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What unpopular opinions do you have about software development?

5 points by jgrahamc 10y ago

Sunset 10y ago
Violations of software licensing are irrelevant. What matters is how useful the end result is to the end-user. If you violate every copyright law in the books, I still wouldn't care as long as your program does what I need to get done to get on with my work/life.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
Safety1stClyde 10y ago
The following opinion proved quite unpopular on Hacker news: "If I was going to try machine learning I would code up from scratch rather than relying on black boxes." Another one, a preference for Python (or Go, or Rust, or whatever it is next week) is due to its fashionability, rather than any intrinsic merit of the language. See also this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14057953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14057953
- PaulHoule 10y ago
  I would disagree with that one. I worked on a neural network product that was coded in C++. It worked, and it came out early, before deep learning got bigger than beatlemania. It used intrinsics to incorporate SIMD instructions, thus it was tied to a particular processor version. I seemed to be the only person who noticed or cared if the derivatives were calculated correctly, or to implement constraints with Lagrange multipliers rather than wishful thinking. Once we got it working we would be crazy to change anything. Thus tensorflow, keras, and similar tools can save you a lot of grief.
  - Safety1stClyde 10y ago
    > I seemed to be the only person who noticed or cared if the derivatives were calculated correctly, or to implement constraints with Lagrange multipliers rather than wishful thinking. In other words, it was a black box.
    - PaulHoule 10y ago
      It may have been to the people who made it. I was the one who had to understand it in order to make it ready to go in front of the customer.
krapp 10y ago
Come at me, scrubs. - Languages which "compile to javascript" are little more than linters with delusions of grandeur. - Significant whitespace is still syntax. Replacing brackets with non-printable characters only offers the illusion of elegance, at the expense of legibility and explicitness. - PHP and Javascript may be terrible as general purpose languages, but they're very good at their intended purpose. - There is no moral dimension to software licensing. FOSS software is not fundamentally good, and proprietary software is not fundamentally evil. - The web is actually much better now than it was in the 90s.

5 points by jgrahamc 10y ago

Violations of software licensing are irrelevant. What matters is how useful the end result is to the end-user. If you violate every copyright law in the books, I still wouldn't care as long as your program does what I need to get done to get on with my work/life.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

Safety1stClyde 10y ago

The following opinion proved quite unpopular on Hacker news: "If I was going to try machine learning I would code up from scratch rather than relying on black boxes." Another one, a preference for Python (or Go, or Rust, or whatever it is next week) is due to its fashionability, rather than any intrinsic merit of the language. See also this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14057953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14057953

PaulHoule 10y ago
I would disagree with that one. I worked on a neural network product that was coded in C++. It worked, and it came out early, before deep learning got bigger than beatlemania. It used intrinsics to incorporate SIMD instructions, thus it was tied to a particular processor version. I seemed to be the only person who noticed or cared if the derivatives were calculated correctly, or to implement constraints with Lagrange multipliers rather than wishful thinking. Once we got it working we would be crazy to change anything. Thus tensorflow, keras, and similar tools can save you a lot of grief.
- Safety1stClyde 10y ago
  > I seemed to be the only person who noticed or cared if the derivatives were calculated correctly, or to implement constraints with Lagrange multipliers rather than wishful thinking. In other words, it was a black box.
  - PaulHoule 10y ago
    It may have been to the people who made it. I was the one who had to understand it in order to make it ready to go in front of the customer.

krapp 10y ago

Come at me, scrubs. - Languages which "compile to javascript" are little more than linters with delusions of grandeur. - Significant whitespace is still syntax. Replacing brackets with non-printable characters only offers the illusion of elegance, at the expense of legibility and explicitness. - PHP and Javascript may be terrible as general purpose languages, but they're very good at their intended purpose. - There is no moral dimension to software licensing. FOSS software is not fundamentally good, and proprietary software is not fundamentally evil. - The web is actually much better now than it was in the 90s.