Hacker News Reader

ernon Navy again lowers requirements as it struggles to meet recruitment goals

the difference hasn’t been significant so far for the low-scoring recruits brought in last year. Overall, 11.4% of those recruits didn’t finish boot camp, compared to less than 6.5% of the high-scoring sailors.

I was watching a documentary about US Navy boot camp, and was wondering if people who are headed for in-demand roles are given more help/slack than generalists? There was someone with a college degree who was going to intelligence, and I doubted they'd be dumped as easily as someone who just scraped their way in.

ernon Missing the Point of WebAssembly

As much as many people want alternatives to JavaScript, there are also people who consider themselves JavaScript experts (or the various related languages like TypeScript). They’ve invested a ton of time and effort into getting to where they are.

There’s a balance between disruptive change and keeping these folks on board. Get it wrong and you’ll end up with it strangled in its cradle.

My own take is that low-code platforms will continue aggressively moving into this space, especially in the enterprise space. They come with their own problems and are often aggressively overhyped, but they will put pressure on “traditional” developers to move faster and look for better solutions.

ernon Tesla blamed drivers for failures of parts it long knew were defective

To be fair, in much of the world, American and European cars (Peugeot, Renault, BMW, Audi, modern Mercedes Benz, VW, Volvo etc) don't have a great reputation either.

ernon Two pharmacists figured out that oral phenylephrine doesn't work

Most serious nasal congestion sufferers would have been wary of phenylephrine for some years.

I feel uncomfortable asking for pseudoephedrine by name, but I do so anyway, because my doctor told me that phenylephrine was hopeless 15 years ago.

ernon Qatar Airways Bans YouTuber for Negative Review

He seems to punch down on airline staff. In this video he picks on a deadheading crewmember presumably because she was sitting next to him and didn’t want him to record:

https://youtu.be/gJPtwy7gAgM?si=j6xsLJVley7hYllA

ernon Qatar Airways Bans YouTuber for Negative Review

I found a similar video from the same creator on an airline called Vistara:

https://youtu.be/gJPtwy7gAgM?si=j6xsLJVley7hYllA

The same sort of “they tried take my video down” and “the staff emailed me”.

It seems to be his spiel. That doesn’t mean it isn’t valid, but it is interesting.

ernon Qatar Airways Bans YouTuber for Negative Review

This reviewer says he doesn't get freebies.

ernon Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd to avoid Red Sea after surge in missile and drone attacks

That night well be the point:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002

ernon High school math doesn't prepare most students for their college majors

Cursive is making a comeback. Google it. The education establishment is often divorced from reality.

ernon Toxic comments are associated with reduced volunteer activity on Wikipedia

The whole place is infused with passive-aggression (by policy) and toxic double-standards.

There are some truly bizarre things that I've encountered on Wikipedia (editing for almost 20 years now). Admins handwave blatant mistakes away by their friends, citing [[WP:NOTBURO]] and other such shenanigans. It seems to be getting worse over time.

ernon A coder considers the waning days of the craft

It looked correct visually and it matched the techniques in the actual CSS that the team lead and I produced when we paired to get my layout to the standard he expected.

ernon A coder considers the waning days of the craft

It’s pretty impressive that it was able to actually decode those strings. In March, I used GPT 3.5 to write code for validating a type of string which used a checksum algorithm.

It did the task well, and even wrote tests, but it failed when generating test case values. I wonder if it would perform better if I did it today.

ernon A coder considers the waning days of the craft

I collaborate with front-end teams that use a low-code front-end platform. When they run into things that aren’t built-in, they try to push their presentation logic up the stack for the “real” programming languages to deal with.

ernon A coder considers the waning days of the craft

Open a ChatGPT account. Set up a GitHub account if you don’t have one. Think of a common problem and see if a library exists in your favourite language to do what you want. If it doesn’t exist, explain your requirements to ChatGPT. You can even tell it the same thing you put in your comment here: “I want to learn how to use ChatGPT to augment my programming skills”. Make sure it’s done properly with automated tests and you have a licence (ChatGPT will help you with both).

Bonus points for doing things like using GitHub actions for CI and publishing it to a package repository with guidance from ChatGPT.

ernon A coder considers the waning days of the craft

I described what I wanted. It was earlier this year..not sure if chatgpt can understand wireframes now, but it couldn’t at the time.

ernon A coder considers the waning days of the craft

Writing code is not my job anymore. It’s not ideal, but my time is better used elsewhere.

In any case, I could have written the code myself, but this literally took a couple of minutes and it read the documentation for me. And it wasn’t just calling an API, there were some other parts to it.

As for replacing me with one of my reports, that would be great, but they’d quickly end up in the same place as me. In fact, I’ve just spent a few weeks coaching one of my team leads in the art of effective delegation -being able to “let go” is one of the traits of an effective leader.

What’s with the toxic tone?

ernon A coder considers the waning days of the craft

Just out of curiosity: is the code generated by ChatGPT not what you expected or is it failing to produce the result that you wanted.

I suspect you mean the latter, but just wanted to confirm.

ernon A coder considers the waning days of the craft

I manage a number of development teams, and I don’t get to write much code anymore, but I was asked to urgently build an integration.

The team lead I was going to assign the task to was offshore, and not yet online, so I put the URL for the documentation into ChatGPT premium, and it spat out a working solution.

My team lead was a bit perturbed and created a more enterprisy solution with factories and DI (more out of pride than necessity), but my original code was production ready.

I’m not going to be firing anyone just yet, and certainly not my senior people, but I can see a lot of grunt-level work going away.

ernon A coder considers the waning days of the craft

I was on a team developing a critical public safety system on a tight deadline a few years ago, and i had to translate some wireframes for the admin back-end into CSS. I did a passable job but it wasn’t a perfect match. I was asked to redo it by the team-lead. It had zero business value, but such was the state of our team…being pixel perfect was a source of pride.

It was one of the incidents that made me to stop front-end development.

As an exercise, I recently asked ChatGPT to produce similar CSS and it did so flawlessly.

I’m certainly a middling programmer when it comes to CSS. But with ChatGPT I can produce stuff close to the quality of what the CSS masters do. The article points this out: middling generalists can now compete with specialists.

ernon German court prohibits LinkedIn from ignoring "Do Not Track" signals

This is your regular reminder that anyone can create a LinkedIn account and see your profile, regardless of your privacy settings.

ernon California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

GM vehicles are generally regarded as not particularly well engineered or reliable, based on what I've seen and heard from mechanics.

Why aren't they investing in core engineering, instead of moonshots?

ernon Killings in the U.S. are dropping at a historic rate

In addition to politicians and media who always tend to benefit from a perception of increased crime, social media feeds perceptions of increasing crime rates.

ernon Stories told by Aboriginal Tasmanians could be oldest recorded

The article is about the myths themselves, and there isn’t anything about it being taught as an alternative form of science.

ernon LinkedIn is laying off nearly 700 employees

I've hibernated my LinkedIn profile after I was stalked by an unstable bank employee who I had a bad interaction with:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37417397

Until their privacy and visibility policies are put on par with other social media platforms, I'm going to use it strictly for job-hunting when needed.

ernon Ask HN: LinkedIn mysteriously banned me permanently; where to go next?

LinkedIn is a security risk, it allowed me to be stalked by a crazy bank employee despite me "locking down" my profile.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37417397

I can't hibernate because I am in a free trial period with Apple for premium, despite ending the trial. I've blocked the stalker, but I have no idea who is viewing my profile.

It needs to really up its game.

Not entirely related to my gripe, but my observation is that Microsoft's pay-freeze and layoffs of employees seem to be having ripple effects across the org.

ernon WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

Airlines have a moving map on their captive wifi portals. Didn’t know it was rendered client side though. Something to try when I next fly.

ernon Bosses won’t like it but WFH is a happier way to work

Similarly, many schools are giving children more autonomy in learning, instead of training them for lives of desk-bound obedience.

This was one of the biggest disappointments of the pandemic. Teachers aren't ready to give up on their old operating models. The flipped classroom, despite the hype in the 2010s didn't really shine.

ernon Two photographers captured the same millisecond in time (2018)

You can delete the overlay using dev tools.

In Chrome, I hit F12, selected the overlay in the DOM and deleted it.

ernon Lead poisoning causes more death, IQ loss than thought: study

I sure am wondering how much of the late 20th century Flynn effect was due to diminishing lead poisoning

Given that the Flynn effect seemed to be strongest in the era of high-lead petrol and has dropped off, I can't see how it could have had an effect

ernon Ask HN: What low code platforms are worth using?

I think that assuming that technology is secondary is a trap that skilled developers encounter when moving into management-they assume that development is as easy for others as it is for them. When I moved into technical management, I was fortunate enough to work with high performing teams for a while, so when I encountered a poor performing team (the team lead didn’t know basic good practices, and bug counts rocketed up because of an inexperienced dev team) it was a nasty shock.