nayroclade

No skilled engineer I've met has had any issue turning a Figma design into a HTML/CSS. That's their job. If someone protested that they couldn't reproduce a Figma design without it spitting out HTML/CSS for them, that would be a serious red flag about their abilities.

Yeah, I’ve helped build some of those huge apps, and I’ve ran in these issues and wasted countless hours debugging and working around them in all of them.

And what do we get from the React team? After five years? More vague promises. More RFCs. More blog posts. More tweets. More docs mentioning nonexistent APIs. No actual shipped solutions. Forgive me, but I just don’t believe you anymore at this point. Five years.

It might have, but that RFC has been withdrawn.

Unbelievable that they’ve gone ahead launching this, going all in on hooks, while the fundamental problem with them, which was raised in 2018 is still unsolved: https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/14099

And they just handwave it away in the docs with an imaginary future API. Embarrassing.

The article assumes an audience sophisticated and informed enough not to require extensive evidence that Peter Thiel is a libertarian, or that he and associated VCs are generally opposed to government regulation, because those assumed to be established facts. The quotes aren't intended to prove these facts, simply to provide a flavour of the types of rhetoric and attitude they have historically displayed.

So what exactly is your argument here? That Thiel and co. aren't libertarians? That they are generally pro-regulation and government bailouts? Or that the article's thesis is invalid simply because it didn't meet your standard of empirical representation, regardless of whether it's true or not?

I doubt this redesign is driven by product managers creating work though (not that that isn't a real phenomenon) but the more insidious effect of the attention economy. Leaving users to drive and curate their own experience doesn't match the "engagement" you can gain by endlessly shovelling an algorithmically optimised feed of content into their eyes and ears, while they endlessly scroll. And the more control you have over what content is being seen, the more effectively you can monetise it by prioritising whoever pays you the most.

I’d say generally the opposite is true. Most commercial software I’ve worked on typically contained only simple typing—discriminated unions are about as complex as it gets—and it’s more of a problem that people get lazy and start using “any” too much than they go overboard.

Where complex types can be a problem is when working with open source libraries, especially when the types are community-developed, separate to the library itself. The library API may not be particularly amenable to easy typing, and the community types can end up being rather confusing, especially to people who developed neither the types nor the original library.

I have some good (or bad?) news for you then. Bing chat has no access to a Stockfish or other chess API. There is strong evidence that LLMs can learn and play games, including Chess. See this paper Emergent World Representations: Exploring a Sequence Model Trained on a Synthetic Task by Kenneth Li et al.: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.13382 or a more accessible write-up here: https://thegradient.pub/othello/

While I also lament what Google Groups has become, let's not rewrite history. By 2001, Dejanews had rebranded as a shopping comparison site, ran out of money, and was on the verge of shutting down. I don't remember many people being upset about Google stepping in to save the archive. And, in the early days, the signs were positive. Google actually cared about it at that point, and still had a good reputation. They expanded the archive with contributions from other sources and worked to improve the search and posting interfaces. Yes, eventually they lost interest and it degraded into the current abomination, but that happened later.

Transcript of a conversation I just had with ChatGPT:

Prompt:

I'm talking with a user named "331c8c71" on Hacker News. According to statistics I found by Googling, the number of Hacker News readers living in the USA is 36%. Assuming this is correct, what is the probability that 331c8c71 does not reside in the USA? Please explain your reasoning.

Response:

If we assume that the statistic you found is accurate, then we know that 36% of Hacker News readers live in the USA. Therefore, the probability that any given Hacker News reader does not live in the USA is 100% - 36% = 64%.

However, we do not know if 331c8c71 is a typical Hacker News reader. They could be part of a demographic that is more or less likely to live in the USA. Without more information, we cannot say for certain what the probability is that 331c8c71 does not reside in the USA.

So, the answer is 64% assuming that 331c8c71 is a typical Hacker News reader, but it may not be an accurate estimate depending on additional information about the user.

---

Like I said, these models are far from 100% accurate, and there is lots they get wrong, but they clearly are capable of some kind of reasoning that goes beyond simple text substitution of training data.

It's well documented that these models can solve variations of questions that are not found anywhere in their training set, and even entirely novel problems invented by prompters. Not with 100% success, but they can do it far with a rate far better than chance, so the idea that they're pulling responses from their training data is simply not correct.

Same in the UK. Rents were up 10% annually in 2022. Meanwhile, new housebuilding is at the lowest level since WW2, and the government has surrendered to NIMBYs and abandoned all construction targets and loosening of planning laws. Looking forward to the when shantytowns start popping up in the UK, to really underscore its regression to developing nation status.

Apple didn’t overhire during the pandemic either, which means they avoided the mismatch between staffing and demand that other large tech firms have.

One thing I think is kinda strange about software development as a craft is how a large portion of the industry seems to believe that the end goal of spending 10-20 years becoming a highly skilled coder is to one day stop coding. You're either supposed to become a manager, an architect, or spend 100% of your time mentoring and reviewing work for junior developers.

Personally, I like coding. I don't want to be a manager. I don't want to be an architect. I don't mind mentoring, but only if it's a minority of my time. If I wanted to be a teacher, I'd have chosen that as a career. I understand that many people do want to transition those roles, but I don't like the feeling that transitioning around the age of 40 is considered the default.

This seems like a definition of racism that, at the very least, doesn't align with everyday use of the word and most people's conceptual understanding of it. What makes your minority interpretation of racism the correct one?

It seems to me that defining racism like this is less about reflecting some ground truth, and more about trying, through linguistic prescriptivism, to change an expansive term into something more proscribed, in order to focus attention only on a particular subset of activity. But doing so in a somewhat underhanded way, that avoids acknowledging or justifying the motivations behind the redefinition and instead attempts to make it a definitional fait acompli, saying "your definition is wrong, and mine is right".

Do you meditate? Because if it leads to an attitude like you're displaying, it's not a great advertisment.

What exactly does this offer over, say, SolidJS, which also has reactivity without a virtual DOM, and has a much larger community, ecosystem, etc? As do several other frontend frameworks. Does the world really need another one, unless it can offer something substantially different?

Perhaps, but if they had a plan to monetize 3rd party clients, then the first people they'd want to sign up would be existing clients with developed products and an install base. Instead it seems they just silently killed them.

You're obviously new to Hacker News :-D

There's a moment in the car scene that I always remembered: When Cameron first starts kicking the Ferrari, Sloane instinctively steps forward to stop him, and Ferris holds her back. Ferris has been exulting about how incredible this car is all throughout the movie, but he doesn't hesitate to let his friend trash it if that's what he needs to do.

It's a nice character moment, but it also speaks to what is, to me, the fundamental message of the film: Objects, like sports cars, no matter how beautiful and rare, are there to be used and enjoyed, not hoarded and held in pristine captivity in fear of negative consequences. And the single most beautiful and rare object you have is your own life. Don't waste it paralysed by fear of what might go wrong, or stuck in a boring classroom or job.

I discovered this issue just last month trying to take a good photo of my partner sat next to our Christmas tree. No matter what I did, the iPhone kept brightening the image and losing the darkened look I was going for. Even after disabling every "smart" feature I could, it still uniformly brightened everything and reduced the contrast.

What was perhaps the most infuriating thing was that what I was seeing in the viewfinder preview looked great. I could see the photo, as I desired it, but when I tried to capture it, I got something else.

The article is an extended intro for a book the author has written. Perhaps the book mentions these things? Have you read it?

Except it isn't the HN readership who choose to constantly frame these stories in terms of engineering. From the article:

"These and other scientific, technological and engineering hurdles will need to be overcome before fusion will produce electricity for your home. Work will also need to be done to bring the cost of a fusion power plant well down from the US$3.5 billion of the National Ignition Facility. These steps will require significant investment from both the federal government and private industry."

If fusion research scientists continue to insist that their research has any viable path to use in commercial power generation, and to demand large amounts on funding on that basis, then they should expect to be critiqued on that same basis.

> Just because you get wet seeing pictures of mummies

Seriously?

A couple of days ago there was a consensus group of Republican commentators confidently asserting SBF’s Democratic donations and connections meant there would no investigation/prosecution at all. Perhaps now this have pivoted to saying they’ll go easy on him?

It seems to me, all these assertions say nothing about the process of justice for SBF, and instead only illustrate that the people making them can’t conceive that there is a section of the political class who believe the law should apply equally to rich people as well as poor people.

This is boilerplate conspiratorial nonsense. West European countries would benefit far more from East European countries being free from the economic drag imposed by endemic corruption. The EU internal market overall would be much richer and stronger, and those banks and corporations would have a better quality consumer and labor base. Banks and corporations can make plenty of money in high-trust societies just as in low-trust ones, and they get more regulatory certainty as well.

Cinema's latest brainwave, at least in the UK, is to run patronising adverts about how great the "big-screen experience" is, and how we shouldn't ruin films by watching on our TVs, laptops, phones, etc. Except, like the old anti-piracy ads, they run these adverts in cinemas before movies, to a group of people who've literally just made the decision to go to the cinema. Like a priest ranting at his congregation about the evils of not attending church.

Every time I see one of these adverts, I think that cinema deserves to die.

This is a fun polemic to read but rather short on evidence. Personally, I doubt tech companies bloat because of a social-minded desire to give "scions of the professional-managerial class" employment, but for the same reason any company does: managers wanted bigger teams because it enhances their status, and when times are good nobody complains.

It's strange to me that this article focusses so much on nullability, which seems like a tangental issue. There's nothing stopping an imperative language from enforcing nullability checks. Indeed, with full strictness enabled TypeScript will do just that, including requiring you check every indexed access to an array.

This seems to ignore the existing, wider audience that enjoyed the movies.

I won't defend the quality of the Rings of Power—I think it's lacklustre at best—but the premiere did get 25 million people watching it. It seems doubtful a completely original series would have attracted so large an audience right off the bat.

And I don't think there's necessarily a problem deviating from the source material when adapting something. But you do need to make sure your new ideas are as good, or better, than the original. To me, the single biggest failure of Rings of Power is that those deviations have been so poorly executed. Bad plotting and bad writing abounds.