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d0liver commented on Typing Speed Is the Hidden Signal of a 10x Developer   texttoslides.ai/blog/hire... · Posted by u/sh_tomer
d0liver · 2 months ago
I think it depends what your typing speed target is, probably. Even for someone who's got a lot of experience, I think it's easy to get bottlenecked on typing speed when it's not a specific focus. Speaking from personal experience, I've been programming for 20ish years and up until a couple months ago my typing speed was probably 90WPM. I recently started practicing intentionally and it's now up to an average of 125ish. If I were interviewing someone and their typing speed was like 60WPM as an experienced dev then that might be a little bit of a red flag. But with auto complete and whatnot, I think it's pretty easy to be at a solid 70 - 90 and still be a very solid dev, and what you get after that is mostly leaning on autocompletion less and being able to spit out some of those idioms a bit faster than you could copy/paste or fill out a snippet.

But possibly to your point, what I am is a passionate _thinker_. I'll take pretty much any opportunity to get away from the computer and do things in my head instead because I find that it's generally faster. If I were someone who liked to prototype "on paper" then I might've been a much faster typist long ago.

d0liver commented on Overly Long Variable Name Could Have Been a Comment   jonathan-frere.com/posts/... · Posted by u/rbanffy
d0liver · 2 months ago
Reading this, the principle of least astonishment immediately comes to mind. I think a lot of the time when a lengthy comment is needed, refactoring or external documentation (maybe with a link in the comments) is actually a better option. PR descriptions and comments have the upside of existing in a historical context; they don't rot because they simply don't exist outside of that context. But, of course, they can be a little bit harder to find.

I definitely do agree that this is often a good use case for a nice comment though, especially because those weird expressions are usually locally scoped so that you don't have to worry too much about comment rot. But yeah, using a proper variable name has that advantage when it isn't local -- changing it in one place will queue the type system to tell you to change it everywhere (and you can probably automate it if you want to).

I guess that I don't think comments, variable names, or PRs are particularly good at conveying broader context though (like what the use case is, historical considerations from bugs, legal requirements, etc.). I think you're kind of talking to a reader who already has the context, and if they don't then none of those things do a great job of clarifying. Kind of circling back, I really like to push more things to external documentation paired with nice conventions and patterns. A lot of the time those docs also have the benefit of being at a high enough level that they don't rot, too. If you know the pattern then you just read the code and it doesn't matter so much if the specifics changed.

d0liver commented on Show HN: Saprius – Automatically turn messy emails into excel document   saprius.com... · Posted by u/testGaussian
d0liver · 2 months ago
I don't think this product is for me, but I wanted to mention that the pricing feels wrong. You're pitching people dealing with large volumes of email, but then I'm paying $25/mo for 200 emails which isn't a lot. Also, how are the fields being extracted? Like, how reliable is it? Is it an AI backed thing or like looking for specific formats? And how do I hook it up to my email?
d0liver commented on What Counts as Discovery? Rethinking AI's Place in Science   nisheethvishnoi.substack.... · Posted by u/almost-exactly
d0liver · 2 months ago
> Newton did not just describe motion—he invented the ideas of force and mass.

I think this is just what incremental progress looks like from the outside. It's a magic trick that happens when we don't see each step of the progression.

> The narrative around AI in science is shifting—from tool to theorist, from assistant to author.

I agree that AI is making people out of touch, and I think that's part of the market's goal. It's a lot easier to sell stuff to people if you can convince them it's magic.

I don't think that AI has fundamentally changed anything about the nature of discovery; we're just making reference materials fluid and generative -- it's an incremental step. So, I agree with you that the narrative is largely missing the pieces that make things "tricky". It feels sort of like people are rediscovering copy pasta and then being like, "Look how much work I did!"

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KarmaCake day209March 28, 2020
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