diamondap

9 ms·

1.
by diamondap 3mo ago
It is extremely mentally demanding to do both, even for someone with an overactive brain. I reached a point of severe burnout in 2025 and cut back to part-time work. I'll have to ramp up my hours again soon because, contrary to one of
2.
Reflections on software engineering in the age of AI(adiamond.me)
107 points by diamondap 3mo ago|102 comments
3.
by diamondap 3mo ago
Ha! I started my career in a company where I had to pump out custom web apps as fast as humanly possible. The apps were successful, and then I had to maintain them for several years. That's where the real learning occurred. I learned t
4.
by diamondap 4mo ago
I tried make my PDFs X-1a compliant with WeasyPrint, then ran them through Adobe's PDF/X validator and they kept failing. I was in a bit of a hurry and found a way to do it with ghostscript. I would like to remove ghostscript from
5.
by diamondap 4mo ago
Kudos to you for doing that. I've been publishing print and ebooks since 2015, and I can attest to the fact the Word to PDF X-1/a to epub/kindle pipeline is painful. Making minor edits after publication is also painful, as th
6.
by diamondap 9mo ago
> Humans are objectively quite cheap. I disagree with that statement when it comes to software developers. They are actually quite expensive. The typically enter the workforce with 16 years of education (assuming they have a college degr
7.
by diamondap 9mo ago
I think AI will substantially thin out the ranks of programmers over the next five years or so. I've been very impressed with Claude 4.5 and have been using it daily at work. It tends to produce very good, clean, well-documented code a
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Google fined $20 decillion by Russian court(washingtonpost.com)
6 points by diamondap 2y ago|7 comments
9.
by diamondap 2y ago
Non-paywalled version: https://archive.is/AkgMN
10.
by diamondap 2y ago
OK, maybe it isn't capitalism but US society that implies that promise. Many (insensitive) people respond to tales of economic woe by saying, "Get a job!" As if that's going to solve even your basic money woes. As others
11.
by diamondap 2y ago
There are more people struggling these days than the mainstream news reports. The lines at the food banks where I live are much longer than they were before COVID. One of the local food banks says they're distributing three times as ma
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by diamondap 2y ago
My all-time favorite flippant description of a programming language: someone once described Java as "a domain-specific language for converting XML files to stack traces."
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by diamondap 2y ago
I love this part: > A workman could check the stone size himself by seeing if the stone would fit into his mouth. They're probably laying down over a million stones per mile. Do all of them have to pass through a workman's mout
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Ask HN: Are AI and data centers are worth the amount of power they use?
3 points by diamondap 3y ago|1 comments
15.
by diamondap 3y ago
> "And if yes, who cares?" One of my managers used to say that the only reason people write software is because there isn't already an emacs or Excel macro to do what they need.
16.
by diamondap 3y ago
After 25 years of coding primarily in emacs, I switched mainly to VS Code for larger, more complicated projects last year. I did it mainly because it eases navigation through large code bases and because the visual debugger is so easy to us
17.
by diamondap 3y ago
A few years ago, I talked to three retired federal law enforcement agents who had each spent 20+ years fighting the cartels that were bringing drugs into the US from Mexico and South America. All three felt betrayed by the US government. Th
18.
by diamondap 3y ago
Actually, one software-developer-turned-writer did something close. Check out Chris Fox's book "Write to Market" on Amazon. He sat down and analyzed sales figures for different book genres on Amazon then chose a genre where h
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by diamondap 3y ago
Basically any company offering special services that work with very large data sets. That could be a consumer backup system like Carbonite or a bulk photo processing service. In either case, legal agreements with customers are key, because
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by diamondap 3y ago
> Only the affluent can learn these things because ordinary people have real problems to worry about. I can't say I agree with all the author writes, but that statement is spot on.
21.
by diamondap 3y ago
Interesting. Thank you! And the about page has some useful links to other projects. https://www.marginalia.nu/marginalia-search/about/
22.
Ask HN: Curated Web Search?
1 points by diamondap 3y ago|2 comments
23.
by diamondap 3y ago
One of the great lines of 18th century theater comes from Richard Brinsley Sheridan's "The School for Scandal." Sir Peter, alarmed at his wife's extravagant spending, asks her why she buys such expensive things. She says
24.
by diamondap 3y ago
Thanks for posting that. That's pretty cool.
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by diamondap 3y ago
To all you folks complaining about the quality of POD books, you should know that the book designer has a lot to do with the book's readability. Many self-published authors who design their own interiors choose bad fonts out of ignoran
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by diamondap 3y ago
Ha! I remember slogging through that as an undergrad. Afterwards, I was hoping for something less dense and arcane. But the next book was Heidegger's Being and Time.
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by diamondap 3y ago
I think this is right. Some book stores in the US even have print-on-demand machines inside the shop. See https://www.ondemandbooks.com/ for more info about the printers. Most publishers make good money on their backlists,
28.
by diamondap 3y ago
I second this advice. I've been in your position, and I can tell you that that kind of management simply doesn't care about the talent beneath them. If you leave, they'll replace you with someone else and treat them the same
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by diamondap 3y ago
I love the succinct summation in the last line of the review: "if this is the output we can expect from one of our bright young things, we’re fucked." I wonder if the author could boost sales by quoting that on the cover of his bo
30.
by diamondap 3y ago
If your management has been letting that wasteful situation go on for a long time, there's not much you can do. It sounds like there's some dysfunction in management. I've seen that in many businesses. Unfortunately, the mone

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