Hacker News Reader

quick_brown_foxon The recurring dream of replacing developers

+1 on programming as theory building. If it wasn’t already, the bottleneck has shifted from code generation to understanding & reasoning.

quick_brown_foxon Signs of introspection in large language models

> I think Anthropic genuinely cares about model welfare

I've grown too cynical to believe for-profit entities have the capacity to care. Individual researchers, yes - commercial organisations, unlikely.

quick_brown_foxon Discovery Coding

Related concepts in Peter Naur's "Programming as Theory Building" [0] or Gerald Sussman's "Problem Solving by debugging-almost Right Plans" [1]

[0] https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MYzvQ1v8Ww

quick_brown_foxon Mistakes engineers make in large established codebases

I mostly agree, however experienced a different challenge exactly for the very reason of consistency:

I used to work within the Chromium codebase (at the order of 10s of million LOC) and the parts I worked in were generally in line with Google's style guide, i.e. consistent and of decent quality. The challenge was to identify legacy patterns that shouldn't be imitated or cargo-culted for the sake of consistency.

In practice that meant having an up to date knowledge of coding standards in order to not perpetuate anti-patterns in the name of consistency.

quick_brown_foxon Nvidia's Project Digits is a 'personal AI supercomputer'

How about “We sell a computer called the tinybox. It comes in two colors + pro.

tinybox red and green are for people looking for a quiet home/office machine. tinybox pro is for people looking for a loud compact rack machine.” [0]

[0] https://tinygrad.org/#tinybox

quick_brown_foxon Levels.fyi's annual compensation report 2024

I'm still having a hard time comparing US salaries across continents. I used to halve SF salaries to arrive at the EUR equivalent for purchasing power parity. In addition to that, median salaries are a poor summary statistic due the "Trimodal Nature of Software Engineering Salaries in the Netherlands and Europe" [0]

[0] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...

quick_brown_foxon Programming as Theory Building (1985) [pdf]

> The "sufficient explanation of the goals/problem" is the code—anything less is totally insufficient.

somewhat in that spirit, I like Gerald Sussman's interpretation of software development as "problem solving by debugging-almost right plans", in e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MYzvQ1v8Ww

quick_brown_foxon Ask HN: What you up to? (Who doesn't want to be hired?)

loved this course!

quick_brown_foxon Playlist for iOS

brave is open source too https://github.com/brave/brave-ios/