pron

36 ms·

451.
by pron 9mo ago
> Unless you are only ever a single engineer, your career is filled with "I need to debug code I didn't write". True, but there's usually at least one person who knows that particular part of the system that you need
452.
by pron 9mo ago
> Complaining about a language having features you don't want is silly. It might be silly if you're working on your own. Software that delivers a lot of value is usually developed and evolved not only by team, but by a team wit
453.
by pron 9mo ago
No doubt, I'm just saying that working with a coding agent is not even remotely similar to being a team lead. If a member of your team can't complete a task and can't accurately explain what the difficulty is, you're in
454.
by pron 9mo ago
Some people say that working with an agent or an agents orchestrator is like being a technical lead. But I've been a technical lead for quite a while, and the experience of working with an agent doesn't even come close. I think th
455.
by pron 9mo ago
This reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Q... : > Borges's "review" describes Menard's efforts to go beyond a mere "translation" of Don Quixote by i
456.
by pron 9mo ago
My theory of the current US administration and its support is one of ideological stupidity. Ideological stupidity wishes to see the world as simple. If "classical fascism" made a promise of order in a tumultuous world, the new rig
457.
by pron 9mo ago
You can use the Vector API ( https://openjdk.org/jeps/529 ) for manual vectorisation. Although there's no doubt that the lack of flattened object is the last remaining real performance issue for Java vs. a lower-lev
458.
by pron 9mo ago
> By definition, this is the worse AI coding will ever be This may be true, but it's not necessarily true, and certainly not by definition. For example, formal verification by deductive methods has improved over the past four deca
459.
by pron 9mo ago
I know that per HN's guidelines we're supposed to be "kind and curious", and "reply to the argument instead of calling names". But with some texts, engaging with individual arguments loses sight of the more imp
460.
by pron 9mo ago
> or the other way around (maybe for direct access to data in a memory-mapped file), you can choose to do that. Java tends to make solutions like that harder. Not so much anymore, thanks to the new FFM API ( https://openjdk.org
461.
by pron 9mo ago
What you're saying may (sometimes) be true, but that's not why Java's performance is hard to beat, especially as programs evolve (I was programming in C and C++ since before Java even existed). In a low-level language, you pa
462.
by pron 9mo ago
P.S. Even for flattened types, the "abstraction penalty", or, more precisely, its converse, the "concreteness penalty", in Java will be low, as you don't directly pick when an object is flattened. Instead, you decla
463.
by pron 9mo ago
There's no aliasing in the messy C sense in Java (and no pointers into the middle of objects at all). As for other optimisations, there are traps inserted to detect violation if speculation is used at all, but the main thrust of optimi
464.
by pron 9mo ago
I don't know what plb2 is, but the benchmark game can demonstrate very little for because, the benchmarks are small and uninteresting compared to real programs (I believe there's not a single one with concurrency, plus there'
465.
by pron 9mo ago
> it's probably because you are trying to write Java in C++ or Rust Well, sure. In principle, we know that for every Java program there exists a C++ program that performs at least as well because HotSpot is such a program (i.e. the
466.
by pron 9mo ago
> Not whether it is sound. Precisely right, but the entire point is that it doesn't need to. The optimisation is applied in such a way that when it is wrong, a signal triggers, at which point the method is "deoptimised". T
467.
by pron 9mo ago
> Is there something they are doing wrong? Yes. The most common issues are heap misconfiguration (which is more important in Java than any compiler configuration in other languages) and that the benchmarks don't simulate realistic w
468.
by pron 9mo ago
> java's language design simply prohibits some optimizations that are possible in other languages (and also enables some that aren't in others). This isn't really true - at least not beyond some marginal things that are of
469.
by pron 9mo ago
No, Java's existing compiler is very good, and it generates as good code as you'd want. There is definitely still a cost due to objects not being inlined in arrays yet (this will change soon) that impacts some programs, but in pra
470.
by pron 9mo ago
You're right that Java lacks inline types (although it's getting them really soon, now), but the main cost of that isn't because of stack allocation (because heap allocations in Java don't cost much more than stack alloc
471.
by pron 9mo ago
> due to jit warmup I think this harness actually uses JMH, which measures after warmup.
472.
by pron 9mo ago
The only "abstraction penalty" of "running on a VM" (by which I think you mean using a JIT compiler), is the warmup time of waiting for the JIT.
473.
by pron 9mo ago
I was surprised to see that Java was slower than C++, but the Java code is run with `-XX:+UseSerialGC`, which is the slowest GC, meant to be used only on very small systems, and to optimise for memory footprint more than performance. Also,
474.
by pron 9mo ago
But a coding agent is free to write any relevant context elsewhere, where it is not necessarily constrained by the syntactic requirements of a programming language. When we write Assembly, we also tend to write comments. It's not like
475.
by pron 9mo ago
Another way of putting it is that predictions based on an assumption of "exponential growth" of anything (which is presumed to slow down at some point) are almost always wrong. It's saying, sure, we may be at 1 right now, but
476.
by pron 9mo ago
Maybe for existing models, but I don't think that's necessarily the case. AI tools that generate or manipulate images or video don't need human words in the format. Also, I'm not sure how much meaningful names help beyon
477.
by pron 9mo ago
I didn't say it wants to do anything. It also doesn't want to build software. But why would it be the case that an AI told to build an air traffic control software could successfully do that, but an AI told to make sure planes arr
478.
by pron 9mo ago
> Similarly, maybe AI can generate software for any task, but maybe it cannot do that task just as well as the task-specialized software. Yes, maybe, but assuming that is the case in general seems completely arbitrary. Maybe not all jo
479.
by pron 9mo ago
Here's what I don't get about the "AI can build all software" scenario. It extrapolates AI capabilities up to a certain, very advanced point, and then, inexplicably, it stops. If AI is capable enough to "build prett
480.
by pron 9mo ago
People who just let the agent code for them, how big of a codebase are you working on? How complex (i.e. is it a codebase that junior programmers could write and maintain)?

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