My personal collection of Hacker News article, just to remember to myself (later in time) that that day wasn't a complete waste of time 🧠.
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Is There Another System? by George Neville-Neil - read on Mar 11 2024
Can large language models replace some parts of software development? Perhaps.
One of the easiest tests to determine if you are at risk is to look hard at what you do every day and see if you, yourself, could code yourself out of a job. Programming involves a lot of rote work—templating, boilerplate, and the like. If you can see a way to write a system to replace yourself, either do it, do not tell your bosses, and collect your salary while reading novels in your cubicle, or look for something more challenging to work on.
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40 years of programming by Lars Wirzenius - read on Mar 13 2024
It's not enough to know how computers work, how to use programming languages, to know algorithms and data structures, or how to use the varied tools involved in software construction. You also need to know how to talk with other people to learn what software to build, what it must do, how much effort is acceptable, how to manage the work, and many more things.
Multi-tasking is fine for a computer, but your brain can only think about one thing at a time and has really miserable context switching.
Take care of yourself. Sleep. Eat. Exercise. Rest. Relax. Take care of other people, as best you can. People are important. Software is just fun.
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Fear makes you a worse programmer by Julia Evans - read on Apr 9 2024
So if you blame people for breaking things, they’ll be more scared to make changes in the future, and you’ll end up with worse programs. Huh.
Even with good design, w/o tests you will fear change and so the code will rot. With good tests, there’s no fear, so you’ll clean the code.
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Calculus Made Easy by Silvanus P. Thompson - read on Apr 19 2024
Some calculus-tricks are quite easy. Some are enormously difficult. The fools who write the textbooks of advanced mathematics — and they are mostly clever fools — seldom take the trouble to show you how easy the easy calculations are. On the contrary, they seem to desire to impress you with their tremendous cleverness by going about it in the most difficult way.
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Ghosts in the ROM by hudson - read on Jun 26 2024
We found this Macintosh SE on the side of the road in Brooklyn and carried it to NYC Resistor. It boots, but lacks any media, so we decided to do some further digital archeology.
While digging through dumps generated from the Apple Mac SE ROM images we noticed that there was a large amount of non-code, non-audio data.
Running Adam’s tool, combined with my hex2png on the regions produced success for the four images! So here is the team that twenty five years ago found space in the ROM to include their own images as an easter egg. Can anyone identify them? Where are they now?