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

To my students

ozark.hendrix.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 221 posts

Re: To my students

#191

Post by hhjinks »

2ndorderthought wrote: post #85
saadn92 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What gets me is the craft point. I've shipped more useful software in the last year than probably the previous five combined, and most of that is because I stopped treating code as the artifact and started treating the product as the artifact. The craft moved up a layer. > until it is clear and elegant New grads who spend weeks refactoring code are going to get lapped by new grads who ship something and iterate. Ther…

This person is an educator. You should absolutely learn how to code by deep practice. You can easily learn how to use the slop machine in I don't know a week or something if the job demands it.

The slop machine is stupidly easy to use. Recently switched jobs and got to use Claude Code for the first time. Literally just talk to it. There's nothing to learn.

Re: To my students

#192

Post by xtracto »

xantronix wrote: post #180
archagon wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a FAANG in a senior role for around 6 years and I completely agree with the article. (I left before LLM/agent use became widespread, but I would have flamed out anyway if it was forced upon me.)

It's scary just how quickly the past has been buried: Decades of accumulated insight on best practices, all discarded in service of the new electric Christ.

This hit very close home. I'm a 44 year old developer, with Software Engineering Bachellors and CompSci MPhil and PhD. All my life I spearheaded "best practices" and code quality (from Fred Brooks, Joel Sposky, Martin Fowler, etc...).

But since LLMs arrived... things have become crazy. The layer of "obscurity" that permeates code writing seems to make a lot of those "standards" moot or just not really pragmatically possible to follow.

Re: To my students

#193

Post by xtracto »

danny_codes wrote: post #38
oidar wrote: post #10

You could write this from the perspective of a historical luddite [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite ] and the points would be identical.

This is a tired, weak, and pathetic argument. Opposition to technology is very reasonable if that technology is doing more harm than good. In the case of present-day LLMs, the vast majority of the public finds them to be more harmful than beneficial. Why accept a decreasing quality of live instead of sensible regulation?

I understand your point and clearly see that LLMs cannot be compared to audio ... but ...

Back when I was a kid, music, audio and sound systems had high quality as a standard.

Nowadays people listen to music mostly with bluetooth headphones which basically recompress an already compressed audio signal to send them in low quality. Also, it is more and more difficult to find OK stereos that play music in good quality. Either, you have to pay very high prices for overpriced "audiophile" equipment, or you are stuck with cheap chinese MP3 players.

Yet, society and markets have spoken. Sometimes society is happy to accept marginally worse products in exchange of price and convenience.

Re: To my students

#194

Post by xtracto »

beej71 wrote: post #151

I spent 20 years in industry before moving to academia, and this resonates for me. I'm not naive enough to think that we'll do the right thing here, but I can dream.

Interesting.

I spent 8 years in academia (2004 - 2012) before moving to Industry. But as I've aged I've thinking of going back. I made it good in Industry so I have enough to jump to Academia without worrying about money... but I just hated the "publish or perish" mentality, and writing papers (I wonder what's the state of that now with LLMs... back in the day I was reviewer for some journals and most papers were pretty bad).

Re: To my students

#195

Post by hackable_sand »

sergiomattei wrote: post #16

> Have the courage to go slowly, especially when everyone else is telling you that you need to go fast and cut corners. I've been struggling to figure out what "slower" would look like when working in industry. If everyone's working 2x faster, how do you slow down meaningfully without getting axed?

Slow is smooth and smooth is fast

Re: To my students

#196

Post by flowerbreeze »

beej71 wrote: post #150
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of ways to ship things & iterate without having any idea what you are building or doing technically, without building any tastes for how things work. Those people are going to be the absolute most dangerous possible thing you can do to a company. Maybe some day we can just totally give up the technicals to the machine, but I strongly doubt it. Every single model is both brilliant, but also a fool, no ma…

> Those people are going to be the absolute most dangerous possible thing you can do to a company. I hear you, but here's the thing: the companies don't give a shit about software quality any farther than it takes to keep you coming back as a customer. And it's actually been like this for a long time. They're going to hire people who can ship who-cares-how-buggy software as fast as possible. It's better for the botto…

It is rather backwards. I've not seen things quite as bad as interviewers wanting to know how many agents you can run, but the attitude of "launch & fix later" is always present and kind of depressing.

Then I think of the companies (not necessarily software) that have had long term success and their products have been quite high quality at least at some point in time. The count of genAI instances someone can keep in flight is certainly a weird metric that I think will hurt the companies who choose to ignore quality.

Unfortunately it's a long process as it's possible to get very far with great marketing and sales with a poor quality product too. Then cash out before customers figure out that there's something else that is better. I have no idea if this pattern will ever self-correct.

Off topic: I followed your guides for network programming years ago getting my tiny C server/client setup working. Thank you so much for writing them!

Re: To my students

#197

Post by archievillain »

oidar wrote: post #10

You could write this from the perspective of a historical luddite [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite ] and the points would be identical.

This person is a Luddite. I just don't think that implies what most people on HN wish it would imply, though, as reading thea actual article shows. You don't even need to ask your LLM of choice to summarize it for you, as the salient point is contained within the first two paragraphs: paragraph one, the Luddites were workers protesting their terrible living conditions. Paragraph two, these workers were jailed and killed by the government.

Then, further down the article, it elaborates:

> The Luddite movement emerged during the harsh economic climate of the Napoleonic Wars, which saw a rise in difficult working conditions in the new textile factories paired with decreasing birth rates and a rise in education standards in England and Wales.

> Luddites were not opposed to the use of machines per se (many were skilled operators in the textile industry); they attacked manufacturers who were trying to circumvent standard labour practices of the time.

>The crisis led to widespread protest and violence, but the middle classes and upper classes strongly supported the government, which used the army to suppress all working-class unrest, especially the Luddite movement.

Re: To my students

#198

Post by JuniperMesos »

danny_codes wrote: post #170
GaryBluto wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the vast majority of the public finds them to be more harmful than beneficial. Examples of ridiculous and incorrect beliefs once held by majorities: - Spontaneous generation - "Miasma" causes disease - Earth is at the centre of the universe - The heart is the seat of thought and the brain is useless - Cold weather causes colds Don't trust "the vast majority" to get anything right, ever.

Examples of reasonable beliefs held by the public: Killing is bad. Kids should be protected. I mean you have a point it’s just not particularly useful or helpful for the conversation

"Won't somebody think of the children" is constantly used sarcastically in order to dismiss the concerns of people who want to ban something they claim is harmful to children. This is often a completely justified rejoinder - many regulatory policies that thoughtless people argue for in the name of children's safety are counterproductive, disproportional, or otherwise harmful.

Re: To my students

#199

Post by lukan »

fooqux wrote: post #168
lukan wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The right choice is rather to strive for perfect - and be unemployed? To me it was actually not clear what his point was. "Above all, be motivated by love instead of fear." Sounds great. But not that practical.

Why isn't it practical? In my life, I've encountered many SWEs that have changed careers. I've met them in national parks working as rangers. In real estate, grocery store butchers, and yak ranchers. Yet I've never once encountered a SWE that was once doing something non-technical and decided to switch. Purely anecdotal, I know. But still, I prefer to think that all those people discovered this practical advice and a…

Oh, I would consider becoming a park ranger as well, but as a european, I also did not had to go deep in dept, to become a SWE.

And a professor should take that into account and give practical advice. In the real world, solving haskell challenes (of which the prof is fan of) is unfortunately not that useful. People have real needs for working software to solve their real pain points. Not to worship code quality.

Some projects need obviously better code quality (airplanes, medical equipment..) - but not all of them. And if you want to have sacred code when coding a crude throw away app .. you won't get enough money for that. And positions for academics are limited.

Re: To my students

#200

Post by 0x000xca0xfe »

wanderingmind wrote: post #79

No disrespect to the person, but this seems to be written by someone who has spent their life in academic bubble, without having to deal with people and entities with diverging interests and the impact of time on any decisions. I'm sure many artists will love to spend more time perfecting their art, based on their subjective interests. However, if they prioritize that, without understanding what their customer wants,…

How has not honing their craft and churning out generic slop instead as fast as possible worked out for artists?

Everybody can do that now with zero training.

LLMS are the ultimate equalizer. You won't have a future if you can only do average things fast. It's time to become eccentric, and the academic bubble is perfect for that.

Post reply on HN