MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kristjank | 2025-04-23 20:13:18+00:00
When we outsource the parts of programming that used to demand our complete focus and creativity, do we also outsource the opportunity for satisfaction? Can we find the same fulfillment in prompt engineering that we once found in problem-solving through code?

Most of AI-generated programming content I use are comments/explanations for legacy code, closely followed by tailored "getting started" scripts and iterations on visualisation tasks (for shitty school assignments that want my pyplots to look nice). The rest requires an understanding, which AI can help you achieve faster (it's read many a book related to the topic, so it can recall information a lot like an experienced colleague may), but it can't confer capital K Knowledge or understanding upon you. Some of the tasks it performs are grueling, take a lot of time to do manually, and provide little mental stimulation. Some may be described as lobotomizing and (in my opinion) may mentally damage you in the "Jack Torrance typewriter" kinda way.

It makes me able to work on the fun parts of my job which possess the qualities the article applauds.
by pulkitsh1234 | 2025-04-23 20:13:19+00:00
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by kazinator | 2025-04-23 20:13:56+00:00
A pixel is not the sample(s) that is value came from. Given a pixel (of image data) you don't know what samples are behind it. It could have been point-sampled with some optical sensor far smaller than the pixel (but not infinitely small, obviously). Or it could have been sampled with a gaussian bell shaped filter a bit wider than the pixel.

A 100x100 thumbnail that was reduced from a 1000x1000 image might have pixels which are derived from 100 samples of the original image (e.g. a simple average of a 10x10 pixel block). Or other possibilities.

As an abstraction, a pixel definitely doesn't represent a point sample, let alone an infinitely small one. (There could be some special context in which it does but not as a generality.)
by chronid | 2025-04-23 20:14:08+00:00
IIRC eBPF and DTrace are (no longer) solving a similar problem, eBPF has become far bigger than just tracing, it's now a way to have user space code "driving" kernel decisions. I'm not sure they can be compared this way - and even if we do, the user base of DTrace is infinitesimally smaller of the one of eBPF.
by cyberpunk | 2025-04-23 20:14:47+00:00
I remember trying to explain to some colleagues why I paid about 100 bucks for the font I use and why I wouldn’t share it with them and they just couldn’t get it.

(It’s Berkeley mono).

I don’t even know how many glyphs it is (it’s thousands) but for something I’m looking at for 6-8 hours a day, every single day and is the absolute peak of perfection (at least to me), 100 bucks seems like a fucking bargain to me.

shrug I guess these folks never sold something they made completely by themselves maybe.
by simonw | 2025-04-23 20:14:50+00:00
One trend I've been finding interesting over the past year is that a lot of engineers I know who moved into engineering management are writing code again - because LLMs mean they can get something productive done in a couple of hours where previously it would have taken them a full day.

Managers usually can't carve out a full day - but a couple of hours is manageable.

See also this quote from Gergely Orosz:

Despite being rusty with coding (I don't code every day these days): since starting to use Windsurf / Cursor with the recent increasingly capable models: I am SO back to being as fast in coding as when I was coding every day "in the zone" [...] When you are driving with a firm grip on the steering wheel - because you know exactly where you are going, and when to steer hard or gently - it is just SUCH a big boost. I have a bunch of side projects and APIs that I operate - but usually don't like to touch it because it's (my) legacy code. Not any more. I'm making large changes, quickly. These tools really feel like a massive multiplier for experienced devs - those of us who have it in our head exactly what we want to do and now the LLM tooling can move nearly as fast as my thoughts!

From https://x.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1914863335457034422
by nickff | 2025-04-23 20:15:49+00:00
This seems like a very strange reading of "express aiming"; instead of those words meaning that a person has done something to 'target', it means that the person did not 'expressly avoid'? I am not sure that "expressly aim" has much meaning at all in this reading.

I don't have any horse in this race, though I know the EFF is very popular on HN, and that many people here are also against data collection.
by pragma_x | 2025-04-23 20:16:40+00:00
> Maybe people don’t like it because of the repetition of “data =“

Eh, at first glance it looks "amateurish" due to all the repeated stuff. Chaining explicitly eliminates redundant operations - a more minimal representation of data flow - so it looks more "professional". But I also know better than to act on that impulse. ;)

That said, it really depends on the language at play. Some will compile all the repetition of `data =` away such that the variable's memory isn't re-written until after the last operation in that list; it'll hang out in a register or on the stack somewhere. Others will run the code exactly as written, bouncing data between the heap, stack, and registers - inefficiencies and all.

IMO, a comment like "We wind up debugging this a lot, please keep this syntax" would go a long way to help the next engineer. Assuming that the actual processing dwarfs the overhead present in this section, it would be even better to add discrete exception handling and post-conditions to make it more robust.
by kbolino | 2025-04-23 20:16:45+00:00
Wow, I completely missed bullet 2. It's quite clear:

All corresponding unexpired and unrevoked subscriber (i.e., TLS server authentication) certificates issued on or after June 15, 2026 MUST include the extendedKeyUsage extension and only assert an extendedKeyUsage purpose of id-kp-serverAuth.

Thanks!
by npc_anon | 2025-04-23 20:17:12+00:00
The "EU over-regulation" argument is pathetic. The exact opposite is true, 2-3 decades of zero regulation has led to Big Tech empires that can get away with anything.

It harms the free market, harms the freedom to compute, creates an asymmetrical extractive relation between mega-corp and average internet user, and omnipresent surveillance. It's anti-American if "American" still means a love of freedom, personal privacy and fair competition.

But I do understand the "new" American perspective. These companies are money printers some of which produce as much as $30B of pure profit in a single quarter. If such companies are to exist, they best be American I guess.
by phkahler | 2025-04-23 20:17:15+00:00
>> Either the service can detect you pulling a font for a domain that isn't paying for it...

Is that really a thing? Markup in a web page tells how to display the text. Saying "use this font over here on this other server" seems fair game on some level. Might not be on another level, but it's technically the end user downloading a file that's publicly available on some server.
by FireBeyond | 2025-04-23 20:17:20+00:00
It's that time of the year again:

> Last night, Elon Musk did what he does best: promise “millions” of autonomous Tesla vehicles would be on the road by the end of next year.

And this tiny little disclaimer:

> Last year, Musk said that Tesla would rollout “unsupervised” robotaxis in Austin, Texas starting in June 2025. And in the call last night, Musk stuck to that deadline, but added a little more color about what to expect. He said the paid ridehailing service would consist of 10-20 Model Y vehicles with remote operators in case any of the cars get stuck.

Ahh, unsupervised, if you ignore the supervisors! And wow, a whole 10-20 for the city!

> Musk has long promised Level 5 autonomy, which describes driverless vehicles that can travel anywhere, under any conditions, without limitations. But last night, he corrected himself: there will be some limitations.

Ahh, geofencing sucks unless Tesla does it, got it.

> One analyst asked about the reliability of Tesla’s cameras when confronting sun glare, fog, or dust. Musk claimed that the company’s vision system bypasses image processing and instead uses direct photon counting to account for “noise” like glare or dust.

I smell bullshit. Photon counting requires specialized cameras that are not present on Teslas. Not to mention lab conditions (so you can direct photons at your sensor, versus you know, scattering into the atmosphere...) And that don't do anywhere near as well at regular image processing, for that reason.
by gh0stcat | 2025-04-23 20:17:47+00:00
This is an interesting direction, realistically I don't expect the government to magically care about the lived experience of most people, because at the end of the day, it's also people running the government, and they are trying to meet their quotas/metrics/goals too, similarly to how the individual is trying to limit their expense for any particular purchase. I don't think I have an answer here, but I really am not satisfied with the possible result of your summary, which is for the average person to continue to explain away the cheapest/most convenient decision when they do have choice in the matter. I guess why not both?
by pdimitar | 2025-04-23 20:18:11+00:00
I don't know man, maybe prompt most of your work, eyeball it and verify it rigorously (which if you cannot do, you should absolutely never touch an LLM!), run a script to commit and push after 3 hours and then... work on whatever code makes you happy without using an LLM?

Let's stop pretending or denying it: most of us would delegate our work code to somebody else or something else if we could.

Still, prompting LLMs well requires eloquence and expressiveness that many programmers don't have. I have started deriving a lot of value from those LLMs I chose to interact with by specifying clear boundaries on what's the priority and what can wait for later and what should be completely ignored due to this or that objective (and a number of other parameters I am giving them). When you do that well, they are extremely useful.
by albedoa | 2025-04-23 20:18:46+00:00
I am not registered with this private instance, but there is a comment that I want to reply to:

> This is so typical of people who are just doing a hatchet job for money but have no personal interest in the topic or skin in the game.

This is both true and incomplete. Advocates against piracy are time and again caught infringing on IP. I think about when Lily Allen stole the content of her anti-piracy screed "It's Not Alright" from Techdirt[0]:

> However, [...] the rest of the blog post – put there by Lilly herself – is someone else’s work. Arrr mateys, Long John Allen lifted the entire post from another site – Techdirt.com – effectively pirating the work of the one and only Mike Masnick.

> “I think it’s wonderful that Lilly Allen found so much value in our Techdirt post that she decided to copy — or should I say ‘pirate’? — the entire post,” Mike told TorrentFreak on hearing the shocking news.

The anti-piracy creators demand that we stay within their narrow definition of "piracy", which just so happens to exclude the work that they steal. Yes, the creative agency behind the "You Wouldn't Steal a Car" ad are disconnected from the cause. And their clients at the MPAA and FACT do not consider fonts to be worthy of the protections that are ostensibly the basis of their existence.

0: https://torrentfreak.com/file-sharing-heroine-lilly-allen-is...
by sct202 | 2025-04-23 20:18:47+00:00
Idk if it's provable how it was recreated but if you type in "XBAND Rough" into the sampler box at the bottom of the page https://www.myfonts.com/collections/ff-confidential-font-fon... and compare to https://fontzone.net/font-details/xband-rough it's exactly the same and the letter splotching is very distinct in the lower case letters.
by JeremyMorgan | 2025-04-23 20:18:53+00:00
One of the things people often overlook don't talk about in this arguments is the manager's point of view and how it's contributing to the shakeups in this industry.

As a developer I'm bullish on coding agents and GenAI tools, because they can save you time and can augment your abilities. I've experienced it, and I've seen it enough already. I love them, and want to see them continue to be used.

I'm bearish on the idea that "vibe coding" can produce much of value, and people without any engineering background becoming wildly productive at building great software. I know I'm not alone. If you're a good problem solver who doesn't know how to code, this is your gateway. And you better learn what's happening with the code while you can to avoid creating a huge mess later on.

Developers argue about the quality of "vibe coded" stuff. There are good arguments on both sides. At some point I think we all agree that AI will be able generate high quality software faster than a human, someday. But today is not that day. Many will try to convince you that it is.

Within a few years we'll see massive problems from AI generated code, and it's for one simple reason:

Managers and other Bureaucrats do not care about the quality of the software.

Read it again if you have to. It's an uncomfortable idea, but it's true. They don't care about your flow. They don't care about how much you love to build quality things. They don't care if software is good or bad they care about closing tickets and creating features. Most of them don't care, and have never cared about the "craft".

If you're a master mason crafting amazing brickwork, you're exactly the same as some amateur grabbing some bricks from home depot and slapping a wall together. A wall is a wall. That's how the majority of managers view software development today. By the time that shoddy wall crumbles they'll be at another company anyway so it's someone else's problem.

When I talk about the software industry collapsing now, and in a few years we're mired with garbage software everywhere, this is why. These people in "leadership" are salivating at the idea of finally getting something for nothing. Paying a few interns to "vibe code" piles of software while they high five each other and laugh.

It will crash. The bubble will pop.

Developers: Keep your skills sharp and weather out the storm. In a few years you'll be in high demand once again. When those walls crumble, they will need people who what they're doing to repair it. Ask for fair compensation to do so.

Even if I'm wrong about all of this I'm keeping my skills sharp. You should too.

This isn't meant to be anti-management, but it's based on what I've seen. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

* And to the original point, In my experience the tools interrupt the "flow" but don't necessarily take the joy out of it. I cannot do suggestion/autocomplete because it breaks my flow. I love having a chat window with AI nearby when I get stuck or want to generate some boilerplate.
by dismalaf | 2025-04-23 20:19:13+00:00
This doesn't make sense because you can definitely do live coding in Chrome devtools (which uses V8 of course) and in Nodejs (--watch will reload code changes automatically and there's ways to keep application state through code changes).

Edit - can also apparently do it with TS directly with Deno (also V8), here's an example: https://dev.to/craigmorten/how-to-code-live-browser-refresh-...
by darth_avocado | 2025-04-23 20:19:23+00:00
It’s a balance. You don’t want spam to be too much so that the product becomes useless, but you also want to let “promotions” in because they bring in money. If you haven’t noticed, they always tweak these settings. In last few years, you’ll notice more “promotions” in your primary inbox than there used to be. One of the reasons is increasing revenue.

It’s the same reason you see an ad on Facebook after every couple of posts. But you will neither see a constant stream of ads nor a completely ad free experience.
by RussianCow | 2025-04-23 20:19:34+00:00
The problem is that there are so many free fonts that most people take them for granted. And honestly, I don't blame most folks for thinking that way because there isn't a good reason for the average person to pay for a font. If you're just making wedding invites or signage for an event or some other one-off thing, you probably don't care.

If you're a professional using them in your work, that's an entirely different story, and you are significantly more likely to appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into making them.
by kragen | 2025-04-23 20:19:39+00:00
A caution I should have thought to include: if you do this to remove the carbon dioxide you exhale, you need to make sure you have enough ventilation that you don't asphyxiate. In the absence of carbon dioxide to tell you to seek fresh air, you won't notice the oxygen levels dropping; you'll just get stupid, then lose consciousness, then die. Homemade rebreathers have a high fatality rate. I don't think such good sealing is likely at the scale of an entire house unless it's literally underwater or something. But keep it in mind.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-04-23 20:20:08+00:00
I've made a couple of fonts. Very bad ones. I know firsthand they absolutely take creativity and tradecraft.

A well made font, from an artistic perspective, is a thing of beauty-- particularly when it incorporates subtle visual themes and nuances. It's definitely more than just "drawing the alphabet". There are also metric ass-tons of glyphs necessary to make a usable font.

Likewise, a properly hinted digital font file, especially with little touches like ligatures, is also a thing of utilitarian beauty. It's a ton of work to get that right.

That the shapes of fonts can't be protected by copyright isn't a new idea. Anybody who makes a font today should know that going in. I wouldn't make a font with the expectation of getting paid outside of doing it for a specific commission. Doing it "for the love" and expecting to get paid seems like a losing business proposition.
by ahamilton454 | 2025-04-23 20:20:19+00:00
I’ve been struggling with a very similar feeling. I too am a manager now. Back in the day there was something very fulfilling about fully understanding and comprehending your solution. I find now with AI tools I don’t need to understand a lot. I find the job much less fulfilling.

The funny thing is I agree with other comments, it is just kind of like a really good stack overflow. It can’t automate the whole job, not even close, and yet I find the tasks that it cannot automate are so much more boring (the ones I end up doing).

I envy the people who say that AI tools free them up to focus on what they care about. I haven’t been able to achieve this building with ai, if anything it feels like my competence has decreased due to the tools. I’m fairly certain I know how to use the tools well, I just think that I don’t enjoy how the job has evolved.
by kube-system | 2025-04-23 20:21:12+00:00
> I tried to make clear I wasn't making a legal argument

I know which is why I used the word "should" to indicate moral hypothetical and not existing law.

>I'm not sure how you got that from what I wrote

Because you said that a situation in which YouTube exercised the right to moderate their own platform was a "total abandonment of free speech principles".

But as you recognize, compelled speech is also a violation of free speech principles, and that is, whether either of us agree with it (I also don't entirely), it is also factually a free speech principle that is in balance here.

> For example, imagine a world where the telephone system operators got to decide which speech was permitted on their phone lines.

And we're back to the common carrier argument, which I think is more relevant to this conversation than a vague appeal to "free speech". Ultimately when the government grants monopolies to businesses, they start to become an effective arm of the government and should be regulated more in line with the rules that apply to government. I think we need to start classifying more of these platforms as common carriers and require them to carry all speech equally -- or break them up until the point they don't hold effective monopolies and/or wrongfully crush competitors.
by immibis | 2025-04-23 20:21:38+00:00
Instagram is the single most garbage app on my phone, and I also have Snapchat installed so that's saying something. It's constantly starting itself up in the background and then using so much memory I can't also have a browser and a keyboard open. Whenever this happens I know I have to go and force-stop Instagram.

Google and/or Samsung doesn't provide a setting to never run this app in the background because that would be bad for their own data collection, I'm sure. Or, you know, let me install my own software on the phone.
by clueless | 2025-04-23 20:22:26+00:00
> Spring ’83 doesn’t formalize interactions and relationships. The protocol doesn’t provide any mechanism for replies, likes, favorites, or, indeed, feedback of any kind. Publishers are encouraged to use the full flexibility of HTML to develop their own approaches, inviting readers to respond via email, join a live chat, send a postcard … whatever!

I think this is one of the biggest missing features of this sort of decentralized approach to following/aggregating content. There is so much in the commenting/interaction handling of the current centralized approach that keep people coming back.
by Suppafly | 2025-04-23 20:22:31+00:00
>What saddens me is that a lot of people are so ignorant that they don't even realize a font is something that takes creativity, tradecraft and a lot of work/time/effort to design.

Except most of the creative part was done 100 years ago and companies are now trying to protect the fact that they digitized something that has existed for a century or longer.
by FireBeyond | 2025-04-23 20:22:48+00:00
What garbage is this? How has any vandalism of Tesla vehicles affected the absolute horseshit that comes out of Elon's mouth and that has been for years?

This is a sad and paper-thin "defense" that doesn't pass the first smell test. Is this the best you have? "Anti-Elon protestors are the reason we don't have Robotaxis"?
by sethhochberg | 2025-04-23 20:22:52+00:00
I think you might be misunderstanding the suggestion - typically when people say "email like a CEO" they're talking about direct 1:1 or small group communications (specifically the direct and brief style of writing popular with busy people in those communications), not the sort of mass-distribution PR piece that all employees at a large enterprise might receive quarterly.

For contrast:

"All: my daughter is home sick, I won't be in the office today" (CEO style)

vs

"Hi everyone, I'm very sorry to make this change last minute but due to an unexpected illness in the family, I'll need to work from home today and won't be in the office at my usual time. My daughter has the flu and could not go to school. Please let me know if there are any questions, I'll be available on Slack if you need me." (not CEO style)

An AI summary of the second message might look something like the first message.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-04-23 20:23:21+00:00
If I were going to knock it off I'd duplicate the splotching exactly, too. I'd prepare as sample as a bitmap, use any of the various raster-to-vector tracers on it to get an SVG, clean up the SVG of any conversion artifacts, then make it into a type format. (Heck, there's probably a fun problem in here to train an algorithm to do the cleanup and conversion. You could probably knock-off the hinting and ligatures, too.)