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genezeta

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genezeta
·22일 전·discuss
> Overall, it's like watching a really bad sight reader doing his act.

After a few clear fabrications, in the hallucinations it suggests I might be "a private individual" about who there's not much information.

I mean, I guess oh my gosh that's me but...
genezeta
·지난달·discuss
I've had quite a few conversations and read many thoughts on the subject of job security in the software industry through the years. New technologies, various crisis and crashes, just age, incoming "hordes" of less prepared developers, or whatever.

If I had to highlight the one thing all those conversations had in common it would be precisely this:

  I thought that having this knowledge would set me apart
And it never does.
genezeta
·지난달·discuss
The following does not answer your question. I am me; I'm not "the HN crowd", if there is even one. And if there is such a crowd I wouldn't be the one knowing what it thinks.

The following is only a perspective on the argument of "the product works" and what "code elegance" means. I don't really care much about LLMs but the following is not necessarily tied to them.

Also, I'm retired from professional programming so feel free to ignore all of it as antiquated and irrelevant.

---

Code is not really "a means to an end". Code is better described as a liability.

People you write code may have different perspectives on code but those with more experience generally end up with this idea engrained in their minds. Code is a cost.

Thus, you'd want to have less of it, and you'd want to have code which:

- you at least have some grade of confidence that you can understand as deeply as possible, because that means you can maintain it better and more efficiently. It means that you can, when if fails, quickly/easily find where it failed, sometimes even why it did.

- you can manage in its entirety, which becomes exponentially more difficult when there's more of it and you didn't write it yourself. Not only that, it becomes more difficult to manage it when it has been incorporated in very large chunks that reach all over the codebase, and it becomes a lot more difficult when it lacks consistency, coherence and a certain uniform style.

What you call "the elegance of code" is not an aesthetical quality but a practical one. A developer obviously wants to have something that works, but that it does so well, reliably well. And they want code that is manageable enough that when shit happens -and it always does-, the fix will be hopefully easier and will hopefully make the resulting code more reliable, not less.

And, sure, in some circumstances development speed does matter. The problem is that the circumstances in which it does are frequently "unwanted" ones, usually external pressures, which we already disliked. Usually, you need to develop faster because someone else is pressuring you into putting that speed above reliability, not because it is intrinsically better to do it faster.

The one acknowledged situation in which development speed is tolerated above these other qualities is when doing a prototype. But then again, experienced developers know that prototypes can very easily turn into traps. When doing a prototype, quality is relegated because it is understood that this will not be the final product. It is understood that a prototype's code is disposable. But too often prototypes then become either the product directly or the basis for it. And again this happens because of external pressures. Most of the time because someone says "hey, it's working" without realising that it is barely so, that it's fragile, that it relies on constant tweaking and manual adjustment. But as it appears to be working, it gives the impression of being good enough to make financial sense to build on it.

And when you "ship version 2.0 at an incredible pace" what you're usually doing is shipping prototype 2.0, an unreliable system that requires more constant tweaking and manual adjustment. A system that entraps the developers into more maintenance on each iteration, when they'd want the opposite.

---

All in all, using LLMs to produce code may have its place. But if you focus on the idea of producing vast quantities of it faster, then that may not be the best use.
genezeta
·2개월 전·discuss
https://archive.is/uTyO7
genezeta
·2개월 전·discuss
Yes, it is custom.
genezeta
·2개월 전·discuss
http://arclanguage.org/install

And you can contact [email protected] if you're serious. But I'm not sure they do actually accept contributions. And anyway a dark mode is something that has been talked about for years and there doesn't seem to be much interest in adding it to the site. You may try other -external- options to add a dark mode through a browser extension.
genezeta
·2개월 전·discuss
Direct link without having to go through reddit: https://www.livesunset.io/

It's a site with live camera feeds from around the world to see the sunset.
genezeta
·3개월 전·discuss
So you've followed your tutorial and you've built your little project. And it works! That's great. Congratulations.

---

But... now let's think for a moment about what you're doing there. Not the technical bits, but what the user sees.

You have decided that the average male lives to 71-72 and female to around 74. You have then decided that this average should be taken as a hard, fixed limit. And that people will die at that age no matter what.

These two assumptions are somewhat tricky. I mean, the first one is fairly random without a context. For, say, India, this is about right, but for other countries of the world -or as an average for the whole world- it can be quite different. And you don't mention any particular country.

But anyway, it's the second assumption that is more problematic. Because the number is just an average and using it as a hard limit is clearly wrong. First of all because death is not linear. Take a look at this sample table for the US [0]. Life expectancy increases with age. That means that initial life expectancy can be 80 years, but if you make it to 60, your total life expectancy goes up to 84. And if you make it to those 80 your life expectancy still gives you -on average- another 9.5 years to live.

Why is this relevant? Well, because such a calculator would assume the user, the person that goes there to see how much time they have left with their parents... well, still has their parents alive. It would be stupid otherwise if they know their parents are already dead. So this is 2026. The user states that their dad was born in, say, 1956. That's 70 years. Is the 71.5 average life expectancy right? Not at all. Even as an average, even as a hard limit, it is wrong. For a person at 70, that life expectancy would be something like 80+ and the remaining time should be calculated according to that. Sure, this means you need to write code that is a bit more complicated than what you've done here. Because you don't just have one average life expectancy, you need a whole table or function to calculate it. But, hey, this is learning! It's a coding exercise. So it is an opportunity to learn more and go beyond the simple tutorial into an exercise that is just a little bit more advanced.

---

But then again, let's ignore even this. Let's go back and keep the simple exercise. Let's assume just one fixed life expectancy. Then, as I mentioned above, we have a problem that's worse, more... stupid. Because as I said such a calculator has to assume the parents are still alive. Otherwise is simply makes no sense. And yet, you're giving the user the option to choose birth years as far back as 1940, while directly assuming that anyone born before 1952 for men or 1955 for women is already dead.

When you offer that option, you're saying it is a valid option. But when the user chooses it, you're saying they are stupid for doing so.

What you're doing is like this conversation:

  - Hi, I visit my dad every Friday afternoon.
  - That's nice. But from this other perspective that may not be a lot of time. How old is he?
  - Oh, my dad is 78.
  - Bad news: your dad's already dead.
  - What? No, he's fine, I saw him just yesterday.
  - Your dad's been dead for years.
  - You're an asshole.
---

So... again, congratulations on your coding exercise. You did it. The coding is solved [perhaps]. Well done.

But take this as an additional learning point: The problems you solve will sometimes involve writing code, but they will always require you to think about the details and nuances of the problem itself. It's all about the decisions and assumptions you make.

[0] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
genezeta
·3개월 전·discuss
In Firefox on Android you can just simply "Save as PDF".
genezeta
·3개월 전·discuss
Alegreya
genezeta
·3개월 전·discuss
Best time is when you find an interesting link to share.
genezeta
·3개월 전·discuss
https://bearblog.dev/

https://mataroa.blog/
genezeta
·3개월 전·discuss
You came here searching for an answer. The problem is you wanted one specific answer, one that validates your own stance. So now if someone gives you an answer that doesn't sit well with you, you will try to convince them that you're right anyway for whatever reason you want.

Discussing this seems useless.
genezeta
·3개월 전·discuss
Did you create it on company time?
genezeta
·3개월 전·discuss
> searching through HN posts and comments I can't find much (if any) discussion about Qubes OS

I think there's a fair amount of submissions and discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Qubes
genezeta
·3개월 전·discuss
I walk to the park during slow hours, sit on a bench, wait for a bunch of sparrows to come, and then I give them some sunflower seeds. Sometimes -but not often- a magpie will approach too. You have to be quiet for birds to come near and fairly calm for them to approach you at all.

Others can only be spotted from a distance. Wagtails are quite timid but can be seen running around sometimes, and the blackbirds can be heard a lot even if you don't see them. I've also spotted a couple of woodpeckers. And once the park fell suddenly still and I looked up and there was a kite passing by (they have been spotted nesting in a much larger park a couple of miles away).

If the park is busy, then I'll watch the dogs, people going by. I ponder about the futility of life. Just sit there silently, doing nothing.
genezeta
·3개월 전·discuss
IF you mean this:

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47611866 ("Show HN: Agentmatic, AI marketing platform that generates full campaigns for you")
It has not been deleted, as you can see.

On the other hand, I don't see any asking for reviews or feedback. What I see is self-promotion, similarly to your previous post from a couple of months ago, which is against the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
genezeta
·4개월 전·discuss
> I already cleaned up

You'd probably need to detail what exactly you have done to clean up, but it sounds like you didn't actually remove the commit?

You can remove a commit with an interactive rebase and then force push the new tree. Or depending on the current state of your tree, you can use other options. In any case, you have answers to this on Stack overflow. e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40245767/delete-commit-o...
genezeta
·4개월 전·discuss
Broken link. Missing an e at the end: https://lovkush.substack.com/p/why-i-hardly-play-board-games...

But in any case, it's not very interesting. I mean, there's not much of an insight about board games. Even after saying that they "give you a false sense of socialising" (emphasis mine), the author immediately notes that "This is not representative of board gamers - many board gamers makes lots of close friends through board games - but for me, I was not building new friendships through board gaming."
genezeta
·4개월 전·discuss
As the sibling comment mentions, it's Astro:

https://github.com/videojs/v10/tree/main/site