austin-cheney (u/austin-cheney)

austin-cheney commented on Where is the exponential growth part of AI? · Posted by u/anon191928

1. ChatGPT is just LLM.

2. Consider why these companies want AI to replace human developers. AI is expensive and error prone so it isn’t about money. It’s that company leaders don’t trust their developers. If developers cannot work outside a very narrow lane, like CRUD apps, or require colossal frameworks to just put text on screen then why bother having humans in the first place? AI can do this without lying about its self importance.

3. Consider what AI is currently capable of versus what people are wanting. That is a huge gap that answers your questions.

4. Finally, consider why AI output is not trusted and thus why its actual value, before expenses, is flat despite being so expensive and so desired. Numerically this is completely defeating.

If you looked at this subject only in terms of measurements it’s stupendously damning and makes you realize investment is an exercise of social behavior.

austin-cheney commented on Ask HN: How do you get your devs to understand your customers? · Posted by u/ghiculescu

austin-cheney · 4 days ago

At most employers product management is far separated from product development. There are several reasons for that:

* management distrust of developers, if your developers need a lot of help to do their jobs management won’t let them near the customers for good reason

* separation of concerns, specialization

* emphasis of productivity, developers should be developing

* assumptions and biases that developers are not people people, which is sometimes completely unfounded and other times strongly reinforced

If you want developers to understand your customers they have to be directly embedded in customer engagement meetings where they can directly see customer wants and reactions the same way your product management learns these things. This can prove very risky due to the personalities involved.

In my line of work developers are completely on the front lines directly communicating with customers. My line of work, enterprise API management, is highly technical demanding a wide technology background but it’s not that challenging. The customers know what their end state is but not how to express their business requirements or diagnose their challenges. The developers, myself included, often have no idea behind the business goals for interconnecting various business system but have little challenge solving for the communications in the middle. Most areas of software are not like this, by a lot.

austin-cheney commented on Ask HN: Tell me about the best programmer you worked with · Posted by u/jvanderbot

austin-cheney · 7 days ago

When I first started programming as an employee at Travelocity I discovered a senior Java developer who was really good at CSS and JavaScript. At that time, around the beginning of 2008, there was a very clear division of labor between Java people and front end web people. Java people had absolutely no idea how to write JavaScript. It was so bad that Google wrote a tool called Google Web Toolkit (GWT) that automatically generated JavaScript from Java logic and it was beyond horrible, but there were some Java developers that really needed it.

What I found most interesting about this excellent developer, and of course she was absolutely excellent at her job writing Java as well, was her secrecy. She did not mean to reveal her ability to masterly address CSS and JavaScript concerns to me. She did so because she knew I was super new and it didn't matter. She did not reveal this to anybody else, because she didn't want to compensate for the repeated failures of people around her. In hindsight I can absolutely see why she went out of her way to suppress her capabilities while at the office.

austin-cheney commented on Eliminating JavaScript cold starts on AWS Lambda goose.icu/lambda/... · Posted by u/styfle

bapak · 7 days ago

I'm not complaining about performance, I'm complaining that people say they put out something faster and smaller only to find out they're not remotely comparable.

Did you know that moment.js used to be a microlibrary? It came out replacing "the huge Date.js library."

If you've been in the field long enough, you've seen this cycle repeat over and over.

austin-cheney · 7 days ago

You were complaining about performance. If you, as in yourself the actual person, are not measuring things its just whining.

moment is a library discontinued years ago. They had a couple of commits in 2023 and a couple in 2022, but work stopped on the library almost 5 years ago. It is an abstraction over the big scary native Date object.

Up until 2 years ago I was writing JS full time for 15 years. I just saw a lot of people bitch and cry about inventing wheels and whining at performance targets they just guessed at. Its because most of these people could not write code. During this time there were some amazing things being written in JavaScript, and later TypeScript, but these awesome things were almost exclusively personal hobby projects the regular employed JS developer either bitched about or relied upon for career survival, because bitching and crying is what you do when you can't otherwise contribute in a meaningful way.

austin-cheney commented on Eliminating JavaScript cold starts on AWS Lambda goose.icu/lambda/... · Posted by u/styfle

bapak · 7 days ago

I seriously dislike this kind of comparisons.

We're faster! (please disregard the fact that we're barely more than a demo)

Everyone knows about 80:20, the slowdowns will come after you start doing everything your competition does.

Look at Biome. We're 15x as fast as ESLint (but disregard the fact that we don't do typeaware linting). Then comes typeaware linting and suddenly they have huge performance issues that kill the project (I'm unable to use Biome 2)

This happens over and over and over. The exceptions are very, very few (Bun is one example)

austin-cheney · 7 days ago

I really find it annoying when JavaScript people complain about performance. If you think something is slow then make it faster and open a pull request.

It’s great when those PRs do come, but most of the time there is just empty whining while a developer contributes nothing. This is because most JavaScript developers are deathly afraid to write original software, as that would be reinventing a wheel.

Most JavaScript developers are absolutely incapable of measuring things, so they have no idea when something else is actually faster until else runs the numbers for them. Let’s take your Bun example. Bun is great but Bun is also written in Zig which is faster than C++. Bun claims to be 3x faster at WebSockets than Nodes popular WS package, because Bun can achieve a send rate of 700,000 messages per second (numbers from 5 years ago). Bun is good at measuring things. What they don’t say is that WS is just slow. I wrote my own WebSocket library for Node in TypeScript about 5 years ago that can achieve a send rate of just under 500,000 messages per second. What they also don’t tell you is that WebSockets are 11x faster to send than to receive due to frame header interpretation. I say not to disparage Bun but to show your empty worship is misplaced if you aren’t part of the solution.

austin-cheney commented on Living with Williams Syndrome, the 'opposite of autism' (2014) bbc.com/news/health-26888... · Posted by u/colinprince

austin-cheney · 8 days ago

Not the same, but another genetic disorder that also impacts intelligence and social reasoning is Fragile X. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragile_X_syndrome

austin-cheney commented on Dev Compass – Programming Philosophy Quiz treeform.github.io/devcom... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

austin-cheney · 8 days ago

Abstract ↔ Concrete: -2 Concrete

Human ↔ Computer Friendly: -5 Computer-Friendly

austin-cheney commented on Ask HN: How do you tune your personality to get better at interviews? · Posted by u/_swfb

_swfb · 9 days ago

I didn’t say I wanted to lie about my personality. I said I wanted to tune my personality so that I do better in interviews. It’s subtly different; I wanted advice on putting my best foot forward, and I was wondering if people had ideas for doing so.

It’s not just about this one job, obviously it’s impossible to know what a single employer’s reasoning is for this stuff; I have just noticed a pattern of me being pretty bad at interviews, and being declined enough to where I probably need to make some kind of change. I am not asking for one simple hack to make friends, it’s fucking interview prep. I don’t think I have low social intelligence in most cases, I have never had much issue making friends or anything like that. I don’t dispute that I am probably annoying and I don’t think I am awesome.

It’s not like interviews are anything like actual human interaction in any meaningful sense, and clearly a lot of people must agree because there are dozens of specific “interview prep” services out there.

austin-cheney · 8 days ago

Employment is all about being a good fit for the employer, not about being a good developer. I am often not selected because I preference things that scares the shit out of most developers even if such things are hugely beneficial.

Interviews are just talking to people. Its not the same as a casual conversation, but its also not a hostile police interrogation. Nonetheless, its still just a conversation. If you imagine it to be something different then something different it becomes.

austin-cheney commented on Ask HN: What "developer holy war" have you flip-flopped on? · Posted by u/meowface

0x445442 · 8 days ago

Keyboard typing speed and compile times aren't really the bottle neck for the overwhelming majority of software engineers. For them these times are dwarfed by the time it takes Service Now access tickets to get fulfilled.

austin-cheney · 8 days ago

Keyboard typing is not a bottleneck. I always cringe when I hear people cry about long method names with those really big tears.

I did find that build times did impact my concentration during rapid experimentation or troubleshooting. When I first got into TypeScript my compile times were only 8 seconds. Then on a later dramatically larger project of around 100 files and greater than 50k lines of code my compile times got up to 30+ seconds. I switched to SWC and my compile times dropped to about 8 seconds before climbing back up to about 11 seconds. Now I am spending my time on a different project that is not as large and my compile times with SWC were about 3 seconds. I recently dumped SWC for the Node native TypeScript support and I have no compile step. It appears Node takes about 1.5 seconds to run its type stripper on my project into memory, and I am comfortable with that.

I know those sound small, but they still interrupt my concentration compared to the almost 0 time to just run a JavaScript run time. You also have to understand I am into extreme performance and can load this one app I wrote, the UI portion of an operating system, in the browser with full state restoration within 80ms of page request.

austin-cheney commented on What would you name a new programming language? · Posted by u/TristanMB

austin-cheney · 8 days ago

* DARK - directed analysis and reasoning kit

* WINS - white space is not syntax

* SNAP - source for network application protocol

* NSFW - node-derived structure for functions and workflow