Hacker News: mvaliente2001

New comment by mvaliente2001 in "We might all be AI engineers now"

mvaliente2001 — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 20:57:03 +0000

One factor in favor of the use of LLM as a learning tool is the poor quality of documentation. It seems we've forgotten how to write usable explanations that help readers to build a coherent model of the topic at hand.

New comment by mvaliente2001 in "Tensors, the geometric tool that solved Einstein's relativity problem"

mvaliente2001 — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 22:05:06 +0000

The idea of tensors as "a matrix of numbers" or the example of a cube with vectors on every face never clicked for me. It was this (NASA paper)[https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/Numbers/Math/documents/Ten...] what finally brought me clarity. The main idea, as others already commented, is that a tensor or rank n is a function that can be applied up to n vector, reducing its rank by one for each vector it consumes.

New comment by mvaliente2001 in "A mathematician who finds poetry in math and math in poetry"

mvaliente2001 — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 19:35:13 +0000

Math and Physics equations are full of beauty capable of transmit the same joy as poetry. The main difficulty is that they require more study.

For me, looking at Maxwell equations is a source of pleasure. Also, after improving my understanding of the Laplacian, I came to appreciate the heat equation.

New comment by mvaliente2001 in "In loving memory of square checkbox"

mvaliente2001 — Sun, 28 Jan 2024 19:30:26 +0000

My same thoughts. The inventors of that revolutionary toggle button should all be tied to the South side of an ass walking towards the North.

New comment by mvaliente2001 in "DSLs are a waste of time"

mvaliente2001 — Mon, 04 Sep 2023 18:28:17 +0000

The alternative, using general programming languages, is a terrible idea. The last thing I want to do when dealing with a domain specific configuration is trying to figure the meaning out of hundreds of poorly written, badly abstracted, totally undocumented, lines of code.

New comment by mvaliente2001 in "SQLedge: Replicate Postgres to SQLite on the Edge"

mvaliente2001 — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 19:53:27 +0000

For one moment I thought this was the equivalent of SQLite for EdgeDB and the idea made me very happy.

New comment by mvaliente2001 in "The Dome: A simple violation of determinism in Newtonian mechanics (2005)"

mvaliente2001 — Sat, 05 Aug 2023 17:29:08 +0000

I think parent comment (by @sebzim4500) is the clearest most concise summary of the argument stated in the article.

New comment by mvaliente2001 in "Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?"

mvaliente2001 — Sat, 25 Mar 2023 20:04:50 +0000

Another evidence is to ask GPT for a link with a reference for the answers it gives: it'll generate them instead of copying them.

New comment by mvaliente2001 in "Ask HN: Do you use RSS? If yes, which reader do you use?"

mvaliente2001 — Wed, 08 Mar 2023 21:25:20 +0000

https://theoldreader.com/

New comment by mvaliente2001 in "Things I Learned from My 2 Year Old Baby Girl"

mvaliente2001 — Sun, 15 Jan 2023 18:12:21 +0000

I think we never get over animism completely, like this old Ikea Lamp ad shows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBqhIVyfsRg

New comment by mvaliente2001 in "Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?"

mvaliente2001 — Sat, 14 Jan 2023 13:12:32 +0000

May I suggest you to take another look at refactoring? I think that if you love unit testing and debugging, you probably would love refactoring too. I like that I don't have to worry to find the perfect name for my functions and methods _on the first try_, and that I can focus in making code that works first, and after that I can worry in making clearer and more understandable.

Now, to be fair, I also like the common practices in the industry too. Scrum or kanban, ticket creation and estimation, and daily stand ups. When you're part of a team you need a lot of communication and effort to keep everybody working in the same direction. Besides, managers want to be kept informed. The how is not as important as the why.

New comment by mvaliente2001 in "The cloudy layers of modern-day programming"

mvaliente2001 — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 21:24:31 +0000

Although I sympathise with the sentiment, that's just half of the story. Today, I can deploy a high available cluster in minutes using any cloud technology + kubernetes and my favourite web framework. True, I need to learn half dozen of frameworks, and _it feels_ like I'm not working in the core problem, but had I tried to implement an equivalent system without those tools would have taken me months, and I would end with an ad-hoc half tested non-reusable mess.

New comment by mvaliente2001 in "Laika, the space dog, and her one-way trip into orbit (2018)"

mvaliente2001 — Fri, 11 Nov 2022 20:55:12 +0000

The best part is the last lines:

If we pay attention to the legend then we'll have to accept that in Earth is one less dog and in heavens one more star

New comment by mvaliente2001 in "Ask HN: How did you learn to draw diagrams?"

mvaliente2001 — Thu, 27 Oct 2022 16:57:24 +0000

(The C4 model)[https://c4model.com/] is a nice way to capture (IMO) the most important characteristics of a system, and you can learn it in half an hour. Optionally, you can add state transition and sequence diagrams for selected parts of the code.

One important thing to take in consideration is that diagrams are not blueprints. What they don't represent is as important as what they include. That's why I like C4: it's limited to answer an important but small subset of questions about your system.

New comment by mvaliente2001 in "Asdf – language tool version manager"

mvaliente2001 — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 18:41:32 +0000

asdf is very nice, with the exception of its interface. You have `asdf `, `asdf ` for others. It's actively hostile for memorisation.

New comment by mvaliente2001 in "Why adults still dream about school"

mvaliente2001 — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 05:55:16 +0000

Mine was that I had forgotten to take a class or that the records were lost and I had to redo the last years of college. It was a nightmare I had even a decade after getting my degree.

New comment by mvaliente2001 in "Don't compare yourself to other entrepreneurs"

mvaliente2001 — Tue, 13 Sep 2022 19:28:51 +0000

I've been reading The Courage To Be Disliked” about Adler's theories, and it's very interesting. According to him, we all have feelings of inferiority. It's normal and could even be healthy, it'll help us to improve. What's negative is the inferiority complex: when we internalise our feelings of inferiority and use them as an excuse to avoid changing.

The idea of feelings of inferiority being a normal part of living is freeing, it helps to accept them.

New comment by mvaliente2001 in "Infrastructure as Software"

mvaliente2001 — Sat, 03 Sep 2022 20:01:02 +0000

GitOps not necessarily means developers should define every aspect of it. In my current work, SRE uses gitops and they are the main contributors to most repositories. But things like creating an AWS ECR repo for a new project or creating k8s resources is happily delegated to developers.

New comment by mvaliente2001 in "Ask HN: Have You Left Kubernetes?"

mvaliente2001 — Mon, 01 Aug 2022 16:59:36 +0000

No. In my current company k8s + helm + istio + argocd + good support from SRE/infra team has made things pleasurable. Seniors introduce the complexities of the system to juniors in a controlled paced way. One thing I would change is to replace terraform for crossplane.

New comment by mvaliente2001 in "Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)"

mvaliente2001 — Fri, 29 Jul 2022 17:16:46 +0000

https://www.libelektra.org/home is an attempt to bring a registry to linux. It doesn't have the problems of its windows equivalent. I wish this project was more popular.