Hacker News: wduquette

New comment by wduquette in "WordPress 7.0"

wduquette — Wed, 20 May 2026 21:22:40 +0000

I've been a WordPress user for years. I don't want integrated AI. Sure hope I'll be able to ignore it.

New comment by wduquette in "The Mercury logic programming system"

wduquette — Wed, 20 May 2026 15:04:52 +0000

You say “dead”, I say “stable”. Not everyone wants to base their work on a moving target.

New comment by wduquette in "Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career"

wduquette — Mon, 11 May 2026 19:36:05 +0000

"You can! You just might not be able to earn a salary doing so, for the same reason that there aren’t many jobs out there for carpenters who refuse to use power tools."

I've long regarded myself as more a master craftsman than an engineer, and I've had the pleasure of working on one-of-a-kind or first-of-a-kind things. Perhaps fortunately I'm near retirement. But I genuinely enjoy the coding: it's how I engage with the problem and learn to understand it. It's also how I ensure that I'll be able to read the code and find things in the code base when I come back to it years later. Last thing I want to do is spend my days overseeing someone (or something) else's code. If I wanted to be a manager of programmers I could have done that years ago.

New comment by wduquette in "The Adventure Family Tree (2024)"

wduquette — Mon, 11 May 2026 19:29:08 +0000

Yes, the Volcano View. We planned to add a new area just past it, but as I say we ran out of memory.

I've no idea where the version we started with would fall in the family tree, but this would have been ~1979, and the OS was HT-11, Heathkit's version of RT-11 for their H11 computer kit. So far as I know there was nothing special about it, except that it had been ported to RT-11 on the PDP-11.

New comment by wduquette in "The Adventure Family Tree (2024)"

wduquette — Mon, 11 May 2026 16:48:03 +0000

We had a copy of the Fortran source for the PDP-11 when I was a teenager. My buddy and I managed to add a room: in the first room of the Maze of Twisty Little Passages All The Same, if you gave the command "out" (as one tried), you discovered that you were "Nowhere". "There is nothing in all directions." You could then enter "in" to go back to the Maze, or "get nothing" to add "nothing" to your inventory.

There was a place in another room where your way was blocked by lava; our plan was to let you drop the "nothing" on the lava, and proceed, but we had run out of memory. (28K max!)

New comment by wduquette in "Nassi–Shneiderman Diagram"

wduquette — Tue, 05 May 2026 20:38:16 +0000

I had an instructor require these in a programming class in the early 80's. I've never seen them used in practice.

New comment by wduquette in "The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It"

wduquette — Sat, 02 May 2026 22:05:19 +0000

I know that to be true because the other group members talked about it with my daughter, and were honestly surprised at how much difference not using AI made. She has another group member who’s a slacker. But not all of them.

New comment by wduquette in "The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It"

wduquette — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 21:36:18 +0000

Fair; I admit I climbed onto my hobbyhorse here.

New comment by wduquette in "The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It"

wduquette — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 21:35:40 +0000

Except that in this case, the other students thought they had done the work. They put the time in, but in a different way than my daughter.

New comment by wduquette in "The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It"

wduquette — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 15:51:46 +0000

My daughter's a senior in college. She recently was part of a group presentation; she did not use AI to prepare for it, but all of the other group members did. She was the only one who could answer follow-on questions.

If you use AI to understand things for you, you're short-changing yourself.

New comment by wduquette in "The Science Behind Honey's Eternal Shelf Life (2013)"

wduquette — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 15:49:43 +0000

Obligatory reference to Ice-9 in Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle: a form of water ice that freezes at a high temperature.

New comment by wduquette in "An amateur historian's favorite books about the Silk Road"

wduquette — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 16:43:23 +0000

I'd add Owen Lattimore's Desert Road to Turkestan: Lattimore traveled through the Central Asian deserts with a camel caravan in the 1930's, one of few westerner's ever to do so; and also Richard Hopkirk's Foreign Devils on the Silk Road, about the first European explorers to enter that region.

New comment by wduquette in "Laws of Software Engineering"

wduquette — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:51:59 +0000

And in addition, the time you spend making a component work properly is absolutely a function of its complexity. Once you get it right, package it up neatly with a clean interface and a nice box, and leave it alone. Where "getting it right" means getting it to a state where you can "leave it alone".

New comment by wduquette in "The Universal Standard Book Number"

wduquette — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:38:45 +0000

Right. This would conflate, e.g., the British and American editions of books published in both countries in the same year; and they are frequently different, as might be different editions of a book published in the same year.

New comment by wduquette in "Show HN: Loreline, narrative language transpiled via Haxe: C++/C#/JS/Java/Py/Lua"

wduquette — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 21:00:04 +0000

Loreline transpiles to Java, but from the diagram it looks like that only works with Android. Is it possible to use Loreline with Java on other platforms?

New comment by wduquette in "Take better notes, by hand"

wduquette — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 21:10:53 +0000

The Habanas don't seem to have page numbers, which is one of the things I particular like about the 1917s.

New comment by wduquette in "Take better notes, by hand"

wduquette — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 17:29:42 +0000

I love the Leuchtterm 1917s. They've got everything you say, and they hold up under daily use without falling apart.

As for pens, I use the Uniball Jetstream 0.38 ballpoint--fine point, doesn't skip, and I prefer ballpoints. I used a Coleto Hitec C multi-pen for a while, but the refills are skinny and run out of ink quickly, and I like the feel of the Jetstream ballpoint better. (The refills for the regular Coleto Hitec are much thicker and last a lot longer...but skip horribly. Life is too short.)

New comment by wduquette in "Take better notes, by hand"

wduquette — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 17:24:31 +0000

I keep notes in Obsidian...but when I'm genuinely studying a text I write out a precis as an outline in my bullet journal, and later transcribe it. That means that I engage with the material at least twice: once when I first read it, and once when I transcribe it. And yes, writing it by hand genuinely does help. And then, when I want to look at it later, my original notes are in my journal, and my transcription is available digitally.

New comment by wduquette in "Meta is shutting down Metaverse. They spent 85B dollars on it"

wduquette — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 21:00:24 +0000

They won't rename themselves again. They're um, "beyond" that.

New comment by wduquette in "Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)"

wduquette — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 16:39:45 +0000

In almost forty years of experience, the fraction of developers I've known who read in the field beyond what's strictly needed for their task is very small. I'm always delighted when I find one.