Hacker News: jayvanguard

New comment by jayvanguard in "We're not Platonists, we've just learned the bitter lesson"

jayvanguard — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 23:51:18 +0000

I agree that a lot of the AI risk pundits are either people with no real AI experience (or very outdated, resting-on-their-laurels experience) or if they do know AI, they probably know little about the complexities of running actual large scale, business or mission critical systems.

However, in their defense, the real question is whether those types of problems are something this new class of AI could potentially excel at. I've been an AI skeptic for decades, having had real world industry experience trying to get it to solve problems, and this is the first technological advance that has actually surprised me with its capabilities.

AI Risk still doesn't rank above many current, pressing global problems for me personally, but it also doesn't seem ridiculous anymore.

New comment by jayvanguard in "The unequal treatment of demographic groups by ChatGPT/OpenAI content moderation"

jayvanguard — Thu, 02 Feb 2023 17:51:54 +0000

Exactly. What's interesting as well is how much this initial point in time will perpetuate forward as future language models are built on the output of the current ones, dampening any potential shifting in the overton window. They may try to avoid ingesting their output (ChatGPT says it can detect use of itself), but as more independent models get developed, the detection will never be perfect and in fact may be impossible at some point.

New comment by jayvanguard in "SQLite-HTTP: A SQLite extension for making HTTP requests"

jayvanguard — Wed, 10 Aug 2022 20:50:49 +0000

Just because you can do it, doesn't mean you should do it.

New comment by jayvanguard in "Ask HN: Must Read from ACM Library?"

jayvanguard — Mon, 06 Apr 2020 16:56:31 +0000

Check out the ACM Tech Packs. They are curated lists of papers organized by topic.

https://techpack.acm.org/

New comment by jayvanguard in "Google Kills Cloud Print"

jayvanguard — Fri, 22 Nov 2019 16:29:40 +0000

I followed this link to a SlateStarCodex article on Google Correlate. At the top of the Google Correlate page was:

"Google Correlate will shut down on December 15th 2019 as a result of low usage. You can download your data under Manage my Correlate data in the top bar, or right from here"

Good timing! Get your correlations in while you can.

https://www.google.com/trends/correlate

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/16/google-correlate-does-...

New comment by jayvanguard in "Virtual Kubernetes"

jayvanguard — Sun, 14 Jul 2019 17:40:21 +0000

That was my question as well.

New comment by jayvanguard in "Solid Design Principles: The Guide to Becoming Better Developers"

jayvanguard — Thu, 27 Jun 2019 19:06:42 +0000

I think SOLID is appropriate for the public interface parts of your code but the internals should strive for YAGNI/KISS.

So the vast majority of your codebase should aim to minimize lines of code and abstraction. Of course there are exceptions - sometimes you really do need to encapsulate complex sub-systems with abstractions but you should have a clear justification.

New comment by jayvanguard in "Canada facing ‘brain drain’ as tech talent leaves for Silicon Valley"

jayvanguard — Fri, 04 May 2018 21:14:22 +0000

Vancouver has changed a lot in the past 5 years. There are now two tiers of tech pay: the smaller companies that pay from low to ok and then a handful of SV companies that have moved in and are paying top tier money.

The dollar numbers are almost on par with the top SV salaries, albeit not with the current exchange rate. That fluctuates though.

Amazon opening up a new HQ in Vancouver will just strengthen this. The downside is that right now it is just a half dozen or so companies paying in this top range.

New comment by jayvanguard in "Avoid Else, Return Early (2013)"

jayvanguard — Mon, 26 Mar 2018 15:05:49 +0000

I don't think you're in the minority. Whenever possible the happy path should be inside the if. The article seems to imply otherwise but on re-read I think he is just building the case for putting the simple, quick pre-condition type handling up front which generally removes the need for the if/then (which I agree with).

For complex methods with branching logic you want prominently displayed, you'd end up with:

def myfunction(args) {

  // check preconditions, return early

  if (x) {
    // happy path
  } else {
    // less happy path
  }

}

But if the else just contains a bunch of error handling you always have the option of wrapping it in a handler method and putting it near the top in a on-liner.

New comment by jayvanguard in "Canada's 'Great Trail' Is Finally Connected"

jayvanguard — Sat, 02 Sep 2017 15:53:27 +0000

Why did they change the name from the Trans Canada Trail? I liked it better.

New comment by jayvanguard in "Exa, a modern replacement for ls"

jayvanguard — Thu, 03 Aug 2017 23:35:16 +0000

Hah, interesting! Mine is writing a simple web server (sockets, IO, string handling) and an ultra-simple command line browser (args handling, 3rd party libs for URLs, HTML parsing, etc.)

New comment by jayvanguard in "The Facebook Algorithm Mom Problem"

jayvanguard — Wed, 12 Jul 2017 16:56:41 +0000

It's probably a core part of their scalability that they never have to produce a complete list of posts. Every fetch is on best effort basis within a small time constraint.

New comment by jayvanguard in "Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs"

jayvanguard — Thu, 15 Jun 2017 14:49:42 +0000

When you're working in a large company with many developers spaces make more sense. Large companies generally pay more.

In a perfect world you'd use tabs for semantic indentation and spaces for stylistic indentation but this is too hard to implement in 100+ person teams and also can't be automated via an IDE style sheet.

New comment by jayvanguard in "Modern Software Over-Engineering Mistakes"

jayvanguard — Sun, 16 Oct 2016 16:16:33 +0000

Good point, the code locality is very important for maintainability down the road. When a single logical unit of functionality is unnecessarily split up across a file or even worse split into multiple classes it makes it much harder to understand.

New comment by jayvanguard in "Project delays: why good software estimates are impossible (2015)"

jayvanguard — Sat, 15 Oct 2016 01:01:37 +0000

The SEI work has been around a long time and it has had very limited success outside of academic or very controlled settings. It had its heyday in the late 90s but never really caught on broadly because it is impractical to collect the level of detail necessary, with consistent teams, languages, environments, and practices in a fast moving computing environment.

New comment by jayvanguard in "On DRY and the cost of wrongful abstractions"

jayvanguard — Mon, 19 Sep 2016 00:59:25 +0000

This article needs to be shown to all upcoming architects, senior developers, and design minded engineers. Too often the balance between abstraction and specialization isn't thought about explicitly but rather dogmatic rules kick in.

New comment by jayvanguard in "What it feels like to be the last gen to remember life before the internet"

jayvanguard — Sun, 28 Aug 2016 18:40:37 +0000

I'd be interested to hear if he has also looked into any parallels with the pre- and post-telephone generation. I'd imagine that was a similar in many ways, particularly since public airplane transportation came of age in roughly the same era.

New comment by jayvanguard in "Programming Language Rankings: June 2016"

jayvanguard — Thu, 21 Jul 2016 14:39:26 +0000

I find TIOBE to be so far from reality I question why it exists and anyone continues to pay any attention to it. It still ranks Delphi higher than Objective-C. Assembly language above Visual Basic. Dart above Scala, Erlang, Haskell, and Bash.

New comment by jayvanguard in "Keep your identity small (2009)"

jayvanguard — Thu, 19 May 2016 22:30:31 +0000

Is he though? Questions on the most performant way to iterate over something rarely result in flame wars.

I believe you are thinking of people arguing over JS frameworks or whether JS sucks or not. Both are identity related.

When it comes down to arguing the specific mechanics of comparing how framework X uses MVC vs how framework Y uses it, you don't see so much conflict because it is expertise, not identity driven.

New comment by jayvanguard in "List of failed and over-budget custom software projects"

jayvanguard — Wed, 24 Feb 2016 15:57:50 +0000

I'm surprised the outsourcing companies aren't listed on this. They are often huge contributors to the overruns.