Hacker News: mukunda_johnson

New comment by mukunda_johnson in "Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it"

mukunda_johnson — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 14:05:53 +0000

Honestly we are headed towards a disturbing height of inefficiency in software. Look at software today, 1000x less efficient than what we had in the 90s. Do businesses care? No, they focus on value. The average user is too stupid to care, even though all their RAM is being sucked up and their computer feels like shit.

The only thing that's keeping us from that hell is the "correct" part. The code is not going to be properly tested or consistent, making it impractical for anything substantial right now.

New comment by mukunda_johnson in "CSS Custom Functions are coming"

mukunda_johnson — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 03:09:46 +0000

I don't know how the web does it. There are so many cool things being added. How do they keep the spec manageable? What if someone wanted to build a compliant web browser from the ground up?

New comment by mukunda_johnson in "It's still worth blogging in the age of AI"

mukunda_johnson — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 02:05:18 +0000

There was a good reminder in the Hanselminutes interview with Shaundai Person about blogging for yourself. It was a while since I listened so I'm fuzzy on the details - all I remember is that I enjoyed the interview and there was some relevance to this topic.

Also, blogs are no doubt a major source of AI training, so maybe more worth than before.

New comment by mukunda_johnson in "TinyCompiler: A compiler in a week-end"

mukunda_johnson — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 01:15:19 +0000

Pretty neat. I would have expected it to take a bit longer, but I suppose the optimizing step is the real magic in a compiler.

New comment by mukunda_johnson in "One year after switching from Java to Go"

mukunda_johnson — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 03:15:06 +0000

I prefer stack traces in errors. It's gives so much more automatically so you don't have to worry about manual annotation. Stack traces and debug logs are the way to go. I like to use panics for exceptional conditions just for the convenient escape with the stack trace.

New comment by mukunda_johnson in "How about trailing commas in SQL?"

mukunda_johnson — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 15:00:34 +0000

No doubt the most errors in my SQL syntax when writing migrations is the extra comma.

New comment by mukunda_johnson in "Meta’s Hyperscale Infrastructure: Overview and Insights"

mukunda_johnson — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 09:17:34 +0000

I think most of those are Instagram shoving it in your face. Yeah I'm a "Threads user", but only because of the inline feed in Instagram. I'm annoyed when there is a notification blip but it turns out to be Threads spam.

New comment by mukunda_johnson in "We are destroying software"

mukunda_johnson — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 15:19:34 +0000

the shitstorms usually have a community behind it. Even if it sucks, it's supported and will be maintained to a point of it "working." If someone writes their own thing, chances are they won't go the extra mile and build a community for it. Then, when it comes to maintaining it later, it might grow untenable, especially if the original "tinkerer" has moved on.

New comment by mukunda_johnson in "Context should go away for Go 2 (2017)"

mukunda_johnson — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 09:41:41 +0000

> It’s very similar to thread-local storage. We know how bad of an idea thread-local storage is. Non-flexible, complicates usage, composition, testing.

I kind of do wish we had goroutine local storage though :) Passing down the context of the request everywhere is ugly.

New comment by mukunda_johnson in "Please don't force dark mode"

mukunda_johnson — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 22:31:38 +0000

I prefer light mode for most things, but use dark mode anyway to save battery on an OLED Screen :)

New comment by mukunda_johnson in "Google is making AI in Gmail and Docs free, but raising the price of Workspace"

mukunda_johnson — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 05:53:35 +0000

I don't think so. If you find otherwise (without any stupid MX/forwarding magic), let me know! Silly that the price keeps going up when I'm basically only using their spam filter.

No idea about Youtube accounts.

New comment by mukunda_johnson in "I've acquired a new superpower"

mukunda_johnson — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 03:49:19 +0000

Those kinds of puzzles are part of the CCAT test (annoying test for "cognitive aptitude") and I used this trick.

New comment by mukunda_johnson in "DOOM CAPTCHA"

mukunda_johnson — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 01:29:36 +0000

In Doom, < and > are strafe, and it works here too.

New comment by mukunda_johnson in "Build a working game of Tetris in Conway's Game of Life (2014)"

mukunda_johnson — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 15:07:11 +0000

TIL that Conway's game is turing complete. Wow.

New comment by mukunda_johnson in "Translating 10M lines of Java to Kotlin"

mukunda_johnson — Sun, 22 Dec 2024 00:24:41 +0000

Wait a minute, this isn't an AI article...

New comment by mukunda_johnson in "OpenAI O3 breakthrough high score on ARC-AGI-PUB"

mukunda_johnson — Sat, 21 Dec 2024 00:24:30 +0000

Deciphering patterns in natural language is more complex than these puzzles. If you train your AI to solve these puzzles, we end up in the same spot. The difficulty of solving would be with creating training data for a foreign medium. The "tokens" are the grids and squares instead of words (for words, we have the internet of words, solving that).

If we're inferring the answers of the block patterns from minimal or no additional training, it's very impressive, but how much time have they had to work on O3 after sharing puzzle data with O1? Seems there's some room for questionable antics!

New comment by mukunda_johnson in "OpenAI O3 breakthrough high score on ARC-AGI-PUB"

mukunda_johnson — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 23:59:16 +0000

Honestly I'm concerned how hacked up o3 is to secure a high benchmark score.

New comment by mukunda_johnson in "OpenAI O3 breakthrough high score on ARC-AGI-PUB"

mukunda_johnson — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 23:58:01 +0000

I always smell foul play from Sam. I'd bet they are doing something silly to inflate the benchmark score. Not saying they are, but Sam is the type of guy to put a literal dumb human in the API loop and score "just as high as a human would."

New comment by mukunda_johnson in "My favourite colour is Chuck Norris red"

mukunda_johnson — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 06:28:18 +0000

I'm surprised this is well defined behavior.

New comment by mukunda_johnson in "How we centralized and structured error handling in Golang"

mukunda_johnson — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 04:30:22 +0000

I usually use Echo which does have an error to return from handlers, but I don't think it's necessarily the wrong thing unless you're writing a library. I used to avoid panics with the same mindset that they aren't supposed to be used like exceptions, but I've found that panics are a clean way to handle a bulk of error cases that are "log and retreat", centralizing the process with some syntactic sugar to not have to check err != nil everywhere. More of my thoughts here if any are curious: https://blog.mukunda.com/cat/2022/dont-be-afraid-to-panic.tx...

I think one thing that could help if the codebase wants to avoid regular panics is more syntactic sugar to help error bubbling, like Rust has.