Hacker News: spawarotti

New comment by spawarotti in "We should revisit literate programming in the agent era"

spawarotti — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 22:15:53 +0000

There is at least one startup doing it already (I'm not affiliated with it in any way): https://promptless.ai/

New comment by spawarotti in "Why aren't smart people happier?"

spawarotti — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 00:19:11 +0000

Smartness and happiness are like test coverage.

If you are not smart or have no tests, you will not be happy.

If you are smart or have high test coverage, you may or may not be happy.

New comment by spawarotti in "Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available"

spawarotti — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 21:54:23 +0000

There are two types of people: those who do backups, and those who will do backups.

New comment by spawarotti in "AGENTS.md – Open format for guiding coding agents"

spawarotti — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 00:52:22 +0000

At this point AGENTS.md is a README.md with enough hype behind it to actually motivate people to populate it with contents. People were too lazy to write docs for other people, but funnily enough are ok with doing it for robots.

This situation reminds me a bit of ergonomic handles design. Designed for a few people, preferred by everyone.

New comment by spawarotti in "Historical Tech Tree"

spawarotti — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 19:53:14 +0000

And a related page, in the other direction: https://www.futuretimeline.net/

New comment by spawarotti in "Debugging: Indispensable rules for finding even the most elusive problems (2004)"

spawarotti — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 12:44:41 +0000

Very good online course on debugging: Software Debugging on Udacity by Andreas Zeller

https://www.udacity.com/course/debugging--cs259

New comment by spawarotti in "Database mocks are not worth it"

spawarotti — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 01:17:44 +0000

Great advice. I follow it in my coding efforts and it has never failed me. Great book about this: Unit Testing Principles, Practices, and Patterns, Vladimir Khorikov, 2020

https://www.manning.com/books/unit-testing

New comment by spawarotti in "Serialization for C# Games"

spawarotti — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 06:23:26 +0000

How do you deal with serializing properties "by reference"? E.g., if 3 objects reference object "Foo", then Foo is serialized once instead of being duplicated in the json 3 times?

New comment by spawarotti in ".NET Smart Components"

spawarotti — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 04:53:42 +0000

I am especially excited for the Smart ComboBox:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-dotnet-sma...

In general, I see the idea of semantic matching instead of textual matching as one of the great, pragmatic applications of the current technology.

Somewhat related fun application of this concept is this: https://neal.fun/infinite-craft/ (the combination outputs are generated by LLMs)

New comment by spawarotti in "More than 50,000 Americans died by suicide in 2023–more than any year on record"

spawarotti — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 23:35:52 +0000

Jake, I just read the blog post you shared. I loved it. The message and the writing style.

New comment by spawarotti in "The "End of Programming" will look a lot like programming (2023)"

spawarotti — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 07:25:12 +0000

Currently some programmers, and with time more, have to write, integrate and debug LLMs, hence for the programming to end, other LLMs would have to be able to do so, too. LLMs successfully modifying other LLMs is, like, singularity. In other words, the moment programming ends is the same moment we all are going to die.

New comment by spawarotti in "TypeSpec: A new API definition language from Microsoft"

spawarotti — Sat, 20 Jan 2024 01:22:04 +0000

From the page:

Describe your data up front and generate schemas, API specifications, client / server code, docs, and more.

With TypeSpec, remove the handwritten files that slow you down, and generate standards-compliant API schemas in seconds.

TypeSpec: A new API definition language from Microsoft

spawarotti — Sat, 20 Jan 2024 01:22:04 +0000

Article URL: https://typespec.io/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39063671

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

New comment by spawarotti in "The Configuration Complexity Clock (2012)"

spawarotti — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 22:42:08 +0000

At a first glance this looks to me to be the same concept as "The Heptagon of Configuration":

https://matt-rickard.com/heptagon-of-configuration

New comment by spawarotti in "Everything that uses configuration files should report where they're located"

spawarotti — Sun, 25 Jun 2023 17:37:26 +0000

Truer words have never been spoken.

Microsoft IntelliTest (formerly Pex) [1] is internally using Z3 constraint solver that traces program data and control flow graph well enough to be able to generate desired values to reach given statement of code. It can even run the program to figure out runtime values. Hence the technique is called Dynamic Symbolic Execution [3]. We have technology for this, just not yet applied correctly.

I would also like to be able to point at any function in my IDE and ask it:

- "Can you show me the usual runtime input/output pairs for this function?"

- "Can you show me the preconditions and postconditions this function obeys?"

There is plenty of research prototypes doing it (Whyline [4], Daikon [5], ...) but sadly, not a tool usable for the daily grind.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/test/intellit...

[2] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-38916-0_...

[3] https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2094081

[4] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~NatProg/whyline.html

[5] https://plse.cs.washington.edu/daikon/

New comment by spawarotti in "Incompetent but Nice"

spawarotti — Wed, 29 Mar 2023 22:22:40 +0000

> but what these people often need is someone to sit with them for a significant amount of time and demonstrate how one breaks a problem down, builds small pieces that demonstrate functionality and then put those pieces together into a solution.

And what if this is done repeatedly for the junior engineer, and yet any initiative they show after that is still negligible?

New comment by spawarotti in "Your "simulation" might not need state"

spawarotti — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 11:49:49 +0000

Thx, nice explanation. I think possibly Mercurial actually stores only the diffs, but I am not sure.

New comment by spawarotti in "Your "simulation" might not need state"

spawarotti — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 10:55:13 +0000

One generalization of this concept I see is: Instead of having a sequence of successive states, you only need the initial state and a function telling you how to compute the next state from previous one.

You can also see a connection to a version control system like Git. Instead of keeping snapshots of all the contents of the repository after each commit, one can keep only the initial repository state and changes in each commit. Then to get to N-th state you say "Apply first N commits to the initial state".

In the bouncing DVD logo example the "function to compute next state" or "commit contents" is just easy and regular, to the point of being expressible via simple math functions.

This is also known as Event Sourcing.

New comment by spawarotti in "Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time"

spawarotti — Thu, 05 Jan 2023 13:25:19 +0000

That's what I was thinking, too. Perhaps we already know majority of what there is to know, when it comes to fundamental concepts? Probably plenty of work left in improving our tools and engineering solutions, like machine learning-based software, as well as in understanding the intricates of biology. Maybe mathematics, too. Maybe improvements in these will cause another golden age of discovery. Like, understanding biology enough to gain significantly extended lifespan, which means much more expertise can be built by one individual.

New comment by spawarotti in "ChatBCG: Generative AI For Slides"

spawarotti — Thu, 29 Dec 2022 00:26:22 +0000

According to [0] the toll of civilian deaths is 9% not ~90%:

> The 542 drone strikes that Obama authorized killed an estimated 3,797 people, including 324 civilians.