joshdavham

This is definitely getting my favorite. I’m also going to shamelessly steal this house analogy.

Thanks for writing this!

What’s English class like anyways in China?

Is it the traditional grammar-translation method? Or have they moved on to modern immersion / comprehensible input methods?

Oh no I’m aware that that’s a bit of a reduction of Google. I’m a GCP user and am even wearing a fit bit while writing this comment :)

It’s crazy that Google and TikTok, which mainly produce consumer software to serve ads, have grown to the scale where they literally need to set up data centres in northern countries while getting their power from nuclear power plants.

Thanks for making this! This was super fascinating and the type of thing I love seeing on HN!

Regardless of the outcome, I’m very thankful for xcancel and all the excellent work they’ve done.

I wish them the best in the legal fight!

Great article, but it doesn't really go into where he disagrees with Sean Goedecke's post.

After reading both posts, I find myself still wholeheartedly agreeing with both of them.

In the last Canadian election, I actually largely liked what I was seeing from our two major parties. It fortunately didn't feel like the choice between two lesser evils, but rather a choice between two greater goods.

(I don't say this arrogantly, I actually did like both candidates and platforms).

With that being said, I do lament that we Canadians and Americans live in two-party states, which is terrifyingly close imo to a sort of one-party state.

> The Democratic Party is identical to the Republican Party for anything that matters.

Well they're at least not identical when it comes to tariffing your friends!

Appreciated!

But please get out and vote! And please convince all of your sensible friends, family and neighbours to do the same!

I’ve been using cursor mainly (so sorta vscode in a way). I just use IntelliJ for unit tests and the debugger mainly.

I would love it if jetbrains were to speed up IntelliJ. I started a new job writing Java professionally last year and, up that point, I had no idea that IDE's could actually be that slow.

My company gave me a brand new, beefy Macbook pro and that thing can barely handle IntelliJ sometimes...

> Having grown up in a large family within a religious subculture full of other large families, the amount of time and attention children consume was crystal clear

Similar experience here growing up Mennonite (they’re sorta like the Amish but more moderate).

I’m one of the only remaining men in my family without kids, but those that do have kids (and there’s a lot of them) are super busy. This is at least partially offset by their wives who are more on the traditional side.

They all do seem very fulfilled however :)

Håhåhåhå

> preferably contain the letters Å, Ä or Ö

Yes, but why prefer these letters?

I don’t know Swedish. Is it because these diacritics make the names seem more exotic?

> If you are in your 20s now and feel like writing down your thoughts about this topic, consider yourself challenged! I'd love to read them.

I’m 29 so I guess I just barely qualify haha. But overall, I agree with your writing and can say as a technologist myself, I also rarely get excited about new technology - nor do my peers.

There are occasional exceptions though. Near the beginning of this current GenAI revolution, I was frequently excited. Watching that SpaceX rocket land back on earth had me on the edge of my seat. I also recently bought AirPods and found the conversation awareness feature to be incredible. Similarly, I got my first fitness tracker and find it mind blowing how much it can measure by just zapping my wrist with light.

I’m actually incredibly excited for the future!

Individuals are now a lot more empowered to work effectively with computers (including us in the tech industry). Would you honestly wanna go back to pre-LLM?

I now have more fun learning CS concepts and the side projects I can work on now were previously impossible.

On the other hand, if you only got into CS for the money… then I take your point.

So perhaps we should be asking Azure engineers, not Guthub engineers?

Microsoft acquiring GitHub is not a valid root cause analysis explaining Github’s degraded SLA.

Awesome app! I got 14/20.

I’ve known about the “new ideas are fragile” concept for a while and it’s why I generally will never criticize someone’s early work or ideas, but rather try to hype them up. Because of this, technical people with new ideas and projects have been more likely to come to me early on when they wanna show what they’ve been working on. Admittedly, I actually do think a lot of the ideas I’m presented with are bad, but a smart person starting with a seemingly bad idea may still end up somewhere very interesting. Never be the shooter down of new ideas.

Is there actually a good reason for language creators’ web pages being so quirky(/ugly)?

The author Paul McCann (polm) is one of my favourite programmers out there!

He’s done awesome work in the Japanese NLP space over the last decade which has really helped me in my language learning projects.

He maintains a mecab (Japanese tokenizer) wrapper for Python [0], has a book on Japanese NLP written for English speakers [1] and also worked on Spacy at one point [2].

[0] https://github.com/polm/fugashi [1] https://www.japanesenlp.com/ [2] https://spacy.io/

I do wonder if language change might start to slow down, however.

Now that we have so much written language from the past, won't that have a sort of fossilizing effect on the language? For example, prior to writing systems, people had no idea how their ancestors communicated. Now with written text and audio recordings, we know in great detail how our language used to be used.

Before seeing this page, I had always assumed that PIE was a lot older. It’s amazing how much linguistic development has occurred in ~6,500 years!

Cool article! But, as the article is in English, it really should include romaaji. If readers were able to read the names, the article wouldn’t need to be in English :)

> It's equally dubious to believe that some sort of body (ostensibly run by practicing software developers) would be able to come up with a means to certify proficiency.

I very much mostly agree with you, but I did take the Google Cloud Associate exam a year and a half ago and honestly it felt like a pretty rigorous exam. I definitely could not have passed that exam if I was incompetent in my knowledge of cloud and IT. Exams like these, I think, might become more mainstream in certifying developers in my opinion. (Though whether this is desirable is another question.)

> people lack the right skills today to wrangle agents into writing good code.

It's actually this that leaves me feeling optimistic. We're definitely bad at this today, but will we always be bad at this into the foreseeable future? I'd like to think not. I'd like to think that we'll get better at working with agents in the future and eventually develop better practices around this new weird technology once it's better understood.

> dealing with scaling pains

That’s a great problem to have! Keep going!

I guess I really should download the iOS app when browsing LinkedIn on my phone then! Thanks for the tip.