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Comment by horticulturist | Hacker News Reader

Nothing was lost using a graphing calculator because you assume the calculator produces the correct result every time. Imagine if, instead, 90% of the time it was wrong, and you needed to check the result and then take another pull on the slot machine lever.

Centering a div and using regex are basic programming skills that aren’t some kind of difficult exercise or the privilege of a select few. Everyone working (at least on typical business CRUD applications) should know how to use these tools.

If you don’t then I’m sorry - maybe you shouldn’t be a programmer.

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I built a ML training framework from scratch in cuda in 2016, for earthquake forecasting - I know quite well how to solve low level kernel optimization problems :) I'm also regularly a rust developer and I do know REGEX thanks.

Building that project today, would not be impressive or particularly hard. There are great references available today to illustrate how to build that. Sure LLMs aren't 100% accurate, neither is an intern or junior dev you might offload a task to. Part of the job of a software engineer is collaboration. Understanding how to collaborate with teammates (local, AI, outsourced) and how to ship when your teammates make mistakes is quite important to know how to resolve.

That's why CI/CD and TTD exists! If you have a project where correctness is critical, why haven't you written a test to validate that correctness?

> you assume the calculator produces the correct result every time

The calculator itself sure. But the whole process of calculating using calculator? Definitely not 100% always correct. You can miss the buttons, hit the entirely wrong ones, you may put in entirely wrong thing. So if you care about the result you double check, especially if you get something unreasonable. The calculator being perfect is quantitative difference, not qualitative once. The process would be exactly the same if the calculator made 1/100 operations wrong.

Centering a div was a hack built on hacks based on a spec that was derived from random browser behaviors built over decades. I am super happy I don't have to do that shit again. Both because of flexbox and AI.

But yeah you need to know how to write a regex, if you want to be a programmer.

I can't do anything with a div, much less center it - I haven't touched web-tech in twenty years, but I've been a programmer the whole time.

Careful, you'll be accused of being an elitist gatekeeper or some sort of nonsense.

But yeah, you're completely right.

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