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You shouldn't need to read a manual to figure out how to open the door of your car.

Depends on what we categorize as a coding agent. Devin was released two years ago. Cursor was about the same, and it released agent mode around 1.5 years ago. Aider has been around even longer than that I think.

gavinfludon Googler... ex-Googler

How exactly would they become "unflushable"?

Also, surely if they were excellent candidates then you'd be doing your absolute best to keep them around?

gavinfludon DeepSeek releases Janus Pro, a text-to-image generator [pdf]

Are the companies running the various AI systems going to release all of their source code and internal research to benefit society too?

gavinfludon Supreme Court Overturns Roe vs. Wade

He sits on the U.S. Supreme Court and is one of those responsible for this ruling.

gavinfludon Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly

"While it is true that pigs are less compatible with humans than monkeys, they can be genetically manipulated to produce organs less likely to be rejected on transplantation. Pigs quickly grow to full size, produce larger litters and can be more easily reared by biotechnology companies."

They do cover this point.

gavinfludon How Developers Choose Names

Funnily enough, I recently had to help with an issue where a company's payment screen was not loading correctly and instead displaying "Invalid session". They use a third-party vendor to handle payments and display their payment form in an iFrame on their website.

There is an initial request to create a session that has to pass the desired expiration time of the session. Unfortunately, the vendor requires the time to be in Eastern Time. The poor, naive soul that originally implemented this just got the current date, added 15 minutes, and converted it to "EST". As soon as daylight savings hit a few weeks ago, the expiration time was automatically being set to 45 minutes in the past, the vendor was responding with "Invalid Session" and the company was unable to take payments from customers.

gavinfludon The Metaprogrammer

> "You post an article about a new programming language, you'll get 10 replies."

A quick search pulls up results that would contradict that statement.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7436401

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10901054

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8735892

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10177716

I realize four search results isn't enough to completely debunk the author's statement, but in my experience programmers love to talk about programming languages. If you start a conversation about an interesting new language, more often than not people will want to give their input.

Programmers also love to talk about their ideal working environment. Things like office chairs, keyboards, monitors and office perks are important to them because the majority of their time is spent at work.

gavinfludon Leicester City: Dirty Dozen or Harvard Case Study?

I think their scouting team has definitely played a huge part, bringing in relative unknowns like Vardy, Mahrez and Kante. Most teams in the premier league track all sorts of statistics nowadays though, so I don't think that has set Leicester apart from the others. Companies like Opta make a fortune by providing some of this data.

Overall, I think they've recruited well, been managed well and have all played to a level most people didn't think was in them. All of that combined with the other top teams all having horrific seasons means the stars have aligned for Leicester. It would be a tragedy if they didn't go ahead and take the title now.

gavinfludon Show HN: HN Replies – Get notified of replies to your comments

Well in a browser extension, you wouldn't necessarily have a lot of people grabbing the comment history. The program could still run as it does, calling the HN API every ten minutes for new replies. The browser extension could just call the service to see if it has found any new replies for you particularly.

gavinfludon Hello, Stranger

I had a conversation about this exact thing while on a business trip with some colleagues recently. I'm from Ireland while my colleagues were from Finland, Italy and France. In Irish culture, we talk a lot and seeing strangers conversing on public transport, with the cashier at the check-out or just waiting at a bus stop is quite normal. However, my Italian and Finnish friends said that this was one of the weirdest things they had to get used to when in Ireland. In their respective countries it's just considered common courtesy to not start up conversations with strangers and just grant them their personal space.

This social experiment is very interesting, but the results would probably be very different depending on what country you're in.

gavinfludon Whatever goes up, that’s what we do

Not entirely true though. Yes the advertisers are their customers, but their customers need a large supply of the product (the users). In order to keep a consistently large supply of the product, Facebook has the difficult task of finding that middle ground where users are happy using the site and advertisers are happy with the revenue they are making from it.

gavinfludon Moto 360

My first car cost me €1000. My latest car that I bought in November cost just north of €3000.

gavinfludon Mayer Is Aiming to Bring Back Search Tech to Yahoo

It'll be very interesting to see if she can manage to get out of the deal. It'd also take a monumental effort in recruitment and research to make a move like this a success, in my opinion anyway.

gavinfludon Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)

I agree with you on a certain level, since there are so many outside factors influencing how quickly you can become a good programmer. It's not as if you are an average programmer for 10,000 hours and then you magically become a great programmer in the 10,001st hour.

That being said, I don't think the estimate is totally wrong. I've been programming for five years, have just gotten through a Software Engineering degree and am comfortable using three or four languages, but there are many people around me with more experience who's development skills I am just in awe of.

The main point is that nobody can teach themselves to be a programmer (or at least a good one) in three days. To build up the amount of skills and experience required takes many years.

gavinfludon Facebook Announces “Home”, A Homescreen Replacement For Standard Android

Yes, of course this isn't something everyone would want. However, I for one know of lots of people that this would suit down to the ground. People who solely use their phones for calling, texting and Facebook.

At the end of the day, it's an option. You don't have to install it and you don't have to use it. The beauty of Android is that if this isn't to your liking, you can uninstall it and install any number of other launchers, home screens, etc.

gavinfludon Ask HN: What should I do?

The higher cost of living factors into that majorly though. I know where I am (Dublin) it's very expensive to live in the city and I imagine London is the same. That's why employers in those areas have to pay quite a bit more.

gavinfludon How much sleep do we really need to work productively?

"Personally, I know that my productivity takes a dip at 3pm every day. This is exactly where I place my nap, and it has been one of the most powerful ways to bring my productivity back to 100% for a good 1,5 hour session after that."

I'm not sure how much science backs up most points in this post, but I can definitely attest to this point. It's so simple yet so effective. A quick 20-30 minute nap and I am buzzing with energy for the next few hours.

gavinfludon Why You Make Less Money

My first job in the development industry was working as a PHP developer for a nine month internship.

Now that I'm graduating I received several job offers, most of them involved working with PHP again. However, I received two offers from two relatively large companies, one as an ASP.Net developer and the other as a Java EE developer. The salaries for these two jobs were quite a bit higher than the others and included great benefits too.

Again, I'm only a graduate so can't really give any solid answer as to whether you're sabotaging yourself by working with ASP.Net, though I doubt you are. Most decent employers will probably be more interested in ensuring you can program rather than focusing on what specific language you've been using recently. If they know you can program, they can probably assume you'll be able to apply that knowledge to a new language.

gavinfludon The Positive Programmer

I wholeheartedly agree. I've noticed it a lot over the last while where many people in the software industry who write blog posts or contribute to forums just have an air of negativity about them. That being said, I'm sure no matter where you look there will be plenty of people who focus on the negatives in life, that's just in their nature.

My preference is to be a positive person and focus on making my life (and hopefully other people's lives) happy and reading blog posts by similar minded people only reinforces that.

gavinfludon Take pride or fuck it

Very well put and it hits home. I always find that once I cut the first corner, I care less and less about each future shortcut or badly coded feature I implement.

However, if I truly care about the project or have a project that has been very well designed so far, I always find myself going out of my way to ensure I will be proud of it when looking back.

gavinfludon Learning JavaScript - my experience and advice

I read "JavaScript: The Good Parts" after having been using JavaScript for a couple of months and still found it overwhelming. Douglas Crockford moves through the topics at a very fast pace.

However, after a few more months of learning the language I went back to the book and was immediately thankful for how quickly he moved from topic to topic. I understood the references and was receiving quick tips on what to do and what to avoid doing with all the different elements that make up the language.

Also, I agree with the author, Professional JavaScript is the ultimate JavaScript book in my opinion.

gavinfludon How To Hire Me (or any other programmer)

This is an excellent post. I'm soon-to-be fresh out of university and the company I'm joining had a hiring process very similar to what you've described.

They were in constant contact throughout the process, sold themselves very well and - although they did carry out a cookie-cutter technical interview - it actually made for an interesting hour where I was able to solve their pretty simple sample problem and we ended up going off on a tangent talking about how to optimize the interview process.

What differentiated them from countless others was that personal touch. I always felt like they wanted me on board and they were able to sell themselves and their culture very well.

gavinfludon Aggressive negative advertising by Microsoft against Google.

Unfortunately for you, you can't pick and choose what you want when Google are providing you with a free email service. Generating personalized ads is how they make money from this venture.

As the saying goes: "If you're not paying for it; You're the product, not the customer."

gavinfludon Want to learn to code? Don't copy and paste, type out other people's code

Copying and pasting is fine if you're copying code you've written yourself. However, as you said, it's a lot more beneficial when you type out code because you'll make mistakes and have to figure them out.

It's very hard to learn how the code you're using works when all you've done is copy and paste it.

gavinfludon Why Do All the Great Node.js Developers Hate CoffeeScript?

I'm not a very experienced Node.js developer, but I have taken the time over the last couple of months to learn how to use it. I find working without CoffeeScript to be much more productive.

Then again, that may change when I get a lot more comfortable using Node. At the moment I just prefer to know exactly what's going on under the hood.

gavinfludon Start ups: Berlin vs London

The language barrier is definitely a problem for countries like Germany and it's startup industry (at least looking in from the outside it is). While they are one of the safer economies in Europe, and seem to be holding the whole thing together at the moment, their reputation for not taking risks would also prove problematic.

Then again, that's only the point of view from someone looking in, it's probably entirely different for German people themselves.

gavinfludon Ask HN: Can I learn JS in a month?

A month studying JavaScript and jQuery (lots of employers place specific emphasis on this) will give you a decent knowledge of the language. Definitely enough to put it on your resume and use it competently.

gavinfludon Ask HN: Can I learn JS in a month?

You could certainly learn how the general syntax of the language and how things like prototyping and callbacks work.

Why limit it to a month though? Learn the basics, develop an understanding of how it works and then carry on learning as you go.

As for books: "JavaScript: The Good Parts" and "jQuery in Action" should help you out.