Recent submissions

Comment · 7 months ago
There definitely isn't enough _specialised_ software. If you look at engineering tools the open source/free stuff is just not good, and the professional software packages run in the tens of thousands per user. I'm eagerly awaiting the day we get competitive open source alternatives to simulink, HFSS, autocad, solidworks, LT Spice, etc.

Unfortunately this kind of software needs specialised domain knowledge to produce that AI doesn't have yet, but when (if) it arrives I hope we see strides forwards in hardware engineering productivity.

Comment · 7 months ago
This point gets raised every single time managed languages and low latency development come up together. The trade off is running "fast" all of the time, even when you don't have to, vs running slow most of the time and tinkering when you need to go fast.

I've spent a fair few years developing lowish (10-20us wire to wire) latency trading systems and the majority of the code does not need to go fast. It's just wasted effort, a debugging headache, and technical debt. So the natural trade off is a bit of pain to make the hot path fast through spans, unsafe code, pre-allocated object pools, etc and in return you get to use a safe and easy programming language everywhere else.

In C# low latency dev is not even that painful, as there are a lot of tools available specifically for this purpose by the runtime.

Comment · 7 months ago
That is the object of the sentence. He is asking who the subject is, in other words the thing or person that is doing the housing of the people. Is it the government? Is it you? I'm currently responsible for housing myself, which is annoying so I would prefer someone else take on this responsibility.
Comment · 10 months ago
It's definitely a step up from PowerApps though.
Comment · 10 months ago
Perhaps, I don't consider them shitty myself but palates differ. Is engineering nirvana a place where tasks are such that any can been done by a junior engineer, and the concept of engineering skill developed through experience is non-existent?
Comment · 10 months ago
You can't give a junior tasks that require experience and nuance that have been acquired over years of development. If you babysit them, then perhaps but then what is the point? By it's nature "nuance" is something hard to describe concretely but as someone who has mentored a fair few juniors most of them don't have it. AI generally doesn't have it either. Juniors need tasks at the boundary of their capability, but not far beyond to be able to progress. Simply allowing them to make a mess of a difficult project is not a good way to get there.

There is such a thing as software engineering skill and it is not domain knowledge, nor knowledge of a specific codebase. It is good taste, an abstract ability to create/identify good solutions to a difficult problem.

Comment · 11 months ago
Comment · 1 year ago
Websockets can operate outside the request/response model used in this long polling example, and allow you to stream data continuously. They're also a lot more efficient in terms of framing and connections if there are a lot of individual pieces of data to push as you don't need to spin a up a connection + request for each bit.
Comment · 2 years ago
This might be something I'll end up buying, I've got a pair of xm4s and they're beyond irritating. There's no way to permanently disable speak-to-chat so every time I clear my throat the music pauses. It constantly re-enables if you touch the side whilst taking them off or picking them up, or also possibly for no reason at all. I've read dozens of complaints about this and I've just about had it with them.

/rant

Comment · 2 years ago
Honestly it was such a revelation once I bought it. didn't buy it sooner because spending £70 on a toothbrush (+ heads) would have been an unaffordable luxury, and anyway I didn't realise how much better it would be :)
Comment · 2 years ago
Under $100: Electric toothbrush: Always hated having to brush my teeth and this makes it so much less tedious, also supposedly better for your teeth, from 1-2 times per day to 3 times every day.

Under $1000: Nespresso machine, was using a mocha pot before but the coffee is much easier to make, no cleanup, and tastes better.

Comment · 3 years ago
They kind of go out their way to highlight that the sample size that chose that option was low. Hardly worth throwing out the article simply because there was an outlier.
Comment · 3 years ago
Coming from the UK, I'd feel more inclined to listen to these ecological/environmental concerns if they weren't abused in such terrible ways. In general safety limits are calculated with significant error margins, so I'd take this kind of scary blog post about destroyed houses with a pinch of salt.

The other aspect to consider is that, as humans, we need space to work and live. This inevitably will come at the expense of the natural environment. Some species will suffer, some will suffer more than others. The only way around that is to tell people to stop having children, to stop living, and to stop advancing society. We have to balance all of these when we consider land utilisation.

I am far from convinced that this post takes a reasonable view of all these points. It is quite common for environmental extremists to make highly irrational decisions (germany shutting down nuclear plants in favour of coal?). Only one side of the argument seems to be considered in this post.

An old boss taught me that I should never oppose an action without having an alternative viable course to propose. I think those of us who care for the environment (I care, a lot) would advance the cause by following this advice.

Comment · 3 years ago
Big fan of spaced repitition, especially for language learning. Unfortunately I feel like it fares worse for topics that require more application instead of memorisation, like mathematics or electrical engineering. Would love know if there was some super effective way to learn these similar to spaced repitiion.

So far, the only thing that really works for me is solving lots of problems until I have the technique mastered, but even then after a while I'm prone to forget how to solve them. Perhaps there some way to combine the problem solving with the spaced repition? It seems like it would be far harder to make a deck for this and I don't think most flashcard software handles it very well.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton