Areading314

Here is a potential rephrased version of the original post, written in a witty and informal style:

"Yo, AI-generated answers on Stack Overflow sound like a real bummer. First of all, the quality might suck compared to human-written answers. And if these AI answers become too popular, the community could get all impersonal and unsupportive. Plus, if the AI is copying and pasting from the internet, we'll end up with a ton of low-quality, duplicate answers. In short, using AI on Stack Overflow could really suck."

OK I'm genuinely curious now.. wouldn't the fact that a computation has taken place mean that energy has been used to do work (non-heat)? My intuition tells me that it would not be possible to simultaneously use energy 100% to generate heat and do something else at the same time. For example if you used an electric motor to move a weight against massive friction, it could be that 99% of energy is lost to heat due to resistance in wires and friction, but if the weight moved, it would mean that not all energy was lost to heat.

If you think of a computer as a heat engine.. some energy goes to heat, and some goes into doing "work". For analyzing the efficiency of a computer as a heater you have to subtract out the "work" which would be the hashing computations, making it less efficient than a pure heating coil (assuming the crypto hashing is 100% worthless)

Its less efficient than a heater because some energy is wasted computing hashes

Startups are for learning, bigcos are for earning

Doesn't QUIC still run over TCP? I thought it was a replacement for HTTP not TCP (Edit: looks like it replaces TCP and HTTP)

Heres an example of an improvement to sending large files over long distances -- Tsunami protocol. It tries to get a best of both worlds to limit the detrimental effect of synchronous roundtrips in the TCP protocol for file transfers:

https://tsunami-udp.sourceforge.net/

It needs something like -- has anyone told a TCP joke in this vicinity in the last 10 seconds? If so I will tell the joke at a slower rate

If the bugs are all your doing, I agree. But many times the developers working on a project are maintaining code that was written years ago before they even joined the company, by other devs that had totally different incentives.

It's especially dumb _after_ buying a company to be acting like the developers are so incompetent across the board that they could be judged on this criteria. Elon just bought all this IP -- now he's going to make extremely rash decisions about who is contributing and who is not based on this very flawed methodology?

CSS variables, test frameworks, are good tools for catching bugs -- but at the end of the day the goal is that the code should work and be easily maintainable. Best practices help you do that, but theres many instances of a code base full of bugs that has to be maintained and improved over time. Developers who turn up their nose at "fixing bugs" are of no use to a business. These ideas are great when starting a new codebase but thats not the situation a developer is going to be in most of the time in practice. And if you follow every best practice there will still be bugs that need to get fixed.

fixing bugs is more important than trivial stuff like swagger, css variables, or adding new test frameworks. Function over form

Fixing bugs is part of the job. If you care about the product you work on, you have to fix the bugs and not whine about who originally wrote the code.

I think theres a middle ground. There is clearly a lot of benefit for having the people building the app experiencing the pain of users using the app. I also think that exposure is a great learning opportunity for engineers. But for certain types of businesses/apps its not scalable to have engineers handle every support call.

AWS is one tool but its a lot like the proprietary computing ecosystems that have existed for a long time (remember the Micro$oft days?). It offers convenience in return for lock in and very high margins. Theres no clear answer but its definitely not a clear cut decision where AWS is guaranteed to save money.

There are 2 major costs that are overlooked by the in-house crowd, which are operational maintenance cost (an increasingly rare and expensive skillset), and also the cost of downtime -- how much does it cost you when your team of data scientists are blocked because of a failed OS update etc. That being said, hiring competent people to maintain AWS properly isn't cheap either -- and it is quite easy to start running up very wasteful AWS bills on things you don't need.

As always there's a tradeoff -- the key is to choose a path and to execute it well.

Not really. Most of the time setting up a segregated network architecture is actually easier than dealing with encrypted database connections -- certificate management is by nature dynamic vs. the static nature of a secure network

I would expect most databases that are listening to public internet connections are doing so by accident

You are both unprofessional and violating the law by discriminating against people based on legally protected parameters, like having children or not. Furthermore you're posting this on HN like an absolute fool. This is great evidence for people that claim discrimination is real in the tech industry.

one of the most cringe things I'll see in "high performance" code is ad hoc syscalls in the middle of loops and such. it should be much more obvious imo in environments like python notebooks that these less scalable operations are happening

Klarna generated $1.42 billion revenue in 2021, a 32 percent year-on-year increase. A majority of Klarna’s income comes from interchange, processing and merchant fees.

As Klarna has expanded its BNPL offering, its losses have increased. It reported a net loss of $730 million in 2021, a 337 percent increase on its 2020 loss.

I would say its surprising that this company is still in business at all with numbers like this.

Do not use C++ for a rest API. I would recommend using common boring tech, and ignore the "magic bullet" promises of languages like elixir.

I find in my personal projects using python backend (flask or django), with a postgres database almost always leads to the most useful work getting done quickly. There are a lot of ways to make python fast if you know C++ when you need it.

I'm not familiar with Flutter, no opinion there.

Doesn't malloc return a pointer? Sounds unsafe

poor

Ironic since I always thought one of the coolest features in perl was taint analysis, which allows keeping track of all unparsed user input:

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/perl-taint-method/#:~:text=Tai....

This is a classic SQL injection bug/security flaw

Enjoyable and thought provoking. Thanks Neal!

From the quotes here it seems like Mark's leadership is well aligned with the values of his business.

Pizza was also one of the first "real" purchases made with crypto/bitcoin: https://www.coindesk.com/learn/what-is-bitcoin-pizza-day/

Renewables are not a viable solution to energy needs on their own. It is not possible to heat houses or power a grid during low-wind periods in winter or at northern latitudes for sustained periods (weeks to months) with wind and solar. Nuclear can act as a zero carbon base load power. And we need to be making those investments now, or we'll be stuck with fossil for a lot longer than 10 years.

I'll also add that renewables were made possible by massive government subsidies while they developed enough economies of scale to compete with other power sources. High carbon tax with subsidies for ALL zero carbon energy, including nuclear, are the way forward.

I've been coding professionally for about 10 years but I'm absolutely humbled every time I stumble on Justine's blog