HackerLangs
TopNewTrendsCommentsPastAskShowJobs

Agingcoder

1,613 karmajoined 9 ปีที่แล้ว

comments

Agingcoder
·6 วันที่ผ่านมา·discuss
Compiler bugs are surprisingly common - most people simply never notice them. Whether these bugs are major or not is a different topic.

If you have a very large scale test suite for your application, a large codebase, and exert most compiler features including the optimizer , you’ll probably find a few every time you upgrade .
Agingcoder
·7 วันที่ผ่านมา·discuss
Yes. Most people don’t actually understand what a program proof is - the answer is usually ‘I have very good tests’.

Now, go write the code for an artificial heart , and sleep at night thanks to strong testing !
Agingcoder
·14 วันที่ผ่านมา·discuss
Physics is an endless source of frustration to me. It feels like a mix of random tricks, most of which I don’t understand.

I find math and compsci reasonably understandable, can read research papers in both fields ( and have published papers) etc. There’s something specific about physics I don’t get but I’ve never been able to figure out what. The main symptom is that most cause -> consequence in such demonstrations , which are seemingly obvious to everyone, make no sense to me.

Am I the only one ? Are there good resources to learn it?
Agingcoder
·26 วันที่ผ่านมา·discuss
Formal methods allow you to prove that it works for all inputs, and not just for the small subset that will be sampled by property testing

It’s a proof, not a successful experiment.
Agingcoder
·2 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
I have found that asking an llm for an Eli 5 ( along with the important follow up questions ) usually works out
Agingcoder
·2 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
Yeah this is willy wonka
Agingcoder
·2 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
Well, I’ve been writing code for decades so I know because there was a time ( when I was younger ) where I did just this.

I also know that these days, for all kinds of reasons, I do not have the time to write the tools I’m writing now without AI. I don’t lack the ability, and I could - it will simply be multi months side projects that I can’t / won’t complete.
Agingcoder
·2 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
Agreed I’ve already started writing software for myself using Claude. I would never have done this if it weren’t for AI - I simply don’t have the time otherwise .

I now have tailor made apps with all kinds of bells and whistles that commercial products can’t offer easily ( I fall under non commercial usage which opens a lot of doors ), and that free software might offer, but later.

I have also learnt a lot technically in the process, since I’ve been able to venture into what was for me unknown territory but at controlled cost

I plan to create more such apps in the future. What is certain though is that my cooking app has immediately displaced all the others on the market , because none of the others cater to my requirements.

The production side is indeed of specific interest - most users don’t run production software so I had to think about that one. Tailscale and Cloudflare came in quite handy and there is indeed a market here
Agingcoder
·2 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
I didn’t find that many - you can find graded readers, but very few ‘graded novels’ ( as in a full novel where chapters are progressively harder, not multiple independent tiny stories ) if I may say so
Agingcoder
·2 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
For those interested in learning old English, I’ve been going through Oswald Bera by Colin Gorrie -

https://colingorrie.com/books/osweald-bera/

Basically it’s a full blown story/graded reader with no modern English apart from vocabulary. You build an understanding of the language as you read the book and what is initially gibberish becomes quite clear as you progress . It does help if you’ve had a lot of exposure to German ( vocab and grammar), or barring this any case inflected language.

What’s noticeable is that it’s about 200 pages long, so the story gets quite sophisticated , and rather unexpectedly the book is a bit of a page-turner !
Agingcoder
·2 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
À lot
Agingcoder
·3 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
It is unfortunately very heavy (2.4kg vs 1.5 for my mb air 15)

I take note though that the 13 inches framework is bigger than it seems because of the aspect ratio
Agingcoder
·3 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
This looks suspiciously like something I could buy : a lightweight well made Linux laptop, with long battery life. I currently use a MacBook and won’t get near a windows machine.

Two questions 1/ will there be a 15 inches version ? ( I’m not getting any younger I like bigger screens ) 2/ software-wise how reliable are the suspend/resume and all the laptop features ? I’ve been using Linux for about 30y and to me this is typically the bits that usually fail. To put it differently, how confident are you that things will work properly out of the box ?

Other than that , I love what you’re doing, please continue.
Agingcoder
·3 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
I understand his frustration : I have a similar issue with video games - Xbox gamepass games sometimes leave the service. So I built an app that takes all my games across the various gaming services ( steam etc ) including the Xbox gamepass ones, and it grabs them from the achievements ( games I have played ) on top of the catalog ( available games )should they have left the catalog

That way games that are gone remain and I have a Netflix like interface to view all my games past and present
Agingcoder
·3 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
You do but you then make a career out of it : you become the fixer ( and it can be a very good career , either technical or managerial)
Agingcoder
·4 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
I tried subscribing to pcgamer ( as in, I literally paid for it ) two years ago but this didn’t seem to change structurally the amount of ads i was getting. I also tried to contact them directly but couldn’t find a relevant email address to reach out to.

I now use an ad blocker instead. I’m not proud of it, but being actively hostile to me is something I don’t quite understand especially when I’m trying hard to give them money.
Agingcoder
·4 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
I work for a mega corp, and our global overlord( who is ex dev) has tried Claude code at home, and figured out that generating large amounts of code comes with its own challenges - they explicitly don’t want this to happen so there’s no such metric.
Agingcoder
·4 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
This is one of the books I recommend to my coworkers who are interested in operating systems - it teaches a surprising amount of things by telling you what an OS will do for you and therefore why you need it, instead of telling you how it works inside.

It also remains being very pleasant to read in spite of its very large size( I read the whole book cover to cover ). Obviously you can also read the classics ( minix book, tanenbaum, Bach , and probably modern references ) but this one somehow gives the operating system a purpose which I find absent in the others I’ve read .
Agingcoder
·4 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
If you don’t mind developing, what made you switch stance ? many people never change their minds even when faced with overwhelming evidence , and based on your prior level of support, I’m quite curious about the actual process .
Agingcoder
·4 เดือนที่ผ่านมา·discuss
‘In other words: AI is making it possible to detect severe security vulnerabilities at highly accelerated speeds.´

Isn’t it rather : we now have a new family of security flaws detector, which find other issues on top of the ones already found by conventional ( human or regular static analyzers ) methods ?

If they supersede all the existing ones , then it’s quite major, and quite a bunch of vendors will disappear …