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ekkeke

101 karma · joined April 25, 2021

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ekkeke··on Ask HN: AI productivity gains – do you fire devs or build better products?
There definitely isn't enough _specialised_ software. If you look at engineering tools the open source/free stuff is just not good, and the professional software packages run in the tens of thousands per user. I'm eagerly awaiting the day we get competitive open source alternatives to simulink, HFSS, autocad, solidworks, LT Spice, etc.

Unfortunately this kind of software needs specialised domain knowledge to produce that AI doesn't have yet, but when (if) it arrives I hope we see strides forwards in hardware engineering productivity.

ekkeke··on Java is fast, code might not be
This point gets raised every single time managed languages and low latency development come up together. The trade off is running "fast" all of the time, even when you don't have to, vs running slow most of the time and tinkering when you need to go fast.

I've spent a fair few years developing lowish (10-20us wire to wire) latency trading systems and the majority of the code does not need to go fast. It's just wasted effort, a debugging headache, and technical debt. So the natural trade off is a bit of pain to make the hot path fast through spans, unsafe code, pre-allocated object pools, etc and in return you get to use a safe and easy programming language everywhere else.

In C# low latency dev is not even that painful, as there are a lot of tools available specifically for this purpose by the runtime.

ekkeke··on Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents
That is the object of the sentence. He is asking who the subject is, in other words the thing or person that is doing the housing of the people. Is it the government? Is it you? I'm currently responsible for housing myself, which is annoying so I would prefer someone else take on this responsibility.
ekkeke··on How we automated federal retirements
It's definitely a step up from PowerApps though.
ekkeke··on AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'
Perhaps, I don't consider them shitty myself but palates differ. Is engineering nirvana a place where tasks are such that any can been done by a junior engineer, and the concept of engineering skill developed through experience is non-existent?
ekkeke··on AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'
You can't give a junior tasks that require experience and nuance that have been acquired over years of development. If you babysit them, then perhaps but then what is the point? By it's nature "nuance" is something hard to describe concretely but as someone who has mentored a fair few juniors most of them don't have it. AI generally doesn't have it either. Juniors need tasks at the boundary of their capability, but not far beyond to be able to progress. Simply allowing them to make a mess of a difficult project is not a good way to get there.

There is such a thing as software engineering skill and it is not domain knowledge, nor knowledge of a specific codebase. It is good taste, an abstract ability to create/identify good solutions to a difficult problem.

ekkeke··on Ask HN: Good resources to learn financial systems engineering?
I work on low(ish) latency trading systems in FX. FIX is the standard communication protocol and familiarity with it is essential for me. Here you can look up the standard message types and tag values: https://fiximate.fixtrading.org/

They also have docs for the standard message flows you can expect during trading. I use it regularly.

ekkeke··on Back to basics: Why we chose long-polling over websockets
Websockets can operate outside the request/response model used in this long polling example, and allow you to stream data continuously. They're also a lot more efficient in terms of framing and connections if there are a lot of individual pieces of data to push as you don't need to spin a up a connection + request for each bit.
ekkeke··on Ask HN: Life-changing purchases since 2020? (Under $100 and under $1000)
This might be something I'll end up buying, I've got a pair of xm4s and they're beyond irritating. There's no way to permanently disable speak-to-chat so every time I clear my throat the music pauses. It constantly re-enables if you touch the side whilst taking them off or picking them up, or also possibly for no reason at all. I've read dozens of complaints about this and I've just about had it with them.

/rant

ekkeke··on Ask HN: Life-changing purchases since 2020? (Under $100 and under $1000)
Honestly it was such a revelation once I bought it. didn't buy it sooner because spending £70 on a toothbrush (+ heads) would have been an unaffordable luxury, and anyway I didn't realise how much better it would be :)
ekkeke··on Ask HN: Life-changing purchases since 2020? (Under $100 and under $1000)
Under $100: Electric toothbrush: Always hated having to brush my teeth and this makes it so much less tedious, also supposedly better for your teeth, from 1-2 times per day to 3 times every day.

Under $1000: Nespresso machine, was using a mocha pot before but the coffee is much easier to make, no cleanup, and tastes better.

ekkeke··on Graphs That Explain Software Engineering Salaries in 2023
They kind of go out their way to highlight that the sample size that chose that option was low. Hardly worth throwing out the article simply because there was an outlier.
ekkeke··on SpaceX's Texas Rocket Is Going to Cause a Lot More Damage Than Anyone Thinks
Coming from the UK, I'd feel more inclined to listen to these ecological/environmental concerns if they weren't abused in such terrible ways. In general safety limits are calculated with significant error margins, so I'd take this kind of scary blog post about destroyed houses with a pinch of salt.

The other aspect to consider is that, as humans, we need space to work and live. This inevitably will come at the expense of the natural environment. Some species will suffer, some will suffer more than others. The only way around that is to tell people to stop having children, to stop living, and to stop advancing society. We have to balance all of these when we consider land utilisation.

I am far from convinced that this post takes a reasonable view of all these points. It is quite common for environmental extremists to make highly irrational decisions (germany shutting down nuclear plants in favour of coal?). Only one side of the argument seems to be considered in this post.

An old boss taught me that I should never oppose an action without having an alternative viable course to propose. I think those of us who care for the environment (I care, a lot) would advance the cause by following this advice.

ekkeke··on Effective Spaced Repetition
Big fan of spaced repitition, especially for language learning. Unfortunately I feel like it fares worse for topics that require more application instead of memorisation, like mathematics or electrical engineering. Would love know if there was some super effective way to learn these similar to spaced repitiion.

So far, the only thing that really works for me is solving lots of problems until I have the technique mastered, but even then after a while I'm prone to forget how to solve them. Perhaps there some way to combine the problem solving with the spaced repition? It seems like it would be far harder to make a deck for this and I don't think most flashcard software handles it very well.

ekkeke··on Tips for a healthier Postgres database (2021)
Would be a whole lot better if it didn't prune their query logs to x (I think 1000?) characters.

We autogenerate many of our own queries which can have significant complexity (regularly over 10 joins, sometimes up to 30!) and our infrastructure isn't quite there yet to be able to recreate the exact query plan a customer saw on their own data without a lot of work. It could all be so much simpler, so if there is a setting to prevent this please tell me!

ekkeke··on MicroCap circuit simulator is now free (as of 07/04/2019)
It would be great if they could have released this as an open source project for the community to maintain. Unfortunately there is a lack of good OSS circuit simulators with decent GUI interfaces.
ekkeke··on Functional Programming – How and Why
I've been using heavily functional c# at work with LanguageExt for about a year. It has been quite painful, especially when it comes to debugging but also because things like pattern matching are really tedious (eg. imagine a class with two Eithers, now every Match needs to handle 4 possibilities when I may actually only care about 1).

Unless f# has massive advantages over c# when it comes to functional programming, I would say this paradigm is not worth it in 90% of my programming projects.

ekkeke··on The five-year engineering feat Germany pulled off in months
Congrats to Germany for this one, I wish we could do the same in the UK.

It has seemed to me that the planning system in its current state is actually badly damaging our economy and posperity. We don't build enough houses, and when we do, the infrastructure that's needed to support them takes decades to build. I've been hearing about another heathrow runway, and new trainline, etc for years and yet it seems we're no closer to having these built. Now we're stuck paying most of our income into a 30 year mortgage rather than anything useful/productive. That money could have gone into the productive economy.

ekkeke··on Mkcert: Simple zero-config tool to make locally trusted development certificates
Have you actually tried doing this? It's an absolute nightmare. I tried creating SSL test certs for my websockets implementation and just gave up because I just couldn't get them working with my libraries SSL stream implementation.
ekkeke··on The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal
Don't agree with this analysis, it will end just not like that. The workers will have worse and worse living conditions until they're reduced to effective serfdom. Eventually they may rise up and force change through voting or riots, but that's quite unlikely for some time as the generations that benefitted from this still outnumber those suffering.

The sad thing is that this has been done by one generation to the following one, parents impoverishing their own children. Not intentionally perhaps, but they have created the artificial supply side restrictions through planning laws and nimbyism that have resulted in their childrens impoverishment.

One of my friends is paying half his salary in rent with his own house impossibly out of sight, while his parents own multiple properties and rent them out.

ekkeke··on Why employees want to work in vilified industries
I would think it depends also on your sense of responsibilty. For some people, the person building a missile has as much responsibility as the person who fires it. Other people might look at it as being entirely the fault of the person who fired it, and therefore there being nothing wrong in building it. The latter would not really care about whether he's building missiles or selling tobacco as the buck stops with the end customer.
ekkeke··on Pioneering economist says our obsession with growth must end
Can someone explain to me why we can't keep growing until the death of the sun? Growth doesn't mean more materials or natural resources necessarily, a microprocessor uses some of the cheapest and most abundant materials and uses less of them now than before. Why might we not continue to find new designs and discoveries that allow us to make ever more efficient and complex objexts, that in turn are worth continually more than what we have now?

Look at software, most of it all uses the same commodity hardware to run but it gets more powerful and complex every year. But by rearranging the same bits of hardware we can get a basic calculator or matlab. The productivity difference between the two is massive and becomes more so every year. Can't we always have new circuits, new software, new FPGAs, new rocket designs, new and better algorithms or even hardcoded solutions calculated once and distributed, that don't use more resources but by being more complex increase productivity?

ekkeke··on The euro has tumbled near parity to the US dollar
I don't think many people I know would abandon family, friends, language, and culture to move to a different country unless the incentive was very high. Moving to the USA is also quite hard and the rhetoric around it isn't great so even a double or triple salary (which I've heard is the norm in some industries eg. software) isn't particularly tempting.

I doubt Germany, France, Austria etc. would see much significant drain. Poorer countries (eg Poland) have been already hit quite hard and might be impacted a lot more by this though.

ekkeke··on Why America can’t build
Yup, exaclty. We seem to have become a nation of landlords seeking to turn a profit without an ounce of effort, rather than the industrious country we once were.
ekkeke··on Why America can’t build
I believe (though I don't have the evidence for it) that we likely see a similar phenomenon in the UK. House prices seem to have become the most important thing to the home owning class and they selfishly oppose anything that would affect them negatively, whether that be HS2 or new house building programs.

This is not current generation I might add, who I believe would be quite happy with a shake up. It's previous generation of 50 years olds and over that have brought this about.

ekkeke··on In defense of cryptocurrency
Have yet to see a reasonable crypto defence, probably because there isn't one. The same people would have been writing "In defence of tulip prices" in age of yore except that was not as bad for the environment.
ekkeke··on Researchers achieve ‘absurdly fast’ algorithm for network flow
In this case the "greedy" algorithm was guaranteed to give the best possible flow in the network so this speedup applies to the optimal solution. I think in a lot of cases greedy algorithms are used when the alternative is an NP-hard problem like bin packing or TSP for which we might be looking at speeding up an already sub-optimal solution.
ekkeke··on Light-field control of real and virtual charge carriers
This was my first thought too. How are they planning on chaining these together? Sounds like a non-starter.
ekkeke··on Web color is still broken
Unfortunately, I don't think iOS safari has webm support yet.
ekkeke··on How to organize yourself as a solo founder
I keep my notes in notepad++ as plaintext. I've always thought of this as a time saver because it removes any time wasted not actually working. Now I'm reconsidering.

I haven't been using GTD but I used a vaguely similar system of notes to keep track of what I need to do. This article has really focused some of the areas I might be improve this, mainly through giving more information about each task (context, time, energy, priority).

I think this is where a more sophisticated tool might help, because it will be hard to organise that in plaintext and somehting with a columnar way of representing this information in tables will help (btw open for suggestions that aren't excel!).

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