3 ms·

Everyone one that has counter examples thinking they prove the opposite, are just not waiting long enough. All the kids think they will be young forever. Can'

Everyone one that has counter examples thinking they prove the opposite, are just not waiting long enough. All the kids think they will be young forever. Can't blame MS for new JS libraries every month, or a new language released every month. This web site is dedicated to people showing off things they created, which replace something that turns into debt, and in turn also become flavor of the month. Yes, biased old man that saw 30 years of code get replaced with the latest "thing that kind of works like the old thing, but not really as good, but we have to do it to keep up with technology or we'll have debt". I've seen old VB6 apps fulfill a business need just as well as anything written in a full LAMP stack that takes a team to implement. (not that I'd ever use VB6, but hey, it did a job). Take me out back of the shed and end it quick while I'm hunched over programming something cool.

arvinsim 4y ago
Seeing the cyclic nature of things after 12 years of programming, I am focusing on the solving the domain aspects of a problem rather than code. I will leave that to juniors who probably appreciate doing the coding.
asdfman123 4y ago
It’s so weird, I used to be much more of STEM triumphalist, the kind of person who used to think the past was evil and the future can’t come fast enough. I wouldn’t consider myself conservative by any means but increasingly in 30s I’m beginning to think everyone needs to stop messing with stuff and accept imperfection.
- riffraff 4y ago
  As the adage goes, things that are new when you're a kid are the norm, things that are new when you're a young person are exciting, things that are new when you're older are unnecessary, confusing, or scary. It's true for everyone in every subject I'm afraid:)
  - hef19898 4y ago
    Even when young, new stuff is scary. Look at any community, ranging from RPGs (new rule editions, new meta plots (those are in the example I think of getting worse, objectively ;-)) to stuff like World of Warships (new classes and ships introduced after person started bad). Nothing to do with age, but rather emotional attachment. I try to avoid that kind of attachmemt, especially with regarda to my work. The odd time I stumble across something I didnyeaes ago more often than not I embarassed to thebpoint wantin to deprecate it myself! The rare, even odder, exception notwithstanding.
- revelio 4y ago
  That's the usual path of becoming conservative as you grow up. Or phrased another way, becoming normal. The training process humans go through leads to a lot of weird biases, just like how RLHF contributes to models getting bad ideas as well as good. For example, you spend years in school being instructed as efficiently as possible in the one right way to do things that was already discovered. You are only rarely or never shown the messy process of trial and error needed to get there, and many really big errors are hardly covered at all (the history of communism didn't even get a look-in when I was at school!). Another: you're instructed near exclusively by specialists, who are definitionally always right (if you argue with the teacher, you lose). Yet another: as you progress through the system, you're rewarded as the ideas you handle get more complex. You aren't rewarded for simplicity. You are also rewarded for bullshitting, because just like RLHF, exams don't award points for saying "I don't know" but they can award points for a lucky guess. These sorts of systems inevitably lead to an assumption that progress is linear, mistakes rare, complexity intrinsically has value, that expertise is nearly infallible, that guessing is OK if you don't know and the situation seems important etc. The longer one spends in education the further from reality these intuitions become, until you reach academia and become a public intellectual who produces the most complex/radical ideas possible based on educated guessing and then ignores whether they work or not. Life outside the training environment eventually starts to correct these false ideas. You see how many things are tried that fail, how nuanced and ambiguous the value of ideas really is, how complexity blows up in people's faces due to problems they didn't anticipate and so on. You start to value incrementalism, evolutionary processes, systems that gather and aggregate the wisdom of the crowds. You become less impressed with ivory tower intellectuals who think they got it all figured out in advance on a blackboard. You become conservative, and end up railing against the young radicals who have some bright idea for reshaping society by force.
  - TRiG_Ireland 4y ago
    Well, becoming small-c conservative, to a certain extent, is probably fairly normal, though perhaps not inevitable. Capital-C Conservative, not so much: that doesn't come with age, it comes with wealth.
    - 4y ago
- contravariant 4y ago
  For better or worse STEM in the English speaking world is still slightly stuck in the empiricist mindframe where inventing new technology and discovering new things by observation is the main method of advancement. This creates a bit of a blind spot for stuff like mathematics where a good idea can continue to be used and be improved on for ages, or in physics where some of the most groundbreaking stuff in the 20th century was not found by observation but by thought experiment. There's a lot that can be gained by recognising and reusing the same good idea for centuries, but it is not really 'progress' in the 'discovering / building new stuff' sense.
- Klonoar 4y ago
  There's a difference in the modern era with the term "conservative", and you may find the term "reserved" fits what you're describing here better. I wouldn't consider myself conservative by any means, but I do find myself more reserved in my decision making - I'll take a bit more time to come to a decision rather than firing from the hip, etc.
ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
If you don't want to be replaced you must solve real issues, like centering a div vertically. Joke aside, the good part of LLMs replacing the programming jobs is that programming can become fully an art [1], such as calligraphy or manual woodworking [2]. [1] Was looking at another HN thread, CS 61B Data Structures, Spring 2023 UC Berkeley, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35957811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35957811 and in one of the videos, Lecture 27 - Software Engineering I, https://youtu.be/fHEVKqYb9x8?t=387 https://youtu.be/fHEVKqYb9x8?t=387 the professor says "Programming is an act of almost pure creativity" [2] Japanese Joinery, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-ODWGUfBEM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-ODWGUfBEM
noobermin 4y ago
It isn't necessarily a cycle, a lot of the issue is just a cultural issue with software development. You can change culture, however slowly, it can change.
WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
It's a good thing if the environment around your VB6 stuff can still work with it, or accept it. Many systems get replaced when the substrate they run on is no longer supported as in "won't run on any hardware still in its warranty cycle or with parts available", or everything around has changed and the layer of glue needed to keep the old system alive and talking to everything else has grown to be prohibitively complex and expensive and is now more like a load-bearing structure by itself. If you can replace it and also fire warm bodies who used to keep it alive by being the irreplaceable wizards with arcane knowledge and job security, it just might be a net win. I hear tales about several layers of emulators the sources for which are forever lost, with the bottommost of them running some very mission critical early COBOL or ALGOL-69 (or Lisp, who knows) code written back in the days when it had been that newfangled thing young guns liked, and which no one now can reimplement today (maybe because elves have died out from smog and the golden age is over), but they may be bunk.

arvinsim 4y ago

Seeing the cyclic nature of things after 12 years of programming, I am focusing on the solving the domain aspects of a problem rather than code. I will leave that to juniors who probably appreciate doing the coding.

asdfman123 4y ago

It’s so weird, I used to be much more of STEM triumphalist, the kind of person who used to think the past was evil and the future can’t come fast enough. I wouldn’t consider myself conservative by any means but increasingly in 30s I’m beginning to think everyone needs to stop messing with stuff and accept imperfection.

riffraff 4y ago
As the adage goes, things that are new when you're a kid are the norm, things that are new when you're a young person are exciting, things that are new when you're older are unnecessary, confusing, or scary. It's true for everyone in every subject I'm afraid:)
- hef19898 4y ago
  Even when young, new stuff is scary. Look at any community, ranging from RPGs (new rule editions, new meta plots (those are in the example I think of getting worse, objectively ;-)) to stuff like World of Warships (new classes and ships introduced after person started bad). Nothing to do with age, but rather emotional attachment. I try to avoid that kind of attachmemt, especially with regarda to my work. The odd time I stumble across something I didnyeaes ago more often than not I embarassed to thebpoint wantin to deprecate it myself! The rare, even odder, exception notwithstanding.
revelio 4y ago
That's the usual path of becoming conservative as you grow up. Or phrased another way, becoming normal. The training process humans go through leads to a lot of weird biases, just like how RLHF contributes to models getting bad ideas as well as good. For example, you spend years in school being instructed as efficiently as possible in the one right way to do things that was already discovered. You are only rarely or never shown the messy process of trial and error needed to get there, and many really big errors are hardly covered at all (the history of communism didn't even get a look-in when I was at school!). Another: you're instructed near exclusively by specialists, who are definitionally always right (if you argue with the teacher, you lose). Yet another: as you progress through the system, you're rewarded as the ideas you handle get more complex. You aren't rewarded for simplicity. You are also rewarded for bullshitting, because just like RLHF, exams don't award points for saying "I don't know" but they can award points for a lucky guess. These sorts of systems inevitably lead to an assumption that progress is linear, mistakes rare, complexity intrinsically has value, that expertise is nearly infallible, that guessing is OK if you don't know and the situation seems important etc. The longer one spends in education the further from reality these intuitions become, until you reach academia and become a public intellectual who produces the most complex/radical ideas possible based on educated guessing and then ignores whether they work or not. Life outside the training environment eventually starts to correct these false ideas. You see how many things are tried that fail, how nuanced and ambiguous the value of ideas really is, how complexity blows up in people's faces due to problems they didn't anticipate and so on. You start to value incrementalism, evolutionary processes, systems that gather and aggregate the wisdom of the crowds. You become less impressed with ivory tower intellectuals who think they got it all figured out in advance on a blackboard. You become conservative, and end up railing against the young radicals who have some bright idea for reshaping society by force.
- TRiG_Ireland 4y ago
  Well, becoming small-c conservative, to a certain extent, is probably fairly normal, though perhaps not inevitable. Capital-C Conservative, not so much: that doesn't come with age, it comes with wealth.
  - 4y ago
contravariant 4y ago
For better or worse STEM in the English speaking world is still slightly stuck in the empiricist mindframe where inventing new technology and discovering new things by observation is the main method of advancement. This creates a bit of a blind spot for stuff like mathematics where a good idea can continue to be used and be improved on for ages, or in physics where some of the most groundbreaking stuff in the 20th century was not found by observation but by thought experiment. There's a lot that can be gained by recognising and reusing the same good idea for centuries, but it is not really 'progress' in the 'discovering / building new stuff' sense.
Klonoar 4y ago
There's a difference in the modern era with the term "conservative", and you may find the term "reserved" fits what you're describing here better. I wouldn't consider myself conservative by any means, but I do find myself more reserved in my decision making - I'll take a bit more time to come to a decision rather than firing from the hip, etc.

ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago

If you don't want to be replaced you must solve real issues, like centering a div vertically. Joke aside, the good part of LLMs replacing the programming jobs is that programming can become fully an art [1], such as calligraphy or manual woodworking [2]. [1] Was looking at another HN thread, CS 61B Data Structures, Spring 2023 UC Berkeley, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35957811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35957811 and in one of the videos, Lecture 27 - Software Engineering I, https://youtu.be/fHEVKqYb9x8?t=387 https://youtu.be/fHEVKqYb9x8?t=387 the professor says "Programming is an act of almost pure creativity" [2] Japanese Joinery, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-ODWGUfBEM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-ODWGUfBEM

noobermin 4y ago

It isn't necessarily a cycle, a lot of the issue is just a cultural issue with software development. You can change culture, however slowly, it can change.

WesolyKubeczek 4y ago

It's a good thing if the environment around your VB6 stuff can still work with it, or accept it. Many systems get replaced when the substrate they run on is no longer supported as in "won't run on any hardware still in its warranty cycle or with parts available", or everything around has changed and the layer of glue needed to keep the old system alive and talking to everything else has grown to be prohibitively complex and expensive and is now more like a load-bearing structure by itself. If you can replace it and also fire warm bodies who used to keep it alive by being the irreplaceable wizards with arcane knowledge and job security, it just might be a net win. I hear tales about several layers of emulators the sources for which are forever lost, with the bottommost of them running some very mission critical early COBOL or ALGOL-69 (or Lisp, who knows) code written back in the days when it had been that newfangled thing young guns liked, and which no one now can reimplement today (maybe because elves have died out from smog and the golden age is over), but they may be bunk.