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

Is something bugging you?

antithesis.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–438 of 438 posts

Re: Is something bugging you?

#431

Post by iamnotsure »

sfink wrote: post #217
iamnotsure wrote: post #180

"I love me a powerful type system, but it’s not the same as actually running your software in thousands and thousands of crazy situations you’d never dreamed of." Would not trust. Formal software verification is badly needed. Running thousands of tests means almost nothing in software world. Don't fool beginners with your test hero stories.

That'll work great for your Distributed QSort Incorporated startup, where the only product is a sorting algorithm. Formal software verification is very useful. But what can be usefully formalized is rather limited, and what can be formalized correctly in practice is even more limited. That means you need to restrict your scope to something sane and useful. As a result, in the real world running thousands of tests is…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family they are the real heroes, not someone starting the sentence with "i love me", and continuing accordingly.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#432

Post by iamnotsure »

pfdietz wrote: post #249
iamnotsure wrote: post #180

"I love me a powerful type system, but it’s not the same as actually running your software in thousands and thousands of crazy situations you’d never dreamed of." Would not trust. Formal software verification is badly needed. Running thousands of tests means almost nothing in software world. Don't fool beginners with your test hero stories.

Formal verification require a formal statement of what the software is supposed to do. But if you have that, you have a recipe for doing property based testing: generate inputs that satisfy the conditions specified in this formal description, then verify that the behavior satisfies the specification also. And then run for millions and millions of inputs. Is it really going to be worth proving the program correct, whe…

I remember a colleague writing his first computer program:

x = 1 // set x to "1"

x = 1 // set x to "1", again, just to make sure.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#433

Post by iamnotsure »

mrkeen wrote: post #206
iamnotsure wrote: post #180

"I love me a powerful type system, but it’s not the same as actually running your software in thousands and thousands of crazy situations you’d never dreamed of." Would not trust. Formal software verification is badly needed. Running thousands of tests means almost nothing in software world. Don't fool beginners with your test hero stories.

Great, but formal software verification is not yet broadly applicable to most day-to-day app development. Good type systems (a pretty decent chunk of formal software dev) are absolutely necessary and available. But things get tricky moving past that. I've tried out TLA+/PlusCal, and one or more things usually happen: 1) The state space blows up and there's simply too much to simulate, so you can't run your proof. 2)…

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously"

Re: Is something bugging you?

#434

Post by [deleted] »

kretaceous wrote: post #22

This might be the best introduction post I've read. Lays the foundation (get it?) for who the people are and what they've built. Then explains how the current thing they are building is a result of the previous thing. It feels that they actually want this problem solved for everyone because they have experienced how good the solution feels. Then tells us about the teams (pretty big names with complex systems) that ha…

[deleted]

Re: Is something bugging you?

#436

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

pawelmurias wrote: post #423
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes: Programmers who start at twelve are often the 10x programmers who can really program faster than the average developer by a lot. No: It's not because they have 10 more years of experience. Read "The Mythical Man Month." That's the book that popularized the concept that some developers were 5-25x faster than others. One of the takeaways was that the speed of a developer was not correlated with experience. At all.…

> Most people will only ever be able to speak a language as fluently as a native speaker if they learn it before they're about 13-14 years old. Very few people both have a ton of exposure to a language and actually study the grammar and stuff as adults. If you don't learn the grammar you will still speak like a dog after living in a country for 20 years. A lot of people in an average company don't write hard things a…

> Very few people both have a ton of exposure to a language and actually study the grammar and stuff as adults.

Very few people actually learn to speak a language as a native speaker by "studying the grammar."

I remember people trying to learn what was and what wasn't a run-on sentence in junior high school, and being shocked that they had a hard time telling the difference.

And studying language explicitly doesn't change the brain regions used to the same that are used by a native speaker.

And that's my point. I didn't really "study" programming explicitly as much as understanding it intuitively. When exposed to a new concept, I just immediately internalize it; I don't need to use it a bunch of times and intentionally practice it. I just need to see it and it's obvious and becomes part of my tool-set.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#437

Post by BehindBlueEyes »

davedx wrote: post #390
QuercusMax wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, that's been my experience as someone who asked for a C++ compiler for my 12th birthday, worked on a bunch of random websites and webapps for friends of the family, and spent some time at age 16-17 running a Beowulf cluster and attempting to help postdocs port their code to run on MPI (with mixed success). All thru my CS education I was writing tons of toy programs, contributing (as much as I could) toward OSS, r…

Yeah similar story here. Basically if you start programming 10y before your peers of the same age then it’s logical you’ll be more productive and knowledgeable. Maybe a lot of “10x engineers” are just guys who gave themselves a huge head start for whatever reason

To work for the aunt/uncle, friend of the family etc described earlier the thread, or having an older brother helping… 10x programmers have a bunch of people giving them a head-start, not just themselves. Sure the person needs a drive and early start, but it’s moot without the support to actually convert that early start into a career. Maybe not moot, but for sure a whole lot harder.

I was coding before age 10 and delivering homework in website form any chance I got. Coding was just another video game to me. And yet, I didn’t even end up being a programmer, let alone 10x. I was given bad advice from highschool career advisors, lacked the family connections that knew better to give me odd tech jobs, had disinterested teachers at best and ones that insulted students who asked clarification questions at worst. I took an engineering class in highschool where i loved the content but I felt like I didn’t belong and dropped from it convinced tech was not for me after all (and then proceeded making games in unreal in my free time). For every person supporting my interest in CS there were 10 telling/nudging me to give up, so i was eventually worn out and gave it up. I still code 25 years later but I am far behind now instead of ahead.

Anyway, this is a longwinded way to say it takes privilege to be a 10x programmer, not everyone who gives themselves a head start will succeed.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#438

Post by BehindBlueEyes »

JimDabell wrote: post #132
giantg2 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm tired of hearing about 10x engineers. I just want to be a good 1x engineer. Or good at anything in life realy.

The “10x engineer” comes from the observation that there is a 10x difference in productivity between the best and the worst engineers. By saying that you want to be a 1x engineer, you’re saying you want to be the least productive engineer possible. 1x is not the average, 1x is the worst.

So it’s like saying “this soap cleans 10x better than if you washed the thing with poop”? That’s not nearly as interesting to debate.
Post reply on HN