That's a very good point. We love to talk about speed in dev tools, probably because it's an easy metric to track, but usability and good features are really the key points for making a tool that people want to use and keep using. Too many open source projects neglect the product angle in favor of the technical.
When I worked at Khan Academy, Charlie was an intern, and for a few months we worked together on building the KA app for Android. I can vouch that he was a damn good developer then, and I'm sure he's a much better one now.
In this analogy, the food is the entire project, and a dev does much more than coding. You can do one thing right with luck, you can't do most things right by luck alone.
The guy is fluent in 2 languages, one being known to be hard to master, create a tool that replace several others, get adopted in months by half the community, welcome 172 contributors on a project that is parsing stuff, a hard problem. Also the doc is good.
As a professional dev, I never get all those right. Never.
So yes, the food is good, and the chef is excellent to get all that stuff right.
I think it's actually basically the same. Being a clean, organized cook is probably positively correlated with making good food, but it's not strictly necessary. If someone is writing sloppy code but shipping a project of this overall quality without leaking the "low quality" of their implementation, then I wouldn't presume to call them a "bad dev" - I would probably conclude that they're more efficient than I am at prioritizing where to spend organizational energy.
then you probably dont know that i'm actually more supportive of charlie than most and are reading negative intent from a perfectly neutral/innocent question that is perhaps badly phrased :)
i mean i kinda like that HN de-emphasizes usernames, conversation should stand on its own if its to be judged by own merit. but i do have 14k karma haha
No it was not. The question was directed at the commenter about assessing skill, never made any statement disparaging said skill.
Also you seem to be unaware of the relationship of this commenter - you may want to examine their Twitter from before this story was submitted here. Or go on and prove yourself a prat, I won’t stop you.
You're out of line, no need to name-call. I may not want to examine the website and twitter feeds of every commenter on here. Perhaps it wasn't rude, but given how pedantic many people here are, I took the original comment to be a criticism of praising the coder, not a genuine question of evaluating code quality.
> I may not want to examine the website and twitter feeds of every commenter on here.
While that sounds fair enough, the commenter had already noted their relationship within the original thread here by the time you decided to make that completely dismissive reply.
If you’re going to just tritely counter a statement it seems rather foolish not to do a bear minimum of observation.
A lot of companies would pay actual money for some semblance of supply-chain security. Hosted, verified, certified Python dependencies. This is how Red Hat made all their money in Linux. Something like "use our vetted and secure pypi instead of the free-for-all full of typo squaters and package takeovers that the public pypi.org offers."
Starting with some nice developer tooling and going from there doesn't seem crazy at all.
I don't know their plan, so I can't speak for them.
What I would do is build an entire ecosystem of that quality that would include a tool to solve the Python distributions problem.
Either you help with deployment on the server, and you offer hosting.
Or you help with making an installer, and you offer nodes to build installers for multiple OS and upload to multiple app stores, manage updates, cdn, permissions...
You can even start small and just help with a service for cross-compiling C extensions and scale from that.
Or provide machine learning analysis of the quality of your code and make companies pay for it.
Or go full Continuum.
They are good enough that they can pick and choose whatever they want, really.
When you solve pain, people pay. If readthedoc managed to survive by being a static rst site, astral has a shot provided they keep the business side of things in mind as nicely as they build their user stories.
There's also the fact that pretty much every useful technology from WW2 ended up being made by dominant industry in the US, because everyone else was rubble.
Airbus came much later than Boeing and managed to be a worthy global competitor. US being first was no advantage for them in the end.
Europe missed tech not because they were not the first (China also wasn't first), but because they ignored the growth and importance of this sector for decades, and still do.
But I can tell you as a French, not having any natural resource and an economy mostly based on services in today's world is not making me bet on a bright future for us.
China has over advantages, like have a sixth of the population in the world, having massive mineral and coal resources and being the factory of Europe and the US.
Baring a miracle, my continent has nowhere to go but down.
We have no metals, not fossil fuels, massive debts, an expensive lifestyle and few industries that cannot be copied elsewhere.
Post covid and the ukraine war, we are in deep, deep trouble.
Politically the extremes are rattling more and more, and they may very well win at some point because things are looking bleak.
Of those, only the resources are an inherent problem, and I'm not sure if it's really that bad if you take a continental perspective. I think you need to take a step back, and look at production of goods, technology, and services, not at money flow. In the end, getting rid of debt is just one default away, and that's a political decision. The Chinese exploit their resources and work hard - good thing they invest at home and in their military, because otherwise they might never get something back for their troubles.
It really could only work around the time it existed I feel. The internet was a lot weirder back then.
One big difference then from now is that you basically need a PhD in the Canvas API (or WebGL or whatever) to accomplish something a 5 year old could do in Flash. Web design was a lot more accessible. You didn't have to worry about responsive designs and fluid layouts. You could just position:absolute everything and that was kinda fine.
I think you might have some nostalgia goggles on at the moment. There's nothing holding people back from making "weird" web pages today, they can even make them nice and responsive. One of the better concepts around HTML and CSS was separation of data and layout.
It's trivial to have a "weird" position:absolute design with a break for mobile that switches to a more fluid layout. Desktop users can have their "weird" layout but I can still read the page on mobile and you can readily crawl and index it.
People moved away from design tools like DreamWeaver that helped make "weird" stuff and instead installed WordPress or some CSS/JavaScript framework that just bakes in all the "boring" fluid layouts.
You're not necessarily wrong about Flash in terms of design or creation but your search engine wouldn't be terribly practical if everyone was still using Flash for everything. Flash allowed content packed inside SWFs but also allowed fetching external resources. You wouldn't be able to index any of that unless your crawler executed the Flash and/or inspected all the URL references for external resources.
Flash created an inaccessible deep web just like today's JavaScript website-is-an-application "sites".
Don't get me wrong, I love the old web with quirky table-based layouts, "unofficial" fansites, and personal homepages hosted on forgotten university servers in a closet. There was a vibrancy that's largely missing from today's web.
I think a big change has been tools have become more geared for boring than the creative and people treat content on the web as a side hustle. Google et all haven't helped by favoring recency over other relevance factors.
There are quite a few interesting alternatives these days. Bored Button is one. There are some that are even more like it but I'm away from grep and my notes at the moment.
They are going to try to stop that train. They have a pending application for a trademark on the term GPT and I suspect they wouldn't have applied for trademark protection if they didn't intend to stop others from using it.
They already have been granted trademark protection for GPT-3[1]. If I had to place a bet one way or the other, I would guess they will get GPT as well. You say it's widely used but even here GPT is mostly synonymous with OpenAI products and services. Even in this thread, plenty of people are complaining about the confusion caused by the name GPT4All.
Let's not confuse the liars (GPT4All) with the real ones. Microsoft works with OpenAI and so Bing does use GPT-4. Github Copilot is GPT-3 based. Notion AI is GPT-3.
There is a clear difference between the GPT family and the mimicry.
It requires designing your life actively, which more people don't do.
It's the same as people saying they need a car, they can't move because they bought a house, they don't have time because they have kids, they don't have money because their loan and alemony is taking everything.
They prioritized some things without thinking about the consequences. Or they didn't even prioritized, they just stumble upon it and went with it.
We have a group of friends in the city which for the last 10 years actively moved in the same district to stay close to each others.
This has a price as well.
But we decided on it, it didn't happen by mistake than 10 people rented, or even bought, in less a mile radius.
Some have children, some are around 50, some travel, some are poor... There is always something.
Adults don't want to behave like they used to behave as kids.
They don't want to spontaneously talk randomly about something to an unknown person, because that comes with risks like rejection, looking like a fool, being labelled in a certain way, associating with somebody boring/annoying/leeching, etc.
Kids takes way more risks, including social risks, because they don't know those are risks.
I guarantee that if you go to clubs or public places you enjoy, and you bring out the kid in you (at least the part that doesn't bring chaos), you will make friends eventually. Not immediately, but keep at it, and it will happen.
However I noticed many adults don't actually want to live the process of making friends. Even without risk, they don't want to make the effort.
Because here is another thing that adults don't have and kids have plenty: energy.
And it turns out making friends require a ton of energy, because while you can be yourself and make friends, you cannot "be on your own" and make friends. You can't live a perfectly scheduled life and make friends. You will have to get out of your bubble, move things around in your day, welcome the unexpected, and interact. You will have to discard something in favor of it. And you will have to do it again and again because most people are not a good fit to be your friends.
Kids do that all the times, without even thinking about it.
Forget about the missing opportunities, it's only the tip of the iceberg, and it can be overcome by getting out of your way. I have friends that are 10 years older or younger. I made friends after my twenties and after my thirties.
Hell I'm going forty yet I made a new friend 2 years ago, and we are getting pretty intimate at this point. My mother is almost 70, and she is still dating.
But when I feel like inviting new people into my life (which I don't always do, right now I have closed doors, I don't have an infinite reserve of private life to share), I will invest in it. I will accept the cost.
Because making friends is not free. Just like sex is not free and speaking your mind is not free.
Kids don't realize the cost, and bare less the weight of it, but we are very aware of it.
Making friends don't "just happen naturally" when you are a kid, there is a process.
But the process is seamless to kids, while it requires effort to adults.
> Adults don't want to behave like they used to behave as kids.
> They don't want to spontaneously talk randomly about something to an unknown person, because that comes with risks like rejection, looking like a fool, being labelled in a certain way, associating with somebody boring/annoying/leeching, etc.
> Kids takes way more risks, including social risks, because they don't know those are risks.
Indeed. Treating every topic as something I should get my mother to do over the phone while driving gives wonderful results. It improves communication, documentation, code, stacks and logistics.
