Now might be the best time to learn software development • Hacker News Board

Re: Now might be the best time to learn software development

#371

Post by eru » Mon, Jun 23, 2025, 12:45 AM UTC

tpm wrote: post #363

eru wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. So if you have the same thing in both the database and in your program, you don't need no mapping. And I suggest that having relations in both places is the way to go.

It's not enough, there is no way to represent some db stuff (not relational, more impl oriented) or some special queries in the program with an ORM. No ORM I have seen comes close to 100% of what you could do with the DB. So still the best way to get closest to the db is using raw queries in the program, but of course that does not scale with more tables, does not scale with more db engines, and does not scale with j…

I'm with the first part of your comment. But why do you suddenly conclude that object orientation is good?

If your language supports relation, there's no need to badly translate to objects. (And even if your language doesn't support everything your database does, there's still less of an impedance mismatch if you use an 'RRM' instead of an ORM.)

Re: Now might be the best time to learn software development

#372

Post by simoncos » Mon, Jun 23, 2025, 10:18 AM UTC

dotancohen wrote: post #370

ak-47 wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For 3 years I've talked to a Philips VoiceTracer & bundled audio for a 1-time listen 3 months later. On occasion I've used Otter or Whisper with some success. Please let me know if you open source any of your work.

I'd love to hear about your workflow. Do you transfer the files to your computer? Do you ever/often listen on the VoiceTracker? How do others respond to you making recordings? Do you organise the recording files into folders? Use filesystem tags (KDE Dolphin, etc) or symlinks? Ever have files on the computer that you needed when you're out (with the phone)? How well do Otter and Whisper transcribe? Do you edit the tr…

These questions are really a nice starting point to develop some product.

Re: Now might be the best time to learn software development

#373

Post by dredmorbius » Mon, Jun 23, 2025, 1:57 PM UTC

eru wrote: post #119

dredmorbius wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strictly speaking, farming is where all our livelihoods come from, in the greatest part. We're all living off the surplus value of food production. (Also of other food, energy, and materials sourcing: fishing, forestry, mining, etc.) This was the insight of the French economist François Quesnay in his Tableau économique , foundation of the Physiocratic school of economics.

You might find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margarine#Coal_butter fascinating. > Strictly speaking, farming is where all our livelihoods come from, in the greatest part. We're all living off the surplus value of food production. I don't think farming is special here, because food isn't special. You could make exactly the same argument for water (or even air) instead of food, and all of a sudden all our livelihoods w…

Food (and other fuels) are special.

Water largely isn't fundamenally transformed with use (unless it's involved in a chemical reaction, though that's a minute fraction of all water usage), though it may be dispersed or degraded (usually contaminated with something). But it can recover its earlier state with appropriate applications of process and energy. Water (and much else we consume) is a material input rather than an energy input.

With energy inputs it is the energy potential itself which provides value, and that potential is intrinsically consumed in their use. Water, wood, iron, aluminium, lithium, helium, etc., can all be recycled, restored to their useful state, at comparatively little cost.

Collecting the waste products of food don't give you that, on two counts. First, most of the actual metabolic output is gaseous and lost to the atmosphere at large (CO2 and water vapour in your breath), and to the extent that solid and liquid human waste are useful in producing new food, it's a nutrient fertilisers which enable energy conversion of sunlight to fuel, and not the primary energy input itself (sunlight).

Re: Now might be the best time to learn software development

#374

Post by eru » Tue, Jun 24, 2025, 2:25 AM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #373

eru wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margarine#Coal_butter fascinating. > Strictly speaking, farming is where all our livelihoods come from, in the greatest part. We're all living off the surplus value of food production. I don't think farming is special here, because food isn't special. You could make exactly the same argument for water (or even air) instead of food, and all of a sudden all our livelihoods w…

Food (and other fuels) are special. Water largely isn't fundamenally transformed with use (unless it's involved in a chemical reaction, though that's a minute fraction of all water usage), though it may be dispersed or degraded (usually contaminated with something). But it can recover its earlier state with appropriate applications of process and energy. Water (and much else we consume) is a material input rather tha…

I think you would want to be talking about entropy, not energy?

Recycling all the materials you mentioned costs 'energy' (to use your terminology). The same for food: we can use used-up food and a lot of energy and grow new food.

The process for 'recycling' wood is basically the same that for recycling food: you grow some plants. The waste products of used up wood are also basically the same as those for used up food.

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In any case, I don't see how any of this makes food more special than eg petrol or sunlight?

And you can argue that food is only useful, if we have air, ie oxygen to burn it with.

Re: Now might be the best time to learn software development

#375

Post by fivestones » Tue, Jun 24, 2025, 6:33 AM UTC

jimbokun wrote: post #255

dredmorbius wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen consistent values for food waste reported for at least the past 40 years, if not the past 80, in various sources. I suspect it's something of a constant. One observation I've seen is that food wastage now occurs far later in the processing cycle, which is to say, after far more resources (transport, processing, refrigeration, cooking) have been invested in it. In the long term, food demand is elastic in tha…

> in that populations tend to grow. That's no longer happening.

I thought that world wide on average populations were still growing quite a bit