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havkom

367 karma · joined November 19, 2017

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havkom··on AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job
They are great instruction followers in general. This is, one single bad instruction during months of work can mess things up.
havkom··on LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
I am mostly worried about the current AI use in management. I’ve met a few with ”AI hubris” making poor managerial decisions that stem from their poor usage of ChatGPT (not understanding the importance of context, model sycophancy, etc).
havkom··on What makes you senior
Some people that are immune to listen to people with more experience will continue to be ”junior” forever. They may eventually not have the title junior, but they really are.
havkom··on The highest quality codebase
There are fundamental differences. Many people expect a positive gradient of quality from AI overhaul of projects. For translating back and forth, it is obvious from the outset that there is a negative gradient of quality (the Chinese whispers game).
havkom··on Agent design is still hard
My tip is: don’t use SDK:s for agents. Use a while loop and craft your own JSON, handle context size and handle faults yourself. You will in practice need this level of control if you are not doing something trivial.
havkom··on Inflammation now predicts heart disease more strongly than cholesterol
What about GLP-1 antagonists to lower inflammation / hs-CRP?
havkom··on GitHub was having issues
Does this matter much? Git is a ”distributed source control system”. Are you using git in the wrong way? :)
havkom··on JavaScript's New Superpower: Explicit Resource Management
Reminds me of C#.. IDisposible and IAsyncDisposible in C# helps a lot to write good mechanisms for things that should actually be abstracted in a nice way (such as locks handling, queue mechanisms, temporary scopes for impersonation, etc).
havkom··on Show HN: Semantic Calculator (king-man+woman=?)
I tried:

-red

and:

red-red-red

But it did not work and did not get any response. Maybe I am stupid but should this not work?

havkom··on AI code is legacy code?
What is the difference between them? Both seems like quite trivial implementations?
havkom··on Jepsen: Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 17.4
Good investigation!

Software developers nowadays barely know about transactions, and definitely not about different transaction models (in my experience). I have even encountered "senior developers" (who are actually so called "CRUD developers"), who are clueless about database transactions.. In reality, transactions and transaction models matter a lot to performance and error free code (at least when you have volumes of traffic and your software solves something non-trivial).

For example: After a lot of analysis, I switched from SQL Server standard Read Committed to Read Committed Snapshot Isolation in a large project - the users could not be happier -> a lot of locking contention has disappeared. No software engineer in that project had any clue of transaction models or locks before I taught them some basics (even though they had used transactions extensively in that project)..

havkom··on Avoiding skill atrophy in the age of AI
The big threat of LLM:s is not the diminishing skills of established skilled developers, but rather the skill set building of junior developers.
havkom··on Better Error Handling
try catch - where you catch the right types of errors at the right level is hard to beat.

However, many make the mistake to handle any errors at the wrong level. This leads to really buggy and hard to reason about code and in some cases really bad data inconsistency issues.

A rule of thumb is to never catch a specific error which you are not in a good position to handle correctly at that precise level of code. Just let them pass through.

havkom··on The Frontend Treadmill
Amen!
havkom··on Posthog/.cursorrules
How to apply these rules on junior co-workers (who think they know what is best from reading a hyped blog post)?
havkom··on DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via RL
Yes. It shines with real problems.
havkom··on That's not an abstraction, that's a layer of indirection
I have seen tons of ”abstractions” in recently created code bases from ”senior developers” which in actual fact is only titanic-grade mess of complicated ”indirection”. Many people nowadays are unfortunately not fit to work in software development.
havkom··on Build systems, not heroes
BTW, I am currently working in an enterprise with a small team mixed with experienced developers (heros - but still always learning because of new complexities) and new developers (heros in becoming).

Absolutely fantastic and we create wonders, but it requires management to acknowledge skill and exceptionalism.

havkom··on Build systems, not heroes
Yes. Focus on building all your team members to heros instead.

The other way around is possible, but you will end up with a team of 1000 people doing the same work as 10.

havkom··on Microsoft formally deprecates the Windows Control Panel
Windows 2000 Professional was the best OS ever. Only downhill from there.
havkom··on Launch HN: Undermind (YC S24) – AI agent for discovering scientific papers
This looks cool!
havkom··on U.S. Department of Defense – Detecting Agile BS [pdf] (2018)
Using these technologies or frameworks may just as well indicate that they are not agile. Nowadays much more common that the wrong technologies are used in the wrong places.
havkom··on U.S. Department of Defense – Detecting Agile BS [pdf] (2018)
The document vibe to me is like it is written by some junior engineers who have just read a blog post about the Netflix stack and think they know it all now.
havkom··on U.S. Department of Defense – Detecting Agile BS [pdf] (2018)
First parts of the document are pure BS focusing on hype technologies rather than “Agile”. I mean, questions about ”Kubernetes or Docker Swarm?” etc.

The last section with flow chart is good though.

havkom··on The CrowdStrike file that broke everything was full of null characters?
Lots of very strong opinions here what they should have done in terms of code/pipelines/etx from people who have no idea how CrownStrikes stack or build systems works and people who have no clue how to write that type of software themselves (including Windows kerneln modules).
havkom··on Effective CSAM filters are impossible because what CSAM is depends on context
The doctors example is good, however may not only be health communication between a parent and a doctor but among parents themselves to figure out what action (if any) to take in relation to a condition.

The hesitation to effectively communicate after CSAM may actually cost lives.

havkom··on Microsoft to delay release of Recall AI feature on security concerns
Did they recall the recall product?
havkom··on ICQ will stop working from June 26
#14401370
havkom··on A forged Apple employee badge
But now with 856+ points on HN about it, it is probably a valuable relic!
havkom··on AI copilots are changing how coding is taught
I agree. The state of level of “basic” knowledge in developers are dropping.

The consequences are that developers can tackle basic tasks which are supported by the frameworks they use, but once something is not supported or straightforward they don’t know what to do and get completely stuck.

From society’s point of view, the usefulness and value of the task force decreases and important problems are not solved or aren’t efficiently solved.

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