hbrn

6 ms·

1.
by hbrn 6mo ago
>all you need to do to make an agentic RAG is to have the LLM be able to write/rewrite its own search queries (possibly in multiple passes) I think this is a huge oversimplification, the term "search query" is doing a lot
2.
by hbrn 6mo ago
While it's true that people are naturally predisposed to invent the "secret quantizing" conspiracy regardless of whether the actual conspiracy exists or not, I think there's more to the story. I've seen Sonnet consi
3.
by hbrn 6mo ago
> it's ridiculous to reserve the term "RAG" for just the earliest most basic implementation Whether we like it or not, dumb semantic search became the colloquial definition of RAG. And when you hear someone saying "we
4.
by hbrn 9mo ago
The furnaces I'm comparing are Claude Code vs hiring more engineers. Not Claude Code vs Codex vs Gemini. If $20/mo makes an engineer even 10% more productive, purchasing Claude Code is a no-brainer. Most engineers feel like Claude
5.
by hbrn 9mo ago
> What a weird blast furnace! Would anyone try to use this tool in such a scenario? Not most experienced metalworkers. Absolutely wrong. If this blast furnace would cost a fraction of other blast furnaces, and would allow you to produce
6.
by hbrn 11mo ago
1. Humans are capable of writing good code. Most won't, but at least it's possible. If your company needs good code to survive, would you take 5% chance or 0% chance? 2. Even when humans write crappy code, they typically can mai
7.
by hbrn 11mo ago
Funny, I've spoken about something like this to a colleague couple weeks ago. This could be a future of software development we're headed towards, if the DX is done right. There are definitely cases where the spec is much easier t
8.
by hbrn 1y ago
Third example was supposed to be Svelte. Vue also isn't too far: function increment() { count.value += 1 } In 2025, React state management is complete shitshow compared to Svelte and Vue. How in the world people are claimi
9.
by hbrn 1y ago
> React feels natural because it never asks you to stop writing JavaScript I want to increment some counter on the webpage. Which approach feels natural? increment = () => { this.setState((prevState) => ({ count: prevState.
10.
by hbrn 2y ago
Have you read the whole section? > Documentation for parameters and return values ([23]) > Let IDEs show what types a function expects and returns ([16]) > For example, one library might use string-based annotations to provide impr
11.
by hbrn 2y ago
I gave you a selection of top 50 startups out of thousands funded by YC. You're giving me one anecdote.
12.
by hbrn 2y ago
> It's just not as good Again, the evidence (as limited as it is) suggests otherwise. You are more likely to succeed if you're going with dynamic language and not doing "proper engineering". This has been widely accep
13.
by hbrn 2y ago
I would expect dynamic type crowd to embrace microservices first, given how everybody says that dynamic codebases are a huge mess. Regardless, to me enterprise represents legacy, bureaucracy, incidental complexity, heavy typing, stagnation.
14.
by hbrn 2y ago
Large programs are harder to maintain because people don't have the balls to break them into smaller ones with proper boundaries. They prefer incremental bandaids like type hints or unit tests that make it easier to deal with the big b
15.
by hbrn 2y ago
How come all those unicorns were built with intolerable Python/Ruby, not Java/C#/Go? https://charliereese.ca/y-combinator-top-50-software-startup...
16.
by hbrn 2y ago
> Most code with type hints is easier to read That has not been my experience in the past few years. I've always been a fan of type hints in Python: intention behind them was to contribute to readability and when developer had that
17.
by hbrn 2y ago
What's even worse, when typing is treated as an indisputable virtue (and not a tradeoff), pretty much every team starts sacrificing readability for the sake of typing. And lo and behold, they end up with _more_ design bugs. And the sad
18.
by hbrn 2y ago
> Writing software without types lets you go at full speed. Full speed towards the cliff. Isn't it strange that back when Python (or Ruby) didn't even have type hints (not type checkers, type hints!), it would easily outperform
19.
by hbrn 2y ago
Anecdotally, can confirm. And the trick of course is to first get the deal (which lasts for 1-2 weeks typically), and then add credits.
20.
by hbrn 2y ago
First of all, this is a really dumb point. If it is so easy to find good assets, why don't you buy those, take the loan against those like the reddit post suggests, then buy even more assets with those money, take another loan, and jus
21.
by hbrn 2y ago
This strategy is usually presented as a way for billionaires to avoid paying taxes on their wealth, but that's a blatant manipulation. The reality is that it allows you to introduce a bit of risk to potentially save taxes on day-to-da
22.
by hbrn 2y ago
AFAIK inflation is one of the reasons. If an asset was worth $50k in 1950, and is now worth $100k, it would feel really weird when capital gains tax is collected on an asset that actually lost more than 80% of it's value over the years
23.
by hbrn 3y ago
Apologies, but such mindset is the essence of the worst programming traits. > The code that is more easily unit testable, is the code I care about. Author argues that his code is more readable. Sounds like you're saying that being u
24.
by hbrn 3y ago
> What you're doing by breaking things into functions is trying to prevent it's eventual growth into a bug infested behemoth Not every piece of code grows into a bug-infested behemoth. A lot of code doesn't grow for years.
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by hbrn 3y ago
> I can't think of a single example of a strongly typed language that has been "fixed" by someone* to get around typing Dependency injection is exactly that.
26.
by hbrn 3y ago
> For example, lets say I gave a simple coding puzzle (think leetcode) to 10 python engineers. I would get at least 8 different responses. A few might gravitate around similar concepts but they would be significantly different. This is t
27.
by hbrn 3y ago
Not only do this, but do it way more successfully. I'll never get tired of repeating that among top YC startups, Java as a primary language contributes to roughly 1% of value, while Python + Ruby are almost at 70%. https://
28.
by hbrn 3y ago
> Python is very difficult to maintain when you program goes over 100k lines of code, while the static type system of c++ is good for millions I see this argument a lot, but people often forget that Python is very concise (yet readable)
29.
by hbrn 3y ago
Key type is not the right layer for solving information leak (and incorrect joins, mentioned above). Use hashids to avoid the leak, and as a bonus your client-facing keys will be short and easily copy-pastable.
30.
by hbrn 3y ago
If you have services with lots of dependencies on other services, then you probably ended up the worst of two worlds - distributed monolith. Typically one-way or two-way is not a choice you can make as an engineer, most processes in your bu

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