Sign up for financial anything, they always ask you, which company you're with? What's your title? What's the range of your income?

I don't know if this is the case in the US, but in my country, I couldn't even open a brokerage account because the automated form required an office job. Entering freelancing or anything of some sort will get auto-rejected.

So it is in your face, all the time. And actually at that time I was fortunate enough not to have to worry about bills etc.

Fast forward 30 years later, I thought those days were gone forever. I'd accepted that I'd never experienced that kind of obsession again. Maybe because I got older. Maybe those feelings were something exclusively for the young. Maybe because my energy wasn't what it used to be. Yada yada, 1000s of reasons.

I was so shocked when I found out that I could experience that feeling again with Claude Code and Codex. I guess it was like experiencing your first love all over again? I slept late, I woke up early, I couldn't wait to go back to my Codex and Claude. It was to the point I created an orchestrator agent so I could continue chatting with my containerized agents via Telegram.

"What a time to be alive" <-- a trite, meaningless saying, that was infused by real meaning, by some basic maths that run really, really, really fast, on really, really expensive hardware. How about that!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47118409

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Probably the most unique feature is that the language supports spaces in identifiers. So you'd have variables like "Option Portfolio Risk" or functions like "Calculate Estimated PnL". Visually obviously different from Python, but it gave me Pythonic vibes.

It's also nice that it supports preconditions, so you can specify the valid range of arguments etc. It has some kind of OOP support but tbh it felt bolted on (understandably).

But the most value adding, IMHO, is the DevEx and deep integration with SecDb. Say what you want about the DOS-like IDE and the old (20+ years old for sure, maybe 30+) language, but you can deploy your code SO easily into production, with guardrails in place.

Out of curiosity, I implemented a toy language (thanks to Robert Nystrom's Crafting Interpreters) that supports spaces in identifiers (https://github.com/rayfdj/gaul-lang) as well. Makes for an interesting weekend coding project, and it helps me understand more the tradeoffs that Slang designers must have gone through.

virtualenv, venv, pyenv, pipenv... I think at one point the recommended option changed because it was integrated into Python, but I can't even remember which is which anymore.

Such a pleasure to finally have just one, for maybe... ~99% of my needs.

The fun / creative part for me is not googling “how to slurp the contents of a file into a string” or “the exact syntax for marking some functions as unit tests” or “the correct order of symbols to specify generic type param”

It’s not “the correct html / css syntax for this basic gui I want to make”

It’s not “how to achieve the thing I’ve done 10 thousand times in other languages/frameworks, but for this language/framework”

It’s figuring the core logic out, building the thing while skipping the boring stuff, playing with abstractions that scratch my itch.

From this pov, AI is the best thing that has happened to my weekend coding. I code recreationally way more than before. Before AI, I would try a new language or framework, and I’d give up halfway because re-figuring out basic stuff for the umpteenth time is boring, it’s not fun at all. Now AI lets me skip those boring parts.

Once you've settled down on a few well-known paths of action, wouldn't you want to freeze those paths and make it 100% predictable, for the most part?

I get that sometimes with human drivers, when I'm lucky, I get someone who goes above and beyond, someone who's fantastic to talk to along the way, and so on.

But if I can trade all that with a guarantee that there's a consistent, predictable floor to my worst experience, I'll take it in a heartbeat.

At the end of it, I take a ride to get from point A to point B. I'd rather have a machine does it for me very efficiently, without all the messy human element, with the ups and the downs, because it's the downs that ruin my day.

Quote: Be Proactive is about taking responsibility for your life. Proactive people recognize that they are “response-able.” They don’t blame circumstances, conditions, or conditioning for their behavior. They know they can choose their behavior.

While it may be common sense/doh-so-obvious today, this was such a mind-blowing reframe for the teenage me back then, and it shaped me immeasurably as a person for the better, for the 30+ years that follow.

In my conversation with friends, business partners, vendors, ex-colleagues, I have never heard a single successful application of GenAI beyond the gimmicky ones.

If you've seen at least one, can you share how it's used? I'm truly curious. I still can't convince myself that this is more than a bubble.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40640832

Points: 12

# Comments: 14

On the other hand, with the toughening of the job market, companies are selecting by degrees and pedigrees more than ever. The last company I worked for is currently doing this exactly, only looking at applications from people graduating from select universities.

So far it's working for them. As the job market gets worse, I think this trend of stronger emphasis on degrees and pedigrees will only get stronger.

Of course at the individual level, there are always exceptional individuals. But by definition, they are few and far between. It's not like going to school precludes you from learning other things and being flexible, creative, with burning passion for learning, etc. I would still encourage my kids to finish school and aim to get into a good university, I think.