hathawsh

11 ms·

61.
by hathawsh 1y ago
Here is a simple summary of the common voices/moods in technical writing: - Active: The user presses the Enter key. - Passive: The Enter key is to be pressed. - Imperative (aka command): Press the Enter key. The imperative mood is conc
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by hathawsh 1y ago
I think the main difficulty is deployment. Grandma wants that recipe manager to be available to her family 24x7. How can she deploy it easily for free or very low cost? If there were a modern Hypercard, I think the key to its success would
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by hathawsh 1y ago
Yes, but I think we have a somewhat different idea about the market forces. My impression from your essay is that you believe app developers will add APIs that enable personal tools, and only then will local software crafting take off. My b
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by hathawsh 1y ago
This kind of list may be right for a trade school. If that's what you're referring to, then I don't disagree. Those students want to learn how to use those tools. But if the class is computer science at a university, then the
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by hathawsh 1y ago
I agree, I feel like the authors are underestimating the effect the new AI is already having on the concept of local software crafting. For my entire lifetime, I've had friends ask me to help them build software that accesses some data
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by hathawsh 1y ago
What I wonder about is the pool of potential Go developers. Is the error handling issue serious enough to stop developers from even considering Go? Go would have been an obviously better choice than most languages 30 years ago, but today
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by hathawsh 1y ago
Interesting discovery. This research sounds creepy and ill-advised, but my intuition suggests to me this is an innocent attempt to do something useful rather than waste energy on a PoW algorithm. My intuition also tells me that if this proj
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by hathawsh 1y ago
Is that still true? There are so many SPAs out there now that if I were to create a web spider today, I would plan to just render a lot of the pages in a browser rather than fight the status quo. Efficiency wouldn't be my top concern.
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by hathawsh 1y ago
The difference is that when AI exhibits behavior like that, you can refine the AI or add more AI layers to correct it. For example, you might create a supervisor AI that evaluates when more requirements are needed before continuing to build
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by hathawsh 1y ago
That concept has been formalized as part of the Python standard library. https://docs.python.org/3/library/doctest.html
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by hathawsh 1y ago
I believe you meant to say we will need a transpiler, not polyfill. Of course, a lot of us are already using transpilers, so that's nothing new.
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by hathawsh 2y ago
Here is how I read it: CPython has a hashlib module that has long been a wrapper around certain functions exported from OpenSSL, but since a SHA3 buffer overflow was discovered in OpenSSL, the CPython project has now decided to wrap a libra
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by hathawsh 2y ago
Thanks for writing! This is a very well written essay that I need to read repeatedly.
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by hathawsh 2y ago
OTOH, I am the kind of person who feels great joy in discovering that I have been wrong about something, I have learned something better, and I have deepened my understanding. It could be about anything. Challenging my viewpoints is very en
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by hathawsh 2y ago
I would like to nominate this comment as one of the best ever posted on HN. In fact, I would love to see a whole documentary about each of these points.
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by hathawsh 2y ago
I can understand what you're saying, but there's a different way to look at it. Imagine yourself in the future. You're in a position of leadership and people want your advice. Let's say a student asks you how they should
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by hathawsh 2y ago
OTOH, what is "code"? In a general sense, I think of "code" as the "codification of a process." If we want to know what steps the AI is following to complete a process, then having an AI write code seems like a
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by hathawsh 2y ago
Kudos to you for enduring through this fight! We can only achieve transparency when people choose not to be complacent. Thank you. What do you think are the next steps?
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by hathawsh 2y ago
I thought for a moment you were talking about https://whimsical.com/ , which is productivity suite that people depend on for work. I wouldn't want to hear it's shutting down! Then I realized you're talking abo
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by hathawsh 2y ago
Great point.
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by hathawsh 2y ago
It does change the semantics if n is negative or large enough to cause an overflow. The challenge for the compiler is to somehow prove that neither of those things can happen.
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by hathawsh 2y ago
Makes sense. Still, I've been burned a bit when Microsoft surprisingly abandoned a developer tool I purchased. Flagship or not, a lot can change in a few years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_M
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by hathawsh 2y ago
I wonder if this concern could be partly alleviated through a price lock-in strategy. There could be a contract that says because the subscriber has paid for N months, that subscriber is eligible to keep paying the same price for 5-10 years
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by hathawsh 2y ago
Correct, and that (intentional) misunderstanding was part of the point. I had a 6th grade teacher who struggled with the idea that multiplying two negative numbers produces a positive number. I imagine someone like her asking a question bas
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by hathawsh 2y ago
I love that it's possible to convince it that I actually know what I'm talking about. First I asked: "Explain why negative numbers are in fact imaginary" It told me that negative numbers are not imaginary numbers and exp
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by hathawsh 2y ago
I remember the glee I felt when I first used logarithms to represent large numbers in Excel. Suddenly, I could easily approximate large factorials, and they were fast! I wondered how many other people have discovered this trick. I couldn&#x
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by hathawsh 2y ago
OTOH, theoretically, could we produce a decently priced EV with US materials only? If we go all-in on automation, could one factory worker do the job that many do today, thereby reducing costs? If we can head in that direction, I think Elon
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by hathawsh 2y ago
I would love to hear someone refute this: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/10/23/10-things... Especially point #8, "The ruling Chinese Communist Party promotes atheism and discourages ci
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by hathawsh 2y ago
Wow, cool! Here's my poll. We'll see if anyone notices. :-) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42955244
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Poll: AI Movies/TV in 10 Years
16 points by hathawsh 2y ago|2 comments

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