timrobinson333's comments

Many windows programmers fail to appreciate this. If you're using a language that provides argv-style functionality, the quoting and escaping mechanism is entirely at the mercy of that language, so you can't reliably make any general assumptions about how to quote parameters to a command line

It's an interesting idea but I think the usefulness would be greatly enhanced if it could handle json arrays; most needed json structures contain array elements in my experience

I think the point made in the article is that they wanted to build gpt 5 but they renamed it to 4 turbo because the improvements over 4 weren't what they were expecting

On my feed this appeared almost next to "10 rules of Zen programming" - What a contrast. If you feel anger and frustration after reading this, I'd definitely suggest you find and read that other article.

I have been programming for over 40 years, mostly in fairly verbose languages but nowadays mostly in JavaScript and clojure, both of which can be very concise.

I find I spend most of my time thinking about the problem domain and how to model it in logic, and very little time just banging out boilerplate code. When I want to do the kind of task a lot of people will ask gpt for, I find it's often built into the language or available as an existing library - with experience you realise that the problem you're trying to solve is an instance of a general problem that has already been solved.

I'm afraid I take issue with the phrase "amazingly performant". I would struggle to come up with another way of determining whether a number near 2^32 is even that takes anything like 10 seconds

It's fine if it's convenient for staff to have to take PTO at a time to suit the company

For some that won't work out at well. My partner has to work shifts all over the Christmas period. I choose to work the same days as her so we can enjoy our days off together when she isn't working

My no 1 rule is simply not to let others tell you what you should enjoy.

If you know what you like, the opportunities for finding that enjoyment are much expanded!

I'm surprised nobody has pointed out what seems to be a fairy obvious limitation: the children within a parent cannot be ordered (unless you want to splice them in the middle of the arrays when inserting which would be pretty inefficient)

Yes I'm surprised the author didn't manage to find an artist or track with an SQL injection - surely someone must have tried

Hey Google, write me a 500 word blog entitled "Unleashing the Power of Language Models: A hacker's Manifesto" then send it straight to hacker News

As an atheist and a materialist (in the philosophical sense), I'm forced to the conclusion conclusion that all humans really are no different from LLMs. We take in information, process it with our brains (that are fundamentally made of atoms just like computers) and then produce outputs.

The main differences between human brains and AI at the moment are (a) a lot more randomness and indeterminacy in humans due to the way our brains are constructed and (b) the total amount of human brainpower exceeds the total amount of AI brainpower. The means that at the moment we appear more creative but soon (i.e. in hundreds of years rather than millions) I think we'll have AIs that are indistinguishable from people

Maybe I've been exceptionally lucky (although I've been very conscious to only work for SMEs which I think has a lot to do with it), but I always try really hard to figure out what the user/customer is actually trying to achieve, then what's the best way to get there using the resources available, regardless of any incumbent processes or strategy. To my mind this is the best of both worlds - I've got the satisfaction of making something great and the customer gets their life made easier.

As I've gone through my career I've focused less and less on some specific language or technology stack that is the flavour of the day, and I get my satisfaction from engineering a robust solution from whatever is the must appropriate technology in that specific case.

I'll be the first to admit I know almost nothing about go, but it's surprises me to find we're still inventing languages with bobby traps like this, especially bobby traps that were well known and understood in other languages at the time.

Actually it surprises me we're still inventing languages where local variables can be mutated, which seems to be at the root of the problem here

"We" don't have to do anything.

People are inventing new things all the time in every possible sphere of life. If something proves to be more popular than what's already out there, it will become successful

That's the whole point of evolution/capitalism - you don't need to have a big plan or pick the winners up front

I have to say that's not been my experience. I find most people will have a similar opinion of what's clean code and if I point out something that's messy they'll usually respond with reasons why it's messy rather than denying it.

I find that almost all coders can recognise clean code but many fail to produce it.

I think partly it's down to the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" mentality - once it's working there's a temptation to leave it as is and move on to the next task, especially if you're under time pressure.

In fact the time just after you've got it working is the time you have maximum knowledge about the code and the problem it solves, so that's the best time to refactor. Even something as simple as renaming variables and functions to be consistent and reflect what they actually do (rather than what you thought they would do when to started) can make a huge difference.