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misja111

4,496 karma · joined April 1, 2015

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misja111··on TSMC to make advanced AI semiconductors in Japan
Trump has openly stated that there would be no military retaliation by the US in case of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Only an economic one. And we have seen what that is worth after the Krim was taken. It lasted a few years and then sanctions started getting dropped.

So the time of military US protection is behind us.

misja111··on Recreating Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments
Won't that entire DOJ archive already be downloaded for backup by several people? If I'd be a journalist working on those files, this is the very first thing I would do as soon as those files were published. Just to make sure you have the originals before DOJ can start adding more redactions.
misja111··on Study: Older Cannabis Users Have Larger Brains, Better Cognition
From the article:

> However, another brain region saw lower volumes – suggesting the impact cannabis has on the brain is complex and nuanced, requiring further investigation.

misja111··on EU launches government satcom program in sovereignty push
That's nonsense. The main security threat for the EU is Russia, a state with a GDP roughly equal to Italy's. We only need to keep up our military spending with that.
misja111··on Celebrities say they are being censored by TikTok after speaking out against ICE
> according to TechCrunch, this language has been included in the privacy policy since Aug. 2024, and wasn’t changed in response to the Trump administration’s latest escalation of immigration enforcement, and is “primarily there to comply with state privacy laws like California’s Consumer Privacy Act.”

This is the problem with any kind of censoring media. The initial intentions of those policies might have been good, but these kind of policies can so easily be abused for malign intentions.

misja111··on Replacing Protobuf with Rust
Correct, this has very little to do with Rust. But it wouldn't have made the front page without it.
misja111··on In Praise of APL (1977)
True, but that doesn't mean that you should stop trying getting close to it.
misja111··on In Praise of APL (1977)
2 reasons:

- in a corporate environment, your code is going to be read by many other people than just you. Your team mates, the guy after you left etc.

- also, by making your code more readable, you're making your own life easier as well. You might have thought at first that your code was fine, but by structuring it properly and possibly removing some redundancy, you might find that you were overlooking some things.

misja111··on In Praise of APL (1977)
@creata:

yes I agree. In case of APL, if your readers are mathematicians, I guess it could well be the language of choice.

And yes like I already said, self explanatory code is not always possible but more often than not it is. It just takes a little extra care and thought.

misja111··on In Praise of APL (1977)
> A decent APL program, like in any other programming language, would need good comments, but here comments are frequently desirable at the level of subexpressions.

I guess that might be true for APL, for other programming languages that's not true at all. The ideal program is clear enough to be self explanatory. Of course there might be some implementation choices that need a comment. Or in some cases the problem is so difficult that this is not possible.

But readability should be the goal and most of the time this is feasible without comments. E.g. by using descriptive variable and function names. And by breaking up your program into logical and cohesive parts, using functions, objects, modules or whatever construct your language is offering.

misja111··on In Praise of APL (1977)
> The virtues of APL that strike the programmer most sharply are its terseness — complicated acts can be described briefly, its flexibility — there are a large number of ways to state even moderately complicated tasks (the language provides choices that match divergent views of algorithm construction), and its composability

I had an introduction to APL in university and what I absolutely hated was this terseness. I guess when you're a mathematician APL is more natural but to me, as a programmer, I much prefer to have some extra verbosity to make my code more (human-)readable.

misja111··on The microstructure of wealth transfer in prediction markets
I don't follow this part, can somebody maybe explain?

> Yet on Kalshi, a CFTC-regulated prediction market, traders have wagered vast sums on longshot contracts with historical returns as low as 43 cents on the dollar.

On prediction markets traders can bet both sides. E.g. on Polymarket I can currently bet that Greenland will be acquired by USA before 2027 and get 4:1 odds: or I can bet that this doesn't happen, and give 4:1 odds. If these odds are off, doesn't this mean that one side gets a bad return on investment, however the other side gets an equally good return?

On balance the average return on investment by traders should just be 100 cents minus the margin of the prediction market, which tends to be only a few percent.

misja111··on Prediction markets are ushering in a world in which news becomes about gambling
I read the article but failed to grasp what exactly the disaster is that America would be walking into.

Is the reliability of Polymarket predictions overhyped? Sure. Is there manipulation of Polymarket odds by some people? Most likely there is. But to say that this is a disaster that America is walking into is nothing else but clickbait.

misja111··on The next two years of software engineering
> And the most successful people I know basically did exactly that.

Well that depends heavily on how you define successful. Successful in life? I would tend to disagree, unless you believe that career is the only thing that counts. But even when career is concerned: the most successful people I know went on from being developer to some high end management role. The skills that brought them there definitely did not come from hanging out with other engineers talking about engineering things.

misja111··on The next two years of software engineering
> Senior developers: Fewer juniors means more grunt work landing on your plate

I'm not sure I agree with that. Right now as a senior my task involves reviewing code from juniors; replace juniors with AI and it means reviewing code from AI. More or less the same thing.

misja111··on AI coding assistants are getting worse?
No I agree with you, there are area's where AI is helping amazingly. Every now and then it helps me with some issue as well, which would have cost me hours earlier and now it's done in minutes. E.g. some framework that I'm not that familiar with, or doing the scaffolding for some unit test.

However this is only a small portion of my daily dev work. For most of my work, AI helps me little or not at all. E.g. adding a new feature to a large codebase: forget it. Debugging some production issue: maybe it helps me a little bit to find some code, but that's about it.

And this is what my post was referring to: not that AI doesn't help at all, but to the crazy claims (10x speedup in daily work) that you see all over social media.

misja111··on AI coding assistants are getting worse?
A while ago someone posted a claim like that on LinkedIn again. And of course there was the usual herd of LinkedIn sheep who were full of compliments and wows about the claim he was making: a 10x speedup of his daily work.

The difference with the zillion others who did the same, is that he attached a link to a live stream where he was going to show his 10x speedup on a real life problem. Credits to him for doing that! So I decided to go have a look.

What I then saw was him struggling for one hour with some simple extension to his project. He didn't manage to finish in the hour what he was planning to. And when I had some thought about how much time it would have cost me by hand, I found it would have taken me just as long.

So I answered him in his LinkedIn thread and asked where the 10x speed up was. What followed was complete denial. It had just been a hick up. Or he could have done other things in parallel while waiting 30 seconds for the AI to answer. Etc etc.

I admit I was sceptic at the start but I honestly had been hoping that my scepticism would be proven wrong. But not.

misja111··on US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes
This mentioning of 'Wall Street' with investors if typical for the kind of populist argument that is used to argue that banning investors from buying houses is a good thing. What would this 'Wall Street' even mean? Would it mean that companies listed on the stock exchange are banned but privately owned companies not?

Anyhow, I argue that investors are positive for the the house market. They shouldn't be banned. Investors provide enough liquidity to the market so that the building companies have enough certainty to invest in large housing projects, because they know that their properties will be sold quickly. If investors would be banned they would sell their houses eventually as well but it would take much longer.

Similarly, investors improve mobility and throughput. An individual putting his house for sale will find a buyer much faster when investors are in the buying market, who are willing to buy up a house when nobody else takes it and sell it for a better price later. So: sellers sell faster, so they can move out and buy a new home faster as well: mobility in the house market increases.

In IT terms: investors function as a buffer.

misja111··on US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes
> it's holding prices steady at some point without the concurrent pressure to sell

Earlier you were arguing that investors were acting as marketmakers and now you say this. Marketmakers make their profit from the difference between buying and selling some asset. They don't want to hold prices, they want turnover. If investors really are acting as marketmakers it's actually a good thing because marketmakers have the effect of adding liquidity to a market.

misja111··on The Napoleon Technique: Postponing things to increase productivity
This works great when you're on the receiving end of e-mails/ messages. However it is a pain to deal with when you are on the sending side and your issue is urgent.
misja111··on Rust is beyond object-oriented, part 3: Inheritance (2023)
It was definitely also a fault of initial OOP in Java. Java's interfaces became a bit more flexible later on.
misja111··on Rust is beyond object-oriented, part 3: Inheritance (2023)
I see the author fighting really hard against a paradigm that was already well known to be suboptimal 20 years ago .. "Favor composition over inheritance" is a phrase that became common knowledge in e.g. the Java world half way during the 2000's.

It was even already mentioned in the famous Design Patterns book from the GOF in 1994.

misja111··on Lessons from 14 years at Google
Your post is absolutely golden and it doesn't apply only at Google. I can't remember seeing so many deeply true statements together in one post. I'm sure many here will start to contest some of them but with enough experience they will also realize that the points were true.
misja111··on Kernighan's Lever
Talent? Not if it was someone who was adding unnecessary complexity to the codebase.
misja111··on Kernighan's Lever
> Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

It's worse than that. It might not be you who has to debug it, but someone else. Maybe after you left the company already. Maybe at 3AM after a pager alert in production ..

misja111··on Thousands of U.S. farmers have Parkinson's. They blame a deadly pesticide
Data does back up this assertion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43933580

The correlation seems to point to usage ground water that is contaminated with pesticides. So people living close to the golf courses have higher Parkinson risk. Probably golfers and employees less so.

misja111··on Thousands of U.S. farmers have Parkinson's. They blame a deadly pesticide
There is so much evidence of this connection piling up ..

E.g.:

Proximity to golf courses where pesticides are used -> Parkinson: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43933580

Farmers using pesticides have 60% higher Parkinson risk (2019): https://nos.nl/artikel/2302396-landbouwgif-kan-kans-op-parki... (Dutch)

Parkinson should be labeled as profession-linked disease for farmers(Swiss): https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/pestizide-als-krankmacher-pa...

misja111··on Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
> I've had Claude Code write an entire unit/integration test suite in a few hours (300+ tests) for a fairly complex internal tool.

And what do you have then? 300 tests that test the behavior that's exposed by the implementations of the api. Are they useful? Probably some are, probably some are not. The ones that are not will just be clutter and maintenance overhead. Plus, there will be lots of use-cases for which you need to look a little deeper than just the api implementation, which are now not covered. And those kind of tests, tests that test real business use cases, are by far the most useful ones if you want to catch regressions.

So if your goal is to display some nice test coverage metrics on SonarQube or whatever, making your CTO happy, yes AI will help you enormously. But if your goal is to speed up development of useful test cases, less so. You will still gain from AI, but nowhere near 90%.

misja111··on Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now
Very nice. But posts about Rust and Zig won't make the frontpage anymore of course in 10 years from now, they will be soooo old fashioned.
misja111··on The Nerd Reich – Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy
Not true. Long before Hitler rose to power, the militant section of his movement, the SA, was already physically attacking political opponents. That started in the early 20's.

When he finally became head of the government, in 1933, that violence immediately became much more official: the SA was officially deputized as 'Hilfspolizei' and attacks on e.g. communists became legalized. In that same year the first concentration camps were established.

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