I’m surprised to see such a reaction to a left-aligned content column. I’d have said it was pretty common, though probably not as common as it used to be.
If I were to pick one problem with the presentation, it would rather be the font-size (12px is unequivocally too small), or the use of monospace (simply unsuitable for body text).
And incidentally, HN suffers from two of these three problems.
> I’m surprised to see such a reaction to a left-aligned content column. I’d have said it was pretty common, though probably not as common as it used to be.
When it was common, columns weren't so thin I think
Left aligned content was much less of a problem on the old displays with a 4:3 aspect.
Nowadays, with wide displays, the browser windows may also be wide, especially when using a lot of open tabs, and left aligned content becomes much more annoying when it is thrown far away from your center of vision.
It's quite exciting how far we've come from the modern exposition of world models by David Ha and Jürgen Schmidhuber in 2018 https://worldmodels.github.io/
I don't think this is bad, if you know Python then most of the code will be fine for you. I think you're probably referring to pm_reduce_collapse, but while it looks daunting at first, it really isn't when you consider the alternatives, I'd be curious on how you'd improve it short of creating a DSL.
One anecdote in the same vein, a couple of months ago, I wanted to parse systemd-networkd INI files in Python and the python built-in ConfigParser [0] and pytest's iniconfig parser [1] couldn't handle multiple sections with the same name so I ended up writing 2 parsers, one using a ParserCombinator library and one by hand and ended up using the latter given it was much simpler to understand and I didn't have to introduce an extra dependency.
Admittedly, INI is quite a simple format, hence I mention this as an anecdote.
As a project gets larger the cost of owning a dependency directly begins to outweigh the impedance mismatch between 3rd party software & software customized to your project.
I've got 10 full time senior engineers on a project heading in to its 15th year. We rewrite even extremely low level code like std::vector or malloc to make sure it matches our requirements.
I have written parsers using parser combinators in Haskell and Clojure. I find that ML-like (Haskell, OCaml, StandardML) languages generally are great at writing parsers, even hand-written ones in it is a superior experience.
In this case, this was a project at $EMPLOYER in an existing codebase with colleagues who have never seen Haskell code, using Haskell would've been a major error in judgement.
I have used systemd services before to do this to run an application, I had a user created specifically for the application, and I defined the capabilities the application needed via CapabilityBoundingSet and AmbientCapabilities [0] and I used a lot of stuff from [1] to restrict the application e.g. the sandboxing facilities, restricting the allowed syscalls [2], ...etc. systemd also comes with a useful command systemd analyze security [3]
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