romankolpak

What’s the alternative? How do you solve the problem of not allowing children into online spaces where they shouldn’t be allowed in?

It's all relative. When I was 20, I'd consider myself old at 36. Now when I am 36, my definition of old has shifted and it's now somewhere past 50. I guess "old" for a person is just that person 10+ years older :)

Hire excellent programmers who spent their lifetime learning how to write good code and build systems, and then the code is easy. Hire some bad ones and watch them struggle and fail and learn why maybe coding is not that easy. AI doesn't change this, it just shifts failure modes a bit since the volume of code produced is now larger, and AI-enabled bad programmers are still bad.

I remember a tennis survey where something like 70% of respondents believed they could win a game against a Tennis pro player (I can't find the source anymore, but it was discussed on Andy Roddick's podcast). If you watch Roger Federer effortlessly and elegantly make beautiful shots, it's very easy to fall into this trap and think -- it must be so easy, right?? Are people falling into the same trap watching Claude Code regurgitate CRUD apps for them?

The scope and complexity of the change is crucial here. There is a sweet spot where spec-driven agent offers great value: the change is small and simple enough that you can describe it reliably with a spec (i.e. you have complete understanding how to do it), while implementing it yourself is a lot more work than writing the said spec plus reviewing and correcting the agent.

For me currently this sweet spot is TINY. It's so small that my usage of Claude Code has dropped to almost none. It's simply more practical to let myself have the agency and drive the development, while letting AI jump in and assist when needed.

Comes to germany, does not like it, makes a picture of a middle finger to Bundestag. This smells like ragebait low effort content I come to HN in order to avoid!

When I was younger I had a few different sources for finding music - a couple of friends who were really into music and I knew they were investing time and searching for it, so I always wanted to hear what they recommend, even if it didn’t match my taste. There was also a curated website and a forum dedicated to alternative genres, like hardcore or post rock and other “edgy” stuff, where I liked to hang out. I knew this is where people really passionate about music gathered and it was interesting to see what they like and what they recommend. It was always driven my community, by people I liked or loved, or trusted their judgement.

Needless to say you get none of that with algorithms. Spotify does recommend some good songs for me regularly and I often add them to “liked” but it’s much lonelier now. Music used to connect me with other people and now it’s just me and my Spotify.

How do you make money by developing a web browser? You build this immensely complex piece of software and then have no choice but to distribute it for free. It seems like with the current browser landscape the only viable business model for companies building browsers is to make your money elsewhere while investing some of it into the browser development.

because of MCP and langchain?

i think we need to come to terms with the reality of coding challenges in the interview process. i know i hate them personally, and dread having to interview again because i'll need to open leet code and remember how to do stupid shit like DFS on a graph, or manipulating linked lists. at the same time, a job opening for a SWE is opening soon in our company and we'll have to somehow filter people, and the job market is such that we'll get MANY applicants, most of them probably wrong for the job. i will probably end up giving them coding challenges (not necessarily leetcode, but some coding challenge for sure), because i need a way to grasp their problem solving and coding skills. i don't know a better way to do it in a condensed time frame of a 1 hour zoom call.

The stories of geniuses suffering from depression and other mental illnesses sure make remarkably interesting reads. It’s a pity he didn’t get psychiatric help, this could have been a boring story of an aging scientist taking care of his plants.

I’m sorry if this is a stupid question, but I want to ask it because I see the same sentiment across HN and other forums and I’m legitimately confused.

If we don’t hijack privacy in messaging, how do we fight crime happening on a message platform? If government doesn’t have access to message contents, what’s stopping criminals from using the platform and never get tracked down? Or proven guilty, since all the proof is safely encrypted? Aren’t we hurting ourselves by being so obsessed with privacy? Again, I apologize for ignorance and am curious

this resonates strongly with me because i just had to nuke an abstraction invented by my colleague, which solved a small DRY issue but introduced a big change difficulty issue.

All we had to do is do some repetitive work for values of a dictionary (stringify and lowercase). We ended up having an abstraction of a dictionary with smart value conversion behaviours, which brought pain every time the business wanted some added custom behaviour (e.g. don't lowercase this property, make human-readable that property, etc). Younger me would keep piling up complexity onto this abstraction. Modern me just duplicated some `str(..).lower()` calls, removed the whole thing and went home happy.

i get the benefit of offloading the admin costs onto your consumers, but, as always, the devil is in the details. i've met both cases where a library should've been a service, and vice versa. this advice is way too broad and abstract to be practical

I'm at my best at writing (code, text, everything) when I'm working remotely. The option to sit down and focus in the apartment all to myself has done wonders to my code and ability to solve problems.

However I'm still a bit unsure how this affects my career. I feel like conventional corporate success depends more on your relationships and politics than the quality of your code and writing. It's really hard to build quality relationships and see the politics and status games people are playing in my company by being a remote worker. I met most of my current network by sitting in the same office with them.

I wonder if this is everyone else's experience too, or maybe I'm just missing something obvious, like scheduling more face-to-face meetings with people.

"too fucked" sounds a bit too extreme, but I agree. it's an interesting problem that we need to learn how to solve - what do you do with people whose jobs have been automated? capitalists won't do shit, so governments need to step in and make sure the portion of the profit from automation progress gets invested into the professional transition assistance programs to those who need it.

this generalizes more broadly in fact and applies to not just parsing and validating data. very often you want to reject all problematic states so you can conveniently code the happy path assuming all preconditions are met (inputs are correct, permissions are granted, etc) using meaningful data structures free from the messiness of the real world.

it's often a matter of experience to get this nuance of programming. you just learn with time that it's very inconvenient to test for emptiness multiple levels deep in the callstack again and again and you go "why can't i just assume good data here?". and then you figure out a way to write the code so you can.

if you worked all day but the output of that work is nothing, you can talk about whether it was work or not all day, but that's not what matters.

Use your complexity budget wisely

Well said

I don't think the industry was supposed to create this magic environment where everybody gets to be a hacker and have good, artistic fun programming. Unfortunately it seems like integrating with as many ready-made solutions as possible is a pragmatic business decision. It doesn't come free, obviously, since we give up a lot of control to vendors and sometimes judging about system performance is hard because of how many things outside of our control are there, and programmers don't get enjoy themselves at all, but such are the economics of this market.

I hate it. But I also don't know if we can do anything about it. Like, for example the company I work at heavily uses AWS Lambda to build mobile app backends and, as a backend developer there, I feel very uneasy about how little I understand and control the system running our critical business logic. But it works well enough and the money savings are amazing when compared to using dedicated hardware, so I can't really make a good point why we shouldn't be doing it.

Sometimes I wonder if other professions get to have fun. Maybe I should explore design to scratch that artistic itch somehow.

I like your take and it resonates a lot with me. But companies splitting up to remove the need of middle management - has that ever happened to anyone? A more realistic advice is probably to get a different job once you see managers start playing their status games and climbing their career ladders while ignoring often uncomfortable facts.

this is insanity

Related personal anecdote:

I am experimenting with Tinder subscription at the moment, and it feels incredibly exploitative. When you make a profile, matches are frequent and you can tell that you show up for people. However it gradually falls down with time, and the only predictable and obvious way to get back up is to pay for Boosts and/or Priority Likes.

Right now my 6-month old profile gets ZERO likes outside of the time it's Boosted ($3 a pop or something). I get plenty once I'm boosted, so the profile attractiveness doesn't seem to be a factor.

It feels like the app's algorithms are rigged to gradually push you towards paid subscription options. There must be a huge invisible market of Tinder whales given how exploitative it is, gambling addiction, loneliness, and desperation for dates are correlated traits and I would absolutely bet on Tinder exploiting this heavily.

Larger and more well-known companies do leet-code style programming challenges. I recently interviewed for a job in a ride hailing app company and they directly recommended practicing leetcode problems, even sent me examples of leetcode problems to practice solving. My sample is not big (it's 2 companies I iterviewed with recently), but it definitely feels like the industry is converging on this practice of testing leetcode-style problem solving in interviews. Community even built "workout plans" like this: https://www.grind75.com/

I'm 11 years into the profession. Solving leetcode is somewhat different from the problems I solve at work, so I struggled at first and had to practice, and practice a lot. I have yet to find out how useful this is outside of job interviews, but my brain started to forget some topics from CS after doing so much web stuff and it was a good way to remember these and practice problem solving.

I have experienced this first hand, so this article resonates a lot with me.

I worked with a manager who prioritized work which was easily measurable, so he could report the good numbers to leadership and get career points out of this. Unfortunately the project we took on was a demanding and technically challenging problem, and in almost a year of work of a team of engineers we made barely any real progress or made any actual difference, but the numbers were great and people were satisfied during presentations. I ended up feeling completely disconnected from my job and losing all motivation to work there.

How would quantitative easing affect the next crash? It seems like a thing that distinguishes this time from all other ones. Governments have more control over the economy with QE: they can inject liquidity into markets and boost spending whenever this is needed, so economy seems less likely spin out of control during a crash.

Did we learn how to tame and limit the blast radius of crashes or am I misunderstanding QE?

That seems utopian. Norway is among the happiest nations in the world, yet a guy once decided it’s a good idea to go to an island fully armed and kill a bunch of teenagers

Daily standups while being mostly useless on the surface, have an implicit value of enforcing a daily face to face communication between team members who work remotely. In remote teams I often find that people who don't interact face to face frequently, but work on the same part of the system, are more likely to run into communication problems down the road - doing duplicate work, passive aggressive attitudes in PR reviews, poor communication in general which impacts the system in a very direct and negative way.

Here's a thing -- people rarely become friends over email or slack conversations, unfortunately. And a team of friendly people who trust each other and communicate efficiently (e.g. feel absolutely comfortable setting up a quick video conferencing call to talk about an issue) is a lot more valuable than a team of people who rarely talk to each other and mostly prefer texting over anything else.

Those are my findings when working with remote teams only. I don't think standups are necessary for colocated teams, which can sync at will anytime they want.

Replace Poland with Ukraine and you’ve described my situation as well, with uncanny precision.

I’m thinking about continuing my education in US after a 6 years break from academia. I’m a bit anxious no one will want me, a 28 y/o guy with a degree from an unknown university. I also find myself leaning towards journalism and social studies, which doesn’t play nice with my CS degree.

Anyway, I wish you luck in any direction you end up taking.

You should take a look at DataRobot, it does most of the things you've listed.

this comment is just beautiful