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ernon High school math doesn't prepare most students for their college majors

Cursive is making a comeback. Google it. The education establishment is often divorced from reality.

ernon Toxic comments are associated with reduced volunteer activity on Wikipedia

The whole place is infused with passive-aggression (by policy) and toxic double-standards.

There are some truly bizarre things that I've encountered on Wikipedia (editing for almost 20 years now). Admins handwave blatant mistakes away by their friends, citing [[WP:NOTBURO]] and other such shenanigans. It seems to be getting worse over time.

ernon A coder considers the waning days of the craft

It looked correct visually and it matched the techniques in the actual CSS that the team lead and I produced when we paired to get my layout to the standard he expected.

ernon A coder considers the waning days of the craft

It’s pretty impressive that it was able to actually decode those strings. In March, I used GPT 3.5 to write code for validating a type of string which used a checksum algorithm.

It did the task well, and even wrote tests, but it failed when generating test case values. I wonder if it would perform better if I did it today.

ernon A coder considers the waning days of the craft

I collaborate with front-end teams that use a low-code front-end platform. When they run into things that aren’t built-in, they try to push their presentation logic up the stack for the “real” programming languages to deal with.

ernon A coder considers the waning days of the craft

Open a ChatGPT account. Set up a GitHub account if you don’t have one. Think of a common problem and see if a library exists in your favourite language to do what you want. If it doesn’t exist, explain your requirements to ChatGPT. You can even tell it the same thing you put in your comment here: “I want to learn how to use ChatGPT to augment my programming skills”. Make sure it’s done properly with automated tests and you have a licence (ChatGPT will help you with both).

Bonus points for doing things like using GitHub actions for CI and publishing it to a package repository with guidance from ChatGPT.

ernon A coder considers the waning days of the craft

I described what I wanted. It was earlier this year..not sure if chatgpt can understand wireframes now, but it couldn’t at the time.

ernon A coder considers the waning days of the craft

Writing code is not my job anymore. It’s not ideal, but my time is better used elsewhere.

In any case, I could have written the code myself, but this literally took a couple of minutes and it read the documentation for me. And it wasn’t just calling an API, there were some other parts to it.

As for replacing me with one of my reports, that would be great, but they’d quickly end up in the same place as me. In fact, I’ve just spent a few weeks coaching one of my team leads in the art of effective delegation -being able to “let go” is one of the traits of an effective leader.

What’s with the toxic tone?

ernon A coder considers the waning days of the craft

Just out of curiosity: is the code generated by ChatGPT not what you expected or is it failing to produce the result that you wanted.

I suspect you mean the latter, but just wanted to confirm.

ernon A coder considers the waning days of the craft

I manage a number of development teams, and I don’t get to write much code anymore, but I was asked to urgently build an integration.

The team lead I was going to assign the task to was offshore, and not yet online, so I put the URL for the documentation into ChatGPT premium, and it spat out a working solution.

My team lead was a bit perturbed and created a more enterprisy solution with factories and DI (more out of pride than necessity), but my original code was production ready.

I’m not going to be firing anyone just yet, and certainly not my senior people, but I can see a lot of grunt-level work going away.

ernon A coder considers the waning days of the craft

I was on a team developing a critical public safety system on a tight deadline a few years ago, and i had to translate some wireframes for the admin back-end into CSS. I did a passable job but it wasn’t a perfect match. I was asked to redo it by the team-lead. It had zero business value, but such was the state of our team…being pixel perfect was a source of pride.

It was one of the incidents that made me to stop front-end development.

As an exercise, I recently asked ChatGPT to produce similar CSS and it did so flawlessly.

I’m certainly a middling programmer when it comes to CSS. But with ChatGPT I can produce stuff close to the quality of what the CSS masters do. The article points this out: middling generalists can now compete with specialists.

ernon German court prohibits LinkedIn from ignoring "Do Not Track" signals

This is your regular reminder that anyone can create a LinkedIn account and see your profile, regardless of your privacy settings.

ernon California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

GM vehicles are generally regarded as not particularly well engineered or reliable, based on what I've seen and heard from mechanics.

Why aren't they investing in core engineering, instead of moonshots?

ernon Killings in the U.S. are dropping at a historic rate

In addition to politicians and media who always tend to benefit from a perception of increased crime, social media feeds perceptions of increasing crime rates.

ernon Stories told by Aboriginal Tasmanians could be oldest recorded

The article is about the myths themselves, and there isn’t anything about it being taught as an alternative form of science.

ernon LinkedIn is laying off nearly 700 employees

I've hibernated my LinkedIn profile after I was stalked by an unstable bank employee who I had a bad interaction with:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37417397

Until their privacy and visibility policies are put on par with other social media platforms, I'm going to use it strictly for job-hunting when needed.

ernon Ask HN: LinkedIn mysteriously banned me permanently; where to go next?

LinkedIn is a security risk, it allowed me to be stalked by a crazy bank employee despite me "locking down" my profile.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37417397

I can't hibernate because I am in a free trial period with Apple for premium, despite ending the trial. I've blocked the stalker, but I have no idea who is viewing my profile.

It needs to really up its game.

Not entirely related to my gripe, but my observation is that Microsoft's pay-freeze and layoffs of employees seem to be having ripple effects across the org.

ernon WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

Airlines have a moving map on their captive wifi portals. Didn’t know it was rendered client side though. Something to try when I next fly.

ernon Bosses won’t like it but WFH is a happier way to work

Similarly, many schools are giving children more autonomy in learning, instead of training them for lives of desk-bound obedience.

This was one of the biggest disappointments of the pandemic. Teachers aren't ready to give up on their old operating models. The flipped classroom, despite the hype in the 2010s didn't really shine.

ernon Two photographers captured the same millisecond in time (2018)

You can delete the overlay using dev tools.

In Chrome, I hit F12, selected the overlay in the DOM and deleted it.

ernon Lead poisoning causes more death, IQ loss than thought: study

I sure am wondering how much of the late 20th century Flynn effect was due to diminishing lead poisoning

Given that the Flynn effect seemed to be strongest in the era of high-lead petrol and has dropped off, I can't see how it could have had an effect

ernon Ask HN: What low code platforms are worth using?

I think that assuming that technology is secondary is a trap that skilled developers encounter when moving into management-they assume that development is as easy for others as it is for them. When I moved into technical management, I was fortunate enough to work with high performing teams for a while, so when I encountered a poor performing team (the team lead didn’t know basic good practices, and bug counts rocketed up because of an inexperienced dev team) it was a nasty shock.

ernon Ask HN: What low code platforms are worth using?

IIRC the HN algorithm downranks stories where number of comments exceeds the number of upvotes. As of me writing this, there are 50 comments and 35 upvotes.

ernon Ask HN: What low code platforms are worth using?

I have around 20 years of experience doing work with third generation languages. So I’d classify myself as both “normal” and “experienced”. The closest thing my group does with “low code” is the odd Azure Logic app for alerting, and we don’t have any plans to change that. I’ve been around long enough to see things like Lighswitch die on the vine.

The problem is that I don’t control the entire IT org and my group has to deal with issues like presentation logic bubbling up into our APIs from underpowered and overhyped low-code platforms.

I guess the difference between you and me is that I’m open-minded about the possibility that some of these tools might potentially, someday, be better than what we’ve seen until now.

ernon The joys of maintenance programming (2011)

I was almost bounced by HR during a screening interview a couple of years ago when they found out I had been doing maintenance work for the previous six months. I had to explain that it was a tiny part of my overall work experience. The hiring hypocrisy is strong.

Also as you point out, getting funding for preventative maintenance or continuous improvement is extremely difficult in a corporate IT environment, especially if there isn't a product owner to advocate for the system and to secure funding. Although I do believe you need a product owner to drive the work to ensure it delivers business value, and not have it driven solely by developers.

ernon Ask HN: 6 months later. How is Bard doing?

the market is slowly moving to abandon chatty AI type LLM things

I didn't know this was happening. Do you know where the market is moving to?

ernon Tell HN: Reminder that your LinkedIn profile is fully visible to site members

<REDACTED. I think you’ve seen that I provided enough>

It’s all there (I’m trying to not give away too much, we’re not connections, but I can see your education and your work history and your endorsements, let me know if you want more proof).

EDIT: looks like you updated the link. ~Let me know if you want me to delete the info I found.~

ernon Tell HN: Reminder that your LinkedIn profile is fully visible to site members

Without giving too much away, it's a small bank. My name is not common at all (in fact I'm probably the only person in the world with my first+last name). You wouldn't find me unless you're actively looking.

ernon Tell HN: Reminder that your LinkedIn profile is fully visible to site members

I'd recommend that you actually try that, and then view it with a different logged-in profile. It's all still visible.

ernon Tell HN: Reminder that your LinkedIn profile is fully visible to site members

There's clearly sufficient demand for them to have settings to lock the profile down from search engines, and non-logged in users. I'd wager that most users who set the privacy settings (heck look at this post) don't realize that random strangers with zero professional interest can see enough detail to cause serious harm if they wanted.