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NortySpock commented on Ask HN: Did modern AI's coding abilities make you lose interest in programming?    · Posted by u/amichail
rayxi271828 · 17 hours ago
It’s quite the opposite for me.

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.

NortySpock · 14 hours ago
Agree that is has been great for weekend coding.

Learning Elixir and fixing a bug in an open source project went from "risk of a long slog over the course of a month with no reward" to "pepper an LLM with questions (debugging errors, understanding syntax, translating code snippets to English descriptions of behavior), write 20 lines of code by hand, write a few test cases, and submit the PR fix".

NortySpock commented on The Therac-25 Incident (2021)   thedailywtf.com/articles/... · Posted by u/lemper
greazy · a day ago
It's still an issue. I've heard stories of EMR system going down forcing staff to use pen and paper. It boggles my mind that such systems don't have redundancy.

These are commercial products being deployed.

NortySpock · 15 hours ago
The redundancy is pen and paper. The EMR just helps teams coordinate faster, pull up records faster, etc.

When I worked at Cerner years ago (now owned by Oracle), there were rumors that the Cerner EMR still could barely handle DST* spring forward, but could not handle DST fall back (where the 01:00 hour is repeated) -- you had do preemptively switch to pen-and-paper for the hours around the switch. I assume this was because someone back in the initial database design used local time instead of UTC for some critical patient-care timestamp fields in the database, and then had a bear of a time getting reliable times out of the database during the witching hour.

* Daylight Saving Time in the USA. And yes, everyone in the USA changes non-networked clocks twice a year because of some "brilliant idea" someone shoved through Congress in 1974.

EDIT: I wonder if Cerner finally fixed it?

NortySpock commented on Adding my home electricity uptime to status.href.cat   aggressivelyparaphrasing.... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
fanatic2pope · 7 days ago
LOL, docker for running mosquitto at home? Who does that?
NortySpock · 7 days ago
I did.

It was convenient. The official docker image includes all the tools you need.

Overkill? Sure. It sips memory and compute, but when most everything else is in docker, what is wrong with one more container.

I did a write-up here:

https://github.com/NortySpock/selfhosted-show-wiki/blob/bca6...

(Eventually I did switch over to NATS emulating an MQTT endpoint so I could get a broker with Prometheus-scrapeable `/metrics` endpoint )

NortySpock commented on Code review can be better   tigerbeetle.com/blog/2025... · Posted by u/sealeck
ivanjermakov · 7 days ago
It's better, but still quite deep vendor lock-in (in both GitHub and VSCode).
NortySpock · 7 days ago
GitHub may be dominant, but it's not like it doesn't have competitors nipping at its heels (GitLab, BitBucket come to mind).

VSCode is open source, and there are plenty of IDEs...

I guess I'm just focused on different lock-in concerns than you are.

NortySpock commented on Pony: An actor-model, capabilities-secure, high-performance programming language   ponylang.io/... · Posted by u/RossBencina
NortySpock · a month ago
https://youtu.be/u9da3UzEhEI

For those who enjoy long form video interviews, here is Kris Jenkins of Developer Voices interviewing Sean Allen on Pony language

NortySpock commented on PSA: SQLite WAL checksums fail silently and may lose data   avi.im/blag/2025/sqlite-w... · Posted by u/avinassh
avinassh · a month ago
> Aight, I'll bite: continue or stop... and do what? As others have pointed out, the only safe option to get back to a consistent state is to roll back to a safe point.

Attempt to recover! Again, not all checksum errors are impossible to recover. I hold the view that even if there is a 1% chance of recovery, we should attempt it. This may be done by SQLite, an external tool, or even manually. Since WAL corruption issues are silent, we cannot do that now.

There is a smoll demo in the post. In it, I corrupt an old frame that is not needed by the database at all. Now, one approach would be to continue the recovery and then present both states: one where the WAL is dropped, and another showing whatever we have recovered. If I had such an option, I would almost always pick the latter.

NortySpock · a month ago
The demo is good, through I wish you had presented it as text rather than as a gif.

I do see your point of wanting an option to refuse to delete the wal so a developer can investigate the wal and manually recover... But the the typical user probably wants the database to come back up with a consistent, valid state if power is lost. They do not want have the database refuse to operate because it found uncommitted transactions in a scratchpad file...

As a SQL-first developer, I don't pick apart write-ahead logs trying to save a few bytes from the great hard drive in the sky, I just want the database to give me the current state of my data and never be in an invalid state.

NortySpock commented on ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action   openai.com/index/introduc... · Posted by u/Topfi
ivape · a month ago
”The people who YOLO it with prompting cycles until the code passes tests and then submit a PR are causing problems almost as fast as they’re developing new features in non-trivial codebases.”

This might as well be the new definition of “script kiddie”, and it’s the kids that are literally going to be the ones birthed into this lifestyle. The “craft” of programming may not be carried by these coming generations and possibly will need to be rediscovered at some point in the future. The Lost Art of Programming is a book that’s going to need to be written soon.

NortySpock · a month ago
Oh come on, people have been writing code with bad, incomplete, flaky, or absent tests since automated testing was invented (possibly before).

It's having a good, useful and reliable test suite that separates the sheep from the goats.*

Would you rather play whack-a-mole with regressions and Heisenbugs, or ship features?

* (Or you use some absurdly good programing language that is hard to get into knots with. I've been liking Elixir. Gleam looks even better...)

NortySpock commented on Could a Paper Plane Thrown from the ISS Survive the Flight?   sciencealert.com/could-a-... · Posted by u/dxs
peterlk · 2 months ago
Answer: it would most likely burn up

Original paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009457652...

NortySpock · 2 months ago
Makes sense, the ISS is moving at ~Mach 25 relative to a fixed point on the ground.

Not much survives at those speeds, in an atmosphere, without careful engineering.

NortySpock commented on Nano-engineered thermoelectrics enable scalable, compressor-free cooling   jhuapl.edu/news/news-rele... · Posted by u/mcswell
wrigby · 2 months ago
I didn’t know this, and it jumps out to me because 10k is pretty much the exact difference between room temperature and wine fridge tenperature - I wonder if this is actually not a horrible application for peltiers?
NortySpock · 2 months ago
Found a wine fridge at the thrift store last month, pulled the model number, realized it was basically a Peltier cooler and a fan, and thus likely to be still operational. Powered up just fine, so...

$10 and an hour of deep cleaning later, and now we have a wine cooler in our basement. I don't recall the specs or power consumption offhand, but it does keep my beverage-of-choice a few degrees cooler than ambient. :)

NortySpock commented on The Offline Club   theoffline-club.com... · Posted by u/esher
kardianos · 2 months ago
As an alternative:

* Go ballroom dancing. * Go square dancing. * Go to the library and read their historical non-fiction primary sources (letters and journals). * Go to church (I'm serious, even if you are an atheist). * Go roller skating at a rink. * Go ice skating. * Go paint balling. * Go to a water park. * Go to your HOA/City/County board/commissioners meetings. * Go to your state legislature meetings. * Go to a volunteer firefighters informational meeting. * Go to a plant/flower (orchid/African violate) growers club. * Go to a sewing club. * Go to a fishing class or just fish. * Go to a hunting/gun class or just hunt/shoot.

NortySpock · 2 months ago
> Go to church (I'm serious, even if you are an atheist).

A few cities have a humanist group called "Oasis"; I used to go and it was basically exactly the same structure as church, except the "sermon" would be a guest speaker talking about a topic that interests them. But still, music, community moment, pass the donation plate, coffee, gossip...

https://www.houstonoasis.org/

Some Oasis groups post a podcast if you want to listen-in.

And of course there's also Unitarian Universalist groups...

Or just find an open-minded place of worship and start attending.

u/NortySpock

KarmaCake day2685April 20, 2013View Original