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

141–150 of 202 posts

Re: Our efforts, in part, define us

#141

Post by latexr »

01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #136
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.

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…

> Where did you hear of them?

I no longer recall, I’ve been using them for something like two decades.

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

See SnippetsLab for a good example of a snippets manager.

https://www.renfei.org/snippets-lab/

> 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 prefer it as a standalone app. I don’t use VSCode nor would I want integration with my text editor. Snippet managers generally have ways of being invoked from anywhere, or you can type a few characters and have them replace the text, or you can search them from launchers like Alfred.

https://www.alfredapp.com

https://alfred.app/workflows/renfei/snippetslab/

Re: Our efforts, in part, define us

#142

Post by dangus »

mym1990 wrote: post #94
dangus wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d also extend this by saying that you can just exist and be happy and then die. There’s no need to be defined by some effort you’re putting into some kind of work or hobby. If there’s someone out there who just sits on the beach all day and survives by eating coconuts they don’t have to be defined by photography or coding or whatever hobby is being used to seek external validation. And that’s a bit of a problem wit…

"If there’s someone out there who just sits on the beach all day and survives by eating coconuts" This seems like a dire situation for most humans and probably isn't the status quo for human operation. Its perfectly fine to sit on the beach, but eventually a light should go on that would say "lets go build some tools", "lets go see if I can catch a fish", "lets build a hut". Which would all be fine and admirable thin…

Obviously I don’t mean it literally, I mean a general situation where one’s needs are met and they decide to spend their time generally idle.

Re: Our efforts, in part, define us

#143

Post by dangus »

dfee wrote: post #91
dangus wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d also extend this by saying that you can just exist and be happy and then die. There’s no need to be defined by some effort you’re putting into some kind of work or hobby. If there’s someone out there who just sits on the beach all day and survives by eating coconuts they don’t have to be defined by photography or coding or whatever hobby is being used to seek external validation. And that’s a bit of a problem wit…

> If there’s someone out there who just sits on the beach all day and survives by eating coconuts they don’t have to be defined by photography or coding or whatever hobby is being used to seek external validation. This is written from a different values perspective than mine, but I can understand it. I think you’d have made a stronger point if you’d focused on internal validation, though. For many, the ideal is inter…

The reason I didn’t focus on internal validation is that I think the article is ultimately not talking about that. I think the article is almost exclusively talking about external validation.

Re: Our efforts, in part, define us

#144

Post by ryandrake »

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…

Unfortunately, as it turned out, standing up a public-facing web page (even a single static HTML one) is more complex than saving a word doc. Especially if it gets a lot of traffic, has any kind of user-input, or it comes under attack. So far, out of the attempts to bring web publishing to the masses, the only successful ones so far have been the "hosted" ones where you have to pay someone else to do the hard, non-creative work for you, and are for the most part dependent on them.

The dream of laymen, needing nothing else but an Internet connection, pushing a button on a locally-running application and "poof" a web page appears and is accessible to the world, remains out of reach.

Re: Our efforts, in part, define us

#145

Post by munchbunny »

bsenftner wrote: post #9

Maybe this is a neurodivergent thing, but I have, as long as I can remember, always had the following progression in my mind: "What are you doing? No, that's this situation's name, what is this really?" and I'd continue a few times seeking the "larger problem, the more basic problem being solved" that whatever I was doing "really is". That "basic problem" was "communicating" far more frequently than I expected, and t…

> often just translating between things, people and software, or people and people, or software and software. But it's almost always communicating.

How true this is. How much of our code, how much compute power, and how much human energy is spent entirely on transforming data from one encoding or schema to another, for the purposes of being able to apply some algorithm or human process to it? Sometimes I feel like it's at least half of our silicon, electricity, and human time spent just doing that transforming.

Re: Our efforts, in part, define us

#146

Post by Etheryte »

fellowniusmonk wrote: post #107
bsenftner wrote: post #9

Maybe this is a neurodivergent thing, but I have, as long as I can remember, always had the following progression in my mind: "What are you doing? No, that's this situation's name, what is this really?" and I'd continue a few times seeking the "larger problem, the more basic problem being solved" that whatever I was doing "really is". That "basic problem" was "communicating" far more frequently than I expected, and t…

Culture has created this odd myth that if something is semantic it doesn't matter. That communication is just another soft skill. Humans make meaning, we are the only source of complex, long term, meaning generation we have ever observed. We emit meaning the way a star emits photons. Sure, a lot of natural processes would still exist if we weren't around. But in this universe, perhaps the only one that exists, we are…

This type of thinking should've died with the contemporaries of Darwin who didn't believe in evolution. We live on a planet full of complex, intelligent life, we're far from the only ones giving things meaning. Animals have social structures and emotions that are as sophisticated as our own, it's only ego to think that we're unique in giving life meaning.

Re: Our efforts, in part, define us

#147

Post by Insanity »

Unlike the author, I think that the value of writing code in my free time (or well, the joy more than the value) has diminished greatly.

I took a lot of 'pride in the craft', and I used to really enjoy hacking away on new projects with languages that I normally wouldn't use in my day-to-day. But now whenever I start something I think of how much faster I could be if I just used an LLM. Which takes away some of the joy.

I'll be honest, I struggled with this for many months.. actually years at this point (since ~GPT3.5). I hardly code in my spare time now, and am spending more time on other hobbies. I think I've kinda come to terms with the fact that I won't really enjoy coding anymore.

Re: Our efforts, in part, define us

#148

Post by carlosjobim »

ryandrake wrote: post #144
carlosjobim wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Unfortunately, as it turned out, standing up a public-facing web page (even a single static HTML one) is more complex than saving a word doc. Especially if it gets a lot of traffic, has any kind of user-input, or it comes under attack. So far, out of the attempts to bring web publishing to the masses, the only successful ones so far have been the "hosted" ones where you have to pay someone else to do the hard, non-cr…

It used to be no more complex than saving a Word document. You used to get a small storage space from your ISP with FTP credentials to upload files. Security was not an issue and neither was traffic. User input was a more advanced matter, but when you've reached the level to having concern for any of these, either your ISP would help you or you'd contract a professional web host. Today it's an immense task for amateurs to just get off the ground.

Re: Our efforts, in part, define us

#149

Post by tyre »

gsf_emergency_2 wrote: post #140
1970-01-01 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

It's highly unlikely that the Romans could have had the industrial revolution[0], so I'm doubtful that calculus alone would have gotten them to Mars.

[0]: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...

Re: Our efforts, in part, define us

#150

Post by jancsika »

bsenftner wrote: post #9

Maybe this is a neurodivergent thing, but I have, as long as I can remember, always had the following progression in my mind: "What are you doing? No, that's this situation's name, what is this really?" and I'd continue a few times seeking the "larger problem, the more basic problem being solved" that whatever I was doing "really is". That "basic problem" was "communicating" far more frequently than I expected, and t…

Do you do the same with emotions? E.g., a) What is this emotion, b) no, that's the undue amount of stress from this particular encounter, c) larger, basic emotion that is the reason you're ruminating about a total stranger taking 20 seconds at the counter to decide on a coffee order after waiting 10 minutes in line... :)
Post reply on HN