Has anyone else noticed the extreme dichotomy of developers using AI agents? Either AI agents essentially don't work, or they are apparently running legions of agents to produce some nebulous gigantic estate.
I think the crucial difference is that I do actually see evidence (ie the codebase) posted sometimes for the former, the latter could well be entirely mythos -- a 24 day old account evangelizing for the legion of agents story does kind of fit the theme.
C is considered easy to pick up for the average user posting HN comments because we have the benefit of years -- the average comp sci student, who has been exposed to Javascript and Python, who might not know what "pass by reference" even means... I'm not sure they're going to be considering C easy.
I've taught several different languages to both 1st year uni students, and new joiners to a technical company, where they had no programming background.
Honestly, C seems to be one of the easier languages to teach the basics of. It's certainly easier than Java or C++, which have many more concepts.
C has some concepts that confuse the hell out of beginners, and it will let you shoot yourself in the foot very thoroughly with them (much more than say, Java). But you don't tend to encounter them till later on.
I have never said getting good at C is easy. Just that it's easy to pick up.
C made a lot more sense to me after having done assembly (6502 in my case, but it probably doesn't matter). Things like passing a reference suddenly just made sense.
I agree. For me as a beginner, C was relatively easy to learn the basics of. Sure, I never went on to get familiar with all the details and become proficient in it, but the basic concepts really aren’t that hard to understand. There’s just not too much you need to wrap your head around.
C is taught as the introduction to programming in CS50x, Harvard's wildly popular MOOC for teaching programming to first-year college students and lifelong learners via the internet. Using the clang toolchain gives you much better error messages than old versions of gcc used to give. And I bet AI/LLM/copilot tools are pretty good at C given how much F/OSS is written in C.
Just to provide another data point here... that C is a little easier to pick up, today, than it was in the 1990s or 2000s, when all you had was the K&R C book and a Linux shell. I regularly recommend CS50x to newcomers to programming via a guide I wrote up as a GitHub gist. I took the CS50x course myself in 2020 (just to refresh my own memory of C after years of not using it that much), and it is very high quality.
The web is straight up a weaker, worse more closed off experience post-flash, so I'm not sure that this engenders the kind of response you had envisioned but now I'm worried about xslt.
On the other hand, when you want to get some plan funded, something which will help real individual people, it is going to be conservatives first in line to block such a thing from coming to fruition. Public libraries are an example of something I think could not come into being today for this reason.
From the LLMs perspective, "let me check the docs" is the invocation you say before you come back with an answer, because that almost certainly appears in the corpus many times naturally.
If "just persuade them with your good ideas" was a workable solution it would've worked at least once by now, instead the means of persuasion are owned by psychopaths who continually convince the public to vote self-destructively. The enshittification of society continues.
>If "just persuade them with your good ideas" was a workable solution it would've worked at least once by now
If I have this right: your measurement for whether or not people are in their right mind is if they take to your specific ideas?
Have you considered the possibility that people are most often persuaded by good ideas and your ideas are awful?
And insofar as you present them in an ostensibly good light, you are lying somewhere in the presentation and people can see that.
To be clear, your perspective is that everyone else is a psychopath or so much dumber than you, personally, as to be led by psychopaths.
And it's not you that's dumber than most others, nor who is led by the psychopath(s), nor who is the psychopath that needs to advance their ideas by marginalizing people who have other ideas.
And the strategy is to marginalize people because...checks notes... your ideas are unpalatable to the population. For no good reason.
Why are your ideas unpalatable to the population, from their perspective?
Any good policy wonk will know that much, will be able to explain the opposition's reasons accurately and in detail, and will be able to steel-man their own argument utilizing that perspective.
Whereas a manipulative person will avoid that level of analysis.
You've demonstrated the problem with good ideas, and the vulnerabilities they have quite well. The parent poster said nothing of the sort, but you've:
* inserted a bunch of words into their mouth
* engaged in a gish-gallop
* insulted the person you are replying to
* accused the person you are replying to of lying
All of which are widely deployed techniques used to prevent good ideas from being heard, let alone from being adopted. It was probably unintentional, but it's pretty amazing how quickly you've made a case for why "good ideas" alone aren't sufficient by demonstrating all the ways savvy opponents can shut them down.
If we were civil engineers it would be shocking for the public to learn that we are sometimes ordered build the bridges terribly on purpose, for something like the purpose that it influences people toward using toll roads -- when in the world of software engineering not only has this kind of anti-user (anti-human) behaviour become commonplace but actually it's increasingly the only novel work we do between gluing other people's code together.
Agreed. You don't even need to just include engineers. Even professionals like electricians or nurses etc stand to be struck off or even sent to prison for incompetence like mislabelling a fusebox or something. Meanwhile software engineers are being told to just fucking put a bolt in the fusebox, we haven't got time to do it properly.
We’re not building bridges though are we. I’m more aware than anyone that the software is terrible about the place. I’ve also seen that fail to matter that much 99% of the time.
Nah, we're just handling national security, healthcare, banking and social welfare. We're of course allowed to make oopsies, and since we're not a real engineering profession we're never held accountable :)
This is by definition a critical comment which teaches something, ie if you don't present viewers with pertinent information about your project, they cannot take an interest in your project. I think it should be noted that both GP and another few highly rated comments are making this exact point.
"by definition"? It's apparently something you believe, but it certainly isn't a tautology. And I don't think that's an accurate characterization of that comment, at all.
If anyone else is reading along, the throwaway account is also lying about this (shocker!)
You'll open link to find a website that does not at all claim math is racist, but instead claims that it has been unequally taught for years. Which makes complete sense, as the racial gap in Math attainment in the US isn't replicated in other countries -- in the UK GCSE Maths levels for black students hover around or slightly above those of white students.
I think the crucial difference is that I do actually see evidence (ie the codebase) posted sometimes for the former, the latter could well be entirely mythos -- a 24 day old account evangelizing for the legion of agents story does kind of fit the theme.