rayxi271828

Many small oh shit moments, mostly of the variety of: "Oh shit, why am I still paying for this app subscription when I can vibecode it myself and just pay less than $1 per month in API costs, if even that?"

Overdramatic: when I saw friends and acquaintances doing this I couldn't help but feeling a slight sense of loss--that we (I) have lost the person.

At that point, is the person still even a person? He's nothing more but a meat RPA, copy pasting responses.

The reason I value a person is the uniqueness of the person's brain's weights and biases. When I lose access to that and I get ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini weights and biases, isn't the person... essentially dead to me and the world?

It's a very unsettling thing to think about. What makes a person a person isn't the fact that the person's breathing air, eating food, copulating, defecating, but it's the person's wetware's weights and biases. Because without those, what is even this meat construct I'm talking to via WhatsApp?

Internal assessment of self-worth is one thing. But one thing that I noticed while I was between jobs, was that the rest of the world was also built under the assumption that you "had a job".

Sign up for financial anything, they always ask you, which company you're with? What's your title? What's the range of your income?

I don't know if this is the case in the US, but in my country, I couldn't even open a brokerage account because the automated form required an office job. Entering freelancing or anything of some sort will get auto-rejected.

So it is in your face, all the time. And actually at that time I was fortunate enough not to have to worry about bills etc.

I'm about a decade behind you, but I also started my programming career during the "good" COM/DCOM/MFC/ATL/ActiveX/CORBA days. Java just came out. I slept little during that time because truly, there was nothing like programming. It was the thing that pulled me awake in the morning, and pulled me from falling asleep at night. I was so spellbound, calling it Csikszentmihalyi's flow felt like it didn't do it justice.

Fast forward 30 years later, I thought those days were gone forever. I'd accepted that I'd never experienced that kind of obsession again. Maybe because I got older. Maybe those feelings were something exclusively for the young. Maybe because my energy wasn't what it used to be. Yada yada, 1000s of reasons.

I was so shocked when I found out that I could experience that feeling again with Claude Code and Codex. I guess it was like experiencing your first love all over again? I slept late, I woke up early, I couldn't wait to go back to my Codex and Claude. It was to the point I created an orchestrator agent so I could continue chatting with my containerized agents via Telegram.

"What a time to be alive" <-- a trite, meaningless saying, that was infused by real meaning, by some basic maths that run really, really, really fast, on really, really expensive hardware. How about that!

Thank you for the kind words! I had great fun implementing it. Robert Nystrom is such a hero for writing Crafting Interpreters.

Slang? The IDE looked like Turbo C++ of old (blue, text based interface). Shortcuts are weird, so you need to remap keys to get sane defaults.

Probably the most unique feature is that the language supports spaces in identifiers. So you'd have variables like "Option Portfolio Risk" or functions like "Calculate Estimated PnL". Visually obviously different from Python, but it gave me Pythonic vibes.

It's also nice that it supports preconditions, so you can specify the valid range of arguments etc. It has some kind of OOP support but tbh it felt bolted on (understandably).

But the most value adding, IMHO, is the DevEx and deep integration with SecDb. Say what you want about the DOS-like IDE and the old (20+ years old for sure, maybe 30+) language, but you can deploy your code SO easily into production, with guardrails in place.

Out of curiosity, I implemented a toy language (thanks to Robert Nystrom's Crafting Interpreters) that supports spaces in identifiers (https://github.com/rayfdj/gaul-lang) as well. Makes for an interesting weekend coding project, and it helps me understand more the tradeoffs that Slang designers must have gone through.

I love how uv allows me to not think of all the options anymore.

virtualenv, venv, pyenv, pipenv... I think at one point the recommended option changed because it was integrated into Python, but I can't even remember which is which anymore.

Such a pleasure to finally have just one, for maybe... ~99% of my needs.

It’s quite the opposite for me.

The fun / creative part for me is not googling “how to slurp the contents of a file into a string” or “the exact syntax for marking some functions as unit tests” or “the correct order of symbols to specify generic type param”

It’s not “the correct html / css syntax for this basic gui I want to make”

It’s not “how to achieve the thing I’ve done 10 thousand times in other languages/frameworks, but for this language/framework”

It’s figuring the core logic out, building the thing while skipping the boring stuff, playing with abstractions that scratch my itch.

From this pov, AI is the best thing that has happened to my weekend coding. I code recreationally way more than before. Before AI, I would try a new language or framework, and I’d give up halfway because re-figuring out basic stuff for the umpteenth time is boring, it’s not fun at all. Now AI lets me skip those boring parts.

Wonder what I'm missing here. A smaller number of repetitive tasks - that's basically just simple coding + some RPA sprinkled on top, no?

Once you've settled down on a few well-known paths of action, wouldn't you want to freeze those paths and make it 100% predictable, for the most part?

I've been taking these rides 5-6 days a week, everywhere, and also in other countries outside the US. What I've come to realize is this: what matters to me the most is the consistency of the lowest bar of the experience.

I get that sometimes with human drivers, when I'm lucky, I get someone who goes above and beyond, someone who's fantastic to talk to along the way, and so on.

But if I can trade all that with a guarantee that there's a consistent, predictable floor to my worst experience, I'll take it in a heartbeat.

At the end of it, I take a ride to get from point A to point B. I'd rather have a machine does it for me very efficiently, without all the messy human element, with the ups and the downs, because it's the downs that ruin my day.

Pass the link to NotebookLM and get the podcast hosts to summarize it for you?

Men and women will have very different body fat percentage level for similar look. In general it's something like women's = men's +8-9%?

Wouldn't AI be worse at Rust than at C++ given the amount of code available in the respective languages?

As a teenager, I was fortunate that my Dad bought me a copy of "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" by Stephen Covey.

Quote: Be Proactive is about taking responsibility for your life. Proactive people recognize that they are “response-able.” They don’t blame circumstances, conditions, or conditioning for their behavior. They know they can choose their behavior.

While it may be common sense/doh-so-obvious today, this was such a mind-blowing reframe for the teenage me back then, and it shaped me immeasurably as a person for the better, for the 30+ years that follow.

Exactly... add to that the requirement that I want to have the peace of mind of being able to accidentally bang the watch against the metal poles of the subway, etc., without damaging it in some ways, and I always end up with a G-Shock.

I'm not French but is it just me, or that "bien sûr" pronunciation is atrocious? Also that "parfait" at the end... urgh.

Have you tried unstructured.io? So far seems promising.

I can imagine so. Would you have a comparison between Claude 3 Opus vs. GPT4o? Which one would you pick?

What kind of field / chat interactions does your chatbot do, if you can share? Apart from Klarna I haven't heard any other success in this regard...

On one hand, there's this.

On the other hand, with the toughening of the job market, companies are selecting by degrees and pedigrees more than ever. The last company I worked for is currently doing this exactly, only looking at applications from people graduating from select universities.

So far it's working for them. As the job market gets worse, I think this trend of stronger emphasis on degrees and pedigrees will only get stronger.

Of course at the individual level, there are always exceptional individuals. But by definition, they are few and far between. It's not like going to school precludes you from learning other things and being flexible, creative, with burning passion for learning, etc. I would still encourage my kids to finish school and aim to get into a good university, I think.

Agree with you. And for specific cases like HFT, the interviews will be a lot more specific in that area anyway, so it would be weird for a "senior developer who doesn't know algorithms" to pass in the first place.

it always frustrates me that I don't hear something, I ask the person to repeat only to not hear it again, usually because they repeat it at the same low level

I thought I was the only one with this problem! Someone would make a joke and I would have to pretend to laugh because I didn't even catch what he/she was saying and asking them to repeat it the 3rd time would be awkward.

Even worse, it isn't always a joke, so even calibrating the laughter level is hard. Ugh.

Wonder if there's anyone who (1) is reasonably comfortable in some popular programming language(s) and (2) has gone through these exercises could/would share their take on how helpful/useful these are?

Context: I've been doing Java professionally for 10+ years, Python, JS a few years ago, C++ way earlier in my career (early 2000s).

While it's clear that AI coding assistants still have a long way to go in general, I wonder how yet another startup, presumably based on the same technology at the back, is going to differentiate itself in a material way?

There are only so many axes along which improvements can be made in this domain, aren't there? What are the bottlenecks that, if solved, will produce a true breakthrough, exactly?

Doesn't the current approach have an upper limit that's inherent in the whole architecture, nay, even the whole foundational theoretical aspect of it?

Would love to hear from anyone who has come across one AI coding assistant that's obviously head and shoulders above everything else. I've tried Copilot, CodeWhisperer, and Ghostwriter.

The biggest thing about the whole commute is the delayed negative impact to health in general.

This is of course worse in Asian cities with super congested traffic. When you spend 2-3 hours/day commuting, it becomes very hard to maintain a regular workout schedule.

A commute time of perhaps 20 minutes one way is manageable. Anything beyond that simply eats into your quality of life, really.

wish they had valued users above all else

My interaction with Google is mostly with GCP. It's amazing how they'd invite their customers to the super swanky Google Office, and did the office tours.

I think they were genuinely thinking that showing their customers all those luxurious excess would somehow... what? Make them more motivated to put their workload on GCP?

Throughout the tour, as they were telling me about the 5-star chefs who prepared breakfast for them, about all the fantastic food that were never more than X-feet away from any employee, about the stand-up comedians who came to entertain them every Friday at 4PM onwards...

The thought that kept coming to my mind was: "Oh! So this is how you're spending the millions we are spending on you".

The tour at the AWS office was the extreme opposite of that. At their comparatively stark office, they went out of their way to make you feel YOU are the special one, the customer.

Ask HN: I've never met someone who uses Mathematica, I imagine its users are even rarer outside the academic circles. I've met many who use Matlab, R, Python, Excel, etc.

If you're using it, what are you using it for exactly? In what way is it irreplaceable by other tools out there, if at all?

I'm grateful for my family, for my Mom, for the peace we're in. I'm grateful that I have the means to work out, to read books I want to read, and to rest when I need to. It's an incredible privilege. May you all be blessed abundantly.

I'm grateful for Hacker News. I'm not that vocal here, but I've lost count of the times HN has become my oasis of peace, no matter how fleetingly, in the periods of high pressure and stress in 2023.

Interesting. I had to make a conscious effort to go the other way around, i.e.: to talk more about me. I grew up reading too many books aimed at the extroverts among us ("There's a reason we have 1 mouth and 2 ears!"; "Silence is golden!").

It's hard to underestimate missed opportunities because a shy introvert (me back then) took and (mis)applied advice meant for extroverts who were already unable to stop talking about themselves. I became virtually invisible. Not good for my career, for my social life, or for my success with women.

I realized much, much later, that to advance in my career, to have a social standing within a group, to be accepted and to have my opinions valued, I HAD to speak up. I HAD to sometimes convey forcefully a personal point of view. That's what makes a person interesting. Nobody remembers a nobody who "listened to me all night long". That only works if you're already somebody that people wouldn't expect to listen to them all night long in the first place!

Sadly, very seldom this kind of advice comes with the correct nuances, in which situation it applies, etc.

I wonder how to tell whether one's reached that sweet spot. Is it when the lift hasn't increased for months?

And of course there's the variable of age as well.