drunkpotato

Actually, yes, it can. Chill a bit.

I’m sad that you’re being downvoted. It’s clear that you’re correct. However, HN does tend to take extending the courtesy of assuming good faith to the breaking point, whether we like it or not.

It’s blindingly obvious that they are here merely to gum up discussion in endless loops that go nowhere under the guise of politesse and question marks, as if they’re just confused and asking clarifying questions.

The thing about assuming good faith, which I agree with in principle, is that you have to be willing to accept your own judgment of when someone is arguing in bad faith and disengage.

Yes, that was evil. If your point is that both Obama and Trump are criminals who deserve imprisonment rather than full throated defense and endorsement, I am in complete agreement.

Caddy is beautifully simple, a joy to setup, configure & use for a simple home server with a few services. I love it! I used nginx before, and it’s great, but caddy makes things easier. I love how easy it makes SSL certificates & reverse proxies.

They don’t have anything because they’re lying. Even the sibling comment is a fabrication.

To anyone else coming across this: this is a lie.

Exactly. All of this was stated in advance, in Project 2025 and in tech bro interviews about how much democracy sucks. These people are not subtle, smart, or original; however, they are completely amoral sociopaths who think they can destroy the US and own/control what’s left. I don’t think it’s going to work out as well for them as they think, but in the short and medium term Elon and his shitheels will do a lot of damage, and cause a lot of pain and death.

I, too, was born yesterday.

Ah, naming things. Something about one of the hard problems in computer science...

I think consistency is more important than perfection. If you use something like vw_ as recommended in the sibling comment, that's fine, then try to apply it to all views. (Without being overly strict; sometimes there are good reasons to defy conventions. They're conventions, not laws!)

Just keep in mind that a view is both code and a data contract just like a table definition is. All the usual best practices around versioning, automated deployments, and smooth upgrade paths apply. As soon as an application or downstream view, function, etc relies on that view, changing it risks disruption or breakage. Loud breakage if you're lucky, silent data corruption if you're not!

I feel you, and LLMs are no doubt a boon in tooling to help in this kind of scenario. I'm not poo-pooing LLMs in general; they are very cool! I wish they were allowed to just be very cool while we incorporate them into our tooling and workflows, rather than over-hyped.

I believe that we'll learn how to incorporate LLMs to improve parts of data pipelines, particularly those that involve extracting unstructured or semistructured data into structured data, especially if it can provide a reliability score or confidence level with the extract. I'm much more skeptical of claims beyond that.

I also think there are unanswered questions about reliability, cost (dollar and energy), and AI business models; I don't think OpenAI can burn $2+ to make a dollar forever.

This is a head-scratcher of a take. Have you actually done any in-depth work on data pipelines and analytics tooling? If so, what precisely do you see LLMs making easier?

I tried using enterprise chat gpt to write a query to load some json data into a data warehouse. I was impressed with how good a job it did, but it still required several rounds of refinement and hand-holding and the end result was almost, but not quite, correct. So I'm not coming at this from the perspective of hating LLMs a priori, but I am unimpressed with the hype and over-selling of its capabilities. In the end, it was no faster than writing the query myself, but it wasn't slower either, so I can see it being somewhat helpful in limited conditions.

Unless the technology makes another quantum leap improvement at the same time the price drops like a stone, I don't see LLMs coming anywhere close to your claim.

That said, I expect to see a huge amount of snake oil and enterprise dollars wastefully burned on executive pipe dreams of "here's a pile of data now magic me a better business!" in the next few years of LLM over-hyped nonsense. There's always a quick buck to make in duping clueless execs drooling over replacing pesky, annoying, "over-paid" tech people.

Treating hallucinations as an error that can be corrected fights against the nature of the technology and is more hype than reality. LLMs are designed to be a bullshit generator and that’s what they are; it is a fundamental limitation. (“Bullshit” here used in the technical sense: not that it’s wrong, but that the truth value of the output is meaningless to the generator.) Thankfully the hype cycle seems to be on the down slope. Think about the term “generative AI” and what the models are meant to do: generate plausible-sounding somewhat creative text. They do that! Mission accomplished. If you think you can apply them outside that limited scope, the burden of proof is on you; skepticism is warranted.

While we’re alive, we care. When we’re dead, it’s up to our children to care. Inheritance wishes are generally respected, but also can and do get overridden. I’m not saying that an author’s wishes shouldn’t be taken into account, the living still care about how they felt while they were alive, but it shouldn’t be the one and only priority that gets respected. Again, the dead can’t care anymore. Only the living can.

Why? They’re dead. Not trying to be flippant, I honestly don’t get why the deceased’s desires should be elevated over the living’s. It’s a moral choice I don’t agree with and don’t entirely understand.

Hard disagree. Those “productive” programmers are a nightmare, their code is a barely decipherable jumble of randomly gluing function calls together until they kinda sorta do something that approximates working some of the time. They cause an unfathomable amount of damage, lost productivity due to bugs and data nightmares, lost data, and headaches.

They do make idiot managers happy though, because look at all those features and scrum points they “finished!” That’s why armies of them will always be there in the software ecosystem, blithely and ignorantly a net drain on whatever unlucky company is currently employing them, busily making a mess for more diligent programmers to clean up for the rest of eternity. It’s called “job security.”

What luxury! I’d kill for a copy-pasted error message! Usually I just get “it didn’t work.”

My sense is that the N64 cartridge just couldn’t compete with the optical disc formats for content storage as RPGs just exploded in size and complexity at the time. (And way too many rendered cutscenes!)

"The Design of Everyday Things" by Don Norman.

Maybe it's just that I haven't been fortunate enough to encounter leadership that's not like that, but this story sounds right to me.

Try to think of it from leadership's perspective. For the sake of simplicity, let's say there are 100 similar initiatives proposed each year, each costing $1 million. That's $100 million per year in pure costs to the business (ignoring amortization, tax shenanigans, etc). Even for a bank, that's real money, to be strategically spent and not wasted.

With that setup, making leadership feel the pain and understand at a visceral level why this particular million dollars is well spent, is all at once a good strategy, rational for leadership, rational for IT, and a healthy-ish dynamic for the business.

Aside/tangent: In a very real sense, executives are managers of the finite time, employees, expenses, etc. of the business. Now, you could, and I would, argue that they're nearly always not especially good managers, and that the purely rational choice from "the company's" perspective is to pay them more like regular employees and not so lavishly. However, "the company" doesn't make decisions, people do, with all their political games, incentives and self-interests. Since executives control the flow of information/decisions/resources/money in the company, they siphon off an out-sized share for themselves, acting as a (perhaps inevitable?) parasite on the host company. Fixing this problem is left as an exercise to the reader.

org-mode tables are great. So is magit, I highly recommend it! I'm comfortable with command line git, use it quite a lot, but I also use magit a lot, and magit is especially great as a much better `git add -p`.

Gosh, I sure hope the door doesn’t hit their asses on the way out.

I think humans already struggle with this, without sufficient background knowledge and context. Reality is messy.

I ran into this the other day as well.

You can override the REQUESTS_CA_BUNDLE env var to point to your own certs.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/37447847

Thanksgiving comes a day closer every day, my turkey friend.

I honestly can't tell whether this is sarcastic or not. Poe's law strikes again.

Luckily if you’re a developer on MacOS, you can have that too! In addition to ~/.config and a million .dotfiles and .dotdirectories from decades of unixy tools! Truly a cornucopia.

I don’t think many engineers claim all software companies should bet long on the metaverse, whatever that is.

In a thread about dysfunctional and mismanaged projects, you describe a very dysfunctional and mismanaged project in a way that brings out the hilarity, frustrations, contradictions, and impossibilities of the situation. Good job! And then the majority of the replies completely miss the entire point and ask some variation of why didn’t you just superhero up and solo run the project? Providing extra entertainment by unintentionally highlighting exactly the manager galaxy brain that leads to such incompetently run projects. I love it!

100% of strict parents would say they have a good relationship with their kids (or within a rounding error). If you asked adult children of strict parents if that was true, you would get fewer than 100% positive responses. People aren’t always reliable judges of their own behavior and relationships.