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

Our efforts, in part, define us

weakty.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 202 posts

Re: Our efforts, in part, define us

#131

Post by carlosjobim »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #71
nuancebydefault wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. If we SW developers define ourselves as 'coders', we could easily end up into this identity crisis which the article seems to refer to. But in fact we are much more than that. We are problem solvers and a big part of it is understanding, defining and refining the problem itself and in finding an elegant solution. The meaningfulness comes from all the communication and experimenting involved with that process,…

This is the frustrating part of software engineering too; the coding itself is the "boring" part, but for me and many others it's also the most fun and gratifying part, the thing you really want to be doing. Something to grow out of I suppose, but still. The AI vendors want to sell to upper management that that part is what's slowing their company down or costing a lot of money, but I don't think it's that. And in a…

> Dreamweaver and Frontpage said you won't need to know HTML because you can just build a website by clicking and typing.

The ability for people to express themselves online on their own domain has regressed immensely since WYSIWYG editors were taken off the market. I don't know who to blame, but the way it is now that you have to learn to code and to be a Linux server admin just to have a website is very damaging.

WordPress does not help much at all in that department, it only makes it worse for people who aren't database admins and PHP developers and want to have a functioning website. I think it only became the "standard" because it was free. Same thing for Linux as the host OS.

I hope things turn around. There's some small hope with services like Fastmail offering an easy interface for publishing your webpage and Wix and the likes which are at least something.

Re: Our efforts, in part, define us

#132

Post by hermannj314 »

alexashka wrote: post #127
hermannj314 wrote: post #63

The people convincing you it is a virtue to move fast always happen to be selling a car. Be careful that you aren't optimizing your life in response to someone else's marketing campaign.

They're ten steps ahead of you. ~85% of spending is done by women. If you don't want to live alone - you will be living a marketing campaign.

She needed the SUV because it is safer for the kids, the more expensive cleaning supplies to save the environment, and the new furniture because the previous color scheme was last decade.

Re: Our efforts, in part, define us

#133

Post by alexashka »

pessimizer wrote: post #66
ants_everywhere wrote: post #44

> If our efforts, in part, define us, then our efforts have intrinsic value. By definition this is instrumental value rather than intrinsic value.

Middle class people can't distinguish their work from their identity. They seek a perfect harmony of purpose and output, in order to be the perfect servant. They need to sustain this for a lifetime, so their pleasure must come from the work (or they can supplement this with a hobby that is extremely job-shaped.) If they fail at this, they will be ejected from the middle class, and their children will not be properly…

> just to keep them caged and desperate, a layoff away from a family annihilation. Loyal to death.

> This essay is pompous

Pompous he said.

Re: Our efforts, in part, define us

#134

Post by allenu »

latexr wrote: post #123
allenu wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how I feel about it too. I got into programming because I liked making software that did interesting things for me. I enjoyed learning new languages and techniques to improve my programming skills to make software better, larger, faster, but after having been doing this in some capacity for 30 years, I find I'm often doing the same things to create these solutions, so I'm not necessarily learning new things a…

Why are you not using a snippet manager? It is significantly faster than an LLM, it’s local, consumes far fewer resources, and actually returns a correct version of what you want based on your knowledge.

Thanks for the suggestion. I don't use LLMs for everything and do still copy-paste a lot from existing projects where I have an established pattern.

LLMs can be a lot faster if you're tossing together an initial prototype with a lot of UI. I could type it all out or copy-paste bits and pieces, but just giving a few sentences of what I want and letting it go build is much faster.

Re: Our efforts, in part, define us

#135

Post by whstl »

carlosjobim wrote: post #131
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the frustrating part of software engineering too; the coding itself is the "boring" part, but for me and many others it's also the most fun and gratifying part, the thing you really want to be doing. Something to grow out of I suppose, but still. The AI vendors want to sell to upper management that that part is what's slowing their company down or costing a lot of money, but I don't think it's that. And in a…

> Dreamweaver and Frontpage said you won't need to know HTML because you can just build a website by clicking and typing. The ability for people to express themselves online on their own domain has regressed immensely since WYSIWYG editors were taken off the market. I don't know who to blame, but the way it is now that you have to learn to code and to be a Linux server admin just to have a website is very damaging. W…

I'd blame Social Media. It did more to kill small websites than anything else. Possibly starting with MySpace in 2004.

WYSIWYG never really went away even after Dreamweaver and FrontPage lost popularity. My ISP had a web-based editor in the early 2000s, lots and lots of free hosting providers also had them (HN tends to only remember only GeoCities, but there were hundreds of those providers).

Also: Weebly, Wix and Squarespace are quite old, mid-2000s.

Re: Our efforts, in part, define us

#136

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

latexr wrote: post #123
allenu wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how I feel about it too. I got into programming because I liked making software that did interesting things for me. I enjoyed learning new languages and techniques to improve my programming skills to make software better, larger, faster, but after having been doing this in some capacity for 30 years, I find I'm often doing the same things to create these solutions, so I'm not necessarily learning new things a…

Why are you not using a snippet manager? It is significantly faster than an LLM, it’s local, consumes far fewer resources, and actually returns a correct version of what you want based on your knowledge.

I have never heard of a snippet manager until right now. (In good faith:) Where did you hear of them? Should I be following news somewhere else?

I see this one is popular and high on DDG: https://github.com/massCodeIO/massCode

But there's no screenshots or example usages, and it's not obvious to me how it works.

Is it like a local search engine you install? Is it an LSP? An LSP that's lighter than rust-analyzer could be useful for this kind of thing.

Edit: I searched for "What is a snippet manager" and DDG search returned a bunch of useless-looking listicles, but their AI actually told me and linked to an article explaining it: https://www.codiga.io/blog/code-snippet-definition/

Edit 2: I guess it's meant to be used as a VS Code extension. It might work as a standalone app but it would be a little unwieldy. I don't think my favorite text editor has a web view built in, so I couldn't install massCode in there

Re: Our efforts, in part, define us

#137

Post by [deleted] »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #73
hermannj314 wrote: post #63

The people convincing you it is a virtue to move fast always happen to be selling a car. Be careful that you aren't optimizing your life in response to someone else's marketing campaign.

Hesitation is another side of the bad decision coin. Good decisions are lost due to overanalysis. Charlie Munger: "A lot of opportunities in life tend to last a short while, due to some temporary inefficiency."

[deleted]

Re: Our efforts, in part, define us

#138

Post by latexr »

allenu wrote: post #134
latexr wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you not using a snippet manager? It is significantly faster than an LLM, it’s local, consumes far fewer resources, and actually returns a correct version of what you want based on your knowledge.

Thanks for the suggestion. I don't use LLMs for everything and do still copy-paste a lot from existing projects where I have an established pattern. LLMs can be a lot faster if you're tossing together an initial prototype with a lot of UI. I could type it all out or copy-paste bits and pieces, but just giving a few sentences of what I want and letting it go build is much faster.

You don’t need to copy and paste manually. Snippet managers allow you to search for what you want and paste directly, or even type a few characters and have the text automatically replaced.

There is no LLM which could ever be faster than a well-configured snippet manager for stuff you’ve done before. Not to mention you won‘t get random bad text thrown at you.

Re: Our efforts, in part, define us

#140

Post by gsf_emergency_2 »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #73
hermannj314 wrote: post #63

The people convincing you it is a virtue to move fast always happen to be selling a car. Be careful that you aren't optimizing your life in response to someone else's marketing campaign.

Hesitation is another side of the bad decision coin. Good decisions are lost due to overanalysis. Charlie Munger: "A lot of opportunities in life tend to last a short while, due to some temporary inefficiency."

Had Archimedes lived to teach the Romans his calculus we might have reached Mars by 500 AD

https://youtu.be/h0gPomI3h8o

that's not from hesitation. And one can only call the Syracuse invasion an inefficiency in hindsight.

The immediate opportunity of a ~million Roman lives compared to other hypothetical opportunities

(One might guess that opportunities of the win-win type weren't covered by Munger's model)

Post reply on HN