Hmm, ~30 years ago the compilers that I was using were generating generally fine assembly/machine code. Some of the other tooling was more troublesome: cross platform high performance numerically stable code and C++ static template deduplication paid for a lot of beers around then, and I needed them.
Compilers are deterministic and they actually possess domain knowledge of what they are trying to do. AI models are non-deterministic, have no real domain knowledge due to lack of an underlying world model, and their way of "writing" software is to spew out something that looks like something that they have been trained on, then iterate on it long enough until it has reached the level of being barely runnable.
People say "determinism" but I don't think that's actually the property we care about. For instance you could imagine a compiler that makes heavy use of superoptimization with random search and it would still have the ineffable quality that LLM codegen lacks. I think what we're actually trying to say is that the compiler preserves the formal semantics of the source language in its output, whereas English text doesn't have any such formal semantics to preserve.
Agreed. There's no place for racist slurs on HN, especially when they're posted from behind anonymous usernames. It's often the kind of thing people wouldn't dare say under their real name if their livelihood depended on it ;)
Has nothing to do with that. If someone is looking for something, they can find it anywhere. If you want to say "prevalent in [place name]... etc" The emphasis is on the tech culture. The factors are multiple. Parallel: Do you know about chauvinism, etc.?
We've banned this account for posting a spate of abusive comments in recent days. You've been here long enough to know this is unacceptable, and when users act like this we have to assume they want to be banned. If you don't want to be banned, you can email us (hn@ycombinator.com) and commit to observing the guidelines in future. https://hackernews.hn/newsguidelines.html
