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codingdave

21,415 karmajoined il y a 13 ans
Old software guy. Pseudo-retired - not seeking permanent work anymore, but I do take on contract gigs to modernize/stabilize legacy platforms.

hikingdave @ gmail.com

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codingdave
·il y a 8 heures·discuss
Oh no. Someone gave an AI access to delete all the files on their system and then an AI deleted all the files on their system.

And then that same person basically said, "I'll try a different model."

Lesson clearly not learned.
codingdave
·il y a 9 heures·discuss
HN Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity."
codingdave
·il y a 9 heures·discuss
I mean, sure, when the history and data from decades of coding competitions has been sold to at least one of the AI vendors, it would be surprising if the resulting LLMs didn't place well in this kind of niche competition.
codingdave
·avant-hier·discuss
That isn't the title on the page. Nor the title applied to the questions. It looks to just be AI slop/summary of: https://piechowski.io/post/how-i-audit-a-legacy-rails-codeba...
codingdave
·il y a 3 jours·discuss
I'm not sure "SaaSpocalypse" is anything more than hyperbole, but there is a grain of truth behind the thought - What I'm seeing is not companies saying "We should re-write this product we use" as much as it is resellers saying "We can be more than middle-men if we create our own."
codingdave
·il y a 3 jours·discuss
You could clone easily before AI. When learning a language, "Build a twitter clone" is a tutorial project.

That doesn't give you the business. It give you no users, no market, no branding. You don't have the operations set up to run at scale, nor the customer base to even need it. Not to mention the leadership to build out a vision. "Clone someone else" is actually a bit of a red flag in terms of vision.

If anything, the ease of launching an MVP should prove what many folks already know - coding is not the bottleneck that prevents business success. It is the tool that allows you to step up to the starting line.
codingdave
·il y a 6 jours·discuss
You are talking about the label on the button. The button does one thing. The label does one thing. You put the two together and you have UX.
codingdave
·il y a 6 jours·discuss
It isn't actually about the machine you use. It is about why they choose not to give your the tools you need to do the job. If they cannot afford it, how can you believe they will afford your paycheck, or even keep the doors opens? IF they refuse to give you the resources to do the job on your first day, what will happen when you need something else down the road? Or are they just trying to minimize their expenses and resources give to employees?

Using your machine "until I found out whether they were serious enough to properly supply the necessities." makes no sense whatsoever. They aren't. You don't need to waste any energy finding out, they fact that they asked gave you your answer.
codingdave
·il y a 8 jours·discuss
> The salesperson knows what customers want

No, and neither does anyone else in these scenarios. Almost all startups are trying to build something new that they want people to want. But customers almost universally do not want your product. They don't give a crap about you or your product. What they care about is delivering their own product and/or achieving their own goals. Your product is a tool. If it is a tool that helps them for a reasonable price, they will buy it. But never be fooled into thinking "They want my product". They don't. They want an effective tool to to meeting their own needs. Your product wins when it is that tool.
codingdave
·il y a 8 jours·discuss
You seem to be misunderstanding the difference between what someone driving a car is responsible for vs. a pedestrian.
codingdave
·il y a 8 jours·discuss
The article you linked is by a different author. It is completely reasonable for different authors to have different writing styles.
codingdave
·il y a 9 jours·discuss
I've been involved with a few different discussions about building something along these lines, but we never actually moved forward because we realized the effort to keep up to date with the new content across all public entities would be enormous. And without close communication with the various entities and governance solution providers, it would be so easy to just become an annoyance and make them want to block our crawlers.

How do you all address such concerns, and handle throttling your data gathering in order to not become a problem for the original content providers?
codingdave
·il y a 10 jours·discuss
> This is a company whose business runs on gathering and monetizing personal data

Seems like they covered your points just fine. They just did it succinctly and trusted the reader to understand the broader implications.
codingdave
·il y a 12 jours·discuss
I wouldn't go so far as to say "nobody". Electric Boat had 2 GB memory in one of its systems at that time, with the hardware capacity to increase to 4 GB. It sounded insane at the time, but it absolutely existed, and thereby seems reasonable to include it in any research of historical pricing.
codingdave
·il y a 13 jours·discuss
Yes, that clarifies things - the term you are looking for is "spyware". I cannot think of many legit reasons to want to build this. If you want to know what devs are working on, look at what they commit into source control.
codingdave
·il y a 14 jours·discuss
I mean, there are some interesting takes in here, but at the end of the day it is a highly-opinionated ad for the product they are building, and the perspective they are putting forth is nothing more or less than the perspective of their ideal customer.

I don't agree with their premises and they lost me early on when they posited that the only reason anyone ever coded locally was to avoid network lag. I'd argue price, simplicity, performance, mobility, isolation of your changes, and probably half a dozen other reason I'm forgetting are in that mix, too. I'm sure that in some ways I am an old grey-haired dude whose comfort zone is outdated, but at the same time, if you want to move beyond the old ways of doing things, and create something new, you need to understand why the old ways existed.

This post/advertisement doesn't indicate to me that they started with that baseline of understanding.
codingdave
·il y a 14 jours·discuss
> where voicing dissent can have real-world consequences for your job and future employability

Yes. But have you considered that one of those consequences could be that companies who are not pushing AI will see that and give you an interview.

If you have criteria that would make you reject a job, regardless of how unpopular it might be, you should be shouting it form the rooftops. Any company who chooses not to engage with you because of it is saving you time and energy. Any application that gets no response because of it saves you from an interview process that would have failed, or worse - a job you would have hated. Which means that anyone who is engaging with you for interviews already knows your opinion and they are OK with it.

BTW, I'm not sure your opinion is unpopular. The concept of the "vocal minority" seems to be at play these days, as for every dev I know and work with who is positive about AI, 2 others are negative about it.
codingdave
·il y a 16 jours·discuss
That is about the software, not the data.
codingdave
·il y a 16 jours·discuss
> for any Y Combinator-related purpose

That is actually the key phrase. HN can provide the API, no problem. People can consume the API, no problem.. But I'd ask an attorney if API consumers can then re-release the data for purposes not related to YC. By my reading, they cannot.
codingdave
·il y a 16 jours·discuss
> we all understand value... what is harder for us to understand is trust... We are much more intellectual... we tend to think... We are much nerdier

You are making a huge pile of assumptions about who "we" are. This is a pile of statements you have learned about yourself. But you are missing the fact that everyone is different. If this formula and way of thinking works for you, great. Thanks for sharing it, maybe someone else will gain some insights as well.

But you are not speaking universal truths here, you are speaking personal lessons.