God what a humorless crowd. We got a bug report from a customer on an Easter Egg once. There was nothing wrong with the software. It just annoyed them that there was an Easter egg.
The idea that Easter Eggs are security risks comes across as the most pedantic paranoid position. Statistically speaking software is not failing because of Easter eggs.
This does not seem to be about security but about typical American style “cover your ass” legalize thinking.
Sure if you create a space rocket control system I would not put in an Easter egg. But if it is a code editor, word processor, email reading client etc then who cares? Nobody will die and million dollar equipment is not going to blow up.
Disclaimer: I have never made an Easter Egg and I get that companies don’t do it if it causes problems with customers. I just think customers who complain about this should get a life.
I tend to agree with that sentiment. If most software "just worked", I would be okay with it from time to time. But it doesn't, so I am not. I feel the same with cutesy error messages. They're usually a bit condescending or infuriating when something is going wrong. I personally tend to be a bit clinical in my software development, despite the urge to be playful. I am also not a big fan of cutesy commit or issue descriptions either.
When I'm having problems with software I'm typically not in a whimsical mood. Most software I use are tools meant to help me do my job. A cutesy / playful error message coming from a misbehaving tool generates nothing but rage for me.
Cute, condescending error messages are unprofessional and unhelpful. If fewer programs were steaming piles of garbage I might feel differently about it.
Does anyone know if Hacker News comments are being used as training data? I wonder this about Gmail, Skype, Voice Conversations on Xbox Live, etc. Mostly too afraid to ask because it sounds like paranoia.
Probably. HN is fairly plain HTML so Common Crawl should have no issue crawling it, and I'm not aware of any HN optout there (which would go against the usual public accessibility of everything on HN to APIs and projects etc), nor would any of the obvious data-filtering measures filter it out.
It seems pretty safe to assume that anything you create in public forums (and someday maybe "private" ones with data-sharing arrangements) is or will be used as training data.
Some of these don't show up for me (like Saturn). This might work better with a web-font? Although then you'd lose the harmonious platform emojis. I wonder if there's a way to check if a unicode character exists in a font and dynamically substitute, without using canvas.
Quick and dirty idea: maybe try rendering it to an offscreen span/div, get its size and compare it to a well known size of what gets substituted for a generic symbol if it doesn't exist, and if the size matches that, replace with something else.
On the question of "is it hated", Stackoverflow publishes a survey every year on interesting questions like this. It doesn't get a lot of attention here for whatever reason.
It is dominated on the server because Java, C#, Elixir, Erlang have a concurrency and parallelism story and node doesn’t.
For most scripting work it is hard to beat Python even if Python is slow.
Sometimes I think compiler and tools writing for node might be fun (boy the world needs an ISO common logic implementation that isn’t hets and Haskell) but compiler and tools writing in Java is fun too, particularly in JDK 16. (Think ‘Haskell the good parts’.)
> compiler and tools writing in Java is fun too, particularly in JDK 16. (Think ‘Haskell the good parts’.)
I would love a more in-depth exploration about this part of your message, if you have some time. I didn't explore the compiler/tools ecosystem for Java for some time, would love to know the advances it got that prompted your message.
I just like it personally. For one thing you have the solid jvm runtime, ides that work, good performance, etc.
With sealed types, var, and similar features, pattern matching, it is getting better all the time in small ways.
I recently wrote a dsl in Java that lets you write a Java AST , transform it as a tree, write Java source code, compile it. It is not quite as simple as doing the same in LISP and you have to mangle names a little to unerase types, but the IDE helps you find the names.
> For most scripting work it is hard to beat Python even if Python is slow.
Apropos of nothing...
I find Python to be unreadable. I have a moderate reading issue and Python just looks like random letters to me. I actually wish I could process it as there are some very nice tools that I see people make that use Python.
With Python it is about the ecosystem. Although jupyter is second only to Excel in ‘programming model not fit to purpose’ you can get it done w/ pandas, sci-kit learn, pillow, etc. Maybe I am crazy but I think it is fun writing async clientservers in Python.
"Why No Easter Eggs"
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/larryosterman...
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Why%20no%20Easter%20Eggs
... and
https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/405874
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27994194