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If the low hanging bugs can't even be triaged, what hope is there for any future innovation? ie, the countless unsupported browser APIs

It is clear that Elm is understaffed, to say the least.


> It is clear that Elm is understaffed, to say the least.

The core team treat bug reports as insults: https://github.com/elm/compiler/issues/1773


Wow, that's remarkable. I can't fathom having the response of "why are you even doing this" instead of something more productive. It doesn't matter why they're doing it (and valid use cases are provided), negative numbers in a case statement should be supported regardless.

Edit: And finishing reading that thread now, Evan didn't even return once his question of "why" was answered. That's something else. I have no skin in this game, and people can run their projects as they see fit of course. But this behaviour doesn't make for a great community/ecosystem.


That's the appropriate response. You have to understand the problem to produce a solution. I don't read that as a negative response to the bug report. Just asking for more context.

It is bad that the bug has remained for so long.


Honestly, even just a tweet from the BDFL twice a year saying 'I still care about this' would be something.

It's impossible to evangelise something when the creator has seemingly taken his ball and gone home.

The idea that enterprise should use Elm is laughable.


People are constantly asking for a pulse:

https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/is-elm-browser-still-mainta...

https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/request-elm-0-19-2-any-upda...

It's pretty sad. I personally believe the ecosystem would be in a much more vibrant state today, if the creator had formally abandoned the language at any point in the past, as there are many who would pick up the torch.

It is telling that several people who could once have been considered 'core team' are now building their own languages:

https://gren-lang.org/

https://www.roc-lang.org/

https://www.derw-lang.com/


I think A) Elm is done, not dead. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." (The JS folks should take a note.) and B) the natural next step is to make Elm-to-native compilers, which is now happening.

I think a lot of programmers get warped views of PL development from over-exposure to the badlands of Javascript. There are languages (like Prolog) that grow like trees, eh?


Mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but the lack of bug fixes imo makes it definitely seem dead. I'm all for stability and sticking to a core vision/set of principles, and agree with your point about the Javascript ecosystem. But not even having small updates to fix bugs here and there doesn't exactly scream "this project is alive but done".

Personally I do believe that the core team are working on things away from the public eye, and that's fair enough in order to keep focus without having to deal with everyone giving their own opinion or criticism. I just wish there was significantly more transparency in the process, and a few bones thrown to the community in the form of fixes.


I think everyone just means something different by dead.

I personally wouldn't use the word until Evan throws in the towel, but he's clearly still onboard. For example, https://gotoaarhus.com/2023/sessions/2529/elm-on-the-backend (yesterday).

I don't think we handle these kinds of oddball cases very gracefully which is evident in basically every HN discussion about Elm. If a language gains traction, then we demand a certain shape of expectations from it, and we're not very good at walking away with just "well, it ain't for me". It's not enough for us to just say that. It's like we have to linger around and ensure everybody else washes their hands of the tool, too.

I'm pretty sure Elm is past the point where anyone who doesn't like the glacial BDFL approach doesn't use it, and those who choose to use it don't care.


Well, I have no particular insight but I heard something about a compiler-to-native code project that might be taking up core team time, or maybe Evan is just burnt out from all the static. I just wish there were fewer people crapping on the kid and more recognition of what he accomplished, and will hopefully accomplish in the future.


Interesting, got any repos written in this style?


Not that I can share unfortunately. But here is the implementation I got the idea from. https://github.com/mjal/rescript-use-tea/blob/master/src/Use...

I defined the actions a little differently and followed the rescript-react pattern of having effects return an Option of a cleanup fn but most of the idea is there.

Looking around just now I also found this PoC of someone doing a very similar thing but all inline with react. https://github.com/mishaszu/rescript-model-view-poc/tree/mai...

Really the only jump you need from react to the elm architecture is having the reducer be (State, Action) -> ('State, Effects) instead of simply returning the new state alone. The then you have a useEffect that invokes the side effect fns, passing in dispatch so they can send updates back to the reducer & so reducer stays pure. There are a bunch of different ways to set that up, and honestly a lot of react apps blunder into an accidental and incomplete version of this anyway it's such a natural model.


How has your experience been with runtime errors? One of the things I like about Elm is that for pure Elm code, there's very little surface area where a runtime error can occur.


For pure rescript code it's pretty much as reliable as elm.

The only time I've really seen them is when interacting with js/ts code. The rescript externals system is easier and more flexible than elm ports, but for that reason less safe.

If you don't model the types of incoming data exactly it can cause runtime errors. For some packages it's very difficult to do that with high confidence so I've seen a few leak in. Similarly if you use gentype to map typescript types to rescript, it assumes the types are both correct and sound. Which are not actually guarantees typescript makes I don't think. So I've seen some from that as well.

Rescript doesn't really do a great job at displaying these types of errors either. It's usually pretty obvious where they came from but not always why unless you have good knowledge of the API you're hooking to. So, rare but anomalously frustrating in an otherwise very pleasant language.

I think for this reason it's pretty standard to avoid writing or consuming package-wide bindings to npm modules. It seems like everyone is just writing tuned limited externals only for the parts they actually use, except for a handful of very popular libraries.


Americans clearly have very low expectations for their standard of living.

As demonstrated by the amount of insane 'actually the murder rate isn't that bad' comments in this thread.


Nationalistic flamewar will get you banned here. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, so please don't post like this here—regardless of how other commenters are behaving.

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


> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work.

I think you are violating this guideline.


>> Americans clearly have very low expectations for their standard of living.

One SF startup I saw had executives mostly working remotely in Sonoma county (wine country) or Marin County (mountains and beautiful views) or Atherton. HR declared themselves remote also. For office visits, many Uber-ed in or drove in, conveniently avoiding all the chaos outside.

The median listing home price in Atherton, CA was $10.4M in February 2023. Unfortunately, it is easy to ignore the other half when decision-makers in power living in some of the most beautiful places on earth.

Low-level workers were the ones trekking into SF daily and dealing with reality.


Every city in America is so much incredibly safer than it was in 1990 that nobody old enough to remember that is going to be bothered by much of anything.

(That is, if you think now's bad, you should've seen it then.)


'actually the murder rate isn't that bad'


Bad is relative. Bad compared to perfect European utopias, yes. Bad compared to the same city 30-40 years ago, no.


Nobody really cares about the murder rate. What they care about is being murdered.

A city where gangs are killing each other off but never bother normal people will feel much safer than a city where a comparatively few people are killed but it’s from the greater pool of everyone.


Nationwide crime is up 50% in the past 3 years, and at about 70% of the 1991 all time high. It's safer than our absolute peak for sure, but this historical reversal should be very concerning.


We should all be incredibly skeptical of the claim. For the 2020-2021 years our rates in Charleston were returning to the “90s Crack Epidemic” rates.

Much like other commenters in the thread, I’ve had a man threaten to “cut my mother effing throat” in broad daylight in front of a dozen bystanders. Thankfully, he turned tail once I drew a handgun and no one died that day. Police showed up 45 minutes later and were of no use, so why bother reported the three times I’ve had guns pointed at me in traffic since 2020?

When police response times are at or above the hour mark and the best you’ll get is an “oh that sucks man, need a report for insurance?” people stop reporting crimes. Now the politicians get to pretend crime is “better”.


Just because something used to be so much worse, it doesn't mean that the current state is good.


The general criticisms are that the current state is worse than it used to be though.

That's simply not borne out by the statistics. Long term trends have been steadily down, and even in the short term:

2017-2022 [0]:

* ~9,000 fewer incidents in total.

* Rape halved.

* Robberies 2/3 of 2017.

* Burglary/Motor vehicle theft increased but Larceny theft decreased by more than both combined.

Q1 2017/2023 [0]:

* ~4,000 fewer incidents in total.

* Only Motor vehicle theft and Arson were slightly up on 2017 levels.

Q1 2022/2023 [0]:

* Total incidents down by 9.7%

* Burglary down by 11.2%

* Motor vehicle theft down by 8.5%

* Larceny theft down by 12%

* Assaults did increase by 2.2%

* As did Robberies by 13.6%

[0] https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crim...


These are all too gameable. Some even go against the grain of common sense. You think if you include porch pirates that theft is down, or that everyone knows there is no point in even reporting it. Murder is the only useful thing to track as a proxy for other crimes, but even that can make things seem better than they are due to better medical interventions.


Things like hospitals tracking gunshots and stabbing is harder to game, but a city can be relatively nonviolent and still feel like an absolute shithole of theft is petty and common.


This is certifiably untrue. Philadelphia, for example, just had our highest 3 year murder period ever. Additionally, we should really compare this to previous eras, not just the other highest crime periods you could name. We're at triple the homicides of the 50s and 60s, for example, and our population has declined since then.


Isn't there a Father Ted episode in which they're trying to lure him from rural Ireland to somewhere in the USA with "it's really not that bad: last month there was a something-percent fall in the number of drive-by shootings"?


America is a land of extremes. We actually have relatively high standard of living thanks to extremely high wages, which allow us to live lives of relative luxury. We also have high wealth inequality and tolerate many horrors - some unfathomable to other developed countries (e.g. gun deaths).


It is possible to tolerate wealth inequality, while not tolerating mentally ill drug addicts terrorising the public.


Arguably the latter is a symptom of the former. So there are broadly 2 approaches to tackle the problem - reduce inequality, or use draconian measures to control the people who got the wrong end of the inequality stick.


Plenty of drug addicts and drug related organized crime is the rise in western Europe, especially in major port hubs.


It's possible to tolerate the cause without tolerating the consequences?


Wealth inequality causes drug addicts unleashing havoc on the public?


Yes. Wealth inequality => poverty => homelessness => despair => substance abuse => "havoc"

It really doesn't seem that complicated to me. Countries that have affordable housing and jobs don't have this problem.


Nothing seems complicated if you wave away all the details. You made quite a leap even in the first link of the chain ("wealth inequality => poverty"). I don't see how poverty follows from wealth inequality. That there are people who earn more or have amassed more wealth than me, sometimes fantastically so, doesn't make me any poorer. In fact, often times my own life is enriched by the value created by those who ended up becoming wealthy. Of course, this is not to suggest that every rich person created value for others to get there, or that people who create value for others necessarily become rich.

The link between poverty and homelessness, as discussed elsewhere in the thread, is mostly due to policy choices local to SF and California as a whole that greatly disincentivize building more homes to keep up with demand. I come from a country where (with some exaggeration) it feels like an urban park might have higher population density than San Francisco. There's no reason why one of the most desired markets in the world should be that way, other than through artificially restricting the supply.

> Countries that have affordable housing and jobs don't have this problem.

Very few countries, whether housing is cheap or expensive and whether jobs pay well or poorly, have this problem of people strung about, high in public, engaging in antisocial behavior. Most countries don't turn a blind eye towards drug addiction from a personal liberty standpoint, which I think is quite a uniquely American concept. Most will imprison people for possessing or consuming any and punish with death those who traffic. There is broad cultural acceptance of behaving in this way.


There's no leap, but we don't even need to have that conversation.

Poverty exists, which leads to homelessness.

This is not because of "local SF and California" policies. Homelessness is a problem in nearly every North American cities, from Vancouver to New York. Large cities in Europe also struggle with it, albeit to a lesser degree.

I'm not against building more housing, but no matter how much you build, not everyone will be able to afford it.

And I don't know where you got the idea that the USA is "turning a blind eye" to these problems. There's no blind eye. The US has the highest carceral population in the world. Cities already spent hundreds of millions on police. The problems are not being ignored, the solutions attempted just don't work.


> Homelessness is a problem in nearly every North American cities, from Vancouver to New York.

It's an order of magnitude higher in San Francisco at ~2.5% of the population compared to New York at ~0.8% and Vancouver at ~0.3%. SF isn't the only city with homeless people, but it likely has it to the highest degree, with other undesirable traits like open-air drug use, public defecation, and property crimes.

> no matter how much you build, not everyone will be able to afford it.

That's true, but we should still build more so that more people will be able to afford housing. No policy choice will completely eliminate poverty or homelessness nor reduce it for free without opportunity cost, so as a society we have to make prudent tradeoffs that help the most people for the least cost.

> Poverty exists, which leads to homelessness.

Are you suggesting that we're capable of totally eliminating poverty?


What's your point? What are you even arguing here? You started at questioning if wealth inequality lead to the current situation, and now you abandoned that point and moved on to claiming SF is unique (it's not), and going off on tangents that you yourself admit don't solve the problem.


Places with lower wealth inequality seem to have fewer mentally ill drug addicts terrorising the public.

Putting aside arguments of social responsibility and taking a purely self-interested perspective, it's typically cheaper and more effective to provide for these people than it is to lock them up. When there's nothing to take away, enforcement doesn't provide any deterrent and frequently leads to an escalation of behaviour instead.


Well I was surprised by the number of murders so far this year. It's less than my much smaller hometown that isn't considered particularly unsafe, while on here everyone acts like SF is hell.

There's no question there's a huge homeless problem in SF but the number of murders there are really low compared to a southern or midwestern city.


Americans have low expectations when it comes to the acceptable level of violence in a country that has third world levels of crime. And in Europe, many politicians wants their own citizens to live in what the former perceive as the ideal society? Just no.

Even being rich in US doesn't protect anyone from being murdered randomly...


I’m going to bet a lot third world countries are safer


The decades of internal and self-violence are quickly forgotten when something happens to a tech bro. I simply can't take that country seriously anymore...


I've been using render.com to host Rust+sqlite stacks recently, and I'd like to leverage this.

Should my Rust server be running sqld, and I would add a passthrough endpoint through its existing http api to the sqlite?

Or alternatively, should I be using sqld locally to access my sqlite instance through SSH or something?


I think personal experience with multiple paradigms is essential for a developer to decide which one they prefer.

The opinions of programmers who have only used one paradigm are less than worthless, since they are demonstrating a basic lack of curiosity and lack of willingness to invest in their craft.

You can always find excuses not to learn.


> They make a significant portion of all US voting machines.

> Just quadrupled their staff to make a voting machine then fired them all.

Fascinating.


Just another project manager trying to hire enough people to make the project happen on time. I am in another one of those situation right now. Nothing to do with anything sensitive, just a team of 9 mothers trying to make a baby in 1 month.


This person has clearly never had a job outside.


Look into web3/blockchain/NFT technology, most of it has been around less than 2 years so experience is less of a hard requirement than in other fields of software engineering.


Gonna hard disagree on this one. Blockchain is a flash in the pan niche tool. There are some legitimate uses for it, but most of it is all style and no substance. It's way too narrow a focus, with far more people playing around than there are jobs. You'd pick up general software skills along the way, but there are better ways to do that with a focus on more useful and practical technologies.


Web3 is like knowing HTML in 1995. Act accordingly.


I don’t see how is that a valid analogy. Html was useful in itself, all this new crypto stuff just convolutes existing solutions.


There were plenty of people in 1995 who did not understand the utility of HTML. That is the nature of revolutionary technology.


You mean some people understood html to be revolutionary even back then.

If you are someone who knows crypto to be revolutionary, would you be able to help me understand why is it so?


I like this perspective: https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/1440026949838069763

For example, predicting Airbnb or Patreon in the early days of HTML/CSS/JS would have taken a lot of foresight and vision.


We also had uncountable useless products made from html/js.

Also the mentioned services make sense. You rent your unused flat to someone, or you ask for money for creating something regularly.

I really tried “getting” the web3 benefits, but all I see is mumbo jumbo / dotcom crash type hype.


Could I get more clues? How might someoone hire a 40 year old for NFT/blockchain?


Solidity (language for Ethereum Smart Contracts) is relatively easy to learn. There's also tons of free resources in learning them (https://cryptozombies.io/). I would say this would be one of the hottest languages of 2022.


Yeah Solidity has many resources and is worth learning. Solana is another smart contract platform which uses Rust, and Rust is a fantastic language, though it is tough.

Both ecosystems use Node.js for scripting/tests/frontend so that is going to be advantage to learn.

A good progression might be:

  - Modern JS / Node.js
  - Solidity / Ethers (https://docs.ethers.io/)
  - Rust
  - Solana / Anchor (https://project-serum.github.io/anchor/getting-started/introduction.html)


Yes. This feels like 2007-level of hotness. Thank you.


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