads to more upvotes.

So there's still an element of who says it that matters

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#jobads

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#yc

You didn't notice they were ads.

Usually it's just "so and so is hiring" (not to be confused with the who wants to be hired threads) weaved in to look like just another submission

They're the ones you can't comment on.

You're talking about false negatives, not false positives. People have different tolerances for these kinds of errors.

But yes, I remember that to see that stuff you had to expand the down-modded comments.

That stuff was also a product of its time. Slashdot had the strong free speech ethos of the early internet, so CmdrTaco had a policy of never deleting comments unless they broke the site somehow or there was a legal process requiring it. Sometimes that meant very new stories would get these comments and they'd be visible before they got modded, but if you browsed stories that had been active for a little while you wouldn't see them.

One downside of a sophisticated moderation system on a site designed for programmers is that some people take it as a challenge. The reason Slashdot trolling was a bunch of dumb memes rather than e.g. commercial ads is because a lot of bored teenagers found spamming it a good way to learn web programming. The systematic nature of the moderation meant that it was a system to beat, a game to conquer. Hence the brief influx of "page widening posts" and other technical hacks. But I don't know if you'd see the same stuff today. The culture has changed, there are much better ways to learn programming and way more opportunities now. And you don't have to be fully automated. CmdrTaco had a strongly systems-oriented streak, but the problem on HN is hardly ever the actions of dang and the other paid moderators, it's really abuse of the overly simple system by other users that's a problem. You could have both good paid moderators and stricter controls on user moderation.

Turns out those GNAA guys are actually white supremacists https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev

You just reminded me of the beautifully rendered, colored penisbird ascii art dipshits would spam on IRC lol

Most of that was downmodded and hidden by default though.

In general: yes. But I’ve certainly had to use swathes of screwdrivers that are worse at being screwdrivers than my Swiss army knife is. Same I believe applies here: there’s a relation, but it’s nuanced. The same screwdriver is a better screwdriver when carried in a hand than in a toolbox full of other high-quality tools, but worse for everything else.

For this particular case, a better candidate is usually empty tuple () since it's actually iterable etc, so unless you need to mutate that argument...

The bigger problem is with dicts and sets because they don't have the equivalent concise representation for the immutable alternative.

Arguably the even bigger problem is that Python collection literals produce mutable collections by default. And orthogonal to that but contributing to the problem is that the taxonomy of collections is very disorganized. For example, an immutable equivalent of set is frozenset - well and good. But then you'd expect the immutable equivalent of list to be frozenlist, except it's tuple! And the immutable equivalent of dict isn't frozendict, it... doesn't actually exist at all in the Python stdlib (there's typing.MappingProxyType which provides a readonly wrapper around any mapping including dicts, but it will still reflect the changes done through the original dict instance, so to make an equivalent of frozenset you need to copy the dict first and then wrap it and discard all remaining references).

Most of this can be reasonably explained by piecemeal evolution of the language, but by now there's really no excuse to not have frozendict, nor to provide an equally concise syntax for all immutable collections, nor to provide better aliases and more uniform API (e.g. why do dicts have copy() but lists do not?).

There's always tension between language simplicity (and thus cognitive load of the programmers) and features. Compare Scheme with Common Lisp.

The idea in Python is:

1. Statements are executed line by line in order (statement by statement).

2. One of the statements is "def", which executes a definition.

3. Whatever arguments you have are strictly evaluated. For example f(g(h([]))), it evaluates [] (yielding a new empty list), then evaluates h([]) (always, no matter whether g uses it), then evaluates g(...), then evaluates f(...).

So if you have

def foo(x = []): ...

that immediately defines

foo = (lambda x = []: ...)

For that, it has to immediately evaluate [] (like it always does anywhere!). So how is this not exactly what it should do?

Some people complain about the following:

    class A:
        x = 3
        y = x + 2

That now, x is a class variable (NOT an instance variable). And so is y. And the latter's value is 5. It doesn't try to second-guess whether you maybe mean any later value of x. No. The value of y is 5.

For example:

    a = A()
    assert a.__class__.x == 3
    assert a.x == 3
    a.__class__.x = 10
    b = A()
    assert b.x == 10

succeeds.

But it just evaluates each line in the class definition statement by statement when defining the class. Simple!

Complicating the Python evaluation model (that's in effect what you are implying) is not worth doing. And in any case, changing the evaluation model of the world's most used programming language (and in production in all countries of the world) in 2025 or any later date is a no go right there.

If you want a complicated (more featureful) evaluation model, just use C++ or Ruby. Sometimes they are the right choice.

> That doesn't negate the fact that it's a concern, though, does it?

Yes, the fact that most people learn very early the correct way to have a constant value of a mutable type used when an explicit argument is not given and that using a mutable value directly as a default argument value uses a mutable value shared between invocations (which is occasionally desirable) means that the way those two things are done in Python isn't a substantial problem.

(And, no, I don't think a constant mutable list is actually all that commonly needed as a default argument in most languages where mutable and immutable iterables share a common interface; if you are actually mutating the argument, it is probably not an optional argument, if you aren't mutating it, an immutable value -- like a python tuple -- works fine.)

It's just plain wrong. For example, next() is a builtin function which mutates the iterator passed to it. And, in general, given that Python doesn't have extension methods or anything similar, if you want to write a helper that works on mutable objects of some type, it'll have to be a free function.

They are referring to a convention, not a language restriction.

If you want to mutate two parameters just pass them to a function like you normally would.

It's sloppy and a bad habit, I would not let it pass a PR in production code. Probably OK for a throwaway script.

folks forget, or never figured out, that community-building is a thing that requires a degree of curation; you wouldn't want your sloppy alcoholic uncle showing up to your business brunch (or whatever the hep cats do these days...) but he may be a welcome addition to your new years eve party. That doesn't mean you are "gatekeeping"

> For HN, replace M$ with Musk and you'll still see parallels.

I think HN leans towards deriding both MS and Musk (see any thread on MS and FOSS). In any case, I think that part of being well-spoken is that you speak out against severely bad actors often. It's never useful to reflexively criticize something, but people may contemplate and still decide they're right. Making a comment is the bare minimum of accountability for bad actors who should know better. It may not be to your taste that HN is such a platform, but that's not up to your decision any more than it is mine. There are many problems from a society that struggles to speak well or ill as a subject deserves, which is to say to speak the truth when it should be spoken, and not to speak mistruths except in exceptional circumstances. It would surely be best if one reasoned critique solved the problem and we never would hear of it again, but alas.

> For HN, replace M$ with Musk and you'll still see parallels. Although to be fair HN is much more even-keeled than most commenting systems, like Ars and Electrek.

I don't really see it. /. had this basically every single thread and the criticism was very not substantive. Musk is unpopular here, but the criticism at least has a bit more meat to it and is not on every single post.

Matt's right, guys.

How do people with experience that predates the internet prove that?