johnmwilkinson

9 ms·

1.
by johnmwilkinson 2mo ago
I completely agree. I wrote a book on the subject of how to write clear code (Bob Martin was off by one letter!) and comments are a key element of that. https://elementsofcode.io/chapters/documentation/ We’re in g
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by johnmwilkinson 7mo ago
It’s not that people don’t write like this, it’s the over-usage and general tone.
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by johnmwilkinson 7mo ago
In what sense is this true? We understand the theory of what is happening and we can painstakingly walk through the token generation process and understand it. So in what sense do we not understand LLMs?
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by johnmwilkinson 8mo ago
Expanding on this regarding the difference between abstraction vs encapsulation: abstraction is about the distillation of useful concepts while encapsulation is a specific tactic used to accomplish a behavior. To continue with the idea of n
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by johnmwilkinson 8mo ago
Computer Science stole the term abstraction from the field of Mathematics. I think mathematics can be really helpful in clearing things up here. A really simple abstraction in mathematics is that of numeric basis (e.g. base 10) for represe
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by johnmwilkinson 8mo ago
Sort of related? https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login-logout_1305_micken...
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by johnmwilkinson 8mo ago
I believe this is conflating abstraction with encapsulation. The former is about semantic levels, the later about information hiding.
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by johnmwilkinson 8mo ago
A peak of 4k/s does not mean they get that for the entire hour. The point I was trying to make is that simply computing the mean over a 24hr period will almost certainly ensure you size things incorrectly. If a stretch of road was used
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by johnmwilkinson 8mo ago
Of course, they make 90% of requests between 6 and 7 PM, with a general peak of 4 thousand req/s.
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by johnmwilkinson 9mo ago
Broad strokes: absolutely. The practical reality gets tricky, though. All programming abstractions are imperfect in some regard, so the question becomes what level of imperfection can you tolerate, and is the benefit worth the cost? I thin
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by johnmwilkinson 9mo ago
> 4. Clarity is seniority. Cleverness is overhead. Clarity is likely the most important aspect of making maintainable, extendable code. Of course, it’s easy to say that, it’s harder to explain what it looks like in practice. I wrote a bo
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by johnmwilkinson 9mo ago
I think clever is being used in two different ways, in that case. In the original quote, “clever” refers to the syntax, where they way the code was constructed makes it difficult to decipher. I believe your interpretation (and perhaps the p
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by johnmwilkinson 1y ago
I recently published a book about coding, and put it all online for free: https://elementsofcode.io I suppose it has moved from “what are you working” to “what have you worked on” territory, but since I wrapped up the website ju
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Show HN: I wrote a book: The Elements of Code
11 points by johnmwilkinson 1y ago|4 comments
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by johnmwilkinson 7y ago
Fun, but terrible on mobile
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by johnmwilkinson 7y ago
> She insisted, “My dream is to build housing only for women who plan to never marry.” Sounds a lot like a convent
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by johnmwilkinson 7y ago
Personally, I am a big believer in doing one thing really well rather than a lot of things kinda ok. I can't speak to how easy it is to use nexus for managing npm packages, but I can say that it is really straightforward with verdaccio
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by johnmwilkinson 7y ago
Not that we don't enjoy donations, but this project won't go the way of Sinopia. Trent and I originally forked Sinopia and purposefully made it an organization rather than putting it into an individual's repo. We very intenti