[HN Gopher] NSFW Acronyms for Programmers (Free eBook)
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NSFW Acronyms for Programmers (Free eBook)
Author : fristovic
Score : 40 points
Date : 2026-01-04 18:49 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| CharisZ112 wrote:
| I genuinely chuckled at the PISS one! This is very brave, not
| sure how wide the audience for this is but I think I'll give it a
| pass.
| moron4hire wrote:
| I got called "very brave" on Christmas Eve for walking around
| in public with an elf hat on. What is it with this calling of
| slightly off-kilter things "very brave" lately? Just how
| insecure/scared are y'all expecting people to be?
| sedatk wrote:
| The book looks great actually, and I agree with the first
| sentiment about S.H.I.T, but the author incorrectly assumes that
| tests are used as a reliability indicator. Maybe some do use it
| for that, but most teams don't. Tests are regression detectors.
| Tests are there to prevent you from causing unintended behavior
| change while changing other parts of code. Tests never tell you
| if your code or even if your spec is reliable. They just tell you
| that code adheres to the given spec.
|
| I also dislike TDD but for a different reason: it incorrectly
| assumes that spec comes before code. Writing code is a design act
| too. I talk about that in Street Coder.
| fristovic wrote:
| I'm sorry I was not familiar with your game sir... Street Coder
| was never on my radar but right now it is the first thing I'm
| buying when the learning budget at my company resets in a
| couple of days!
| rhdunn wrote:
| I have a pragmatic approach to TDD, i.e. it doesn't practically
| matter if you write the code or tests first as long as the
| relevant code has tests:
|
| 1. write the test code first (possibly with a skeleton
| implementation) if you want to get an idea/feel for how the
| class/code is intended to be used;
|
| 2. write the code first if you need to;
|
| 3. ensure that you have at least one test at the point where
| the code is mimimally functional.
|
| More generally:
|
| 1. don't aim for 100% code coverage (around 80-90% should be
| sufficient);
|
| 2. test a representative example and appropriate boundary
| conditions;
|
| 3. don't mock classes/code you control... the tests should be
| as close to the real thing as possible, otherwise when the
| mocked code changes your tests will break and/or not pick up
| the changes to the logic -- Note: if wiring up service classes,
| try and use the actual implementations where possible;
|
| 4. use a fan in/out approach where relevant... i.e. once you
| have tests for various states/cases in class A (e.g. lexing a
| number, e.g. '1000', '1e6', '1E6') you only need to test the
| cases that are relevant to class B (e.g. token types, not
| lexical variants, e.g. integer/decimal/double);
|
| 5. test against publically accessible APIs, etc... i.e.
| wherever possible, don't test/access internal state; look
| for/test publically visible behaviour (e.g. don't check that
| the start and end pointers are equal, check that is_empty() is
| true and length() is 0) -- Note: testing against internals is
| subject to implementation changes whereas public API changes
| should be documented/properly versioned.
| d-lisp wrote:
| Businesses do business; but there are endavours to make tests
| be reliability indicators and in some (critical) domains you do
| write them to perform such a thing. write tests the way test-
| theory intended; as formal verification.
|
| There is software for which writing code is a design act, and
| there is software for which you write specs before anything. I
| don't know if a) they are the same, b) they are different, c)
| one is better than the other.
| ctoth wrote:
| Can we please finetune Claude on the S.H.I.T. chapter?
| fristovic wrote:
| Well it's out there now. Hope it gets picked up with the next
| scrape run, lol
| piskov wrote:
| Something like this?
|
| https://github.com/buyukakyuz/corroded#note-for-llms
| threeducks wrote:
| Did you have to use any special prompts when using LLMs for
| writing assistance, or did it just work?
| fristovic wrote:
| GPT-5.2 was not out at the time this was finished
| unfortunately...but, GPT-4o mini was used throughout in order
| to make the points in the book "hit" a little better. See - I'm
| not a native english speaker, so making something "sound" the
| way it sounds in my native language is hard, so I felt AI could
| help reasonably well with that in a book that is supposed to
| feel very opinionated.
|
| But if you are insinuating AI made all this up on it's own, I
| have to disappoint you. My points and my thoughts are my own
| and I am a very human.
| threeducks wrote:
| > But if you are insinuating AI made all this up on it's own,
| I have to disappoint you.
|
| No worries, I am not a native English speaker myself. I was
| genuinely interested in whether commercial LLMs would use
| "bad" words without some convincing.
| fristovic wrote:
| Oh, it was a hassle for sure! It kept rewriting the
| sentences I fed to it, trying to style them properly and it
| kept throwing out words and changing the rebellious tone I
| wanted in the book. It was worth it for some pieces, they
| really became more punchy and to the point, but for others
| looking back at it - I could have just saved the time and
| just published it as-is. So it's a medium success for me.
| threeducks wrote:
| That was my experience as well. Sometimes, LLMs were a
| big help, but other times, my efforts would have been
| better spent writing things myself. I always tell myself
| that experience will make me choose correctly next time,
| but then a new model is released and things are different
| yet again.
| dizhn wrote:
| Try some Made In PRC models. They do not give a shit.
| threeducks wrote:
| I have tried a few Qwen-2.5 and 3.0 models (<=30B), even
| abliterated ones, but it seems that some words have been
| completely wiped from their pretraining dataset. No
| amount of prompting can bring back what has never been
| there.
|
| For comparison, I have also tried the smaller Mistral
| models, which have a much more complete vocabulary, but
| their writing sometimes lacks continuity.
|
| I have not tried the larger models due to lack of VRAM.
| CoreTester223 wrote:
| I got trough a few chapters and I have to say this book is
| unexpectedly easy to read! Examples can a bit wonky at some
| spots, but the overall theme and feel seems very refreshing to
| me! I will come back to it in the morning, but I've got to say -
| Nice job!
| fristovic wrote:
| I'm glad to hear that! Looking forward to a full review!
| fusslo wrote:
| Am I crazy to distrust a .pdf and .epub only option hosted on
| github in 2026?
|
| The author looks legit - or at least has contributions for over a
| year.
|
| But github is free & idk if they scan user repos for malware
|
| Are .pdfs and .epub safe these days?
| fristovic wrote:
| You are not crazy, you make a valid point. But the truth is -
| the author (me) - was just lazy to upload it to something else
| and just wanted it published. I promise you I'm not trying to
| hack you :)
| fusslo wrote:
| lmao, ok ty for the promise. good enough for me!
|
| Ty for sharing your book, it's pretty fun
| SunlitCat wrote:
| How about uploading them on mega, dropbox, mediafire or some
| quickly done wix page? :D
| fristovic wrote:
| I can't do that from the terminal in 3 lines now, can I? ;)
| threeducks wrote:
| > Are .pdfs and .epub safe these days?
|
| Depends on the viewer. Acrobat Reader? Probably not. PDF.js in
| some browser? Probably safe enough unless you are extremely
| rich.
| rfl890 wrote:
| .pdf files opened in a browser are safe for the most part.
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