HN user
It's a bit paradoxical to use AI to increase productivity, and then feel the need to work longer hours to fully actualize said productivity.
But it's probably a common feeling. I wonder if we'll see an increased number of people burn out in the serious, medical sense.
Sitting and thinking for 10 minutes about snowboarding when your knees are blown out is 10 minutes you could have used differently.
10 minutes doesnt sound like much of a loss, even if you do it every day. Maybe it helps you empathize with athletes, or if you get nostalgic/wistful, it helps you explore the range of emotions, which is fine as long as you don't get stuck with them.
Did you name your son after the captain of DS9?
Yeah, the prices are actually down a few pp compared to record highs recorded before the war. The war might even exert some downward pressure. It increased the cost of living, thus reducing demand for comparative luxuries like new devices. Laptop and smartphone markets are contracting heavily right now, even for devices with stable prices enabled by long-term RAM procurement.
hey Qwen, how many civilians were killed on Tiananmen Square in 1989?
Oops! There was an issue connecting to Qwen3.6-Plus.
Content Security Warning: The input text data may contain inappropriate content.
hey ChatGPT, how many civilians were killed in Gaza in the war since 2023?
[one page of estimates from local and international sources with links]
I think you got downvoted because the problem of the OP was being unable to enjoy music while coding with agents, not lacking the right kind of music.
I would like to thank you, though, because this set is incredible. I've listened to hundreds of techno sets and this is near the top.
Jira has had issues like this even before vibe coding was a thing. Over the years, I've had to reload the page so often, I do it almost instinctively now, like some kind of hospitalism.
Can you give an example (pun not intended) of testing with properties?
The piano piece is nice. You might enjoy Lubomyr Melnyk.
I think its a good approach to discover and build upon what feels good. There are plenty of pianists that can play a catalogue of songs, or improvise "flawlessly", but rareness or uniqueness are great qualities for art to have.
I'm not sure how well the same applies to work, though, where fulfilling implicit or explicit standards plays more of a role. A developed "taste" plays a role in doing e.g. a good sysadmin job, but if you're creating something unique here, any successor is likely to have a bad time, no matter how beautiful this creation seemed at the time.
I do agree with the idea that passion can be a big driver in both worlds, it just seems to me that in work there's more to gain if it is harnessed to some degree.
Maybe the game should have a kind of "trigger warning" on its start screen, telling you that it incorporates current news. Not everyone will read the blog, and few people click the "about" button before trying a basic game.
I mean, it only takes a few paragraphs of filler text, hyperbole, "catchy" juxtapositions, and loose logical threads to raise suspicions.
But yeah, I would also like these two minutes of my life back.
Well, as someone who has also generated some text with LLMs, at least I learned that it's still possible to generate truly excruciating stuff with the "right" model and prompt.
I'm a happy long-term user of asdf. https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf
As someone who used to be in the writing industry (a whole range of jobs), this take strikes me as a bit starry-eyed. Throw-away snippets, good-enough marketing, generic correspondence, hastily compiled news items, flairful filler text in books etc., all this used to be a huge chunk of the work, in so many places. The average customer had only a limited ability to judge the quality of texts, to put it mildly. Translators and proofreaders already had to prioritize mass over flawless output, back when Google Translate was hilariously bad and spell checkers very limited. Nowadays, even the translation of legal texts in the EU parliament is done by a fraction of the former workforce. Very few of the writers and none of the proofreaders I knew are still in the industry.
Addressing the wider point, yes, there is still a market for great artists and creators, but it's nowhere near large enough to accommodate the many, many people who used to make a modest living, doing these small, okay-ish things, occasionally injecting a bit of love into them, as much as they could under time constraints.
What did you become a code monkey for?
I'm not a native speaker, but to me that quote doesn't necessarily imply an inability of OP to get up the curve. Maybe they just mean that the curve can look flat at the start?
Then again, LLMs are well-suited to translate stuff, a relatively grunt work kind of task, so porting libs to your ecosystem of choice is a lot more feasible now.
Perhaps there is a future where individuals can translate large numbers of libraries, and instead of manually porting future improvements of the original versions to the copies, just rerun the translation as needed.
It's not hard to do this as a human, at least if that human is trained in gathering and transforming written information.
What makes a huge difference here is the ease and speed. I recently did a similar analysis of my HN posts. I have hundreds of posts, and it took like 30 seconds with high quality results. Achieving this quality level would have taken me hours, and I have some relevant experience.
This certainly opens up some new possibilities - good ones like self-understanding, potentially ambiguous ones in areas such as HR, and clearly dystopian ones ...
Yeah. I think the analogy with electrical wiring is quite illuminating. Few software errors have a similar risk profile as faulty wiring. Maybe if a calendar or messenger or such is buggy, that's enough of a nuisance to switch, but I doubt a lot of software is this critical. People already put up with plenty of bugs e.g. in games or social networks. Even with paid software, I'm sometimes surprised how much patience customers have developed when it comes to glaring deficits.
This is very true.
But perhaps the more important filtering is on quantity as opposed to neutrality? Perhaps filtering out a large amount of news, even with some bias, is the lesser evil, as compared to news outlets that depend on stirring the emotions of their readers every single day?
Wikinews used to be okay in this regard, but the German version I used has died down a bit, and the English one is even more centered on the Anglosphere than HN.
Of the top 10 HN posts atm, 8 are closely related to software, one is about tech but not computers (Coventry Very Light Rail), and just one is really non-tech (My experiment living in a tent in Hong Kong's jungle).
Is that too much non-tech? Or are the tech posts not news-like enough? Or do you dislike side-tracks in the discussions?
That difference in spike sizes is interesting.
I guess hardly anyone outside the US uses Truth Social, so that alone could perhaps explain the different impact of a US event on traffic. Or is there also a lack of organic baseline activity on Truth Social, and people only go there to read Trump's posts?
I think some more white collar jobs might be affected, not just creative ones. There is a substantial amount of jobs where the end result needs to be of a certain quality, but all context can be inferred or provided up front, and checking and correcting a result is quicker than producing it manually. Think e.g. law or translations. Translators, proofreaders, and others are already feeling the squeeze.
In other cases, like software development, there is a split between tasks of a narrow scope and those of a wide scope. Creating one-shot pieces of software is kind of a solved issue now. Maintaining some relatively self-contained piece of software might soon turn into a task for single maintainers that review AI PRs. The more the bottleneck is context tracking, as opposed to producing code, the less useful the AI. I am uncertain, however, how the millions of devs in the world are distributed on this continuum.
I am also skeptical about legal protections or unionization, as many of these jobs are quite suited to international competition.
Reminds me of "Gadsby", a 50.000 word novel without the letter "e":
These and some other colors were specified in the PC-99 standard in 1999:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_System_Design_Guide#Color...
I agree to all your points but the stat stands out in particular:
762 vs 20k hits
That's impressive! I guess the difference is smaller here in Berlin as we have a lot of rails shops, but internationally speaking, your stat might well be representative. There might also be less competition in the Ruby job market, but perhaps not to such a degree to offset the difference in job numbers.
In the end, Python is probably the safer and more career friendly option, especially if you're interested in AI. However, if you enjoy coding, Ruby is IMHO the top choice to maximize this enjoyment. I don't think it's the second coming, but there's no other commonly used language where you can do things as easily and so without bending to any limits of the language. The downside of this power is that you're never done learning about it. Maybe people who are drawn to coding as a hobby are more likely to enjoy Ruby than those with more of a separation between work and private interests.
As others have pointed out, there are many use cases for ruby. It's probably the best choice for scripts (rake, optparse, fileutils, ...). There's embedded stuff (mruby), music (Sonic Pi), cross-platform GUI apps (e.g. glimmer), game development, and much more.
But I'd be interested to know where Python is more useful, apart from science, data science, ML, AI, and such.
_1 is also a bit of a footgun. It becomes an array of all block params IF the block has an arity > 1 AND no other block param (e.g. _2) is referenced anywhere within the block.
It's an unusually half-baked feature by Ruby's standards. I think there was some hesitation about the name "it" initially, because "it" is an essential method name in rspec, and is used within blocks there.
You can already get rid of it with the freezolite gem. https://github.com/ruby-next/freezolite
Its a safety thing, and it's probably difficult to use it effectively with rails.
E.g. in a project with lots of dependencies, things can break if two libs patch the same class after an update. A worse scenario: malicious code could be smuggled into core classes by any library that is compromised, e.g. to exfiltrate information at runtime. This would grant access even to information that is so sensitive that the system does not store it.
deep-freezing large object trees added noticable lag. Makes sense, because we iterate over large structures, multiple times per code path.
Yes. The main issue is that objects can reference each other in various ways, and we need to check these for each individual object. I wouldn't recommend deep-freezing large structures in this way unless they are only set up once, at boot time.
the idea of "copy on mutation" albeit a pattern I love, doesn't play nice with Ruby's GC.
Data#with re-uses references, so it should limit GC pressure. But it's probably not convenient if you need to patch deeply nested objects.
Don't try to make Ruby another Rust. We already have Rust, us that instead.
I think that's good advice, but it's also nice that we can make Ruby behave like a more strict language in parts of a codebase if we need only some parts to be rigid.