Hacker News Reader

Vibe coding in the 90s was probably like learning C and pointers for the first time and then deciphering strange errors when you couldn't figure out how scanf worked, so you added asterisks and ampersands to the code until it compiled.

View on HN

This is pretty close. I once spent 4 hours in college (circa 1997) looking for an error in a C++ program. The compiler's error messages were rubbish.

It ended up being a missing semicolon in an odd spot and the compiler was just confused.

I remember walking homing thinking, "hey, if I can survive that, maybe I can just hack this CS thing..."

C compilers will still shit themselves and give meaningless error messages if you forget a semicolon after a function declaration in a header file.

Oof. Microcontrollers? LLVM and Clang has improved the situation somewhat for the rest of the world.

I once spent a couple hours debugging a perl cgi script. Nothing worked. Called in my colleague. Looks fine. We both were tearing our hair out. Sent it to the line printer, ordered pizza, and one of us read the code while the other typed it in. Couple hours later we finished and it worked.

Look how far we've come! Now we add random .unsqueeze(-1) and .permute(-1,-2) until our PyTorch models run without shape errors!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com