OmarIsmail
Not enough engineers engage with the concept of code and programming and as an industry we suffer for it. The beginning of this post does a phenomenal job of simplifying very basic but high level concepts as “what is a function” “what is a tag”.
99% or programmers don’t think about these things like this, and so get confused when these building blocks are manipulated and presented in seemingly strange ways like React components or server components or whatever. By breaking down these concepts (functions, blueprints) and having rebuilding them with simple definitions it allows the reader to start their mental model fresh and go from there.
This is a masterclass in technical communication.
Who gives a shit if it’s long. In fact I’m glad it’s long because every sentence is gold. These are deep subjects and foundational to programming and so ya, talking about them like this can take a few words.
99% of people who take the time to really read and process this post will come away as noticeably improved developers. That kind of bang for the buck is rare!
On a personal quality of life basis the middle class will get hit the hardest. It will impact retirement timelines, vacations, home renovations, car purchases, etc. seeing their 401k go down will make them feel poorer and want to save more and thus reduce their discretionary spending and reducing the amount of fun and entertainment they enjoy.
I think this is a really interesting decision from Suhail and one not taken lightly. I think this decision is another data point that AI-infused applications are a potential new “tech platform” and we’re at the beginning of a new “mega cycle”. I.e. web2 2002-2010, mobile 2010-2020.
Folks shouldn’t be spending much energy on thinking about how Mighty may have gone wrong (and seriously the negative analysis is so boring and lame), and instead think about the new AI opportunity.
So for sideproject I'm going mostly bespoke and using very little 3rd party libraries. The result of that is there's sooooooo much boiler plate to write and it's very boring and it's hard to be motivated and productive to get through it. What's keeping me going is that once the boilerplate is done - it's mostly the foundational level of data queries + endpoints - then I shouldn't really have to touch that stuff again.
My conclusion is that there's no great answer.
Using lots of libraries is like riding a horse. It'll start moving right away but you don't have full control and you gotta find the right way to get it to do what you want, and may have to fight it if it really doesn't want to. Vs building most things yourself is like building a car. You don't go anywhere for a long time as you're building it, but once you've built it you can move very quickly and if anything goes wrong you can easily pop the hood and fix/change things up.
I think for long lived projects it's better to build the car, but also be disciplined in writing very good code + documentation. The initial build out sucks hard but that pain will get amortized over a very long future and ultimately be worth it.
And for absolutely required dependencies go with paid services. Specifically paid services where the company's primary focus _is_ providing that service. They are financially and existentially motivated to give good service, and are usually good about keeping backwards compatibility while usually staying on top of security/modernization upgrades without requiring work on your own end. A managed database is a good example of this kind of paid dependency.
It seems to me you're throwing a bunch of barely-built stuff at the wall to see what has traction to then actually build out. I don't think HN is a good way to do that. This now feels like a waste of everyone's time.
- the tool is too difficult to use for even yourself to be worth it
- you don’t use your tool deeply so you don’t have intuitive understanding of what is needed to be improve
- you don’t actually take user guides seriously and think they are important for a company to provide
When looking at this kind of service I’m evaluating on two levels: my customers experience, and my authoring experience. By not having your own user guide filled out I’m unable to evaluate the end customer experience (search, navigation, etc).
I know you’re in beta, but I don’t know why you’d do a show HN without at least having your own user guide filled out. A big wasted opportunity.
I still enjoy a burger and I can do that relatively guilt free. Totally worth it for me.
Also, this space is still very young so I expect it to improve dramatically over the coming years. Which is a great aspect about fake meats. They are a technology that can evolve and improve a great deal. Technological development with regular meat appears to result in worse treatment for animals, not a direction I want to support.
Appropriately from the recent news stories, but it's easy to imagine at least portions of such pictures being available for medical diagnostic purposes. I've sent pictures of my children to my doctor, so presumably in the future it's easy to imagine sending pictures to an AI to diagnose which would require a suitably fleshed out (pardon the pun) training set.
And bringing the two ideas together, is child pornography that is provably created by an AI still illegal?
If you try to ask for permission and write up docs, etc etc then it’s a pain, but if you just _do_ it resistance becomes a lot less.
Backend to backend communication is almost never graphql (is that changing in a big way?) which would indicate the main reason for graphql in a client-server situation is data saving but at the cost of complexity and other downsides. Almost certainly the data savings in many cases is not worth it.
Oh and then you have things like Apollo having cache bugs that result in incident level problems.
If a person had 1000 RSUs that were on paper worth 40k, now they are worth 30k. Either way they can’t be sold right now. And I don’t understand how 30k is “worthless”
1. I believe that man-made climate change is real and we should do something about it.
2. I want to limit/eliminate my own family's personal contribution to the warming of the planet for ethical and emotional reasons
3. I believe that solar is a "green" way to generate electricity, and at the limit if every house and building was covered in solar panels that would be a great world to live in
4. I want to help make that world a reality, and I'm not looking to maximize my ROI on the investment, it's not just about the money
5. I'd prefer much more solar energy production even if it's not the most efficient
6. I currently only have access to install solar panels on my own roof (which I'm already doing)
7. I think non-green energy production will only get more expensive, so solar energy is a decent diversified asset in a broader investment portfolio.
I've actually gone pretty deep in thinking about how I could do this, i.e. get a bunch of investors together and install solar panels on business roofs like schools, warehouses, etc.
I'm gonna request early access to this.
It really goes to show that nukes just shouldn’t exist- there’s no “counter” to them if the other side is suicidal
But now that the pool of people that could work from the jungles of Brazil has increased 10-100x there’s a lot more incentive to making that possible.
This is worth a read.
I totally agree that many/most software organizations don't take it seriously. But I don't think that it's because of a lack of desire, I think it's a lack of even knowing it's a thing.
I put my skills in writing clean code in my most recent performance review but I didn't do a good job of describing it. It's also not something that is apparent to higher ups, but is readily apparent to colleagues who describe the code as a "joy" to work with.
I think we need to get better as an industry at measuring "Code UX" in a quantified way, and then that can start to be a meaningful area of progress that engineers can use in their career, which will motivate them to improve on that metric.