MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nneonneo | 2025-05-06 23:20:44+00:00
Oh, I'm fully aware an LLM can hallucinate a GDB trace just fine.

My complaint is: if you're trying to use an AI to help you find bugs, you'd sincerely hope that they would have *some* attempt to actually run the exploit. Having the LLM invent fake evidence that you have done so, when you haven't, is just evil, and should be resulting in these people being kicked straight off H1 completely.
by mwigdahl | 2025-05-06 23:21:05+00:00
I do this, but it’s because I am evangelizing proper use of the tool to developers who don’t always understand what it can and can’t do.

Recently I used o3 to plan a refactoring related to upgrading the version of C++ we are using in our product. It pointed out that we could use a tool built in to VS 2022 to make a particular change automatically based on compilation output. I was not familiar with this tool and neither were the other developers on the team.

I did confirm its accuracy myself, but also made sure to credit the model as the source of information about the tool.
by josephg | 2025-05-06 23:21:48+00:00
I agree with you, but it’s definitely inconvenient. Result also doesn’t capture a stack trace. I spent a long time tracking down bugs in some custom binary parsing code awhile ago because I had no idea which stack trace my Result::Err’s were coming from. I could have switched to another library - but I didn’t want to inflict extra dependencies on people using my crate.

As you say, it’s not “batteries included”. I think that’s a fine answer given rust is a systems language. But in application code I want batteries to be included. I don’t want to need to opt in to the right 3rd party library.

I think rust could learn a thing or two from Swift here. Swift’s equivalent is better thought through. Result is more part of the language, and less just bolted on:

https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-pr...
by jjmarr | 2025-05-06 23:22:05+00:00
> wiring diagrams of an extremely basic CPU was part of everyone's CS undergrad at my school (and I assume most other schools too?)

I went to Toronto Metropolitan University (ranked 800-1000 globally) and actually designing that basic CPU was too hard for most students, so they just gave us VHDL code to copy & paste into Quartus II.

Their VHDL code had bugs in it which I discovered after doing the project myself from scratch and comparing my answer with the "correct" one.

This has been the policy for many years now. Shockingly our co-op placement rates have dropped from 70% to 30%.
by dhc02 | 2025-05-06 23:22:57+00:00
I am constantly surprised how seldom aider is mentioned in threads like this. I understand that it's not directly integrated into the editor, but the "editor + parallel CLI tool chain" paradigm feels so natural to me because we drop to terminal for so many other parts of building software. If you haven't tried it (particularly the architect/editor modality), it's worth a couple of hours of experimenting.
by noworriesnate | 2025-05-06 23:23:00+00:00
No, this discussion doesn't have to be qualitative. You dismiss Little House on the Prairie, which is ironic because Laura Wilder quite literally wrote an exact biography that had some details (like the death of her brother) that were left out in the child-friendly books. I'm so thankful that she wrote both kinds of books so that folks can't honestly dismiss the "bad old days" as objectively worse than the present.

Your chronological snobbery reminds me of a similar blindness that modernity has for the "women and children first" policy when the Titanic was sinking. When they made the movie, the director deliberately altered the story because he believed nobody would believe the truth. Yet the truth is, women and children were a whole lot more likely to survive than men, indicating that policy must have taken place[1].

The reality is, if you read first-hand accounts of the west, you see an incredible optimism, an incredible amount of sacrifice and an incredible amount of shared community on the west. That is so alien to our modern culture, where most people know a prophet of doom and gloom, people think that "community" is something you can purchase with a membership or find online, and conspiracy theories (real and imagined!) are a constant hot topic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_and_children_first#20th_...
by didgetmaster | 2025-05-06 23:23:02+00:00
So, is this why the software world is full of bloated, slow, and buggy applications? Work on something just long enough to get it barely functional so the manager can check some box; then quickly move on to the next thing??

Sure, there is always a point of diminishing returns; but leaving something only half-finished will cause more problems down the road.

I have been brought in several times during my career to fix something that initially passed some acceptance criteria; but later became unusable once the load picked up (massive data, more concurrent users, etc.).

The world doesn't need just more apps. It needs many of the current ones to work better.
by tharant | 2025-05-06 23:23:03+00:00
I don’t know for certain (he’s no longer around) but I suspect he did. The prevalence of folks who nowadays believe that Gen-AI makes everything worse suggests to me that not much has changed since his time.

I get it; I’m not an AI evangelist and I get frustrated with the slop too; Gen-AI (and many of the tools we’ve enjoyed over the past few millennia) was/is lauded as “The” singular tool that makes everything better; no tool can fulfill that role yet we always try to shoehorn our problems into a shape that fits the tool. We just need to use the correct tools for the job; in my mind, the only problem right now is that we have a really capable tool and have identified some really valuable use-cases for that tool yet we also keep trying to use it for (what I believe are, given current capabilities) use-cases that don’t fit the tool.

We’ll figure it out but, in the meantime, while I don’t like to generalize that a tech or its use-cases are objectively good/bad, I do tend to have an optimistic outlook for most tech—Gen-AI included.
by MR4D | 2025-05-06 23:24:00+00:00
I think an analogy that is helpful is that of a woodworker. Automation just allowed them to do more things at in less time.

Power saws really reduced time, lathes even more so. Power drills changed drilling immensely, and even nail guns are used on roofing project s because manual is way too slow.

All the jobs still exist, but their tools are way more capable.
by marricks | 2025-05-06 23:24:20+00:00
Yes, but it's not a meaningful part of their revenue unlike Google where it's' their entire revenue.

They are very different companies in structure and it certainly is a "pick your poison" but it's completely stupid to act like they're the same on this front. Apple is better on user privacy

...unless you care about state actors, which you should, in which case your data is the US government's either way.
by libraryofbabel | 2025-05-06 23:25:15+00:00
Yes and no. A messaging app with 450m users has very strong network effects. Users are sticky in a way they aren’t going to be with a VS Code fork which will be increasingly incompatible with the VS Code ecosystem. There are a lot of equally good alternatives to Windsurf and you don’t have to persuade all your friends and relatives to switch too.
by vitus | 2025-05-06 23:25:33+00:00
It's fascinating that "long" is the biggest tip-off you have, given that Mandarin Chinese (based on the mention of "a noticeably strong Chinese accent") does have words that have the same IPA pronunciation (if you set aside tone) [0] as an American whose speech follows the cot-caught merger [1].

Meanwhile the thing that stood out to me in the initial recording were the vowel sounds: for instance, "young" sounded almost like it rhymed with "long" before training. (That makes sense, since Mandarin similarly has a word with that sound, as can be found in the common last name Yang [2].)

Incidentally, Mandarin has words that sound like "lung" (e.g. the word for "cold" [3]), but if you replace the "l" sound at the front with a "y" sound, depending on which of two transformations you use, it turns the vowel sound into a long o [4] (near rhyme with "lone"). (There is another transformation that you can use that results in a leading "y" in pinyin, but in that specific case, the vowel turns into a long e, and the "y" is largely silent (e.g. the word for "solid" [5]).)

In the last recording, Victor is clearly rushing through the sentence, and you can tell that where he previously had a clear "s" ending for the word "days", it's now slurred into a "th" sound. Agreed that that's actually a net negative for intelligibility.

The wiktionary links below have clips of pronunciation. I will note that not all native speakers have a Standard Chinese accent [6,7], so there are assuredly some differences in pronunciation to be expected depending on exactly which region said individual hails from.

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%B5%AA

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/long

[2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/y%C3%A1ng#Mandarin

[3] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%86%B7

[4] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%94%A8

[5] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%A1%AC

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Chinese

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/Mandarin
by jasinjames | 2025-05-06 23:26:03+00:00
Can someone explain the ip address in the hackerone profile[0]? I can't tell if 139.224.130.174 is a reference to something real or just hallucinated by the LLM to look "cool". Wikipedia says that this /8 is controlled by "MIX"[1] but my google-fu is failing me atm.

[0] https://hackerone.com/evilginx?type=user [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...
by momojo | 2025-05-06 23:26:20+00:00
> When I look back at my time doomscrolling, it doesn’t feel restorative, rewarding, fulfilling. Resending I have been kind of forcing myself to do more things, instead of telling myself that I “need” that mindless downtime.

I agree. I hate how I feel after doom scrolling. But the initial impulse is hard to fight.

I'm encouraged to hear about your intentional movement towards healthier digital habits.

> force myself to ... instead of ...

Where does this energy come from? Are some people better at forcing themselves to do things they need to do? Is it genetic? Is it biology[1]?

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biolo...
by mdp2021 | 2025-05-06 23:26:23+00:00
> A saw

No: that in context is a plaster cast saw that looks vibrational but is instead a rotational saw for wood, and you will tend to believe it has safety features it was really not engineered with.

For plaster casts you have to have to plan, design and engineer a proper apt saw - learn what you must from the experience of saws for wood, but it's a specific project.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-06 23:27:40+00:00
> I'd define them as a large company acquiring a private startup. Slack >> Salesforce was a cash-and-stock deal. Postmaters >> Uber, all stock

Okay, in that category of M&A in practically any category, the vast majority of deals are all cash. Deferred, for executives, in most cases. But cash.

> In cases where the company being acquired is already publicly traded, those deals would have to be all cash as their shareholders would need to be bought out

Not true. Preferable. Easier. Not not a requirement.
by brundolf | 2025-05-06 23:27:41+00:00
> Isn't this a runtime problem and not a compile-time problem? buy() or sell() is going to be called with dynamic parameters at runtime, in general.

Yes, but the strength of Rust's type system means you're forced to handle those bad dynamic values up front (or get a crash, if you don't). That means the rest of your code can rest safe, knowing exactly what it's working with. You can see this in OP's parsing example, but it also applies to database clients and such
by burnerthrow008 | 2025-05-06 23:27:52+00:00
Really? Most of those sound like positives to me (the consumer)

I am not shedding any tears over developers not being able to nag me about why I’m cancelling, for example.

Same goes for all the shenanigans mentioned about variable pricing for different users.

I think a lot of devs are out of touch with what customers want: transparent pricing, easy cancellation, not worrying about the store running off with my credit card. How the costs are split up between Apple and the devs is jury not something anyone cares about.
by mattbillenstein | 2025-05-06 23:28:37+00:00
I think the flip side of this is at some point after looking at enough crap software, you feel free to write your own. You can actually solve your directly problems in simpler ways with a lot less code than more generic tools.

I've had great fun writing little daemons, deployment and config management systems, my own tcp networking protocols, process management, and using these tools to "build my own k8s" more or less. It's more fun for me to build and understand these relatively simpler systems than pick up all the tech debt of some more established ones.

And, given enough time, it can be very stable, fast, and tailored to my specific needs.
by NavinF | 2025-05-06 23:29:32+00:00
NYC and California are 10% of the US population and I'd be unsurprised if the two make up 50% of the food delivery market. Flyover states aren't dense enough for drivers to drop off 3 orders on the way to your home and the median income in many states isn't high enough for people to buy private taxis for their burritos
by parliament32 | 2025-05-06 23:30:03+00:00
> I see email blasts suggesting I should be using it, I get peers saying I should be using it, I get management suggesting I should use it to cut costs

The ideal scenario: you write a few bulletpoints and ask Copilot to turn it into a long-form email to send out. Your receiving coworker then asks Copliot to distill it back into a few bullet points they can skim.

You saved 5 minutes but one of your points was ignored entirely and 20% of your output is nonsensical.

Your coworker saved 2 minutes but one of their bulletpoints was hallucinated and important context is missing from the others.

Microsoft collects a fee from both of you and is the only winner here.
by randycupertino | 2025-05-06 23:30:38+00:00
Probably related to their failed pulmonary fibrosis play:

https://ir.pliantrx.com/news-releases/news-release-details/p...

> SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., March 03, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Pliant Therapeutics, Inc. (Nasdaq: PLRX) today announced that following a prespecified data review and recommendation by the trial’s independent Data Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB), as well as a secondary review and recommendation by an outside expert panel, Pliant has discontinued the BEACON-IPF Phase 2b trial evaluating bexotegrast in patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF). While an imbalance in unadjudicated IPF-related adverse events between the treatment and placebo groups led to the discontinuation of the trial, early evidence of efficacy on the forced vital capacity (FVC) endpoint was also observed.

> BEACON-IPF is the first late-stage IPF trial to be discontinued for safety while showing strong evidence of efficacy.
by mountainriver | 2025-05-06 23:30:45+00:00
I still find it basically impossible to get started with a C++ project.

I tried again recently for a proxy I was writing thinking surely things have evolved at this point. Every single package manager couldn’t handle my very basic and very popular dependencies. I mean I tried every single one. This is completely insane to me.

Not to mention just figuring out how to build it after that which was a massive headache and an ongoing one.

Compared to Rust it’s just night and day.

Outside of embedded programming or some special use cases I have literally no idea why anyone would ever write C++. I’m convinced it’s a bunch of masochists
by makeitdouble | 2025-05-06 23:31:02+00:00
That Apple ecosystem only isolation is something you had to wish for in the first place, so for you, technically nothing changes.

For instance up until now you probably refused to register to Netflix or any other system that manages payments and subscription outside of Apple, and you can keep doing so.

Same way you probably didn't register PayPal integration that would have shifted part of the cancellation/refunds to PayPal. You of course didn't integrate PayPay either.

Basically you can keep being Apple only, as you always did. From the discovery documents, Apple didn't seem to give a damn about these and only discussed revenue regarding their policies, but you're free to see what you want in Apple's behavior.
by crazygringo | 2025-05-06 23:32:58+00:00
I don't really understand the point of this.

Most of the CSS that gets used below the fold on a single page on most pages, gets used above it too. Especially when considering it needs to handle large desktop monitors, and responsiveness. And then remaining part (e.g. styling a footer) is tiny.

The CSS "bloat" that you might want to delay loading is CSS for the rest of the entire site, including all sorts of legacy stuff that might not even be used anymore.

There are lots of strategies for how to load CSS used only by the page, as opposed to the site, which involve various tradeoffs, but can be worth it.

But loading CSS for part of a page seems almost nonsensical. It's not like lazy-loading large images, where we're sometimes talking about megabytes. The CSS used on any single page is usually pretty small to begin with, and even smaller zipped.
by treetalker | 2025-05-06 23:33:54+00:00
Well, I have nothing but praise for the Oxford "Very Short Introductions" series, and two of the books on the list are part of that series.

Nevertheless, one may know all there is to know about sleep and still have terrible sleep hygiene (often caused in part from other bad habits).

Call it "grandmotherly wisdom" or anecdata, but the following have never failed to deliver great sleep for me (and vice versa):

- minimize caffeine and sugar intake, and stop consuming them by early afternoon

- eliminate alcohol intake

- 1–3h of exercise per day, 4–6 times per week

- try to get up at the same time every morning

- no late-night TV / device use

- no drugs

FWIW.
by whartung | 2025-05-06 23:35:18+00:00
Indeed. The LLMs will ruin it. They still very much struggle to grasp a code set of any reasonable size.

Asking one to make changes to such a code set, and you will get whatever branch the dice told the tree to go down that day.

To paraphrase, “LLMs are like a box of chocolates…”.

And if you have the patience to try and tack the AI to get back on track, you probably could have just done the work faster yourself.
by cogman10 | 2025-05-06 23:35:25+00:00
Definitely a possibility.

However, I have a very strong suspicion they also didn't understand the GPT output.

To flush out the situation a bit further, this was a performance tuning problem with highly concurrent code. This engineer was initially tasked with the problem and they hadn't bothered to even run a profiler on the code. I did, shared my results with them, and the first action they took with my shared data was dumping a thread dump into GPT and asking it where the performance issues were.

Instead, they've simply been littering the code with timing logs in hopes that one of them will tell them what to do.
by crazygringo | 2025-05-06 23:36:03+00:00
That too! 99% of the time I tap a missed call, it's because I want to see more info about the call or the contact or if there was a voice mail. My phone should never make a call unless I explicitly tap a big ol' "CALL" button. It should never be the default action for tapping on a contact or a missed call.
by darth_avocado | 2025-05-06 23:37:42+00:00
> A few minutes later than usual

That’s an understatement. Your order sits on the shelf for while before someone picks up if you don’t tip, sometimes more than 30 mins, until DoorDash forces some poor underpaid driver to pick it up sometimes with incentives, but mostly threats on their livelihood. In some cases, drivers do pick it up, don’t deliver, eat your stuff, or drive in other directions to focus on other orders. Orders without tips do extremely poorly these days.
by al_borland | 2025-05-06 23:37:51+00:00
Thank you. I just spent a while investigating this and found out I (and probably many others) have been lied to my whole life.

If I look at it from the point of view of a thermostat salesman or support person, and consider the mechanical nature of early thermostats, it makes sense why people would start to believe this and share it.

I will probably still act as if it's true, since I work from home and don't like being hot, but I will choose a different metaphor in the future. I will also probably be a bit pedantic as well if I hear people bring this up, to try and help kill the myth.
Show HN: Aude – I built this because I hate bothering other engineers in my team
by Aude-Daniel | 2025-05-06 23:38:01+00:00
Hi HN! I’m Dan, and I just built this tool called Aude an AI-powered assistant built specifically to help engineers quickly navigate and understand large, complex codebases (all within Jira). It's now live on the Atlassian Marketplace and free for you to try.

-------------

Why I built this:

The reason I built this was because everywhere I worked, SWE spent significant time navigating and understanding complex codebases and it always slowed down feature deployment. What normally happened was:

1. Assigned a ticket.

2. Reach out to an SME (sometimes took days).

3. Write code and reach back out to SME to review PR (Lots of back and forth).

4. Push code.

-------------

How it works:

1. Connects directly to your GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket via Jira as an app extension. We’re looking at expanding to Linear and DevOps but started with Jira as that seemed the most popular and had the most problems for legacy orgs.

2. Finds relevant code files based on your current ticket (Title, Description, Comments…etc).

3. Provides insights (Relevant Files, suggested implementation, testing scenarios) and recommendations based on your codebase (Monorepo or microservices, works for all).

-------------

How it's different:

Unlike general purpose tools (Co-pilot, Chatgpt…etc), we built Aude with enterprise security in mind. We’re not looking to generate code for the developer, rather, augment the experience by reducing time in the discovery phase.

- Isolated cloud

- On-prem deployment

-------------

Try it out (no signup required): We’re live on the Atlassian Marketplace and free to install and try immediately: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1237445?tab=overview&...

-------------

The ask:

I'm keen to hear your experiences as devleopers, suggestions on the product, or any questions you have.

Cheers, Daniel Daniel@aude.app | Aude.app
by burnerthrow008 | 2025-05-06 23:39:10+00:00
> - YouTube videos can’t be played on the lock screen without some tricks

Waiwaiwait. Hold the phone.

That’s GOOGLE’s decision, not Apple’s. This whole thread is a circle jerk about how Apple doesn’t let developers do what they want. It’s a general purpose computer and all that. This is an example of what happens when Apple doesn’t prevent developers from doing something anti-consumer.
by doright | 2025-05-06 23:39:24+00:00
If you had to ask me years ago, I would probably say that programming was my lifeblood. Not only did it pay, but it was fulfilling. Nothing could have convinced me otherwise.

Some people will have to go through the burnout phase and reach rock bottom to learn this advice, I'm afraid. Only from there can they see the consequences of not leaving everything broken, and decide to do something else.