MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pmarreck | 2025-05-06 14:11:20+00:00
> Proper refactoring with an llm requires full testing coverage

Proper refactoring WITHOUT an LLM requires full test coverage! But most definitely WITH an LLM.

In cases where there is no test coverage, the first thing I do is have the LLM write one test at a time. The problem there is that if you truly wanted valid tests, you'd have to actually break the code, watch the test fail to prove it was valid (basically, the inverse of TDD) and then re-fix the code and start on the next test, but in practice, it is difficult to get an LLM to stick to this loop. I wish someone would train or refine some coding LLM to use either TDD or this form of "inverse TDD" where you're applying tests after the fact and also want to check their validity. (Or tell me how to do it.) Because mere prompting doesn't seem to stick- it always regresses to the mean eventually.

(I'm currently seeking work, btw, and would probably be happy to help refactor old code, advise people on code, etc. Sorry for the self-promo.)
by horsawlarway | 2025-05-06 14:12:08+00:00
Sure - none of that changes that longhorn.io is great.

I run both an external NAS as an NFS service and longhorn. I'd probably just use longhorn at this point, if I were doing it over again. My nodes have plenty of sata capacity, and any new storage is going into them for longhorn at this point.

I back up to an external provider (backblaze/wasabi/s3/etc). I'm usually paying less than a dollar a month for backups, but I'm also fairly judicious in what I back up.

Yes - it's a little weird to spin up a container to read the disk of a longhorn volume at first, but most times you can just use the longhorn dashboard to manage volume snapshots and backup scheduling as needed. Ex - if you're not actually trying to pull content off the disk, you don't ever need to do it.

If you are trying to pull content off the volume, I keep a tiny ssh/scp container & deployment hanging around, and I just add the target volume real fast, spin it up, read the content I need (or more often scp it to my desktop/laptop) and then remove it.
by nico | 2025-05-06 14:12:11+00:00
Maybe try using AI to jumpstart your process and get the basics up and running

For me, it’s brought back the joy of coding and building things: I feel like I was in a rut for years before that

Also, finding people to share the stuff with helps a lot too. Even if they are personal projects, it’s nice having others to show it to, appreciate it and give feedback
by stryan | 2025-05-06 14:12:59+00:00
Maybe you're thinking of BlueChi[0]? It used to be Red Hat project called 'hirte' and was renamed[1] and moved to the Eclipse foundation for whatever reason. It lets you control systemd units across nodes and works with the normal systemd tools (D-bus etc).

[0] https://github.com/eclipse-bluechi/bluechi

[1] https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/hirte-renamed-eclipse-bluechi
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-05-06 14:13:09+00:00
Timescale, for one. If a lender wants to foreclose on your home, they'll usually have to go through a whole process, giving you a month or more of notification. During and even after this time, they'll often be happy to just take your money if you can come up with it, and they may be required to, depending on your jurisdiction's redemption laws. (E.g., my state gives owners an entire year following a tax sale to redeem their property. Some people make a whole business of chasing after redemption money.)

In contrast, many domain providers will resell your domain in a heartbeat once you miss a payment deadline. And then the buyer can do whatever they want with emails sent to that domain, since there's no such thing as identity theft when your domain is your identity. In the case of a mailing address, it's not an identity at all, which is why non-junk mail will also have a recipient line.
by lxgr | 2025-05-06 14:13:20+00:00
It should, but they've recently been somewhat picky about which phone numbers they accept for the initial setup.

Once you get it, you don't need access to that US number afterwards – very useful when traveling; everything just works via VoIP, including texting, which is a lifesaver for 2FA when traveling without US roaming.

Of course, it's a Google service, so expect it to be discontinued without warning at the exact moment you've totally integrated it into your daily life.
by SketchySeaBeast | 2025-05-06 14:13:38+00:00
If you look at the numbers, in 2023 Chicago there were 23.3 murders/ homicides per 100,000 population, about 0.02% of the population, which is a statistic that totally ignores if there's specific patterns to these homicides.

For perspective, in 2022 42,514 people in the US died in car accidents, which works out to about 0.01% of the population, so about half that rate. Would you say the fear of Chicago is more or less than twice the fear of driving?
by codingdave | 2025-05-06 14:13:46+00:00
Why do we need a term for any of it, other than "coding". Before AI, I did not need different terms for coding when some devs would cowboy-code buggy slop straight to production vs. a full team doing test-driven development with dedicated QA staff on top of it, or anywhere in the middle. Vastly different qualities of work, but the same term - "coding".

So why do we need a term? What difference in action will hearing a different term drive?

On that front, I like the fact that the term "vibe coding" exists because anyone who uses that term unironically has just told me that they care more about the process than the result. Now that is information that changes my actions because it changes how seriously I take them.
by Rhapso | 2025-05-06 14:14:13+00:00
If it is a joke, it seems more like mockery than good humor.

> I understand humor might be too foreign and loose for people on HN but trust me, there was no maliciousness in their comment.

Adding your own mockery doesn't help with my perception of the situation.

Malice isn't required to do harm and it's absence doesn't really change my opinion on the situation.
by owendarko | 2025-05-06 14:14:55+00:00
We're reaching a point where we don't need to switch to another IDE (from VS Code/IntelliJ/insert-your-IDE-here) for "AI/vibe coding"

IDEs can support "AI coding agents" on their own.

The entire workflow for "AI coding agents" boils down to:

1. You write a prompt

2. The "agent" wraps it in a system prompt and sends it to the LLM

3. The LLM sends back a response

4. The agent performs specific actions based on that response (editing files, creating new ones, etc.)

Microsoft already started doing that with Copilot. And they have a vibrant ecosystem of VS Code extensions (I maintain one of them [1])

"AI agents" should be a feature, not a separate piece of software (IDE) that's integral to software devs.

[1] https://github.com/Kilo-Org/kilocode
by Ygg2 | 2025-05-06 14:15:14+00:00
> The religious element of rust programmers

Yeah. I too, hate the Rust Evangelically Orthodox Later Day Christians.

Oh, wait... You're serious. What is religious about rewriting tools in Rust? Isn't that what most programmers do for fun and learning?

Is it any more religious than worshiping Alan Kay or Dijkstra?

> It makes me wonder how much is motivated by stuff other than what’s actually the best outcome.

Looks in the thread... Sees https://www.sudo.ws/security/advisories/

Are you sure the status quo is the better outcome?
by sanderjd | 2025-05-06 14:15:30+00:00
By the way, I fear I'm harping on "AI tools can be really useful" here, but I really find that learning new things is my favorite way to use these tools.

You said that you don't want to use them to generate code and just be a reviewer. I definitely feel that! But you can instead use them like a tutor helping you learn to the code yourself. "I'm trying to do xyz in Rust, can you show me a few techniques for that?" Then you can conversationally ask more questions about what's going on. Maybe eventually you can go read relevant sections in the book, but with the concepts better motivated.

I do this all the time when learning new things. It's not a canonical source of information, but it can be a useful guide.
by grakasja | 2025-05-06 14:15:31+00:00
Their re-defection in Vienna seems extremely unlikely. The tape doesn't actually say that they were kidnapped from Hong Kong, that's the summary of a Wikipedia editor. Shin later said that if he had been blocked from making films in the 60s he would have gone to the North voluntarily. We only have his version of the story after he left NK, and the NK government version which are both going to be biased. The truth could be somewhere in the middle e.g. he was lured for a visit or talks and then kept against his will when he changed his mind.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-05-06 14:15:39+00:00
It's going to be a spectrum so will be hard to divide up.

I know a crash-course-day's worth of programming language(python and C), but very strong understanding of the principles of programming. So LLMs are a godsend because I can basically write code, function by function if need be, in English.

"Create this variable, do these mathematical transformations on it with retrieved value from API, display the output of it here, also compare it to the output of everything in the test set, store differences greater than 30% to their own set, store all values in an SQLite database, create a simple GUI with a field showing each output, make a button that outputs the results to a .pdf, give it a title block with labeled results listed, etc. etc."

Does coding become vibecoding when you do it in English? hah
by gaoshan | 2025-05-06 14:15:42+00:00
I can tell you that for me (early Gen X) it got bad when my wife was out of town for an extended period of weeks for work. Ours kids have moved out, we have no family in the region, all of my oldest friends live across the country and I'm 20 years older than most of my coworkers. I found myself getting home from work, making dinner and then having absolutely nothing to do for several hours. That's when I got sucked in. Next thing you know I would wake up on a rainy Saturday and just reach for the phone and then it was lunch time and suddenly dinner time. It feels pretty shitty, too.

Recently I've had to find things for myself to do in order to make sure my time is better filled otherwise I will "fill" it with doom scrolling. I don't know that my brain is more susceptible (hard to self determine something like that) but my time is certainly more open than it ever was in my life previously.
by behnamoh | 2025-05-06 14:15:51+00:00
> At the same time, Microsoft will likely replicate Windsurf and Cursor's features within a year. And deliver them with far greater stability and polish.

Microsoft software quality has gone downhill recently, and I'm not going to bet on them delivering something more polished than WS and Cursor here.

Side: all images on Microsoft websites are low resolution! it's like they don't even check their own website.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-05-06 14:16:05+00:00
“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” ― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

If I have to do the proof, then as you say, it's probably harder and (in many cases) more error prone than if I didn't use a proof. If the language can do it for me, and I get the lack of errors without having to do the work (and without the chance of me making the mistakes)? Yeah, now we're talking. (Yes, I am aware that I still have to design the types to fit what the program is doing.)

If a tool introduces complexity, it has to make up for it by eliminating at least that much complexity somewhere else. If it doesn't, the tool isn't worth using.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-05-06 14:16:08+00:00
>Being a generalist with depth of understanding means you are the type of person who needs to understand things properly before doing them . .You are lot of time learning things which are not required for get the task completed.

It's just how my career swung me. I would have loved to have developed as a subject matter expert, but everytime I get into the swing of things, layoffs came around or the studio shut down. Now I'm freelancing and that by nature requires a generalist approach.

no one's really investing in specialists, so I have no idea how the millentials/Gen Z of the world will ever get to properly specialize. Specialization requires time to master something, and that time implies stability to do that thing.

>To be productive to learning curve is steep and the prior knowledge is limited in usefulness.

business wise, sure. It's a shame all business sees as "productive" is based on how many widgets you churn in that time. It's no surprise such companies want to force AI into it without quality considerations.
by dec0dedab0de | 2025-05-06 14:16:09+00:00
I don't work with anything that would need this, but I love TUIs so I checked it out and saw this bit:

Operations that can't be instantaneous (loading debug info, searching for functions and types) should be reasonably efficient, multi-threaded, asynchronous, cancellable, and have progress bars.

I wish this were more common, especially the progress bars thing.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-05-06 14:16:13+00:00
> The Illusion of Finality

One of the most important skills that I've learned, through writing ship software, is "Knowing what 'Done' looks like."

There's a point, where -even though there's still stuff that I have to do- I need to declare the project "done," wrap it up, slap a bow on it, and push it out the door.

There's always a 2.0.

Writing in an iterative manner (where I "discover" a design, as I develop the software), makes this more difficult. One thing about "hard" requirements, is that there's no question about what "Done" looks like.
by haswell | 2025-05-06 14:16:31+00:00
> Why do we need a term anyway?

For the same reason I think it’s useful to distinguish between purely AI-generated imagery vs. using AI tooling in some specific and restricted way. e.g. if someone uses an AI de-noising program on a RAW photograph, the implications of that are entirely different from generating the entire image.

Until recently, it was not possible to generate sophisticated programs from scratch across a wide variety of problems domains without being involved in writing the code. This type of “development” is entirely unlike a more limited “AI-assisted” workflow and the implications of each are quite different.

As a viewer of artwork, how the art was produced entirely changes how I value it.

As a user of software - especially in certain categories - how the software is produced also changes how I value it, whether or not I trust it with my data, would be willing to install it in my computers, etc.

To your point, there’s a spectrum of AI involvement. But I think it’s necessary and useful to have language that helps identify software that sits on the extremes of that spectrum. Classifying things across the range is more difficult.
by bitexploder | 2025-05-06 14:17:33+00:00
Well, there are ~2.4 million people in Chicago. In the last 12 months there were ~2600 shootings. In a given week, ignoring all other factors your odds of being shot are 1 in 48000. As a visitor you are unlikely to be in higher crime areas where shootings are more likely as well. In short, no, it is probably not something to overly worry about.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-05-06 14:18:12+00:00
> It's my employer's responsibility to allocate tasks to me in order to best suit the organisation's needs and goals.

I don't disagree that your personal employment relationship is like that, but keep in mind that you are describing only you here.

Contrast with another example: It is my employer's responsibility to describe the organization's needs and goals, and to give me the freedom and leeway to figure out how to best accomplish them according to agreed-upon measures.
by mulmen | 2025-05-06 14:18:38+00:00
> Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.

It’s a lot easier to teach someone when they aren’t starving.

Teaching someone to fish almost certainly requires giving them a fish.

That’s how teaching works. First you do it for them, then you ask them to try and you help them when they falter.
by stackskipton | 2025-05-06 14:18:45+00:00
Most traders I dealt with want to do it on personal cell phone so they can keep contacts as they move around. Most of them are like salespeople, they know exactly how much money they bring in and successful ones refuse to do anything that will impede THEIR method of working. SEC Fines, Regulations? Those are for less successful people.

EDIT: There was another post calling them divas, alot of them act that way.
by whizzter | 2025-05-06 14:18:46+00:00
This highlights the single biggest problem I have with the MS/C#/.NET runtime/ecosystem (The article seems to be from a .NET developer), so many functions connected to string handling are locale dependent and you have to explicitly select the non-locale variants and that then becomes an issue when dealing with the common data interchange and file-formats since those are usually with US semantics.

Many European developers run into this frequently since the default parse for float/double/decimal will assume comma as the decimal separator due to our locale settings.
by Aeolun | 2025-05-06 14:18:50+00:00
While I have experienced both sides of the equation here, I find it much more pleasant to have things specialized instead of standardized. Yes, you spend a bit of time maintaining the functionality, but all that functionality (and maintenance) is there in support of your goal.

Using standardized software often leads to spending half a day just trying to find a way to work around the limitation you face. The next level there is that you realize you can just fix it, spend half a day crafting the perfect PR, and then submit it into the void, leaving it hanging for half a year before someone gets to it.
by jmillikin | 2025-05-06 14:19:04+00:00
Nothing that you wrote here indicates you understand what is being discussed.

Water has very low compressive strength, so low that it freely deforms under its own weight. You can observe this by pouring some water onto a table. This behavior is distinct from materials with high compressive strength, such as wood or steel.

(I say "very low" instead of "zero" because surface tension could be considered a type of compressive strength at small scales, such as a single drop of water on a hydrophobic surface)
by Volundr | 2025-05-06 14:19:09+00:00
FWIW this is my experience too. I use LLMs pretty regularly for coding but to get decent code you really have to supervise the hell out of them and often it's not worth the effort to push them into doing the right thing.

Maybe I'm just bad at getting it to do things, but I think your question about "letting go" is the real story. I think there are a lot of people not paying close enough attention to what's coming out of the LLM, and the tech debt building up is going to come back to bite them when it builds to a point the LLM can no longer make progress and they have to untangle the mess.
by mg | 2025-05-06 14:19:20+00:00
The way I "ask" is that I really ... ask!

I ask the LLM "Can you find anything in this file(s) that can be made shorter or more logical?"

And then as I said, I like less than 10% of the ideas the LLM comes up with. But it is so fast to read through 10 ideas (A minute or so) that it is well worth it.
by whstl | 2025-05-06 14:19:25+00:00
No.

Keep in mind that:

- I didn't step in between engineers and the company. I am an engineer.

- I didn't step in between my team and the decision makers. It wasn't me who "invented" the requirements, nor it was me who said the projects were complete.

- It was the only time in the last few years where I could actually follow the advice in this article and ship things people need. Because I could TALK with people.

- My entire team got salary increases all across the board.

- Everyone has an ego, and everyone has a personality. But nobody in a team should get to put "more" of their personality over the others. We had brand guidelines and accessibility requirements, but other than that we decided things together.
by palmotea | 2025-05-06 14:19:27+00:00
> Excuse my lack of experience in that matter, but with modern inventions like the watch shouldn’t keeping track of time be something that is possible?

No, just like the existence of books or the internet doesn't relieve you of needing to know stuff.

Everyone has internal sense of time that relies on external natural cues. A watch is a kludgy bolt-on that's not well integrated with one's awareness.
by highfrequency | 2025-05-06 14:19:29+00:00
> How can you finish things in a world where you can keep improving systems indefinitely? It means getting them to a point where the decision-makers at the company are happy.

Rational mindset for an employee, but the problem (for the company) is that upper management is usually unqualified to distinguish good vs. bad technical work. So under this advice, engineers do the minimal work to “deliver” lots of features in order to check off the OKR for upper management, but the engineering is done poorly. Upper management has no insight into the quality of the work, but over time the bugs and performance degradation pile up, while engineering managers get promoted and OKRs completed.

The only real resolution is to push technical expertise as high up into the org as possible, so that even if engineers are only appeasing upper management, upper management will demand good quality work. Apple is the notable example of this org structure: there are no general managers except Tim Cook; everyone who reports to Cook is a technical expert.
by shadowgovt | 2025-05-06 14:19:54+00:00
Learned this weekend: among the reasons soldiers needed to identify the planes by sight - the B-29 had a computer-assist turret that adapted to target range and relative velocity. But it could only estimate range appropriately if the gunner dialed in the wingspan of the target so that dialing the reticle to "pin" the target wing-to-wing corresponded to the correct range.

Training film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJExsIp4yO8
by camgunz | 2025-05-06 14:19:55+00:00
I posted about it in a different little branch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43903848

TL;DR: the average disability recipient age has hovered ~50 (stddev 1.54 years) since 1960. The theory of "baby boomers are a huge generation, they got old and US health care sucks ass" is far more parsimonious than your theory of individual accountability, which has to explain why every generation suddenly becomes fraudulent/immoral/unaccountable at the exact same point in their lives.
by haradion | 2025-05-06 14:19:56+00:00
YMMV, naturally, but I've found that some embedded devices have really excellent hardware abstraction layers in Rust that wrap the majority of the device's functionality in an effectively zero-overhead layer. Timers? GPIO? Serial protocols? Interrupts? It's all there.

- https://docs.rs/atsamd-hal/

- https://docs.rs/rp2040-hal/
by dmje | 2025-05-06 14:20:12+00:00
Totally disagree! If you're non technical: wordpress.com - choose site name, create account, make website. Then if you want to grow you can pay for a domain, custom plugins, themes, shop. If you really want to grow then you can bring your data out and setup your own (or pay someone to setup) a wordpress.org instance. Thousands of options for hosting, themes, whatever.

And: compared to the other builders like Wix, Squarespace etc, you're not locked in. If you make a thing on wordpress.com or wordpress.org and want to escape, you just export your stuff in a common XML format. You get none of that with the commercial options.

So, yeh, however much HN likes to hate on it, it's still the best platform of choice for non-technicals to get stuff on the web.