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Yeah somewhere deep in Facebook they’ve put a black mark against my profile “filthy 300 CD player buyer, keep an eye on him”.

I like async and await.

I understand that some devs don’t want to learn async programming. It’s unintuitive and hard to learn.

On the other hand I feel like saying “go bloody learn async, it’s awesome and massively rewarding”.


> It’s unintuitive and hard to learn.

Funny, because it was supposed to be more intuitive than handling concurrency manually.


Some come to async from callbacks and others from (green)threads.

If you come from callbacks it is (almost) purely an upgrade, from threads is it more mixed.


Yeah, that's what annoys me, async comes from people who only knew about callbacks and not other forms of inter thread communication.

It is a tool. Some tools make you more productive after you have learned how to use them.

I find it interesting how in software, I repeatedly hear people saying "I should not have to learn, it should all be intuitive". In every other field, it is a given that experts are experts because they learned first.


> I find it interesting how in software, I repeatedly hear people saying "I should not have to learn, it should all be intuitive". In every other field, it is a given that experts are experts because they learned first.

Other fields don't have the same ability to produce unlimited incidental complexity, and therefore not the same need to rein it in. But I don't think there's any field which (as a whole) doesn't value simplicity.


Except you're hearing it from someone who doesn't have a problem handling state machines and epoll and manual thread management.

Frankly, async being non-intuitive does not imply that manual concurrency handling is less so; both are a PITA to do correctly.

It is. A lot.

But concurrency is hard and there's so much you syntax can do about it.


It IS intuitive.

After you’ve learned the paradigm and bedded it down with practice.


I can't follow that it's hard to learn and unintuitive

What's awesome or rewarding about it?

It forces programmers to learn completely different ways of doing things, makes the code harder to understand and reason about, purely in order to get better performance.

Which is exactly the wrong thing for language designers to do. Their goal should be to find better ways to get those performance gains.

And the designers of Go and Java did just that.


> It forces programmers to learn completely different ways of doing things, makes the code harder to understand and reason about, purely in order to get better performance.

Technically, promises/futures already did that in all of the mentioned languages. Async/await helped make it more user friendly, but the complexity was already there long before async/await arrived


Yes - I was really talking about "asynchronous programming" in general, not the async/await ways to do it in particular.

What different way of doing things?

If I want sequential execution, I just call functions like in the synchronous case and append .await. If I want parallel and/or concurrent execution, I spawn futures instead of threads and .await them. If I want to use locks across await points, I use async locks, anything else?


The company is run by lizards in hoodies.

Now now don’t be mean to lizards

Sounds like the plot of a Hammer Horror movie.

HIVE of the DEAD!!!


Postgres is not the only database that does queues.

Any database that supports SKIP LOCKED is fine including MySQL, MSSQL, Oracle etc.

Even SQLite makes a fine queue not via skip locked but because writes are atomic.


SKIP LOCKED isn't quite enough to get a real MQ product. Oracle has a full blown MQ product inside it transactional with other data.

In particular you need the ability to wait for messages to appear in a queue without polling, and for a proper MQ you need things like message priority, exception queues, multi-queue listening, good scalability etc.


Countries like Japan seem to make policy that serves the people.

Other countries decisions serve politicians, corporates, the rich, and maybe possibly finally, the citizens.

Here in Melbourne a city of 5 million people we don’t have a train from the airport to the city despite decades of political talk about it. But why not? Because the Airport Coporation makes vast unfathomable profit on car parking. What’s most important? Just look around.


most of the japanese railway system is private. their 2 largest companies are some of the largest publicly traded companies in the world.

Works in progress also had a great article recently (also discussed on hacker news) about how Japanese railways are private, profit earning real estate development corporations. [1]

Unfortunately, people from western countries have very negative views toward the privatization of mass transit despite the wild success that Japan has experienced. The model makes so much sense: if trains are just a way to get people to the real estate that you developed, then you’re going to make sure that the trains AND the destinations are really nice, which also turns out to be very lucrative (at least in densely populated areas) as a cherry on top.

And even worse, like this commenter above alludes to, it is trendy in the West to believe that real estate developers are evil, and that corporations that make money are sucking the life out of society. This kind of degrowth populism pretty much guarantees that the successful Japanese model is out of reach for most countries, because it is exactly the pursuit of profit that makes Japan’s system so nice - not some edicts from a benevolent and extremely capable government.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47762060


> Unfortunately, people from western countries have very negative views toward the privatization of mass transit despite the wild success that Japan has experienced

Japanese culture would frown heavily on enshittifying the transit experience to earn more profit. Western culture mass transit is already often shitty, and I cannot imagine how shit it would become if a for profit corporation took it over and started to squeeze it to make more money


Did you read what I said? The whole Japanese system is for profit and the one of the biggest reasons for Japan’s system being so pleasant is that it is done for commercial purposes.

If the incentives are right American companies can make good things, but usually they are not so because of poor policy.


> If the incentives are right American companies can make good things, but usually they are not so because of poor policy

I disagree. The incentives are never right for American companies because the only incentive they care about is making money at all costs. They don't even care about their reputations anymore if they can sell their rep for money


I believe most of it was sold off after it was built, am I wrong?

like many other places, there is a airport bus in Melbourne as I recall. there is (or was) a train from Melbourne to Canberra too (with a short bus transfer on the Canberra side). it was very difficult to figure out how to buy a ticket for it!

You’re kinda implying that there’s a few people standing around in a shed, and that really don’t cost too much.

Are you willing to say how much they pay you?

I watch all your videos by the way. By the PCB Way!


I can’t really say, but it’s honestly not very much.

$100?

A PCB Way sponsorship pays $100?

You show their logo, talk about them thank them praise them for $100? And it’s not even cash?

All those tech guys getting the PCB Way sponsorship really don’t know business do they.

That is absolutely insane.


For some small channels, $100 could be more than what youtube pays for their video.

And PCBway sponsors a lot of channels.


can you elaborate a bit on this? How much do other companies pay for, say, a 30 second slot promoting their product?

I'm not in the monetization business yet, but I'm thinking about creating a YT channel and stream some DIY/hardware related things, so I'm genuinely curious on how much such sponsors really pay.


I have compensated hundreds to thousands of dollars to content creators to promote my products and have had content creators ask for thousands up front. It really depends on channel size and market. It also depends on what deliverables are being asked for. Logo on screen, 30 second advertisement reading, link in description, pinned comments, accompanying social media post, etc. Some content creators will haggle on all the pieces while others will accept a flat rate for a typical package deal of deliverables.

yes I'm sure they pay everyone the same amount no matter if it's a small blog or a big YouTube channel, everyone gets $100

> All those tech guys getting the PCB Way sponsorship really don’t know business do they.

Eh.

For a hobbyist it's pretty neat. I don't expect to be extracting a lot of value from hobbyist PCB designs.

That some PCB manufacturer is willing to do a small batch of my PCB design & I don't have to pay for it, just give them a shout out & write about it, that seems pretty neat.


Pardon power can serve no reasonable goal in a functioning democracy except to subvert justice.

https://pardonned.com/search/?president=obama-2&categories=d...

I haven’t looked into each case here, but I assume these are a bunch of non-violent drug offenders serving years and decade-long sentences. I see 30 years for “possession with intent to distribute”. That’s just crazy.

When the justice system is clearly broken, it’s ok to subvert it.


The parent’s wording does actually imply that subverting justice is a reasonable goal.

There's some value to "the President can correct some wrongs". There are genuine miscarriages of justice sometimes and it's kinda nice to have a release valve for them.

The recent presidential immunity decision just made the downsides way more likely.


Justice is a moving target mate. Should people who had a few pounds of reefer still be serving 30 year sentences? 90's adults would probably say yes. Today? Not so much. Part of being human is being open to the fact you were wrong. The Pardon is the release valve that lets the Chief Executive remove the targets the System has painted on people's backs in response to a clear shift in public conscience. The public in recent history, threw all prudence to the wind and put a con man in office. Surprise, surprise when a con man uses the office to do what con men do.

It’s an alternative to coups and civil wars. The deal made in private conversations is something like “Give up power peacefully. Everybody gets pardoned and goes home to their families. Nobody needs to do anything crazy or violent out of desperation to avoid prison.”

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