lanstin (u/lanstin) - Readit News

lanstin commented on AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas' finalroundai.com/blog/aws... · Posted by u/birdculture

ebiester · 17 hours ago

So, I think there are two models.

One is a "one junior per team" model. I endorse this for exactly the reasons you speak.

Another, as I recently saw, was a 70/30 model of juniors to seniors. You make your seniors as task delegators and put all implementation on the junior developers. This puts an "up or out" pressure and gives very little mentorship opportunities. if 70% of your engineers are under 4 years of experience, it can be a rough go.

lanstin · 9 hours ago

My first big job was the 1 junior per team; those years were extremely good for learning how to design and write high performance services. Since then, I've mostly been at the 70/30 places where I'm considered senior. Occasionally I just sit down and blast out a big software project, just to feel I am still able, but mostly I tend the garden hoping that a few of the fragile stems will survive and grow into mighty oaks.

lanstin commented on AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas' finalroundai.com/blog/aws... · Posted by u/birdculture

iwontberude · 16 hours ago

Usually the people who question decisions are shot down because they don’t have a wholistic understanding of the decision and (respectfully) don’t have good arguments. This is only because they are focused on some narrow aspect of the business which distorts or reduces their visibility and understanding.

lanstin · 9 hours ago

This thinking pattern exactly illustrates how a group of very intelligent people can make disasterously bad decisions without anyone challenging them. Don't look for holes in the the arguments of people saying you are making a bad decision, look for the information they have that you do not have or have not explicitly analyzed. If you think you have all the information that the org possesses, go right ahead and make your choices without others; you might be lucky and be Steve Jobs post 2000.

lanstin commented on AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas' finalroundai.com/blog/aws... · Posted by u/birdculture

simsla · 15 hours ago

I don't think that's the same. I spitball crazy ideas, but my core knowledge/expertise is sound, and I try not to talk out of my ass. (Or I am upfront when I'm outside my area of expertise. I think it's important to call that out once your word starts carrying some weight.)

A product manager can definitely say things that would make me lose a bit of respect for a fellow senior engineer.

I can also see how juniors have more leeway to weigh in on things they absolutely don't understand. Crazy ideas and constructive criticism is welcome from all corners, but at some level I also start expecting some more basic competence.

lanstin · 15 hours ago

In general there are so many different sub-fields of knowledge that it's extremely confining to stay in one area of expertise; the slow uneducated person that has been working to keep some giant build farm running and migrating projects and helping fix tickets for 5 years will have a lot of expertise you don't have if you have a more casual experience of the system.

lanstin commented on AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas' finalroundai.com/blog/aws... · Posted by u/birdculture

rsanek · 17 hours ago

"without losing face"? What culture are you referring to? The Western companies I have worked at do not discourage such questions -- in fact, it's often the sign of someone very senior when they ask a seemingly 'dumb' question that others have taken for granted.

lanstin · 15 hours ago

I have worked at a place where people were routinely criticized for asking basic questions on a big all-dev DL (which was archived and searchable, so they actually added to a growing record). The preferred solution was to ask a co-worker on the same team. People were answered a lot of questions were also criticized for being helpful. In neither case was the criticism that much from devs but from managers and given in boss feedback directly to people. Also it had a problem with spreading a good culture and common technical vision to new people, for some reason ( /s )

lanstin commented on How exchanges turn order books into distributed logs quant.engineering/exchang... · Posted by u/rundef

eep_social · 5 days ago

in high scale stateless app services this approach is typically used to lower tail latency. two identical service instances will be sent the same request and whichever one returns faster “wins” which protects you from a bad instance or even one which happens to be heavily loaded.

lanstin · 5 days ago

And the tail latencies are wildly improved with each addition dup. Has to be idempotent of course.

lanstin commented on Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools larr.net/p/namings.html... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

forrestthewoods · 7 days ago

lol no. There are literally a hundred plus Unix tools and commands. I couldn’t tell you what 90% of them mean. I sure as hell couldn’t have told you what sed stood for. And if you asked me tomorrow I also wouldn’t be able to tell you.

C programmers are great. I love C. I wish everything had a beautiful pure C API. But C programmers are strictly banned from naming things. Their naming privileges have been revoked, permanently.

lanstin · 6 days ago

creat(...)

lanstin commented on Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools larr.net/p/namings.html... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

DSMan195276 · 6 days ago

You can, but then the names get needlessly long and one of the things we generally like (especially for command-line programs) is names that are short and easy to type. If we're going to make this argument then why not call the unix tools `concatenate`, `difference`, `stream-editor`, etc. Those are way better names in terms of telling you what they do, but from a usability standpoint they stink to type out.

Libraries and programs also have a habit of gradually changing what exactly they're about and used for. Changing their name at that point doesn't usually make sense, so you'll still end up with long names that don't actually match exactly what it does. Imagine if we were typing out `tape-archive` to make tarballs, it's a historically accurate name but gives you no hint about how people actually use it today. The name remains only because `tar` is pretty generic and there's too much inertia to change it. Honestly I'd say `cat` is the same, It's pretty rare that I see someone actually use it to concatenate multiple files rather than dump a single file to stdout.

The author is missing the fact that stuff like `libsodium` is no differently named from all the other stuff he mentioned. If he used libsodium often then he may just as well have mentioned it as well-named due to it's relation to salt and would instead be complaining about some other library name that he doesn't know much about or doesn't use often. I _understand_ why he's annoyed, but my point is that it's simply nothing new and he's just noticing it now.

lanstin · 6 days ago

libeay

lanstin commented on Ask HN: Should "I asked $AI, and it said" replies be forbidden in HN guidelines? · Posted by u/embedding-shape

JeremyNT · 9 days ago

In a work context, for me at least, this class of reply can actually be pretty useful. It indicates somebody already minimally investigated a thing and may have at least some information about it, but they're hedging on certainty by letting me know "the robots say."

It's a huge asterisk to avoid stating something as a fact, but indicates something that could/should be explored further.

(This would be nonsense if they sent me an email or wrote an issue up this way or something, but in an ad-hoc conversation it makes sense to me)

I think this is different than on HN or other message boards, it's not really used by people to hedge here, if they don't actually personally believe something to be the case (or have a question to ask) why are they posting anyway? No value there.

lanstin · 9 days ago

Yeah if the person doing it is smart I would trust they had the reasonable prompt and ruled out flagrant BS answers. Sometimes the key thing is just to know the name of the thing for the answer. It's equally as good/annoying as reporting what Google search gives for the answer. I guess I assume mostly people will do the AI query/search and then decide to share the answer based on how good or useful it seems.

lanstin commented on OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race theverge.com/news/836212/... · Posted by u/goplayoutside

seatac76 · 16 days ago

Semi analysis is great, they typically do semiconductors but reporting is top notch.

lanstin · 15 days ago

Wow, that was a good article. So much detail from financial to optical linking to build various data flow topologies. Makes me less aghast at the $10M salaries for the masters of these techniques.

lanstin commented on Trillions spent and big software projects are still failing spectrum.ieee.org/it-mana... · Posted by u/pseudolus

brendoelfrendo · 22 days ago

The other nice thing about FAANG is that almost nothing they do is actually necessary. If Facebook rolls out a new feature and breaks something for a few hours, it doesn't actually matter. It's harder to move fast and break things if you're, say, a bank, and every minute of downtime is a minute where your customers can't access their money. Enough minutes go by and you may have a very, very expensive crisis on your hands.

lanstin · 22 days ago

Replying to myself in sibling: except maybe people paying for ads, which is more of a faith based action; it's well known a lot of ad traffic is fraudulent, but not which traffic. So if you pay for ads, who can tell what happened.