msteffen

9 ms·

61.
by msteffen 7mo ago
I liked this a lot in retrospect. I really like to understand the practice of software engineering by analogy to research mathematics (like, no one ever asks mathematicians to estimate how long it will take to prove something…). Something I
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by msteffen 8mo ago
In the recent HN thread announcing the new Gemini coding agent ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47074735 ), a lot of people complained about Gemini’s tendency to do unwanted refactors, not perform requested actions, etc
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by msteffen 8mo ago
> it's almost impossible to get Gemini to not do "helpful" drive-by-refactors Not like human programmers. I would never do this and have never struggled with it in the past, no...
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by msteffen 9mo ago
I think IP kind of breaks a lot of engineers' brains (despite how much of it they create) because a lot of IP law is about intent, and their theory of mind is so bad that the idea of a body of law based on deduced intent, and the ways
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by msteffen 10mo ago
Okay, but…most programs are written in Python or Rust or something, where invoking library functions is a lot safer, more ergonomic, more performant, and more common than spawning a subprocess and executing a program in it. Like you can’t r
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by msteffen 10mo ago
My understanding is that scientific research has a dual problem, where the number of students needed to carry out existing professors' research is much larger than the number of junior faculty positions generally available. The result
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by msteffen 10mo ago
This one? https://www.arrowsmith.ca/cip-arrowsmith-school
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by msteffen 11mo ago
Not to mention the partner who he made move to another country and then still wouldn’t tell anyone about . The more I think about this post the more insanely controlling the guy seems!
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by msteffen 11mo ago
In support of your point, after Hashicorp relicensed Terraform (thereby killing, or at least squeezing, a lot of Terraform consultancies who had collectively contributed a massive amount to Terraform and prompting the creation of OpenTofu),
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by msteffen 11mo ago
I understand that DeepMind is working on this too: https://deepmind.google/blog/genie-3-a-new-frontier-for-worl... I wonder how their approaches and results compare?
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by msteffen 11mo ago
I love the author's argument, but this conclusion feels obvious to me—rationalizing emotional decisions is like the oldest human activity there is. Try asking somebody why they're whatever-religion or whatever-political-party that
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by msteffen 1y ago
Given all the money spent on trying different educational models to achieve better outcomes, it's really gratifying to see a result suggesting that improvement is actually possible. I have a lot of teachers in my family and they tend t
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by msteffen 1y ago
Lot of finger pointing at the author in this thread. I googled her and found this article from nine months earlier (I think), complaining that her husband does jack shit around the house: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas&#x
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by msteffen 1y ago
That’s interesting, thanks for posting an explanation. There is a parallel strain of argument for the former: - https://www.tinygnomes.com/qwiki.cgi?mode=previewSynd&uuid=B... - https://medicalxpress.com&#x2F
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by msteffen 1y ago
Look, the people making this argument all come from a fairly aligned political unit. If you start hearing this perspective from a broad coalition of ideologically diverse groups, it would mean the thesis has become consensus. I agree with y
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by msteffen 1y ago
Honestly the biggest reason I became a pro-density advocate is because low-density communities are almost always tax-revenue-negative[1], given that the cost of things like roads, water and sewer infrastructure scale with land area. What NI
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by msteffen 1y ago
It’s nice to know that other people out there are as grumpy as I am (or can be), but I don’t think it’s particularly healthy. Something I think about sometimes: the abstractions in math can be awfully elegant. Learning about them is probabl
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by msteffen 1y ago
There's this: https://bench.vortex.dev/ , which links to https://github.com/vortex-data/vortex/tree/develop/bench-vor... . I haven't tried pulling the repo or anything but it see
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by msteffen 1y ago
> randomly talk about my issues with a random phd in the lab (great scientist with tens of thousands of citations) which quickly scans the data and notes that the voltage obtained by the system in the publication is literally impossible
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by msteffen 1y ago
I think your frustration is illustrative, actually: the reason mutable global state is bad is because in order to prove that a piece of code reading it is correct, you have to know what _the entire rest of the program_ is doing. If, instead
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by msteffen 1y ago
Ah, got it, thanks!!
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by msteffen 1y ago
I'm trying to work through the math here, and I don't understand why these two propositions are equivalent: 1) min_{x,y} |x-y|^2 x ∈ A y ∈ B 2) = min_{x,y} d d ≥ |x-y|^2 x ∈ A y ∈ B What is '
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by msteffen 1y ago
> This creates a system where companies find it easier to fire good employees in bulk than to fire bad employees individually. The legal protections meant to prevent arbitrary termination end up enabling exactly that I have some passing
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by msteffen 1y ago
I had heard CL’s error handling was different but didn’t understand the details. Thanks for the explanation!
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by msteffen 1y ago
It still runs much of Facebook, I think
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by msteffen 1y ago
> The reason the Go code is so much bigger is because it checks and (kind of) handles errors everywhere (?) they could occur I’ve said before and will say again: error handling is most of what’s hard about programming (certainly most of
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by msteffen 1y ago
This article is ridiculous Q: but the code that AI generates is incoherent gibberish Guess what, life’s tough. Fixing incoherent gibberish is part of the job you wuss. Honestly, I bet you write incoherent gibberish. Would you rather be
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by msteffen 1y ago
Sorry for the slow reply here, but in Java, “final” variables can’t be updated to reference a different object, but the underlying object can be modified with method calls (e.g. you can append things to a “final” ArrayList, whereas in C++ y
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by msteffen 1y ago
> The bytes.Reader should really implement Peek. I’m pretty sure the reason it doesn’t is because this is the only way of creating read only views of slices. And a naughty user could peek at the bytes and then modify them. Sigh. People h
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by msteffen 1y ago
…first of all, what about every business that isn’t software? Restaurants need to secure a lease and buy equipment. Manufacturing anything requires you to build a factory. Then, is it so far-fetched to imagine a software business that needs

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