The State of the Art is Terrible • Hacker News Board

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#151

Post by billswift » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 7:47 AM UTC

Confusion wrote: post #147

robotresearcher wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> support people are not your janitors. Quit expecting us to spend hours digging through arcane documentation, followed by further hours troubleshooting things that you left half-finished I am amazed once again at some people's ability to take free stuff and complain that it isn't making them money fast enough. Just take a few seconds to think about the value we all get out of the deep and broad Free Software stacks.…

The problem is that writing the code yourself is nice, while tracing/solving bugs in the code of others and fixing docs sucks. Too many free software authors do the nice work and rely on others to do the dirty work. They write code, release it and claim victory, while their code is only barely usable. The problem is that something barely usable is better than something nonexistent, so it gets used and we are stuck wi…

>The problem is that something barely usable is better than something nonexistent

No necessarily. I think sometimes the existence of something, even if only barely usable, blocks the creation of something else that might be better.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#152

Post by jeffnonumber » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 7:48 AM UTC

noonespecial wrote: post #134

thaumaturgy wrote: post #70

I'd like to buy Zack a drink, because all of this is obvious to those poor shmucks among us that handle the support end of things (also known as the "shit end"). I've been saying a lot of the same things for years. I'm tired of it now; I'm starting to give up, because it's obvious there isn't a programmer out there that gives a damn. You can try telling them that there's something wrong with software -- something fun…

I remember when it was, when it seemed like most things just worked, even though they didn't look pretty. I remember spending hours moving around jumpers to set DMA and IRQ. Only to find out that the only free IRQ was #9 and bloody Packard Bells sometimes didn't have a frikkin' 9 because that batch of boards was $2 cheaper that month... I remember when it wasn't pretty and it took ridiculous efforts to make it work e…

I was thinking about this last night, the evolution problem - whether the only effective strategy would be to synthetically reintroduce tribal-era scarcity so we could all find our balance again, or would moving to a genuine post-scarcity world be something humankind could handle, or do we need to find some way to hack our minds to accept this new availability model in the same way that alcohol or cocaine short-circuit our reward pathways?

w.r.t. OP, should lines of code be restricted to manageable amounts by some kind of international regulatory fiat, or can they just abstract the problem away into utterly comprehensive libraries of functions, or do coders just need to man up and take it?

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#153

Post by gnaritas » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 7:49 AM UTC

michaelochurch wrote: post #97

alnayyir wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Eh, I appreciate that, really, but I don't want to stop caring. I want it to be better. Corpses write no code. shrugs > If it was just one company that consistently produced crap software, it would be easy to say that there's probably something broken at that company. Anything below the top, say, 2-5% of software is guaranteed to be shit because all the programmers below the top 2-5% are shit. There is no grand move…

Anything below the top, say, 2-5% of software is guaranteed to be shit because all the programmers below the top 2-5% are shit. There is no grand movement or methodology to be had here. It's a people problem. Disagree. I don't think 95-98% of programmers are idiots. However, a lot of programmers (even some very smart ones) are terrible architects and have no sense of the big picture. Moreover, a lot of projects start…

> It takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become good at something,

No, it takes that long to master something, it takes much less time to simply become good.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#154

Post by JoachimSchipper » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 8:05 AM UTC

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #78

mhewett wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, you youngsters. Trust me, it is FAR easier now to get started than any time in computing history. Before GitHub, you installed SVN or CVS on your own. Before that you accidentally overwrote your software once a month. Before Cloudant you installed MySQL on your own. Before that you wrote your own storage system. Before Amazon you bought a server and installed Linux on it. Before that you wrote customer databases…

Youngster? Gee, thanks! I remember writing my first program on a Commodore Pet with 4K of RAM. Used peek and poke statements to draw the game field on the screen and loaded and saved the whole thing on a cassette tape. The problem here is that you can argue this either way, so let me clarify. When we do systems analysis, we first focus on "happy path" scenarios. You want something, there's no exceptions, you push a b…

(Off-topic, but if you want to rejuvenate the F#-as-node.js thing, look into FastCGI. It's still a bag of hurt, though - notably, mod_fcgi feels proof-of-concept-y and will not multiplex requests over a single connection. Other HTTP servers apparently do better.)

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#155

Post by axefrog » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 8:11 AM UTC

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #78

mhewett wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, you youngsters. Trust me, it is FAR easier now to get started than any time in computing history. Before GitHub, you installed SVN or CVS on your own. Before that you accidentally overwrote your software once a month. Before Cloudant you installed MySQL on your own. Before that you wrote your own storage system. Before Amazon you bought a server and installed Linux on it. Before that you wrote customer databases…

Youngster? Gee, thanks! I remember writing my first program on a Commodore Pet with 4K of RAM. Used peek and poke statements to draw the game field on the screen and loaded and saved the whole thing on a cassette tape. The problem here is that you can argue this either way, so let me clarify. When we do systems analysis, we first focus on "happy path" scenarios. You want something, there's no exceptions, you push a b…

Luxury! In my time, my father would wake me up by cutting me in half, then I'd have to walk forty miles uphill through a blizzard to get to my computer and then I'd have to electrocute myself to turn it on and I'd interface with it using an abacus and punch cards!

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#156

Post by danmaz74 » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 8:12 AM UTC

There are some true things in this rant, but I'm pretty sure about one thing: "provably correct algorithms" are never going to deliver us a computer to which "you should literally be able to tell it what you want it to do and it would do its darnedest to do a good job for you."

Natural Intelligence is the product of billion years of crappy evolution, and thinking that the application of some clear, clean mathematical concepts will be able to recreate it is very naive.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#157

Post by noonespecial » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 8:17 AM UTC

jeffnonumber wrote: post #152

noonespecial wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember when it was, when it seemed like most things just worked, even though they didn't look pretty. I remember spending hours moving around jumpers to set DMA and IRQ. Only to find out that the only free IRQ was #9 and bloody Packard Bells sometimes didn't have a frikkin' 9 because that batch of boards was $2 cheaper that month... I remember when it wasn't pretty and it took ridiculous efforts to make it work e…

I was thinking about this last night, the evolution problem - whether the only effective strategy would be to synthetically reintroduce tribal-era scarcity so we could all find our balance again, or would moving to a genuine post-scarcity world be something humankind could handle, or do we need to find some way to hack our minds to accept this new availability model in the same way that alcohol or cocaine short-circu…

I think maybe we just need to grow into it. This takes time, and probably generations. The first generation that has truly never been without a globally interconnected computer as part of their life is about to come of age. Lets see what they can do.

There was a time when there were no humans who knew how to drive a car.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#158

Post by jeffnonumber » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 8:22 AM UTC

noonespecial wrote: post #157

jeffnonumber wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking about this last night, the evolution problem - whether the only effective strategy would be to synthetically reintroduce tribal-era scarcity so we could all find our balance again, or would moving to a genuine post-scarcity world be something humankind could handle, or do we need to find some way to hack our minds to accept this new availability model in the same way that alcohol or cocaine short-circu…

I think maybe we just need to grow into it. This takes time, and probably generations. The first generation that has truly never been without a globally interconnected computer as part of their life is about to come of age. Lets see what they can do. There was a time when there were no humans who knew how to drive a car.

Yeah and at that time say there were dudes running around on the rigging of big 4-mast galleons like it was no big deal, and if you dropped one of them on a busy road they would be as horrified as I would be if someone dropped me in their place and told me to splice the mainbrace or whatever...

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#159

Post by nodata » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 8:23 AM UTC

cpeterso wrote: post #133

nodata wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative used to be: report a bug. Put it in bugzilla. I've reported thousands of bugs. Maybe 30-50% of them used to be fixed. Nowadays I'd be pushing it to say 5%.

But do you still report bugs? I've gone to report GNOME or Ubuntu bugs, only to find that the problem already has a bug report from 5 years ago. The bugs are still open and unfixed, with a poor sap adding a "me too" comment every few months.

I still report bugs, but nowhere near as many.

Before there was a feeling of progress: report a bug, see it fixed. Now it's report a bug and silence.

Re: The State of the Art is Terrible

#160

Post by loup-vaillant » Tue, Oct 04, 2011, 8:25 AM UTC

tensor wrote: post #98

The thing that the author of this rant and every other rant like it don't understand is that computer science is hard . While tools like functional programming may indeed deliver on the promise of a 60% code reduction, they have a correspondingly higher barrier to learning. Evolving algorithms? Automatic programming? These problems become theoretically intractable so quickly it's not even funny (I currently do resear…

> While tools like functional programming may indeed deliver on the promise of a 60% code reduction,[…]

Most code is badly written C++ that could have been written in, say, Ocaml, Haskell, or Lisp. This is easily a 10 fold reduction. And the guys at http://vpri.org/ are doing at least five times better than that (50 fold reduction compared to well written C).

On your point 3, Bugs have lower accountability. Meaning, lower impact for those who commit them. If they have lower impact as well, that's because they forced us to distrust software.