jdswain (u/jdswain) - Readit News

jdswain commented on Tony Hoare has died blog.computationalcomplex... · Posted by u/speckx

Plasmoid · 3 days ago

Fun story - at Oxford they like to name buildings after important people. Dr Hoare was nominated to have a house named after him. This presented the university with a dilemma of having a literal `Hoare house` (pronounced whore).

I can't remember what Oxford did to resolve this, but I think they settled on `C.A.R. Hoare Residence`.

jdswain · 2 days ago

Our Graphics Lab at University used to be in an old house opposite a fish and chip shop. The people at the fish and chip shop were suspicious of our lab as all they saw was young men (mostly) entering and leaving at all hours of the night. We really missed an opportunity to name it "Hoare House" after one of our favourite computer scientists.

jdswain commented on The Windows 95 user interface: A case study in usability engineering (1996) dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/1... · Posted by u/ksec

linguae · 12 days ago

Steve Jobs is famous for his 1996 quote about Microsoft not having taste (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiOzGI4MqSU). I disagree; as much as I love the classic Mac OS and Jobs-era Mac OS X, and despite my feelings about Microsoft's monopolistic behavior, 1995-2000 Microsoft's user interfaces were quite tasteful, in my opinion, and this was Microsoft's most tasteful period. I have fond memories of Windows 95/NT 4/98/2000, Office 97, and Visual Basic 6. I even liked Internet Explorer 5. These were well-made products when it came to the user interface. Yes, Windows 95 crashed a lot, but so did Macintosh System 7.

Things started going downhill, in my opinion, with the Windows XP "Fisher-Price" Luna interface and the Microsoft Office 2007 ribbon.

jdswain · 12 days ago

The windows 95 user interface was 'inspired by' the NeXT user interface, and to some degree the Mac UI. Microsoft had a NeXT computer to copy off, even though they wouldn't develop for it.

jdswain commented on LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop github.com/TechPaula/LT65... · Posted by u/classichasclass

Tor3 · 25 days ago

It does not run Microsoft software at all, as far as I can tell. EhBasic isn't Microsoft Basic, ehbasic was written by Lee Davison. And this particular version was further enhanced (see github). And wozmon was obviously written by Woz.. not Microsoft.

jdswain · 25 days ago

There has been some discussion around this, and Lee Davison is no longer with us so that makes it more difficult. It appears from the source code that Lee's independent basic is highly based on Microsoft Basic. I'm sure it is no longer an issue, especially as Microsoft has provided a free license for Microsoft 6502 basic, but the licensing situation is not entirely clear.

jdswain commented on Coding agents have replaced every framework I used blog.alaindichiappari.dev... · Posted by u/alainrk

max51 · a month ago

>I would argue that it's going to be the opposite. At re:Invent, one of the popular sessions was in creating a trio of SRE agents, one of which did nothing but read logs and report errors, one of which did analysis of the errors and triaged and proposed fixes, and one to do the work and submit PRs to your repo.

If you manage a code base this way at your company, sooner or later you will face a wall. What happens when the AI can't fix an important bug or is unable to add a very important feature? now you are stuck with a big fat dirty pile of code that no human can figure out because it wasn't coded by human and was never designed to be understood by a human in the first place.

jdswain · a month ago

I treat code quality, and readability, as one of the goals. The LLM can help with this and refactor code much quicker than a human. If I think the code is getting too complex I change over to architecture review and refactoring until I am happy with it.

jdswain commented on Canada jenn.site/on-canada/... · Posted by u/nsm

light_hue_1 · 2 months ago

I grew up in Canada and live in the US now with kids.

The US is not one country. It's two that are radically different.

There's wealthy America. The top 5% to 10% that have healthcare, have their own safety nets, don't need to worry about money, their kids go to select schools that they can buy into (mostly by buying into the right neighborhoods), an amazing pension plan, etc. My kids go to a fancy library with reading time, puppets and classical music. All the things I love about Canada and more.

That country is amazing and the quality of life is unparalleled unless you're obscenely wealthy.

The bottom 80 to 90% percent of Americans live a life that is far inferior to any western and even many developing countries. They have no safety nets, no job security, no retirement, housing insecurity, they're even the smallest accident away from ruin, etc.

In other countries people know roughly how badly or how well they're treated by the system. Only in the US have I experienced the level of brainwashing where people are thankful for the horrors of this system, and somehow wash away anything they see or hear about anywhere else in the world.

Because your family mostly decides if which America you live in, most people don't understand the other side at all and can't comprehend how they live.

jdswain · 2 months ago

There's a selfish case for the wealthy to care about this: rising tides lift all boats, including theirs. When the bottom 80% are struggling with housing insecurity and desperation, the consequences don't stay contained to poor neighbourhoods. San Francisco seems like a good example—the visible decline in public spaces, safety concerns, and urban decay affect everyone who lives there, regardless of income. The wealthy can insulate themselves to a degree, but they can't fully escape a deteriorating society. They'd be better off in a city where everyone has a baseline of stability.

jdswain commented on Geology of the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary pubs.usgs.gov/fs/farallon... · Posted by u/greesil

jdswain · 2 months ago

Also where Jim Gray was sailing too when he went missing. His yacht has never been found.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Gray_(computer_scientist)

jdswain commented on Has the cost of building software dropped 90%? martinalderson.com/posts/... · Posted by u/martinald

jdswain · 3 months ago

Software Development is much more than writing code. Writing code may have become 90% easier, but a lot of the other development tasks haven't appreciably changed due to AI, although that might come. So, for now at least the answer to the question posed in the headline is no.

An exception might be building something that is well specified in advance, maybe because it's a direct copy of existing software.

jdswain commented on Autodesk's John Walker Explained HP and IBM in 1991 (2015) cringely.com/2015/06/03/a... · Posted by u/suioir

jaynate · 4 months ago

Had me hooked right up to this point: “When we get the check, we pay a commission to this representative. Assume the commission is $500.”

I’ve never seen a software company pay 50% commissions on a software sale. I know it’s and example but the percentages are wrong even for the perpetually licensed days. Should be closer to 8-15%.

Totally sales and marketing spend could indeed be higher in this model because autodesk moved to direct positioning with end buyers rather than distributors.

jdswain · 4 months ago

Commissions were different back then. I worked part time selling computers around 1990 and a little earlier, margin on computers was moving down, but was as high as 50%, I recall it moving down to 30% and stabilising there for a while. I don't remember software margins, but it could have been about the same. I used to get 50% of the margin as commission.

jdswain commented on Kafka is Fast – I'll use Postgres topicpartition.io/blog/po... · Posted by u/enether

saberience · 4 months ago

Why can't you? In my experience, scaling Kafka was far easier than scaling our RabbitMQ cluster. We started running into issues when our RabbitMQ cluster hit 25k TPS, our Kafka cluster of equivalent resources didn't break a sweat at 500k TPS.

jdswain · 4 months ago

What sort of systems do you work on to require this kind of traffic volume? I've worked on one project that I'd consider relatively high volume (UK Post Office Horizon Online) and we were only targeting 500 TPS.

jdswain commented on Minecraft removing obfuscation in Java Edition minecraft.net/en-us/artic... · Posted by u/SteveHawk27

beachy · 4 months ago

First time I have heard of object-oriented obfuscation.

I get it, but in general I don't get the OO hate.

It's all about the problem domain imo. I can't imagine building something like a graphics framework without some subtyping.

Unfortunately, people often use crap examples for OO. The worst is probably employee, where employee and contractor are subtypes of worker, or some other chicanery like that.

Of course in the real world a person can be both employee and contractor at the same time, can flit between those roles and many others, can temporarily park a role (e.g sabbatical) and many other permutations, all while maintaining history and even allowing for corrections of said history.

It would be hard to find any domain less suited to OO that HR records. I think these terrible examples are a primary reason for some people believing that OO is useless or worse than useless.

jdswain · 4 months ago

(Hi Andrew)

It's the misuse of OO constructs that gives it a bad name, almost always that is inheritance being overused/misused. Encapsulation and modularity are important for larger code bases, and polymorphism is useful for making code simpler, smaller and more understandable.

Maybe the extra long names in java also don't help too, along with the overuse/forced use of patterns? At least it's not Hungarian notation.