Fast • Hacker News Board

Re: Fast

#421

Post by sirwhinesalot » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 3:34 PM UTC

pron wrote: post #417

sirwhinesalot wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Architectural blueprints are very precise. What gets built is a more detailed form of what is in the blueprint. That is not the case for the TLA+ spec and your 1MLOC Java Database. You hope with fingers crossed that you've implemented the design, but have you? I can measure that a physical wall has the same dimensions as specified in the blueprint. How do I know my program follows the TLA+ spec? I'm not being facetio…

> That is not the case for the TLA+ spec and your 1MLOC Java Database. That is the case. Of course, nobody bothers to write the TLA+ proof that that is the case, because even if somebody had the resources to do it, the ROI on doing that is not good. If you can avoid 4 major bugs with 10 hours of work, you probably won't want to work an extra 10,000 hours to avoid two additional minor ones. That most people choose to…

Too defeatist. If much of the software infrastructure of the world was built on say... Idris, we could do it. That's the promise of dependent types, proof carrying code.

Can we extend that to large scale software? There's no obvious barrier to it, beyond a lack of existing provably correct code to build upon.

I don't expect this to change, however, since the cost/benefit ratio just isn't there. And that makes me sad. We build everything on quicksand.

Re: Fast

#422

Post by cruffle_duffle » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 3:54 PM UTC

sien wrote: post #231

cruffle_duffle wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, Slashdot became full of curmudgeons. It’s pretty tiring when every “+5 Insightful” on a hard drive article questioning why you’d ever want so big of a drive, or why you’d require more than 256 colors or whatever new thing came out… like why are you even on a technology enthusiast site when you bitterly complain about every new thing? Basically either accept change or get left in the dust and slashdot’s crowd…

Kuro5hin was far less about technology though. It was interesting in a different way though. Like Adequacy. Did you also move over to MetaFilter ?

Never really “got” MetaFilter.

Adequacy was awesome.

Re: Fast

#423

Post by bullen » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 3:58 PM UTC

If you want fast try booting your old DDR3 computer, that's fast!

Re: Fast

#424

Post by zahlman » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 4:13 PM UTC

baq wrote: post #345

zahlman wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A prompt like " I want to make this change in the code where any logic deals with XXX. To be/do XXX instead/additionally/somelogicchange/whatever" If I reached a point where I would find this helpful, I would take this as a sign that I have structured the code wrongly.

You would be right about the code but probably wrong about the you. I’ve done such requests to clean up code written over the years by dozens of other people copying patterns around because ship was king… until it wasn’t. (They worked quite well, btw.)

If you're generalizing "you" to all developers, perhaps.

I know how I'd respond based on personal experience.

Re: Fast

#425

Post by NohatCoder » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 4:49 PM UTC

jodrellblank wrote: post #404

jodrellblank wrote: post #399

It's well known, but this video[1] is a proof of concept demonstration from 4 years ago, Casey Muratori called out Microsoft's new Windows Terminal for slow performance and people argued that it wasn't possible, practical, or maintainable to make a faster terminal and that his claims of "thousands of frames per second" were hyperbolic, and one person said it would be a "PHD level research project". In response, Casey…

Someone posted their word game Cobble[1] on HN recently, the game gives some letters and the challenge is to find two English words which together use up all the given letters, and the combined two words to be as short as possible. A naive brute-force solver takes the Cobble wordlist of 64k words and compares every word against every other word and does 64k x 64k = 4Bn loops and in the inner loop body, loops over the…

Of course finding the optimal solution to a Cobble puzzle does not actually require the computation you describe. We can in a single pass find a limited set of candidate words and work out a solution with those.

Re: Fast

#426

Post by lucisferre » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 5:05 PM UTC

So not PowerBI then. Or really any BI tool.

My favourite example of not "fast" right now is any kind of Salesforce report. Not only are they slow but you can't make any changes to the criteria more often than once a minute. Massively changes your behaviour.

Re: Fast

#427

Post by amradio1989 » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 5:18 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #410

SchemaLoad wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How's that different from a human developer? Give the same task to different developers and you'll get different levels of correctness and quality. Give the task to the same developer on different days and it is the same.

Its a lot faster to give a task to an ai agent than a developer. The agent is always at their desk, always listening, and will immediately prioritize whatever you tell it to do.

An ai agent always has capacity, does not have competing priorities, nor does it have ideas about what does or does not fall within their "scope of work".

Re: Fast

#428

Post by rick1290 » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 5:45 PM UTC

bodhi_mind wrote: post #396

I’m senior developer on a feature bloated civil engineering web app that has 2 back end servers (one just proxies to the other) and has 8k lines of stored procedures as the data layer and many multi k line react components that intentionally break react best practices. I loathe working on it but don’t have the time to refactor legacy code. ———————- I have another project that I am principal engineer and it uses Djang…

whats your setup for the frontend? do you autogen your queries from DRF? do you prefer react headless over django templates?

Re: Fast

#429

Post by qingcharles » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 5:48 PM UTC

jq-r wrote: post #358

qingcharles wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What changes have been made to the HN design since it was launched? I know there are changes to the moderation that have taken place many times, but not to the UI. It's one of the most stable sites in terms of design that I can think of. What other sites have lasted this long without giving in to their users' whims? Over the last 4 years my whole design ethos has transformed to "WWHND" (What Would Hacker News Do?) ev…

Slashdot looked a lot like HN with high information density. It was fast and easy to read all the comments. Then a redesign happened because of web 2.0 or "mobile-first" hype and most of the comments got hidden/collapsed by default, sorted almost randomly etc. So a new user would come there and say "wtf this is a dead conversation" or would have to click too many times to get to the full conversation. So new user wou…

Looks like I've had my Slashdot account over 20 years. I remember the original UI being much simpler - much more like HN. Did the membership collapse because of the UI changes they made or because Digg and Reddit took its place?

Re: Fast

#430

Post by jq-r » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 6:06 PM UTC

qingcharles wrote: post #429

jq-r wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slashdot looked a lot like HN with high information density. It was fast and easy to read all the comments. Then a redesign happened because of web 2.0 or "mobile-first" hype and most of the comments got hidden/collapsed by default, sorted almost randomly etc. So a new user would come there and say "wtf this is a dead conversation" or would have to click too many times to get to the full conversation. So new user wou…

Looks like I've had my Slashdot account over 20 years. I remember the original UI being much simpler - much more like HN. Did the membership collapse because of the UI changes they made or because Digg and Reddit took its place?

I think it was mostly because of the UI, but I don't think anyone has any data on that so it probably was a timing and combination of things. The UI redesign really was a hot topic for weeks/months on slashdot but unfortunately they stuck to their guns and got what they've deserved.