MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AIPedant | 2025-04-06 00:00:55+00:00
I am still dismayed how quickly we gave up on including the pre-training data as a requirement for "open-source" LLMs.

As someone who thinks LLMs as akin to Lisp expert systems (but in natural language): is like including the C source code to your Lisp compiler, but claiming the Lisp applications are merely "data" and shouldn't be included.
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-06 00:02:51+00:00
Depends on your toolset. For some kind of code, testing is the solution and not a problem. For React before version 17 between the test code never being able to know if your callbacks have settled and react-testing-library insisting that you aria-everything or screw up your code with test id’s, writing a test is hours of wasted time now and more hours wasted gradually over the next year because your tests already take 70 sec to run. React always knew what was queued to run and why it took them 17 releases to expose it to test runners is beyond me.
by mewpmewp2 | 2025-04-06 00:04:41+00:00
I tend to think that the most valuable tests are on the exact level of when something gets used by multiple consumers.

So shared functions get unit tested, but if there is a non shared function that gets triggered only from few layers up via user click, it is better to simulate that click and assert accordingly. However the exceptions are when the input can have tons of different permutations, when unit test might just become more optimal then.
by annjose | 2025-04-06 00:05:18+00:00
This is the script that assembles the structured comments and generates the summary - https://github.com/levelup-apps/hn-enhancer/blob/main/script...

You can run it as: node summarize-comments.js <post_id> Example: node summarize-comments.js 43597782

And the summary will be put in the "output" folder.

You need to set the environment variable (in this case OPENROUTER_API_KEY because LLama4 is currently available at OpenRouter).
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-04-06 00:05:21+00:00
Nelson's arguments sound odd to me. He says that embedded markup is bad for WYSIWYG editors since they have to maintain a connection between the raw and formatted text streams (which can have different character counts, etc.), but out-of-line styling would similarly need careful implementation work to keep it synchronized with the text stream at all times, even with concurrent editing and other such features.

(Cf. how the cross-reference stream in PDF files makes it painful to edit objects in them, even when the files are nominally encoded in plaintext.)

He then goes into how a separate styling layer can assist with transcluding text from other people's work while modifying the style. But style variations are hardly the only legitimate changes typically made to direct quotations: people often want to modify capitalization or punctuation, elide portions, or insert bracketed notes. And at that point, you're modifying the content as well as the styling, so style-only modifications would be very limiting for that use case.

As for the structure layer, this would have the same issues as every other attempt in the last three decades to create a semantic web or whatever. Authors don't want to spend their time carefully curating metadata that 99.9% of readers won't care about, while bad actors want to game their relevancy metrics through any mechanism available.
by idle_zealot | 2025-04-06 00:06:01+00:00
You start conservatively, and set up a watchdog to investigate loopholes and punish those abusing them. Fund an astroturfing campaign? Congrats, that's 10 years and a hefty fine to fund the continued operation of the watchdog. You can make promotional material and publish it, but it has to be clearly labeled and opt-in, not bundled with access to something else. The problem isn't small-time promotion that's difficult or impossible to crack down on, it's that we've built a whole attention economy. So long as we make it a bad value proposition for big players we'll have succeeded.
by jug | 2025-04-06 00:06:14+00:00
The problem here and with your comparison is that Gemini (the language model) wasn't creating black vikings because of political bias in the training, but due to how Google augmented the user prompts to force-include diversity. Behind the scenes, you were basically telling Gemini to always remember racial diversity even if you didn't in your prompt.

But if you were asking Gemini, vikings were white.

This was later rectified in an update once Google realized what mistake they had done, since it causes gross historical inaccuracies. But it wasn't rectified by doing anything to Gemini the language model. It did right all along.
by joelbarton406 | 2025-04-06 00:06:26+00:00
Location: San Francisco, CA. USA.

Remote: yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, postgres, Node.js, React, Express, MongoDB, AWS

Résumé/CV: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelbarton406/> (Full resume available upon request)

Email: joelbarton406@gmail.com

Howdy folks! I’m a software engineer with several years experience in multiple full stack web ecosystems and a wide-range of technical and non-technical skills. I’m curious, detail-oriented, and gain energy from tackling interesting technical problems. I thrive in collaborative environments and am told I have an easy-going and good-humored nature. Here's a link to my most recent project: https://harrier-gha-runner.github.io

I just moved to San Francisco and am actively seeking in-person full-stack & frontend opportunities (mainly interested in startups working on AI or observability products/platforms but am flexible).
by briHass | 2025-04-06 00:07:12+00:00
It's also quite difficult to manage.

I was lucky enough to have 3 companies that all gave me offers (a couple years back when the market for tech was at its peak). It played out like this article recommends. After an offer was on the table, the other 2 kept throwing better and better offers at me.

However, interviewing at 3 companies, over the span of 2 weeks, with an existing (remote) full time job was hard work. Likely impossible if I hadn't already checked out at the FT job. It was also mentally exhausting, with how companies like to do multiple rounds.
by neilv | 2025-04-06 00:07:33+00:00
> Rule #5 of negotiation: don’t be the decision-maker. Even if you don’t particularly care what your friends/family/husband/mother thinks, by mentioning them, you’re no longer the only person the recruiter needs to win over. There’s no point in them trying to bully and intimidate you; the “true decision-maker” is beyond their reach.

It's a very old thing in general, not just in job-hunting.

And sometimes "I have to discuss it with my spouse" is literally for real.

But if someone says it, but the listener doesn't think it's for real, then the speaker sounds like either:

* from a culture in which it's mutually understood as a nicety, not to be taken literally; or

* a bullshitter.

The former is very Californian stereotype, incidentally.
by jjk166 | 2025-04-06 00:07:49+00:00
The problem is the harder you try to imagine it, the less it looks like a better world.

Letting people communicate freely is a good thing in its own right, and fundamental to so many other good things we enjoy. Getting rid of a billboard for something I am never going to buy sounds great, but it kinda sucks for the person who actually is interested in the thing that billboard is advertising. Even if there were some type of advertising that provided no benefit to any part of society, the restriction on the freedom to communicate those advertisements is something that harms all of us.

Sometimes the part of building a better world that takes the most effort is recognizing where we already have.
by kragen | 2025-04-06 00:08:05+00:00
Sometimes you're writing code because you want to see what happens. Richard P. Gabriel wrote a wonderful, moving essay about this recently, "I Throw Itching Powder at Tulips": https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/Tulips.pdf

> Software engineering is not what I do when I program. I am programming. I write software as part of doing science. I use software as a machine or instrument to explore how the mind / brain might work. Not when the mind’s thinking—that’s old AI. I mean when people are creating.

I find that it's pretty common when I'm, say, tweaking gameplay in a game, that I have no trouble making the code behave the way I expect, but impossible to predict ahead of time how I will feel about different possible behaviors. I have to try them on to see how I feel in them. Adding tests to that feedback loop doesn't help; it just slows it down, dramatically slowing down the process of learning and exploration.

On the other hand, when I am writing code to meet someone else's needs rather than as a form of self-expression or exploration, I usually want the code to behave in a specific way, at least in certain situations, and to keep behaving that way as I make other changes to it in the future, unless I change my mind. In those cases I think it's very rare for automated tests to slow me down instead of speeding me up.

In languages with expressive static type systems like OCaml, the crossover happens a little later, because the static type system already constrains the program's behavior a lot. But automated tests still become very valuable very soon when I want a specific behavior.

I've also, unfortunately, worked on projects where the test suite we had was worse than nothing. Invariably it wasn't because we were throwing itching powder at tulips so that the optimal test suite would be empty; it was because we'd done a bad job writing the tests.
by mewpmewp2 | 2025-04-06 00:08:50+00:00
I totally understand writing tests on professional projects and on projects that I am working with others, but for my side projects, I could never. I don't feel like I have lost anything by not writing tests in my side projects.

My issue with tests in my side projects is that it kills my flow. I need to actively iterate on the code that matters and feel out the results. At what point should I be writing tests?

I can only think of a point where I am certain this is where I am going to stay at and then I write some sanity regression tests.
by roenxi | 2025-04-06 00:09:14+00:00
That was a bit weird for the US system though. There is the obvious element that topical cable news political reporting is nearly wall-to-wall misinformation and it is often hard to tell if it was the politicians or the news operations that were most responsible. They've already hit an equilibrium where everyone appears to be doing their best to be wilfully stupid to obscure whether they are lying or just that dumb.

For the legal system to single out the Dominion Voting thing as an issue was ... acceptable but probably a misfire. Of all the craziness, hysterics targeting voting machines was the issue most likely to accidentally be a net good for the US system.
by echelon | 2025-04-06 00:10:59+00:00
This article must've been written in Spring 2022. Tech hiring is now like 2008 or post-dotcom.

The question is whether it will return to what it once was.

The big tech companies are monopolies, no longer afraid that they have to employ "all the engineers" to prevent competition. ZIRP isn't there to give rise to startups, or to give the tech companies unlimited leeway in development.

If interest rates drop or big tech is broken up, we might see a sharp rise in salaries. But now there's also more competition from overseas, both in terms of great talent and competition from large international players.

edit: the article was from 2016, and can confirm. I was making bank then and getting free at-work massages, boba, and towel service.
by zeristor | 2025-04-06 00:11:52+00:00
Good spot.

From the page it suggests in 2021 the opportunity for private investment. I’d infer that there’s a few turf wars, and legal things to be resolved.

I’d hope that many people would be painfully aware of how essential this is to enable battery power to produce a return on investment.

Considering the governments passion for transparency there doesn’t seem to be much on this, and I only realised this since grid battery charging and power is missing from the daily stats.

I’m curious to find out if the grid controlling software is written in COBOL and running on a BBC model B in a back room somewhere.
by idle_zealot | 2025-04-06 00:12:23+00:00
> If you live in a conservative state, what are the chances that they say advocacy for Planned Parenthood is advertising and say that advocacy for pro-life is freedom of religion?

A nonsensical argument. You might as well ask how "Oh yeah, you want to ban murder? Well how would you like it if conservative states say that abortion is murder, and killing negroes isn't? Clearly outlawing murder is unworkable."

Great job pointing out that laws can be misinterpreted by motivated judges, I guess we should get rid of all the laws then to make sure that doesn't happen.
by georgeck | 2025-04-06 00:13:39+00:00
This is a great idea! Exactly what I was also thinking and started working on a side-project. Currently the project can create summaries like this [1].

Since HN Homepage stories change throughtout the day, I thought it is better to create the Newsletter based on https://news.ycombinator.com/front

So, you are getting the news a day late, but it will capture the top stories for that day. The newsletter will have high-level summary for each post and a link to get the details for that story from a static site.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43597782
by convolvatron | 2025-04-06 00:14:20+00:00
manual testing doesn't scale at all. the more functionality and code you have, the more people you have to hire to run tests. since those people aren't being spun up and down by an orchestrator, you need more resources to cover their coffee breaks. you also don't get testing at night or on the weekends unless you have a global presence. manual testing also limits your reach, if every time you add a new test you have to add another body to run it, you're not going to be running as many tests as you could (if those people were employed writing tests instead of running them)

worse, manual testing is considerably less repeatable than automated testing. was this result worse than it was before, or did someone just forget to set that environment variable or run it on the correct node type.

if your developers are running manual tests before every commit, that's potentially a huge waste of resources. and if you're hiring people specifically to do manual testing that's.. kind of inhuman? unless you're really hiring people that can't do anything else, in which case you'll need to hire an appropriate number of overseers.

automated testing gives you so much more leverage for less cost than manual, I struggle to think of a situation where that might be preferable.
by gerdesj | 2025-04-06 00:14:55+00:00
Columns work if you can see all of the column - screens are wide and short, books/mags are thin and deep.

A physical book has a ratio of exactly the opposite of your laptop. Amazon realised this quite quickly and you will note that their readers have a book shape.

Look at this web site (HN) which is used by some of the most vociferous nerds ever (including you and me) and tell me I am talking bollocks! Note the styles, layout, colours in use.

How far removed from white on black text, 1/3 screen width and teenager bedroom looks are we away from?
by simonsarris | 2025-04-06 00:16:47+00:00
> If nobody advertised, every solution would be equally discoverable via search and word-of-mouth.

This is unbelievably untrue. Consider clothing brands, large and older labels have an immense advantage over newcomers. Newcomer word of mouth will never come close to some brand that has a store in every mall across the US.

With (say) Instagram ads alone, tiny labels can spend and target very effectively to create a niche, and begin word of mouth.

Gap and Lululemon would love it if all advertising was shut off today. It would basically guarantee their position forever because of the real estate and present day distribution Schelling point.
by angarg12 | 2025-04-06 00:18:09+00:00
So I joined this company as a lead of a team of 4 developers. I found a medium size Java codebase with not a single test. Instead of unit tests, we had a list of scenarios, and at the end of each sprint a QA guy would manually go through each scenario and verify the software.

One of my first moves was to ask the developers to write tests for their code. I got terrible pushback, specifically from one of them that said the dreaded "we don't have time to write tests".

This went back and forth a few times until it got escalated to the lead of the whole project, who sided with the developer: writing tests takes too much time and we don't have enough.

Two days. It took me two days of my own time to go through a completely unfamiliar codebase and get a reasonable code coverage with unit tests.

The benefits were immense and immediate. For starters, we caught a bunch of regressions before a new release that might have taken days of manual testing by QA. We were also able to ship faster and with more confidence.

As OP say, if you don't have time to test, you certainly don't have time not to test.
by ryandrake | 2025-04-06 00:19:03+00:00
In a 25 year career, I've never really managed to significantly negotiate compensation upwards, either at the job offer phase or for raises once I'm in. It's always a "take it or leave it" offer and yea, I've chosen to leave it a few times.

Recruiter: "Here's your offer for $X compensation."

You: "I was actually looking for something paying $X+Y."

Recruiter: "Well our offer is $X."

You: "This data shows that comparable jobs with the work I'm taking on are paying $X+Y."

Recruiter: "Our offer is $X. Do you want the job or not?"

You: "Well, I'm not willing to join for less than $X+(Y/2)."

Recruiter: "OK, well, bye. We have 35 other candidates lined up to talk to. Good luck."

Not sure how it's different when you have multiple offers. The company offering a lower comp will just say "Well, their offer is higher. Have fun at Company B. Thanks for interviewing!" Reading stories of these Captains Of Industry just asking for more and getting it, or getting companies into a bidding war over them is... kind of wild. It's like we're living in different universes.
by JustExAWS | 2025-04-06 00:19:25+00:00
Whether I commit murder is objective. Speech is always subjective.

Even if abortion is murder is objective based on the state laws. We see right now how government controlling speech that it doesn’t like is harmful.

Again I’m amazed that people want to give the government more power unnecessarily seeing the current abuses of power and how it is used to punish people the government doesn’t like.

We should limit the power of the government to only punishing things that infringe on our rights and our person.
by 1659447091 | 2025-04-06 00:20:16+00:00
> I do have Holywood's ... output to act as a proxy and it seems that US companies do love to shout it from the hill tops at vast expense and fuck up the scenery with those bill board thingies.

This reminded me of learning the Hollywood sign was literally an advertisement (shouted from the hill top) that turned into a cultural landmark

On to the point for the topic, parts of Asia (mid/large cities) are overwhelming with their advertisements which I don't think the US or EU/UK can compare either
by Jedd | 2025-04-06 00:20:29+00:00
It seems like it would be extremely difficult to identify that breakdown.

Not because it's difficult to identify emissions generated in order to produce those goods subsequently exported (it would be arduous to do so, but not infeasible), but because absent that particular manufacturing effort for those specific exports, what would that nation state instead be doing with those resources / what emissions would they be generating in the pursuit of domestic consumption needed to replace the income from those exports.
by SideQuark | 2025-04-06 00:20:57+00:00
One person's desire for ignorance should not force that on everyone.

Don't want an add supported service? Don't use it. Don't want ads on TV? Don't watch it. Don't want ads on others property? Let them control the look of your property.

Lots of people like ads because it's how they discover movies, restaurants, better financial help, better doctors, new hobbies, and a world they'd not have found otherwise.
by dietr1ch | 2025-04-06 00:21:58+00:00
> It's impossible. How do you even define advertising? If you define it conservatively, then advertising will skirt through the loopholes. If you define it liberally, then you have an unfair, authoritarian system that will definitely be selectively enforced against political enemies.

I've been on the advertising, is an evil parasite around useful transactions bandwagon for a while and thought this was really hard to define properly.

So far my best take is around that what's good is being discoverable instead of something that you run into. This allows people to do what they want, without the evil side of unconsciously or in-competitively driving them to your business/deals.
by KEJfJ | 2025-04-06 00:23:12+00:00
Location: Outside NYC

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Maybe, depends where

Technologies: PHP, Laravel, Vue, React, SQL, Python, CSS

Email: hacknews.0eeaz@simplelogin.com (privacy email, will reply from real email)

Previously founded and sold a SaaS company (70+ FTEs), worked in high growth tech teams.

What I can bring to the table: Leadership, strategy, operations where I can help build the product (actually writing code). My previous experience could also help with investor relations.
by johnea | 2025-04-06 00:23:21+00:00
I bought a used 2023 Nissan Leaf for $15K. It had 18K miles on it, 150 miles of range on a full charge, and still 5 years on the battery warranty, and 2 years on the bumper to bumper warranty. I did admittedly find a good deal, but this is not unobtainium

A friend wanted one of those licensed electric golf carts to drive around town, it cost more than my car.

With off-peak charging, (and the cost of gasoline in San Diego) I expect the car to pay for itself in fuel savings in ~5 years.

How many years will it take an inexpensive gasoline car to pay for itself?
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-04-06 00:24:39+00:00
Here is my negotiation tactic: “I see on levels.fyi that people of my level make X dollars, I want the top of that range”

And magically I got 25% more TC. Only works for big enough companies with salary datapoints online.

It is kind of crazy how there is a bifurcation of TC between those who bothered to negotiate and those who didn’t. Being on the inside I know there are ranges for positions and if you push you can pretty much always get to the max for your range, obviously the recruiters will not give you a max TC offer right away.
by Aeolun | 2025-04-06 00:25:24+00:00
Me too. It was utterly bizarre. Spent 6 month looking for a job, with I don’t know how many failed interviews, then I got one offer for a 6 month contract, and suddenly the next two companies I interviewed with were falling over themselves to give me a permanent one.

I just do not see how that works. There’s no logical reason for it.
by jasonjmcghee | 2025-04-06 00:26:44+00:00
Yes exactly. If you're writing a library, unit tests are likely a great investment. Your "customers" are using the things you are testing.

If you're writing an API, your customers are calling the endpoints. Very important they behave properly on happy path and fail appropriately when they should (permissions / security especially)

(I also ensure tests in the service/dao layer to protect developers from footguns and/or more "unexpected" behavior, but I'd argue the API layer is generally more important)

If you're writing a react app, playwright is very important (and using it properly / acting like a real user) as your customers are interacting with it via a browser.

Though the larger the codebase/ when you start having reusable components, the better tested they are, the less will go wrong in the future as an unfamiliar developer will inevitably hold it wrong.