Algorithmic trading developer; Scala, R, Java, C++, et al. Recent work: I took care of IT for a 6-person startup hedge fund till we got acquired by a larger firm. Would love to work on algo trading, data engineering, ML ops, etc; Ping me to discuss anything.
Question: if I don't use TUIs or millions of lines of scrolling text, what am I missing by not using these newer terminal implementations? I use mintty on Windows and am pretty happy with it.
I love such stories. Right now, a lot of folks I know are struggling to find jobs, so I read the part about how he got a job the first day he was out of jail with some astonishment and nostalgia for the simpler days, when showing interest was often enough to land the job! Now, hoop number 1, the AI resume filter, is a strange obstacle that one has to jump through first.
Well, I'm on Windows (+ Cygwin) and wrote a Dockerfile. It wasn't that hard. git branch + worktree + a docker container per project and I can work with copilot in --yolo mode (or claude --dangerously-skip-permissions, whichever). vscode is pretty smooth at installing the VS Code Server on first connection to a docker container, too, and I just open up the workspace in a minute.
I've always been struck by how long sentences are in writing from a century or more ago. To my mind whose attention-span has been poisoned by YouTube Shorts (even if they are mostly about trigonometry) and Tweets (even if I tell myself that's the new newspaper), they are most difficult to read. I often have to restart from the beginning.
Albeit an extreme example, here's a sentence from Henry James' "The Ambassadors", 1909:
The principle I have just mentioned as operating had been, with the most newly disembarked of the two men, wholly instinctive - the fruit of a sharp sense that, delightful as it would be to find himself looking, after so much separation, into his comrade's face, his business would be a trifle bungled should he simply arrange for this countenance to present itself to the nearing steamer as the first "note," of Europe.
I disagree with "the golden age of software quality". For example, right now, on the front page of HN, is this article, "After Windows Update, Password icon invisible, click where it used to be", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46116567. I could be wrong, but it feels as if this egregious error is AI workslop?!
It's become a universal truth that you should probably not upgrade to the latest and non-greatest version of ANYTHING these days. Not Android, not Windows, not iOS, not macOS. It's just embarrassing how companies with market caps sometimes above $1T produce workslop.
I use Windows Update Blocker on Windows 10 to keep it "protected" from upgrades (!). I can see that critical security updates are occurring despite this, so it's a good compromise. For now. When Windows 12 is announced, Windows 11 may finally be usable.
I took care of IT for a startup hedge fund once. I was the quant's right-hand man, data engineer, visualization dashboard guy, everything. The quant needed to run a monolithic C++ program daily to chew through stock data and we decided a dual-Xeon server with 512 GB RAM would be great. OVH MG-512, for those curious.
Quant happy, boss happy, all good. Then the boss goes for lunch with someone and comes back slightly disturbed. We were not buzzword compliant. Apparently the other guy made him feel that he was using outdated tech by not being on AWS, using auto-scaling etc;
Here I am, from a background where my first language was 8086 assembly, and compactness was important to me. I remember thinking, "This whole thing could run on a powerful calculator, except for the RAM requirement".
It was a good lesson for me. Most CTOs know this bias and have unnecessarily huge and wasteful budgets but make sure they keep the business heads happy in the comfort that the firm is buzzword compliant. Efficiency and compactness are a marketing liability for IT heads!
They're great at creating test cases out of code and/or log file excerpts. They're good at run-of-the-mill tasks whose answer one can reasonably expect to find on StackOverflow. I'm using GPT-4.1 and Clause Sonnet Thinking 3.7 with vscode + GitHub Copilot
Wish I was taught things these in school. Psychology, CBT techniques, etc; I have always had a low EQ and learned a lot from basically messing things up, and from having a wife with super high EQ. Perception is reality for all practical purposes, despite the more mathematical wanting it to be not so, simply because the objective can literally not be perceived: each perceiver is subjective. Fixing this input layer would have saved me a lot of CPU churn, so to speak.
Somewhat related: sentence completions / fill-in-the-blank templates are shockingly effective at eliciting your inner thoughts which even you didn't know you were feeling. The idea is from Nathaniel Branden's work.
"What I regret right now is ____"
"What I should now is ____"
"I am become aware that ____"
You don't need to journal these on paper. Don't do these in public. You might find yourself overwhelmed by what comes out.
Yes! Once I've figured out that this problem is best solved using parser combinators, and that I have a good idea of how to model the transformation, I'm so glad I can delegate work to the LLM code gen and focus on the specification, test cases, corner cases, etc;
Programming is in a niche in comparison to other hobbies / professions in that it is a creative process where you can repeat the experiment endlessly and without physical costs or destruction (assuming your code is not operating a robot or something in the physical world). Re-writing pieces of your code and re-running never fails to bring joy to me. Painting, carpentry, racing, etc; do not have an analogue. Producing digital art (music, for example), writing and tinkering with mathematics come close.
Researchers in chemistry and biology may enjoy a similar joy, but I assume it is much more difficult to re-run your experiment with slightly different ingredients. One aspect where these fields are leaps ahead of code is "code producing code": chain reactions are common in the real world and in fact, probably key to the whole thing.
> One reason for flat design is because it was the lowest common denominator and easy for devs to implement.
The 3D buttons in Windows 98 (Start button, for example) must have be harder to develop due to the animation involved. Yet, that was perfectly fine on hardware much older than those on which flat UIs were developed. I think you are missing the main point, which is that designers maul designs every season exactly like in the fashion industry due to merely being employed to do so and feeling a need to produce something new all the time (, which is sub-optimal for the humans who have to bear the UX consequences, to say the least).
I got a minor amount of hate for it, but to repeat what I wrote here [1]:
"Slowly, I'm coming to the conclusion that designers should never be employed, only consulted on a per-project basis. If they sit around 8 hours a day, they end up changing something or the other to justify their existence. But human beings are not used to change at such a rapid cadence. Humans take time to settle into a design and establish patterns of usage."
Can you please tell me your thoughts on how it is "hard to defend"?
My thoughts:
How can designers criticize the use of Comic Sans? If users use it where it's connotations (childlike, casual) are appropriate, such as birthday parties, and love it, who are designers to comment on it? I find this indefensible, as if design sensibilities have a foundation very much like mathematics or physics and there is a clearly Universal litmus test of good design and bad design. There isn't. In fact, arbitrary mores of fashion such as "Comic Sans is uncool" are the very tell that design has foundations as strong as a piece of string in the wind. The disdain for Comic Sans reeks of elitism, where designers gatekeep "good taste" based on arbitrary conventions.
Designers are so out of touch. That whole criticism of Comic Sans is one example. Slowly, I'm coming to the conclusion that designers should never be employed, only consulted on a per-project basis. If they sit around 8 hours a day, they end up changing something or the other to justify their existence. But human beings are not used to change at such a rapid cadence. Humans take time to settle into a design and establish patterns of usage.
vijay.v @ google's email thingy | http://hk.linkedin.com/in/varanasivijay