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-2000 Lines of code (2004)

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513 points xeonmc | 5 comments | 25 Jun 25 19:53 UTC | HN request time: 1.895s | source
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bironran ◴[25 Jun 25 22:55 UTC] No.44382555[source]▶
One of my best commits was removing about 60K lines of code, a whole "server" (it was early 2000's) with that had to hold all of its state in memory and replacing them with about 5k of logic that was lightweight enough to piggyback into another service and had no in-memory state at all. That was pure a algorithmic win - figuring out that a specific guided subgraph isomorphism where the target was a tree (directed, non cyclic graph with a single root) was possible by a single walk through the origin (general) directed bi-graph while emitting vertices and edges to the output graph (tree) and maintaining only a small in-process peek-able stack of steps taken from the root that can affect the current generation step (not necessarily just parent path).

I still remember the behemoth of a commit that was "-60,000 (or similar) lines of code". Best commit I ever pushed.

Those were fun times. Hadn't done anything algorithmically impressive since.

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ifellover ◴[26 Jun 25 05:49 UTC] No.44384528[source]▶
I’m a hobby programmer and lucky enough to script a lot of things at work. I consider myself fairly adept at some parts of programming, but comments like these make it so clear to me that I have an absolutely massive universe of unknowns that I’m not sure I have enough of a lifetime left to learn about.
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1. Cthulhu_ ◴[26 Jun 25 12:15 UTC] No.44386666[source]▶
I want to believe a lot of these algorithms will "come to you" if you're ever in a similar situation; only later will you learn that they have a name, or there's books written about it, etc.

But a lot is opportunity. Like, I had the opportunity to work on an old PHP backend, 500ms - 1 second response times (thanks in part to it writing everything to a giant XML string which was then parsed and converted to a JSON blob before being sent back over the line). Simply rewriting it in naive / best practices Go changed response times to 10 ms. In hindsight the project was far too big to rewrite on my own and I should have spent six months to a year trying to optimize and refactor it, but, hindsight.

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2. geon ◴[26 Jun 25 15:45 UTC] No.44388521[source]▶
Yes. I invented the Trie data structure when I was 19. It was very exciting finding out it had a name, and it was indeed considered a good fit for my use case.
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3. tired-chimp ◴[26 Jun 25 17:02 UTC] No.44389189[source]▶
Thats so funny, I had the exact same experience. And when I was 16 I "invented" csv's because I was too lazy to setup SQL for my discord bot. I like to think I've gotten better at searching for the correct solution to things rather than just jumping in with my best guess.
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4. bhaak ◴[26 Jun 25 18:01 UTC] No.44389734{3}[source]▶
LLMs are pretty good at providing names and search terms for very vague prompts.

Although that's also often an invitation for hallucinations so you have to be even more careful than usual.

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5. mikepurvis ◴[26 Jun 25 19:45 UTC] No.44390615{4}[source]▶
I was just going to say the same— LLMs are great for giving a name to a described concept, architecture, or phenomenon. And I would argue that hallucinations don't actually much matter for this usage as you're going to turn around and google the name anyway, once you've been told it.