The .txt website fails to load if you won't enable WebGL on your browser. Incredible
The bottleneck was never the code
331–340 of 446 posts
Re: The bottleneck was never the code
#332It typically is the code that’s the bottleneck, but not writing the code. My career is littered with numerous delays from slow applications. I am stuck with an editor based on Eclipse. It’s slow and periodicity pauses or crashes. I am stuck with build jobs that take 15-20 minutes. I am often stuck with web apps that take forever to do a task that should take 50ms max. The list can go on and on. Every delay is a distr…
Which editor and why eclipse?
Because our software platform requires use of a proprietary editor built over eclipse. I use other editors when I can deviate from the official one.
Re: The bottleneck was never the code
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah yes, the good old No True Scotsman fallacy, where we smugly proclaim that anyone who thinks AI is good now must be working on unimportant and easy things.
Ah yes, the (please copy & paste this message into an LLM to get it to generate a novel response in these parentheses)
My comment from 3 years ago still something I agree with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34925145
Re: The bottleneck was never the code
#334My buddy made a music software, with synths, effects, visualizers, etc. with Claude and Codex.
For him, the bottleneck very much was the code. He still doesn't know any programming.
I want to say that his ability here has been accelerated by orders of magnitude, but without AI he couldn't have done it at all, so it's actually a divide by zero situation.
(Yeah, he could have just learned programming... and audio engineering... and the specifics of JavaScript ... and the web audio API, and the DOM, and WebGL, and his demo would be ready in like, 2030.)
Re: The bottleneck was never the code
#335It's hilarious to me to see the same kind of engineer, who throughout my career have constantly bitched and moaned about team meetings, agile ceremonies, issue trackers, backlogs, slack, emails, design reviews, and anything else that disrupted the hours of coding "flow state" they claimed as their most essential and sacred activity to be protected at all costs, suddenly, and with no hint of shame, start preaching abo…
Are you referring to the author specifically? Or a specific hypocritical person you know? If you're making a general statement about groups of online people you might be falling for the group attribution error[1], where the characteristics of an individual are assumed to be reflective of the whole group. In any case, two things can be simultaneously true: 1. Writing code is not the bottleneck, as in we can develop fe…
I think it's obvious that they're not referring to the author or a specific person at all. They're talking about how the zeitgeist has changed. Look at Hacker News archives 3 or more years ago and it would be really hard to find anyone arguing that coding speed is not a bottleneck or that engineers need to spend more time in collaboration. You would find a lot of arguments that leaving engineers alone to code is the best thing a business can do and constant lambasting of meetings, documents, approvals, and other collaborative activities.
I think there are small pieces of truth on both sides of the argument, but I find the sudden change to claiming that coding speed doesn't matter to feel half-baked. Coding speed is part of building a product. Speeding it up does provide benefit. There's a lot of denial about this, but I think the denial is rooted in emotion more than logic right now.
Re: The bottleneck was never the code
#336> Software is what’s left over after a group of humans finishes negotiating with each other about what the system should do.
The issue is that sometimes you don't know what the system should do until you build it.
A design is a hypothesis. Most of them are wrong, in subtle or not so subtle ways.
(Also, as a separate issue, having a group in the first place increasingly adds negative value. If it was ever a good idea to design by committee... it's increasingly expensive to do so, in opportunity cost.)
Re: The bottleneck was never the code
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
In general, hypocrisy is a pretty weak argument. It's an annoying personality trait, but consistency is a thing humans often fail at, and humans failing at holding consistent opinions is a failure of those humans, not the claims they're making. It's not quite as weak as the more non-sequitur kind of ad-hominem attack, because it does at least pertain to the argument being made, and kind of resembles a logical contrad…
Are you a very smart writer or are you using smart tools, I'm not sure?
Wouldn't know if I'm a smart writer, but I see little value in writing with a model if that's what you're asking. Language models are good for searching, getting alright at structured outputs like code, and trash at meaningfully expressing my thoughts in prose. Frankly, it concerns me that people think vomiting their thoughts onto the internet could possibly benefit from computational assistance
Re: The bottleneck was never the code
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 2. It's annoying and disruptive to be interrupted when doing work that requires deep focus. Steering a LLM also requires deep focus. Unless you want to end up on accidentally quadratic or have a CVE named after your project.
How can it? You prompt it, then wait minutes+ for it to come back. It's the opposite of flow state.
You don't wait. You run multiple independent incremental feature in parallel, while also running a code review, which will create the next set of tasks while you or the llm think up the feature to add after.
Re: The bottleneck was never the code
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or just goomba fallacy
til https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy
The collective smarts on the Internet can't come up with a better name that might help our brains tag the concept?
Although at least it has some cross-cultural references. Why is naming so hard.
Re: The bottleneck was never the code
#340(not related to the article) The flashing red dot on the web page is very annoying. Is there some design reason for that? edit: I meant the inside `trail-map-container`
From what I can tell, it marks the article you're on. There are other light grey dots with other article names in it.
Yeah. This one shows a graph:
https://www.thetypicalset.com/blog/grammar-parser-maintenanc...
Solid red dots are articles you've visited.