Hacker News: GrumpyYoungMan

New comment by GrumpyYoungMan in "The quiet resurgence of RF engineering"

GrumpyYoungMan — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 21:46:05 +0000

In what way? RF test equipment is costly and so is building a home electronics lab.

New comment by GrumpyYoungMan in "The quiet resurgence of RF engineering"

GrumpyYoungMan — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 21:01:18 +0000

> "...stuck with hardware out of passion..."

At least you don't hate your job, I hope? The recent maturation of AI revealed how many people in software seemingly loathe their own profession.

New comment by GrumpyYoungMan in "Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI"

GrumpyYoungMan — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 22:11:55 +0000

> Fred Brooks "throw one away" philosophy

Everybody remembers that soundbite but nobody remembers that he changed his mind about it later and switched to advocating iterative refinement.

New comment by GrumpyYoungMan in "Ask HN: Why isn't there Just-in-Time hardware?"

GrumpyYoungMan — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 15:56:13 +0000

> "FPGAs reconfigured during program execution to speed up hot paths"

The IEEE conference on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (https://www.fccm.org/) is in its 34th year, to give you an idea of how old that idea is. The answer to your question is both 1 and 2 and also 3. that FPGAs have rather poor efficiency, both in terms of cost and performance, so it's not worthwhile outside of a few niches.

New comment by GrumpyYoungMan in "Kernighan on Programming"

GrumpyYoungMan — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 21:16:14 +0000

Developer testing is checking whether the code does what the developer themself thinks it should. QA testing is checking whether the code does what the customers / users / rest of the world thinks it should.

New comment by GrumpyYoungMan in "What Makes You Senior"

GrumpyYoungMan — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 17:18:26 +0000

My frequent "senior moments" are what make me senior. (ba-dum-tish)

New comment by GrumpyYoungMan in "Ask HN: What fiction books would you recommend for programmers?"

GrumpyYoungMan — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 01:06:21 +0000

Terry Pratchett's Going Postal seems particularly apropos these days as we have Reacher Gilts aplenty in tech news headlines.

Obscure and a bit dated but Bruce Betkhe's Head Crash is hilarious if you've been deeply immersed in the software industry.

New comment by GrumpyYoungMan in "The Manuscripts of Edsger W. Dijkstra"

GrumpyYoungMan — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 20:38:32 +0000

The problem with that quote is that all of us reading this are telescope operators, not astronomers. The quantity and quality of our telescope photos is what we are paid for so we have no choice but to know our chosen brand of telescope inside and out.

New comment by GrumpyYoungMan in "Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines?"

GrumpyYoungMan — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 19:15:57 +0000

The things you list illustrate @aplamers point that software "doesn't really kill people". If you asked the average person on the street, they might just barely remember the Boeing incidents and the rest they probably have never heard of. Even something as gruesome as the Therac-25 incident is probably unknown to most.

It's the rising tide of low-level everyday harm from software that is going to motivate the public to start coming after the software industry.

New comment by GrumpyYoungMan in "Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines?"

GrumpyYoungMan — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 19:12:59 +0000

> "How many centuries did it take for civil engineering, for example, to become the codified, standardized, and respected calling it is now?"

But the software industry is not starting from centuries ago. We have the benefit of modern education and literacy rates, instantaneous global communication, centuries of experience and data in other life and safety critical fields to draw on to understand how to establish a reasonable level of safety in the face of uncertainty, vast libraries of knowledge and data that can be called upon online, and nearly a century of increasing regulation and professionalization in those fields. Sorry but that doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

New comment by GrumpyYoungMan in "Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines?"

GrumpyYoungMan — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 15:58:14 +0000

Software "engineering" doesn't kill people instantly in a flashy way, sure, but it has become more like leaded gasoline, a widespread low-level harm whose effects are increasingly evident in hindsight. You pretty much can't go more than a couple of days without hearing about another massive consumer data compromise by hackers, CVE, major services outage, etc. At some point, there is going to be a software related incident that is bad enough that the public and government is going to demand accountability.

New comment by GrumpyYoungMan in "AI Broke Interviews"

GrumpyYoungMan — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 01:48:19 +0000

"Is the company consistently profitable or not?" and "Are revenue and profits growing over time, stable, or declining?" are very important questions to answer, particularly if stock grants are part of the compensation package.

For developers who work on products, getting a sense of whether the product of the team you'd be joining is a core part of the business versus speculative (i.e. stable vs likely to have layoffs) and how successful the product is in the marketplace (teams for products that are failing also are likely to be victims of layoffs) are also very important to understand.

New comment by GrumpyYoungMan in "Asked to do something illegal at work? Here's what these software engineers did"

GrumpyYoungMan — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 00:37:10 +0000

Casual of research shows that the ACM's Code of Ethics can be traced back to its Guidelines for Professional Conduct in Information Processing dating back to 1966 (https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics/1966-acm-code) and the IEEE's Code of Ethics can be traced back to a precursor organization's Code of Professional Conduct dating to 1912.

New comment by GrumpyYoungMan in "Testing is better than data structures and algorithms"

GrumpyYoungMan — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 22:08:06 +0000

TDD is a development methodology, not a testing methodology. The main thing it does is check whether the developer implemented what they thought they should be implementing, which is not necessarily what the spec actually says to implement or what the end user expects.

New comment by GrumpyYoungMan in "Ask HN: Would you rather have 20% more money or 20% more time"

GrumpyYoungMan — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 16:48:45 +0000

Early in my career, the raise and put it entirely towards retirement savings. Later in my career, the free time.

New comment by GrumpyYoungMan in "The Grug Brained Developer (2022)"

GrumpyYoungMan — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 03:24:16 +0000

Debuggers are great until you have to work in a context where you can't attach a debugger. Good old printf works in every context.

By all means, learn to use a debugger well but don't become overly dependent on them.

New comment by GrumpyYoungMan in ".localhost Domains"

GrumpyYoungMan — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 15:24:52 +0000

The *.home.arpa domain in RFC 8375 has been approved for local use since 2018, which is long enough ago that most hardware and software currently in use should be able to handle it.

New comment by GrumpyYoungMan in "The Pentium contains a complicated circuit to multiply by three"

GrumpyYoungMan — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 21:15:35 +0000

The fabs propped up the corpse of Moore's Law by throwing mountains of cash at expanding transistors into the third dimension: finFET, GAA, CFET, etc. That has kept the party going a little while longer than it would have lasted but it's a one-time deal since are no more dimensions to expand into.

New comment by GrumpyYoungMan in "Ask HN: Former devs who can't get a job, what did you end up doing for work?"

GrumpyYoungMan — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 17:51:13 +0000

The issue with scrum and agile is that it became a managerial and reporting process to force teams to hit a management imposed deadline instead of what it was intended to be: a tool for engineers to self-manage and self-evaluate their progress to provide a realistic completion date.

New comment by GrumpyYoungMan in "Computer Architecture, Fifth Edition: A Quantitative Approach (2011)"

GrumpyYoungMan — Sun, 08 Dec 2024 22:42:26 +0000

Vastly? I dunno about that. I was rather fond of Tanenbaum's Structured Computer Organization.