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Fast

catherinejue.com

381–390 of 450 posts

Re: Fast

#381

Just want to say how much I thank YCom for not f'ing up the HN interface, and keeping it fast. I distinctly remember when Slashdot committed suicide. They had an interface that was very easy for me to scan and find high value comments, and in the name of "modern UI" or some other nonsense needed to keep a few designers employed, completely revamped it so that it had a ton of whitespace and made it basically impossibl…

HN is literally the website I open to check if I have internet connectivity. HN is truly a shining beacon in the trashy landscape of web bloat.

I usually load my blog to check internet connectivity.

I work at an e-waste recycling company. Earlier this week, I had to test a bunch of laptop docking stations, so I kept force refreshing my blog to see if the Ethernet port worked. Thing is, it loads so fast, I kept the dev tools open to see if it actually refreshed.

Re: Fast

#382
post #361

> Instant settle felt surprising in a world where bank transfers usually take days. Yeah, that's not "a world" it's just the USA. Parts of the world - EU, UK etc have already moved on from that. Don't assume that the USA is leading edge in all things.

> Yeah, that's not "a world" it's just the USA. "In a world" is a figure of speech which acknowledges the non-universality of the statement being made. And no it is not "just the USA". Canada and Mexico are similarly slow to adopt real-time payments. It is wild to tell someone "don't assume" when your entire comment relies on your own incorrect assumption about what someone meant.

There is better commentary on the same basic point regarding SEPA / Faster Payments / FedNow and how the US lags world-leading practice in the other thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44738579

It's a bit more substantial, and less complaints about the semantics of the wording.

Re: Fast

#383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok so it's poker rather than a slot machine

Not really, it's not a zero-sum game. You're not competing against anything, you're working with something. It's just a tool that takes practice, has some variability and isn't free. Like most things in life. More like buying corn or having friends.

Poker takes practice, has variability and isn't free. In fact it's the only game I know of that's pointlessly boring without money on the table.

LLM workflow is competing with other ways of writing code. DIY, stack overflow, paired, offshored...

Re: Fast

#384
I like fast but more and more I get slow web applications where every clicks comes with a delay.

Re: Fast

#385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counter example (re: agents), I routinely delegate simple tasks to Claude Code and get near-perfect results. But I've also had experiences like yours where I ended up wasting more time than saved. I just kept trying with different types of tasks, and narrowed it down to the point where I have a good intuition for what works and what doesn't. The benefit is I can fire off a request on my phone, stick it in my poc…

Sounds like a slot machine. Insert api tokens, get something that's pretty close to right, insert more tokens and hope it works this time.

That’s fine if your expectations are consummate.

Re: Fast

#386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counter example (re: agents), I routinely delegate simple tasks to Claude Code and get near-perfect results. But I've also had experiences like yours where I ended up wasting more time than saved. I just kept trying with different types of tasks, and narrowed it down to the point where I have a good intuition for what works and what doesn't. The benefit is I can fire off a request on my phone, stick it in my poc…

Thats cool, how are you integrating your phone with your Claude workflow?

I just SSH into my CC machine from the phone, then use CC.

Re: Fast

#387
post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only in the small subset of programmers that post on HN is that the case. Most users or even most developers don't mind slow stuff or "getting into flow state" or anything like that, they just want a nice UI. I've seen professional data scientists using Github Desktop on Windows instead of just learning to type git commands for an easy 10x time save

GitHub Desktop is way better for reviewing diffs than the git cli. Everyone I’ve ever worked with who preferred cli tools also did an add and commit everything, and their PRs always have more errors overall that would be caught before even being committed if they reviewed visual diffs while committing.

Sublime Merge gets you all those benefits, PLUS it’s really fast!

Re: Fast

#388
post #145
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble is that "fast" doesn't mean anything without a point of comparison. If all you have is a slow web app, you have to assume that the web app is necessarily slow — already as fast as it can be. We like to give people the benefit of the doubt, so there is no reason to think that someone would make something slower than is necessary. "Fast" is the feature people always wanted, but absent better information, th…

> you have to assume We don't have to assume. We know that JavaScript is slow in many cases, that shipping more bundles instead of less will decrease performance, and that with regard to the amount of content served generally less is more. Whether this amount of baggage every web app seems to come with these days is seen as "necessary" or not is subjective, but I would tend to agree that many developers are ignorant…

The slow web app is probably still faster than the previous solution.

Re: Fast

#389
post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only in the small subset of programmers that post on HN is that the case. Most users or even most developers don't mind slow stuff or "getting into flow state" or anything like that, they just want a nice UI. I've seen professional data scientists using Github Desktop on Windows instead of just learning to type git commands for an easy 10x time save

GitHub Desktop is way better for reviewing diffs than the git cli. Everyone I’ve ever worked with who preferred cli tools also did an add and commit everything, and their PRs always have more errors overall that would be caught before even being committed if they reviewed visual diffs while committing.

The best interface is magit, IMO. I use a clone of it in VS Code that is nearly as good. But you get the speed of CLI while still being very easy to stage/unstage individual chunks, which is probably the piece that does not get done enough by CLI users.
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