Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I think I need to go lie down

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

461–470 of 475 posts

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#461

Post by IggleSniggle »

pseudosavant wrote: post #406
davio wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I describe our work as an endless loop of taking data from the screen to the database and back again.

This reminds me of the introductory scene of the amazing game The Stanley Parable: Stanley worked for a company in a big building where he was Employee #427. Employee #427's job was simple: he sat at his desk in Room 427 and he pushed buttons on a keyboard. Orders came to him through a monitor on his desk telling him what buttons to push, how long to push them, and in what order. This is what Employee #427 did every…

That dialogue is hard to fully appreciate without the audio, and that button didn't work for me, so I'm linking a yt. However, I highly recommend that anyone who hasn't played this game should just go play it, even if you're not especially keen on games. It's absolutely brilliant, and consumed as a played game is absolutely the greatest way to absorb its delightful prodding (or anti-prodding (or anti-anti-prodding)) message.

Even just the free demo! The demo is incredible as a standalone experience, and does not have identical dialogue / experience as the full game. It is in fact a meta-experience of the game.

https://youtu.be/YzytQUZx4FU?feature=shared

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#462

Post by Lord_Zero »

ed wrote: post #393
steveruizok wrote: post #140

Hey, Steve here from tldraw. This is a toy project with a horrible security pattern, sorry. If you want to run it locally or check out the source, it's here: https://github.com/tldraw/draw-a-ui . You can also see a bunch of other examples at https://twitter.com/tldraw . Happy to answer any questions about tldraw/this project. It's definitely not putting anyone out of work, but it's a blast to play with. Here's a more…

Launch launch launch! Seriously this is lightning in a bottle. Charge $5/mo and have users bring their own OpenAI key. Here’s a freshly MIT’ed licensing server you can use. It’s written in elixir and powers https://go.robocoder.app Reach out if you need help getting it running! https://github.com/emcmanus/robocoder-server/ (Or I’m sure Robocoder.app can walk you through the dev setup)

What does a licensing server do?

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#463

Post by IggleSniggle »

pc86 wrote: post #134
isilofi wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Almost none of those get i18n, hotkeys, shortcuts, taborder, screenreaders and other accessibility right.

Most users don't care about any of that, either. And I would argue that i18n and l10n belong outside your language's framework (and obviously outside CSS).

Of course the way that text is written, displayed, rendered, formatted, etc is all highly language dependent and culture dependent.

"stop" "STOP" “Stop” "STAHP"

These all mean different things even though it's just one language. To suggest that the way symbols are presented doesn't carry its own symbolic communication is willful ignorance at best, and at worst a kind of arrogant imposing that "my way of seeing things is the only correct way."

In a thread about the "bits of information transfer successfully encoded by AI on a UI implementation," I would expect an experienced engineer to notice the bandwidth of communication (or lack thereof) being demonstrated.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#464

Post by CamperBob2 »

lobsterthief wrote: post #453
CamperBob2 wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a matter of refactoring. AI should ideally regenerate the code from the spec each time the requirements change. "Programming" won't go away, but it will refer to working with specification languages, not implementation languages. In the best of all possible worlds, you'd have to deal with the C++ or JavaScript code about as often you have to dig into the x86 or ARM assembly code now.

The second you need to do something the AI can’t do, you’ll be trudging through garbage and breaking tons of things in regression (causing either errors or visual bugs). In your scenario, AI will likely produce code that _it_ determines to be maintainable, or if it’s rebuilt each time as you suggest, then it doesn’t need to be maintainable or readable at all. Good code is written for teams, not individuals. It’s writ…

You'll find that argument holds up well at first, but it won't age well at all. None of the "AI can't do X" arguments will.

The most popular programming language in 2030 -- 2035 at the latest -- will be English. Few people will GAF whether the underlying generated code is readable or styled for human understanding, any more than they care about the compiler's machine language today. Some will, of course, but it'll be a rarefied, specialized career practiced only by gurus on mountaintops, as assembly programming is now.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#465

Post by ed »

Lord_Zero wrote: post #462
ed wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Launch launch launch! Seriously this is lightning in a bottle. Charge $5/mo and have users bring their own OpenAI key. Here’s a freshly MIT’ed licensing server you can use. It’s written in elixir and powers https://go.robocoder.app Reach out if you need help getting it running! https://github.com/emcmanus/robocoder-server/ (Or I’m sure Robocoder.app can walk you through the dev setup)

What does a licensing server do?

Mostly it generates a key that users can paste into an application.

It also implements

- Stripe payments

- “Sign in with GitHub”

- JSON API to validate keys

This is nice because it means you don’t need a user system in your app. Users just paste a key, and the app validates it on startup.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#466

Post by tsunamifury »

joshstrange wrote: post #456
tsunamifury wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate it with engineers complain moan and drag their feet on implementations that are hard but worth it. Because really under the surface they just don’t like doing something new, even if it has clearly defined user and business value.

As a developer I actually agree. Too often we let “straightforward” or “fits best with the backend design” cause a knee jerk reaction to reject designs that are better for the end-user. I’ve been working to catch myself and say “yeah this won’t be easy but in the end it’s going to fit better with the user’s mental model of what they are doing”. The example I think of is if you have 2-3 related entities a developer mi…

I generally agree with you and its how I operate, but then you see Apple who strictly requires engineers to follow design/marketing requirements to the pixel -- and they are the most successful consumer business on the planet.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#467

Post by jayd16 »

tsunamifury wrote: post #401
jayd16 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect you're on the wrong side of town for a comment like this, haha. Almost always its just conflicting requests. Every ticket has a clearly defined user and business value to the person who wrote it.

I managed a 250 person engineering team at FANG. The number of times I had to explain to a jr or mid level engineer what our fundamental business was, was astounding. They would constantly argue tickets on a premise that was entirely self contained inside their code -- and be entirely oblivious to what the product was accomplishing outside in the real world with real users. Now this wasn't always the case, and frankl…

The disconnect is that both sides are valid. User value is important, but stability, opportunity cost, and ROI also provide user value.

It's not valid to say that the realities of the current code base are irrelevant just as much as it's invalid to say clean code always trumps features.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#468

Post by tsunamifury »

jayd16 wrote: post #467
tsunamifury wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I managed a 250 person engineering team at FANG. The number of times I had to explain to a jr or mid level engineer what our fundamental business was, was astounding. They would constantly argue tickets on a premise that was entirely self contained inside their code -- and be entirely oblivious to what the product was accomplishing outside in the real world with real users. Now this wasn't always the case, and frankl…

The disconnect is that both sides are valid. User value is important, but stability, opportunity cost, and ROI also provide user value. It's not valid to say that the realities of the current code base are irrelevant just as much as it's invalid to say clean code always trumps features.

That’s actually not true and this is the mistaken idea engineers have. It’s not a negotiation. User value that translates to business goals strictly always trumps internal code. Or you don’t have a business to fund that code. You find a way to do it if you need to fund the business. If not your are sunk.

Re: I think I need to go lie down

#469

Post by allarm »

ChrisArchitect wrote: post #30
redrove wrote: post #7

Can we please stop posting twitter links? It's a horror show of a website, especially if you don't have an account.

Does the link load so you can see the content OP thought worth sharing here and join the discussion? Yes. What else do you need?

> What else do you need?

Some damn sanity. Thank you.

Post reply on HN