mmorearty

Joined 15 years ago

Karma
587
Submissions
38
Member since
Mar 8
Retired software engineer, most recently at Asana.

Previously worked at Macromedia/Adobe. Worked on Dreamweaver, the Flex Builder IDE, and the Flash Player's ActionScript VM (Tamarin).

Previously worked at Microsoft. Was on the original team that created Visual C++ (as a developer on the debugger team).

View on Hacker News

Recent submissions

Comment · 1 year ago
About the risk that vibe coding may go astray. Some irresistible quotes:

> […] Claude is a fuckin' slot machine, not a human. Every query is a pull of the lever, with potentially infinite upside or downside. It's addictive, sure. Lots of dopamine and adrenaline, and what's more, over time, your outcomes are even improving. But your slot machine doesn't "get" you. You don't have a beautiful rapport with it. You're just getting better at prompting, and getting consequently luckier with your pulls. Any bond you might perceive there is illusory.

and

> Paraphrasing astronaut Frank Borman, you should be using your superior judgment (only vibe code when there's an instant Undo) to avoid having to use your superior skill (vibe coding your way out of the mess you made.)

Comment · 2 years ago
I've had good results recently by deleting all my social media apps from my phone, BUT allowing myself to use them through Mobile Safari. And I did not bookmark them; e.g. for Instagram I type "in" and then Enter.

This gives me some friction, without having to go cold turkey. All the popular social media sites have mobile websites that are "good enough", but slightly clunkier than the apps, and also they can't send me notifications.

My phone screentime per day has dropped by about 1/3rd.

Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
Shoot, you’re right. I’ll try to delete this HN submission
Comment · 4 years ago
A joke I heard around 1988:

A young man went back to visit his old economics professor, under whom he had studied many years earlier. He took a look at the final exam the professor was preparing to give the students. He said, "Professor, this exam is identical to the one you gave us year ago!"

The professor replied, "That's okay, all the answers have changed."

Comment · 6 years ago
From https://twitter.com/brainwane/status/1319692088758489089 :

For most of this year, @elwoz and I have been working on a pretty ambitious project:

* to make a fresh release of GNU Autoconf, a crucial #FLOSS build tool that hadn't had a new release since 2012

* to get paid for that

* to help put Autoconf on a more sustainable footing, so it doesn't have to get rescued again a little while down the road

Comment · 6 years ago
Scons is definitely slow in some scenarios. It has O(m * n) performance if a rule has m inputs and n outputs. I tdiscovered this when working with a code base that had a single rule with all .ts files as inputs, and all .js files as outputs. As the number of files we had got bigger, SCons got painfully slow. Of course we can rewrite our rules, but that shouldn’t be necessary, especially since it was quite hard to figure out why our builds got so slow.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton