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dcuthbertson

372 karma · joined June 8, 2012

Hi! I'm Doug Cuthbertson. I've been writing software for a couple of decades, mostly in C and C++ on Windows. As far as computers are concerned, I am interested in algorithms, programming languages (I wish I had more opportunities to play with Erlang, Scheme, Go and LLVM at work), and plain good tools.

Reach me at gmail: doug.cuthbertson

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dcuthbertson··on San Francisco Onion Futures Company
It's the mischief caused by shadow onions lurking in dark corners of the market bins that make me cry.
dcuthbertson··on Classical chess ranks 562nd of 960 starting positions after 460,800 games
but every setup plays against every other one and earns an "honest" score. /scream
dcuthbertson··on My agent.md to improve LLM-assisted code quality
I'm not convinced, yet, that eliminating LLM-generated comments is the right path for me. I do review everything written by an LLM and some comments are actually pretty good, but sometimes I'm just too tired to try to figure out how to reword an oddly worded one.

I just added Sanglard's rules to my ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md file, did another code review, and found some LLM-generated comments were really hard to understand. I think they're due to invented metaphors and flowery language instead of using standard terms, so I've added this:

- Comments must be literal. Don't invent figurative language for what a plain technical term already says — write "rows still reference it," not "rows still wear it."

Improving LLM code generation is an iterative process. I'm glad people share their efforts to improve it.

dcuthbertson··on Don't you mean extinct?
I worked for a company that measures developer's output in number of commits, PRs created and approved, and Jira tickets per sprint. Management doesn't even insist on that the tickets have any kind of an effort estimate.

It can be pretty depressing, until you learn how to game the system - create tickets for yourself that are tiny amounts of work. I hear that it's getting harder to do that, because management is looking more carefully at tickets generated and it looks like they'll start having developers assign points to their tickets before the tickets are added to the sprint

dcuthbertson··on Memory Safe Context Switching
> If a() calls b(), I wouldn't think the stack frame while running b is the ancestor of a.

I think of b as the child/descendant of a because a creates the running instance of b, and that makes a the parent/ancestor of b.

dcuthbertson··on A glitch in February of the year 0
> 2000 - 2999: 21st century

You have the right idea, but you made the 21st century a millennium

dcuthbertson··on The Garbage Collection Handbook: The Art of Automatic Memory Management (2nd Ed) (2023)
I too have written C programs for decades. I encountered reference counting when I learned how to write Windows kernel drivers. It was very liberating to see that there were so fewer opportunities for memory leaks when reference counts were applied liberally.
dcuthbertson··on Why Janet? (2023)
TIL that statements of obvious exaggeration are called causal, hyperbolic statements. Who knew?

All kidding aside, I've never heard them called causal hyperbolic before. It's a good term.

dcuthbertson··on Show HN: Files.md – Open-source alternative to Obsidian
> Well, we know that it's impossible to remember everything.

Yet it's possible to remember a lot. Those who pass "The Knowledge" test are truly inspirational. See this 60 Minutes report on London's Black Cab drivers [0]

[0]: https://60minutestonight.com/the-knowledge-60-minutes-report...

dcuthbertson··on Investors pile into clean energy as Iran war drives push for energy security
I'm curious as to how low a temperature your heat pump will operate. I live in New England and replaced a whole-house air conditioner with a heat pump, but the heat pump works only to 35F. Much colder than that, and an auxiliary electric heater kicked in. The first Winter cost me about $800 over my gas-fired forced hot water heating system. I had the contractor disable the electric heat in the Spring and rewire the thermostats to start the (high efficiency) furnace when the outdoor temp got too low.
dcuthbertson··on Antimatter has been transported for the first time
Imagine your own, household matter/antimatter reaction chamber. I can hardly wait for antimatter to be transported through pipes underground along side water mains, natural gas pipes, and sewer connections.
dcuthbertson··on Rob Pike's 5 Rules of Programming
But doesn't No. 2 directly conflict with Pike's 5th rule? It seems to me these are all aphorisms that have to be taken with a grain of salt.

> 2. Functions delay binding; data structures induce binding. Moral: Structure data late in the programming process.

dcuthbertson··on Good software knows when to stop
There are few things so valuable as a good user who is willing to work with you. Many years ago I worked at a company that was going to shutdown a very buggy product. There was one user who relied on it heavily and convinced the CEO to make one more release, and I was tasked with working with that customer to make it happen. Over the next month, we fixed the bugs (I coded, he tested). We wound up making a stable and more user-friendly product. It was a real pleasure to work with that guy. The company still mothballs the thing, but I know we had at least one happy customer in the end.
dcuthbertson··on Ask HN: Share your personal website
https://douglascuthbertson.com/ - my personal blog
dcuthbertson··on LaTeX Coffee Stains (2021) [pdf]
Now I want a package to add blood stains on my murder mystery screenplay.
dcuthbertson··on Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
Thank you. There are so many TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) that they overlap significantly. Maybe the coffee hasn't kicked in yet, but I didn't know what CTA meant in this context. I thought it might be related to PSA (Public Service Announcement), so I searched "CTA announcement" and got Chicago Transit Authority and California Teacher's Association - obviously not helpful.
dcuthbertson··on Show HN: KiDoom – Running DOOM on PCB Traces
Could you print the designs to paper and make a repeatable flip-card stack? Oh no. How long before it becomes a PowerPoint presentation?!
dcuthbertson··on Playball – Watch MLB games from a terminal
Remember, all things in moderation - especially moderation.
dcuthbertson··on GamerNexus to benchmarks GPUs on Linux [video]
This video is worth a look if you care about gaming on Linux. Steve and Wendell are really thinking through which distros to use for testing, what to test, and how to test before jumping into setting up test rigs.

I hope GamersNexus gets to benchmarking games. It will be fun to see benchmarks of popular games running on something other than Windows.

dcuthbertson··on Knotty: A domain-specific language for knitting patterns
Oh, the missed opportunities, like a little "ribbing" for the versions :^)

Version 1: Knit

Version 2: Purl

dcuthbertson··on Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah
I'm not comparing anything to 1950s America. I am disagreeing with your assertion "His position seemed fairly reasonable ...". Kirk insinuated in the video that women in America would be happier if they had a belief in the divine and a lot of kids (which may correlate with beliefs from the 1950s, but that's besides the point) when he compared what women in America have to what women in sub-Saharan Africa have. That doesn't seem reasonable to me. (edited to fix a typo)
dcuthbertson··on Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah
> His position seemed fairly reasonable that women were happier with the get married and have kids model then the focus on you career one.

Broad statements like that are just plain wrong and aren't reasonable. Saying women were happier with the get married and have kids model denies the fact that all humans have different aspirations. Some want to be doctors, nurses, chefs, electricians, plumbers, or artists. Saying that women should get married and raise lots of children denies those aspirations, and says to me that those who ascribe to that model have no consideration for women as human beings. Let women pursue their own definition of happiness rather than prescribing one for them.

dcuthbertson··on How I code with AI on a budget/free
FYI: the first AI you link to, " z.ai's GLM 4.5", actually links to zai.net, which appears to be a news site, instead of "chat.z.ai", which is what I think you intended.
dcuthbertson··on We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes
On, off, and ooh shiny!
dcuthbertson··on Show HN: I built a tool to solve window management
I can't imagine wanting this. When I press ALT-Tab or SHIFT-ALT-Tab I can see most of the Windows I have open, and can get to the one I want quickly. The last thing I want is some algorithm showing me a next/previous window that may have nothing to do with where I'm headed. How would I be able to predict where it would send me so I can reliably know how many key presses I need to make to get there?
dcuthbertson··on Root for your friends
> "why would it make me feel better that my friend also had this bad thing happen to them?"

Sometimes people feel alone in their failures. Knowing that something similar has happened to others can help the person feel less alone.

dcuthbertson··on You Wouldn't Download a Hacker News
Thanks for saying it's a fair point, but it's more of an offhand joke about "an innocent machine". In reality, a machine, even an LLM, has no innocence. It's just a machine.
dcuthbertson··on You Wouldn't Download a Hacker News
The innocent machine can't do either. It's akin to having no mouth, but it must scream (apologies to Harlan Ellison)
dcuthbertson··on Show HN: 10 teams are racing to build a pivotal tracker replacement
Sorry folks. After only a few minutes of using Nestfull, I don't think it is a good candidate. While the UI, with it's nested Kanban boards and lists, is interesting. I don't see any way to estimate the size/length of tasks, and there's certainly no velocity calculation (sigh).
dcuthbertson··on Show HN: 10 teams are racing to build a pivotal tracker replacement
In another HN post[0], the top comment mentions Nestfull[1]. Is that a viable candidate to replace Pivotal Tracker?

It provides a Kanban board with swimlanes, but the UI is unique AFAICT, because items in the swimlanes can be entire Kanban boards themselves.

Regardless, I'm going to try it for personal projects.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43362725

[1]: https://nestful.app

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