Hacker News Reader

booleangateon My guiding principles after 20 years of programming (2020)

It takes 20 years to learn to compromise? I would expect these kinds of lists to change very little after the first 10-15 years.

booleangateon Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations

Unsightliness maybe, but also California is no stranger to earthquakes. Stacking up to 6 high sounds like a deadly and expensive game of dominos.

booleangateon I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

There’s a lot of consternation over copyright issues, but I see an entirely different problem. When I hear this tool described and see it’s examples the first thing I think is that Github has just automated the dubious process of copy/pasting from StackOverflow.

As a senior developer, I am strongly biased against the SO+c/p programming approach that I’ve seen many Junior and mid level developers use. There’s certainly a time and place for it when you become really stuck but at least having to go out and find the code yourself requires thought which helps you grow.

My gut reaction to Copilot is that adding this automation into IDEs is going to have a net-negative effect on growing developers as it lowers the level of thought and effort necessary to write even trivial applications. This is a huge detriment to learning. You don’t even get the chance to try to solve the problems yourself because the AI is going to be proactively getting in the way of your learning.

All that being said, I think a tool like this could be of great use with boilerplate within a project — but only suggesting things from that project. For example, setting up a new api route, dependency injection, error propagation, etc. Help with all of these mechanical things would be awesome.