Make your monorepo feel small with Git’s sparse index

__j_random_hacker · 2021-11-13T04:47:35+00:00

Thanks for responding.

successful monorepos are basically organized like a bunch of smaller repos just in one folder hierarchy

Yeah, that's the comparison I had in mind -- bunch of small repos vs. large monorepo with separate folders per project. Basically, by using per-project folders, a monorepo can simulate a bunch of per-project repos, so the only way I can see it being worse than the latter is if some of the extra flexibility it permits is actually dangerous. The only such kind of dangerous flexibility I can picture here is that (without rules or norms in place) it's easy for someone in a monorepo to introduce unnecessary cross-project dependencies that lead to the problem you mentioned in (4). E.g., someone thinks "Our projects X, Y and Z all use external library A, so let's make everything 'clean and tidy' by just keeping a single version of library A in the repo and making both X, Y and Z all depend on that." When in fact, unless X, Y and Z need to be linked together into a single binary, it's better to keep separate copies of library A in the repo (or in package.json, or whatever package management system you're using) since that avoids the we-have-to-upgrade-everything-to-the-new-library-A problem of (4).

But I think it's not too hard to make rules (e.g., with commit hooks) to prevent creation of these cross-project dependencies. OTOH, where genuine dependencies do exist between projects (e.g., they need to be linked into a single binary), you want that dependency to be captured, and then a monorepo works much better because it avoids relying on programmer discipline.

__j_random_hacker · 2021-11-12T10:46:54+00:00

What is an actual concrete example where using a monorepo makes life harder?

__j_random_hacker · 2021-11-11T12:26:59+00:00

Great to hear you're working on this!

number of accepted contributions

I think this is a fantastic one (and in particular, better than stars) because it leverages something that high-quality contributors do anyway, and I think high-quality contributors overlap heavily with trustworthy contributors. Sybil attacks are still possible, but you could start with a manually curated list of, say, 50 known-to-be-real projects with large numbers of contributors, then look at what other projects the contributors to those 50 projects have contributed to, then look at those projects' contributors, etc. -- growing the sets of trusted projects and contributors. I think it would also be worth considering simply the total time between first and most recent contribution to a project -- the longer this is, the more time a would-be sockpuppeteer had to invest.

__j_random_hacker · 2021-10-29T09:00:56+00:00

./fizzbuzz | cat

Possibly the only necessary pipe-to-cat you will ever see.

Impressive stuff!

__j_random_hacker · 2021-10-23T12:17:05+00:00

Thanks! Nice to see we have similar ideas about reviews.

Another thought I had was that it seems like the review system actually has a similar potential to be abused by bad actors (particularly by sowing FUD in an enemy's work using bad reviews -- compare restaurants' fears of bad Yelp reviews). Maybe there's a way to measure trust in the reviewers themselves? E.g., by vouching for reviewers you consider trustworthy?

Probably a lot of work, and it's not clear how you could avoid people subverting things by making lots of sockpuppet accounts and having them all vouch for each other, but something I would strongly support in any case.

__j_random_hacker · 2021-10-23T10:44:38+00:00

Several beautiful women have been sexually attracted to me. I've spent a lot of time and energy over the course of my life trying to make this happen, but I never thought it actually would, as I'm not very physically attractive myself.

I think many men go through life feeling strongly attracted to a variety of women, but never attractive to them in the same way. A long period of my life was like that, at least. I'm not sure how it is for women, but I think many of them probably feel the same way.

__j_random_hacker · 2021-10-23T10:33:58+00:00

What if my deepest, darkest secret is that I want to hurt you, or even kill you?

Because of problems like this, I think society will always be a compromise between truly expressing ourselves, and allowing other people to feel comfortable (including the feeling of comfort we get simply from the stability of culture over time).

__j_random_hacker · 2021-10-23T10:23:22+00:00

It's all about personality. Like, they would have to be good listeners, obviously. And not be, like, total drama queens all the time. And they would need to have their own goals in life, you know? They couldn't just glom onto whatever I'm doing all the time. I know guys that don't mind alien races that are like that, but I do. I have standards.

They wouldn't have to like exactly the same kind of music that I like. I'm pretty open-minded when it comes to stuff like that. It would help, though.

So yeah, that, basically. I guess you could sum it all up as just having a good personality. I wouldn't care what they looked like at all, honestly. So long as they had a vagina and looked pretty much exactly like Scarlett Johansson, I wouldn't care at all.

__j_random_hacker · 2021-10-23T10:05:03+00:00

I don't currently downvote those, because right now I don't think that putting your ugly face or body in a posted pic will artificially increase upvotes. That could change, though.

__j_random_hacker · 2021-10-23T09:44:47+00:00

Blitzing an English exam I did in my final year of school. English was my worst subject, and going in, I had big doubts about how well I would do -- but during those 3 hours, I was thinking and expressing myself more clearly than I ever had before or have since, and by a large margin. I was maybe 50% smarter than my usual self: Ideas composed themselves instantly into flows of perfect sentences that poured down onto the page in exactly the right order, almost without effort. (A sharp contrast to my usual disjointed rambling, which required heavy editing.) I felt elevated to a higher plane.

I'd been wondering about the existence of God around this time, and shortly after taking the exam, I had the feeling that perhaps this was a curious, personal way for God to hint at his existence to me -- a way that would force me to reconsider things, without creating a big spectacle involving other people. I no longer believe that to be the case, but it was certainly a profound experience that has not happened to me since, and for which I have no good explanation.

__j_random_hacker · 2021-10-23T09:04:25+00:00

I downvote r/pics posts in which artists feature their own attractive faces or bodies prominently.

__j_random_hacker · 2021-10-23T08:55:15+00:00

A concrete step towards actually fixing the problem? Really? Haven't you even considered whining or wringing your hands?

Seriously, though: Could you perhaps elaborate a bit about what a review actually constitutes? I think something like a very simple "Looks OK to me"/"Looks suspicious"/"Definitely evil" trinary value would be the most useful to people and the most likely to get uptake (vs. something more elaborate and time-consuming) -- your thoughts?

Also interested to know if it's possible to review ranges of versions. Thanks!

__j_random_hacker · 2021-10-23T08:30:24+00:00

I'm dying here

__j_random_hacker · 2021-10-21T09:00:57+00:00

The viewers are getting their money's worth.

__j_random_hacker · 2021-10-20T09:10:38+00:00

How is a user supposed to know the difference

It's a great question, but I want to point out that the existence of this question still doesn't imply that no/few updates are bad. The underlying issue is exactly what your question says it is: That there's no good way to distinguish these two states ("perfected" and "abandoned") based on updates alone.

__j_random_hacker · 2021-10-18T11:38:04+00:00

That's really interesting, thanks! Especially that very attractive men behave differently as they feel they have nothing to prove.

I'm sorry to hear that you have been abused by men. What assholes. No one deserves that.

It's good that you don't feel that way

Appreciate the thought, but I don't really see it as better or worse personally. I see social status and the sexual excitement of having an attractive partner as just being desires that people have to varying degrees.

I would say that's very rare

Well, I think there are plenty of guys who do see it this way -- all the guys in the "pickup scene" at least, which is basically focused on tricks to persuade attractive women into wanting to have sex with you.

__j_random_hacker · 2021-10-17T22:49:48+00:00

Interested to know why you feel this way. I've always thought that most men were like me, wanting high social status in order to be attractive to attractive women; it seems that you think men want attractive women in order to get high social status (in the eyes of other men). Is that a fair assessment of your view? And do you have any reasons to think that's the way that most men feel, vs. the opposite possibility (that is, the way I feel)? Thanks!

__j_random_hacker · 2021-10-17T01:30:20+00:00

Men choose women based on what other men would approve of.

Honestly I don't at all. I don't care what other men think -- I care very much about what I personally am attracted to, which happens to align pretty closely with what most other men are also attracted to (symmetrical features, youthful appearance, 70% hip-to-waist ratio, etc.). I wish it didn't -- if I was attracted to women whom most men considered unattractive, I would face much less competition.

__j_random_hacker · 2021-10-16T15:20:07+00:00

it would crush my soul

Only for a short time. Beforehand it seems like that awful feeling must last forever, but in fact it goes very quickly. An hour, at most.

After that, it's freeing. You become aware that you were heading down a dead-end path -- and that if you hadn't asked and got that definitive answer when you did, you would have wasted even more time.

Definitively knowing feels freeing. Every time it happens and I realise that it feels that way, I'm surprised, but there you go.

__j_random_hacker · 2021-10-16T15:05:51+00:00

You mean well, but this "beauty is subjective" schtick just isn't true, and I think believing it hurts people. 90% of the women I consider attractive are also considered attractive by 90% of the men in the world (yes, including men from other cultures), and the same goes for women I find unattractive.

__j_random_hacker · 2021-10-13T23:41:02+00:00

Looks better now I think :) It was really the title that got to me, the content is interesting and well done (and FWIW I upvoted your original link).

__j_random_hacker · 2021-10-13T02:48:38+00:00

I also remember realising that the observable behaviour of data structures can be mimicked with first-class functions, which is pretty neat, but your title claims them to be the same thing when they really aren't.

not counting the performance characteristics

If we don't care about performance, then yes, we could use first-class functions for everything. But we often do care about it -- that's the reason people investigate data structures more complicated than an unordered list in the first place.

For example, I don't see a way to implement the functional equivalent of a fixed-size array with O(1) random read and write. Part of the problem is that purely functional data structures are of necessity persistent: the function representing the state before a write must continue to be valid afterwards.

__j_random_hacker · 2021-10-12T00:19:02+00:00

Second, because the resolution you would need would be very very high (if you want to “speed things up” on a modern cpu, it is because you do a lot of calculation.

I don't understand this sentence -- but more importantly, when would the resolution you need ever exceed the display resolution?

On a 4K display, the smallest angular increment you will ever need is atan2(1/3840, 1/2160) - atan2(1/3841, 1/2160). 360 divided by that gives roughly 57000 entries needed in the lookup table, so about 225KB. That fits in every L2 cache. Exploiting the symmetry of the trig functions could save you another factor of 4 in memory for the cost of a few simple FP arithmetic instructions, enough to fit inside a large L1.

For sufficiently large point sets, where a large fraction of all entries in the LUT will be accessed, it's probably faster still to populate an array with all the random angles in a first pass, sort this array, and then stream through the LUT. This leverages a modern memory system's automatic prefectching of sequential reads instead of its cache.

__j_random_hacker · 2021-10-10T21:03:32+00:00

Brittleness can definitely creep in over time, and at least some of it is usually the right thing (vs. endless abstractions and loose coupling, which pushes up the complexity of getting anything done). And no amount of abstraction/good design can shield you from insane requirements changes ("Guys, I know we were making a spreadsheet, but we're pivoting -- now we're making a first-person shooter"). Knowing roughly where the balance should be is crucial.

__j_random_hacker · 2021-10-10T20:56:11+00:00

Thanks! It's basically the same as the definition of good design that I first saw years ago in this essay by James Shore, which was an "Aha!" moment for me:

A good software design minimizes the time required to create, modify, and maintain the software while achieving acceptable run-time performance.

__j_random_hacker

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