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> Software engineering is a mostly solved problem at this point

I guess that's why Claude Code has 0 open issues on Github. Since software engineering is solved, their autonomous agents can easily fix their own software much better and faster than human devs. They can just add "make no mistakes" to their prompt and the model can solve any problem!

Oh wait, they have 5,000+ open issues on Github[1]. I'm yet to be convinced that this is a solved problem

[1]: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues


The OP probably is the only person in their team. There's no other plausible explanation of this level of AI psychosis.

PS: All in for AI agents I use all the time but sorry - SE is not a solved problem. Yet.


We have 80 engineers.

Indeed. In my view, "software engineering is a solved problem" is a roughly equivalent statement to "writing is a solved problem." I'm convinced that people who say this were never serious engineers to begin with, viewing code entirely as a means to an end.

To me, code is both the canvas and deterministic artifact of deep thinking about program logic and data flow, as well as a way to communicate these things to other developers (including myself in the future). Outsourcing that to some statistical amalgam implies that the engineering portion of software engineering is no longer relevant. And maybe it's not for your run-of-the-mill shovelware, but as a profession I'd like to think we hold ourselves to a higher standard than that.

Also, does the sum total of software engineering done up to this point provide a sufficient training set for all future engineering? Are we really "done"? That sounds absurd to me.

I think people spouting absolutist statements like "software engineering is a solved problem" should largely be ignored.


Having spent 3 years of my career working with Clojure, I think it actually gives you even more rope to shoot yourself with than Python/JS.

E.g. macros exist in Clojure but not Python/JS, and I've definitely been plenty stumped by seeing them in the codebase. They tend to be used in very "clever" patterns.

On the other hand, I'm a bit surprised Claude can tackle a complex Clojure codebase. It's been a while since I attempted using an LLM for Clojure, but at the time it failed completely (I think because there is relatively little training data compared to other mainstream languages). I'll have to check that out myself


This changed a lot over the last year, with an absolute seismic shift with Opus 4.5 (I've been trying regularly).


That's awesome! I recently picked up bird photography as a hobby and have contributed a few pictures to wiki commons.

Do you have a website I can follow?


Oh really?! Could you share your wiki profile with the photos?

I have another little game for bird watchers who want to improve their recognition skills and we often showcase photographers and recordists who contribute to the public domain. It's called Birdle and we have a few countries (next month will be releasing Mexico and India). Here is the website with the country selector: https://birdle.world (or directly https://birdle.us for the US one).

If you join our community newsletter, we will be giving access to the new game to our Birdle players. You can join it for updates at: https://newsletter.birdle.co.za/


Sure, my wiki username is the same as HN: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:List...

Thanks! I signed up to the newsletter


Thank you, will check it out!


I got tired of trying to pick a date spot with my girlfriend, so I made this website to randomly pick an restaurant/date activity for me based on OpenStreetMap data.

I've also used the data corrections submitted by users to contribute over 3,000 edits back into OSM!

https://surprisedatespot.com/


As an avid mapper (and liking to go on dinner-dates with my wife) I absolutely love this. Very slick and quick search, congratulations! Do you also parse the `opening_hours` tag to filter for currently open restaurants?


Currently I don't check the opening_hours, because I've found it's missing for many (most?) restaurants, so I felt it wouldn't be a very useful filter


Have you heard of:

https://www.openhistoricalmap.org

I don't think you can pay for it, but I'm sure they'd accept donations!


Interesting but not entirely accurate. Moldova has not existed as a state until 1991, after the dissolution of the USSR but it shows up on the map after WW2.


The great thing about open map projects is that they can be updated, and store a historical edit log along with discussions and sources for each change.


As with other community projects such as Wikipedia or OSM, OpenHistoricalMap relies on keen-eyed volunteers such as yourself to improve their database!


Ah, wonderful -- thank you


Overture is an awesome resource because it has more coverage than OSM, but at the cost of accuracy. When I was considering using it for restaurants in surprisedatespot.com, I found that it has a lot more automated content with bad geocoding (imprecise locations) compared to OSM.

E.g. restaurants can come from an old Facebook page and the geocoding might not be accurate compared to a survey.

So where OSM might have a restaurant that closed 8 years ago, overture has every restaurant that's been at that location for the past 8 years.


Now I'm curious, what causes the latency for range requests with R2?


I don't have any insight into this other than observing how their storage system works, but here's some scripts I made last year to test:

https://github.com/bdon/cloudflare-r2-latency


Range requests means work and logic. Getting a file requires no logic.

Also, I'm pretty sure range requests are going to be difficult to cache. That implies going to origin every request which is bad.


Highly recommend this performance from the last Strange Loop on a similar topic! I had the pleasure of seeing it live. A great combination of live music and Markov chains.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M2o4f_2L0No


There have been quite a few articles corroborating the existence of books like this, the only part that needs believing is that someone actually used the books as advertised.

https://www.vox.com/24141648/ai-ebook-grift-mushroom-foragin...

https://fortune.com/2023/09/03/ai-written-mushroom-hunting-g...


The fact that this exact thing has received media coverage increases the likelihood that the post is fake.

Of course the story remains plausible, and it certainly has an air of truthiness, but I'd give it very good odds for being fake.


Right, that's the only thing I'm questioning.


Even if you doubt this particular case (which I haven't seen any reason to do), it's inevitable that people will believe some of the things they read in legitimate looking books sold by major online retailers.



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