[HN Gopher] Flintstoning your way around hard technical challenges
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Flintstoning your way around hard technical challenges
Author : scrollinondubs
Score : 52 points
Date : 2020-06-09 12:17 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (grid7.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (grid7.com)
| karmakaze wrote:
| There's another aspect to this. Sometimes that human isn't 'in'
| the system but can be the user of it.
|
| I recently made a script to document the code paths from any
| GraphQL or REST endpoint to code lines taking a database lock. It
| was a hack with false positives. I 'fixed' it by making it an
| interactive app instead of a script.
| gkop wrote:
| "Wizard of Oz prototyping" is a better name for this idea.
| lqet wrote:
| I have seen this pattern multiple times: (1) tell client
| completely underdefined problem can be solved automatically, (2)
| tell developer to implement it, (3) developer spends months
| trying to automate it, (4) days before the deadline the code does
| something that would barely count as acceptable, (5) an intern is
| hired last-minute to solve the problem manually, (6) "we will do
| it by hand until we have fixed the code".
|
| The client will never know (5). The intern will eventually do it
| manually full-time. The code is of course never fixed.
|
| Months later, the developer finally has enough understanding of
| the problem to find out that it has been a research topic for
| decades, with no satisfying results so far.
| m463 wrote:
| There's that xkcd...
|
| https://xkcd.com/1425/
|
| They're going to have to update the comic, since the GPS tech
| tree that enabled the first one can not be combined with the AI
| tech tree to make the second one simple.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| The simplest solution to the problem presented in xkcd 1425
| is to assume every photo is a photo of a bird, and just let
| billions of users be mildly annoyed / extremely frustrated by
| that assumption.
|
| Then we can write thousands of blogs posts titled like _"
| Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Photos"_.
| m463 wrote:
| So you're saying "everything is a bird" +
| https://xkcd.com/386/ = training data :)
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| I'm not a software developer by any stretch of the
| imagination, but from an outsiders perspective:
|
| That does appear to be the AI / Machine Learning approach
| ;)
| [deleted]
| jasimmonsv wrote:
| I have always heard this as to "mechanical turk the problem"
| jacinabox wrote:
| Yeah right, mechanical turk it, that's easy enough to say, then
| you have to find yourself a dwarf.
| Finnucane wrote:
| Hand me the pliers.
| 1propionyl wrote:
| This is referred to as the "Wizard of Oz" method (or
| "experimenter-in-the-loop"). It's very common in HCI research, as
| well as in product prototyping in various industries.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_of_Oz_experiment
|
| A variation of the technique is also common in CS user studies,
| where the novel tool under study works, but is too
| computationally intensive (i.e. slow) to actually use in the
| study. In this variation, the tool's results are precomputed, and
| the tool's interface is mocked up so that it just retrieves
| precomputed results (or it delegates to a human researcher
| playing the "wizard").
| jimmaswell wrote:
| How hard can a script to delete documents based on timestamp
| possibly be?
| stagger87 wrote:
| The saying "can't see the forest for the trees" comes to mind
| here.
| joshribakoff wrote:
| Regardless, the website may change, so the script may also
| require upkeep
| cardiffspaceman wrote:
| There was some research at IBM, which I have tried to find a
| reference for, that tested: "What if we wanted to build a better
| word processor, after having completely solved speech
| recognition?" They devised an experiment where the subject, given
| the task of say creating a document, would speak and "the system"
| would respond by entering text and the usual things that word
| processors do. "The system" was a CRT and a human confederate
| behind a curtain who would type stuff and otherwise respond to
| the subject's commands.
| [deleted]
| diablo1 wrote:
| There's an XKCD for this: https://xkcd.com/1319/
|
| Also, anecdotally, I literally automate to prevent RSI[0].
| There's only so much the human body can manually do with a
| computer
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repetitive_strain_injury
| chrisweekly wrote:
| classic xkcd, one of my faves. esp the alt-text.
| Scarblac wrote:
| We have a website where customers of our company can upload data
| sets for various domain-specific modelling software, and we can
| do various integrity and quality checks on the data for them.
|
| If it gains traction we'll maybe automate parts of it some day,
| but for now it's lovingly referred to as AaaS, or Arnold-as-a-
| service.
| gowld wrote:
| Or as it's called in the industry, "AI/ML".
| [deleted]
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