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

The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

techtrenches.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–480 of 896 posts

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#471

Post by cloverich »

gyomu wrote: post #231
mawadev wrote: post #156

I highly question the ability of companies to gauge the level of experience of any dev. The distinction between junior, mid, senior, lead is a facade. It is a soft gradient that spans multiple areas, but is tainted and skewed by the technology du jour. Technically you don't have to be an employed developer to become a senior developer. It boils down to your personal willingness to learn and invest time building. What…

There are two kinds of developers. There's the kind that, when given a problem, will jump in, learn what they need to learn to solve the parts they don't fully understand yet, deliver meaningful iterative results, talk to people as needed, keep you posted on their progress, loop in other team members and offer/request help to/from them, take initiative on the obvious missing parts that would benefit the project as a…

I'd color this a little. I think there's also an engineering mindset some people have, and some don't. And over 10 years in, I'm still not sure if it can be trained or not. Some people are just really good at seeing the technical solutions in terms of engineering: Where does the data live, where does it go. How does it get there, how does it change. How does it break, how will we know, how will we fix it, how will we cope with its shortcomings. All of those questions to some people are a relatively quick and intuitive part of scoping and design. And for others its like a constant cliff they run into midway through their projects, or worse (and far more common) a set of bugs that are "tech debt" (for someone else to inherit) as the slap the "Mission Accomplished" on yet another project.

I've seen people that are very proactive and generally fall into your former group, but also don't quite seem to think like an engineer. I really want it to be trainable - I am trying - but IDK if it is or not.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#472

Post by everforward »

torginus wrote: post #434
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The core problem is that decision-makers—often far removed from actual engineering work — believe that tacit knowledge can be replaced with documentation, tools, and processes. [It] cannot. I am not so certain: For example, I think that a lot of my knowledge about the system that I work on could be documented, and based on this documentation someone new could take over the system. The problem rather is: the volume…

I think it's an important property of a system to be document able not just document ed . What I mean essentially, is the system was designed with sound principles, and said principles were written down and followed. I have seen this work only once in my life, and it was so nice to see, but yeah, most code is just a ball of twine, and even if there was a guiding principle beneath, it has been long abandoned, and over…

I think it’s reasonably easy to design a system that’s documentable and documented. It’s very, very hard to maintain and iterate on a system while maintaining those properties.

Hacky things will make their way in because it takes a month to do the documentable thing and a week to ship the hacky thing.

It takes a lot of skilled people from varying disciplines to figure out what things are going to survive long enough and be important enough to spend the resources doing the right thing instead of the hacks.

It bites both ways. I’ve seen core business products crippled by years of digital duct tape, but I’ve also seen internal tooling that never really becomes useful because they insist on doing the “correct” thing and it’s constantly a year behind what we need it to do.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#473

Post by ranger_danger »

throwaw12 wrote: post #446
gnz11 wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps US companies should invest more in their employees then? Advancement, promotions beyond %1-3% COLAs, career paths, etc would go along way to keep employees interested in seeing their employers succeed instead of jumping ship every couple of years. The would require some effort from the C-suite however and since they jump ship every few years as well, I don't see that changing anytime soon.

Invest in employees is very broad statement. Before investing to employees I think it should revisit management practices and strategies, which starts in MBA and university. Instead of teaching how to increase shareholder value in the short term, it should also teach how to increase value to the society in the long term as well (and focus on it highly) - not just say: if you win society wins kind of generic fluff. Wi…

> teaching how to increase shareholder value in the short term

Problem is this is quite often a requirement for a public company, to maximize company value/profits above all else.

Also execs who are more right-wing are typically not interested in helping the larger society in general.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#474

Post by bit1993 »

matwood wrote: post #400
bit1993 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the cutoff date is closing in on our current now. If models cannot easily become bigger, they will likely advertise using "up-to-date-ness". Maybe they will be merely a few days behind. Or bigger models will make use of smaller but more up-to-date models But they will still rely on assembly, C, Rust, Linux, HTML, TCP/IP... Doesn't matter how up to date they are, they rely on existing code they have been tra…

Except they already have invented new languages. https://medium.com/@trezzescience/the-ai-that-invented-its-o...

That's not what I mean, even I can invent my own language that only I use, but if that language is not widely deployed and used by other people or LLM models, it's just a toy language.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#475

Post by SoftTalker »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #319
t-3 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the bean counters get a bad rap for this a bit unfairly. The past century has seen more progress in knowledge and technology than the rest of human history combined. The world and business environment are changing too rapidly to make longtermist thinking practical. Few care if you have a lifetime warranty and excellent service or replacement parts if the majority will upgrade in a few years! Mature technologi…

> R&D can be outsourced or bought and subsidized by the government in universities, so why do everything yourself? Because some problems that many companies in very specialized industries work on are so special that outside of this industry, nearly all people won't even have heard about them. Additionally, many problems companies have where research would make sense are not the kind of problems that are a good fit fo…

Those fields still develop in-house expertise and world-leadning products. General Electric was cited above, but their turbine engine division is producing the most fuel-efficient, reliable, and lowest TCO aircraft engines there have ever been. The materials science and engineering expertise needed to do this isn't something you can find in a freshly-graduated university student.

Products like jet engines, though, are still those where quality matters. They are so costly that there's room in the finances to deliver it. Unlike household appliances, where consumers make decisions mostly on the basis of price and being $5 cheaper than the competition is what will get you the sale even if it means using plastic instead of cast or forged metal parts.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#476

Post by atq2119 »

esseph wrote: post #284
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone wants to tag the evil with their opposition's name. The evil is concentration of power. But no one wants to call it that because then they can't pretend that it's something different when they're doing it themselves. Witness the people who keep proposing to solve market consolidation with higher taxes. Higher taxes go to the government, and therefore the interests that have captured the government. Are we go…

I'd argue we need both massive antitrust, and higher taxes on the wealthy to prevent them from amassing the power to prevent the antitrust.

Plus a systematic way of keeping the Gini coefficient of wealth small in a sustainable way. I'm a fan of establishing sovereign wealth funds whose dividends are paid out equally per capita for this purpose.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#477

Post by scotty79 »

I think comments on such posts have bimodal distribution. On one end there are people who see the utility of AI models for programming and are generally eager to see more capable models and ways of using them. On the other there are people who see AI destroying programming and have no idea how AI could change to be a force for good.

I had idea what might be the difference between the groups. I think for the latter group the code is important part of the goal. They see software as rather ends than means. Not entirely of course.

And the first group considers artifacts that the software produces to be the goal. So as long as AI written software is capable of producing valuable artifact they are willing and eager to go with it. And AI does that.

If the result of my code is finetuning of a neural network, I don't really care how it happened. I can benchmark it afterwards and know if the code that AI made for this purpose was good or not. I can inspect the code, investigate it, pinpoint ideas I don't like, suggest some ideas to try that I believe could give better results. I can restart, or try doing same thing few times in parallel trying different harnesses and models. All in service of the result, that is not code.

If you have a program that needs to do something and are willing to try AI to write it, think foremost about how you can rephrase the problem so that the output of AI written program becomes an artifact that can be independently verified, how to turn desired behavior into an artifact to evaluate.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#478

Post by [deleted] »

01100011 wrote: post #425
barankilic wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am really amazed at how we are really okay with LLMs writing code end to end (without human in the loop) / dark factory concept but when it comes articles, HN is suddenly against LLMs writing words. I do not see the difference between writing code and writing prose. Both have keywords, grammars, syntax, meaningful combinations (function or chaining in code / collocations in words). If we think that AI-generated wor…

Who is the 'we' here? When did I become ok with LLMs writing code end to end or against LLMs being used to assist writers? I wasn't aware I held either of these positions.

[deleted]

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#479

Post by mopsi »

don_esteban wrote: post #438
mopsi wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Russia's paranoia about the west is really strong, well founded and well documented. It's an act, and everyone in Russia knows that it's an act. Acting this way gets the dumber kind of Western politicians to carefully tiptoe around Russia; that is the value this act provides.

There are many western authoritative sources documenting that. Have a look at William Burn's 'Nyet means nyet' depeshe. Or Merkel's memoirs. Or George Kennan's statement's in the 90's on the wisdom of expanding NATO. But, ultimately, one believes what he/she wants to believe.... Do you think it is better to not carefully tiptoe around Russia? Do you consider full-on sanctions, total refusal (except Trump) to diplomat…

You listed joke sources. Merkel, in particular, has been utterly discredited for her naivety toward Russia. Her sucking on Russian gas left Germany lagging in the transition to renewables and EVs, and the German economy is now paying a double price by also having to bear a part of the economic burden of the war.

As to Russia, virtually no-one in Russian academic foreign policy circles, nor in the influential semi-formal circles of imperialists and neo-nazis, nor anywhere inbetween, is paranoid about the US, NATO and the West in general. What is there to be paranoid about? They see the West in general as utterly impotent, making big words, but not backing it up with a stick. This week one year ago, Trump wrote "Vladimir, STOP!" in response to a massive air attack on Kyiv. Putin didn't, and what followed? A bunch of nothing.

The answer to your question about tiptoeing is abundantly clear to anyone familiar enough with Russian culture to know what zek and kagebeshnik mean and how to deal with them. Politely asking them to stop has never worked. The idea that you have to talk with people in the language they understand is hardly a novel one.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#480

Post by the_af »

SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #243
vishnugupta wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> removing people and organizational slack You are spot on w.r.t every assertion you've made. When bean-counters took over the ecosystem they optimised immediate profitability over everything else. Which in turn means, in their mind, every part of the system needs to be firing at 100% all the time. There's no room for experimentation, repair, or anything else. I've commented about lack of slack on several times here…

They also took out all the quality , though in pure business terms one can argue that's a kind of "slack" by itself. The beancounters have cut all the corners on physical products that they could find. Now even design and manufacturing is outsourced to the lowest bidder, a bunch of monkeys paid peanuts to do a job they're woefully unqualified for. And the end result is just a market for lemons. Nobody trusts products…

> Desktop Linux has always been kind of a joke. It hasn't gotten better, the problems are all still there.

Desktop Linux mostly works these days. It does everything most regular people would want of it, with zero fuss. Including playing games. In some respects, it's easier to use than Mac or Windows.

When it has trouble with some things, one must remember neither Mac nor Windows is perfect, and they can be extremely frustrating at times.

Time to update those prejudices!

Post reply on HN