MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dgb23 | 2025-05-13 13:50:57+00:00
There are tricks one can use to mitigate some of the pitfalls when using either a conversational LLM or a code assistant.

They emerge from the simple assumptions that:

- LLMs fundamentally pattern match bytes. It's stored bytes + user query = generated bytes.

- We have common biases and instinctively use heuristics. And we are aware of some of them. Like confirmation bias or anthropomorphism.

Some tricks:

1. Ask for alternate solutions or let them reword their answers. Make them generate lists of options.

2. When getting an answer that seems right, query for a counterexample or ask it to make the opposite case. This can sometimes help one to remember that we're really just dealing with clever text generation. In other cases it can create tension (I need to research this more deeply or ask an actual expert). Sometimes it will solidify one of the two, answers.

3. Write in a consistent and simple style when using code assistants. They are the most productive and reliable when used as super-auto-complete. They only see the bytes, they can't reason about what you're trying to achieve and they certainly can't read your mind.

4. Let them summarize previous conversations or a code module from time to time. Correct them and add direction whenever they are "off", either with prompts or by adding comments. They simply needed more bytes to look at to produce the right ones at the end.

5. Try to get wrong solutions. Make them fail from time to time, or ask too much of them. This develops a intuition for when these tools work well and when they don't.

6. This is the most important and reflected in the article: Never ask them to make decisions, for the simple fact that they can't do it. They are fundamentally about _generating information_. Prompt them to provide information in the form of text and code so you can make the decisions. Always use them with this mindset.
by JdeBP | 2025-05-13 13:51:02+00:00
It's a combination of factors:

* The original author of the project has not been involved in it since 1990. The people who took it over and made it a GNU project then largely stopped working on it in 2004. The people who are now working on it are something like its 3rd or 4th wave of developers.

* Learning the internals of screen now from scratch is a lot harder than when I did it in 1987. There's an awful lot more operating system historical and portability factors, now. In 1987, it was works-on-4.3BSD-might-not-on-your-Unix.

* If you deal with pseudo-terminals cross-platform, there are still huge variations on how pseudo-terminals work and how the long-standing security issues of pseudo-terminals, identified in the 1990s, have been addressed in operating systems.

* screen is encumbered by a lot of 1980s Think. It still today diligently manages, and puts quite a lot of effort into constructing, a generated-on-the-fly TERMCAP environment variable, for example.

* Attitudes to security have changed. At least one security hole in the headlined report was actually a neat-o feature of terminals in Unix in the 1970s and 1980s.
by marcosdumay | 2025-05-13 13:51:33+00:00
Looks like a tech-debt ridden large piece of software that new developers just can't understand.

If that's the case, it's not really about it being "understaffed". Instead, it's doomed to rot until it's replaced of rewritten. There's no scenario where more maintainers will help, except for marginally delaying it.

The good news is that there are almost perfect replacements out there, and most of them are leaner.
by lreeves | 2025-05-13 13:51:52+00:00
I use o3 with architect mode for larger changes and refactors in a project. It seems very suited to the two-pass system where the (more expensive) "reasoning" LLM tells the secondary LLM all the changes.

For most of the day I use Gemini Pro 2.5 in non-architect mode (or Sonnet when Gemini is too slow) and never really run into the issue of it making the wrong changes.

I suspect the biggest trick I know is being completely on top of the context for the LLM. I am frequently using /reset after a change and re-adding only relevant files, or allowing it to suggest relevant files using the repo-map. After each successful change if I'm working on a different area of the app I then /reset. This also purges the current chat history so the LLM doesn't have all kinds of unrelated context.
by pc86 | 2025-05-13 13:52:12+00:00
I don't think it's a grift in the negative sense but this is absolutely a marketing comment. They're doing exactly what they say to do in the comment. They're on HN where at least some of their target market is. They have a product that is relevant (right down to the headline/CTA). They didn't just post the link but put it at the end of an informational comment.

10/10 meta-promotion IMO
by sgarland | 2025-05-13 13:52:12+00:00
Yep. I’m a DBRE, and can confirm, it’s almost always the DB, with the explicit caveat that it’s also rarely the fault of the DB itself, but rather the fault of poor schema and query design.

Queries I can sometimes rewrite, and there’s nothing more satisfying than handing a team a 99% speed-up with a couple of lines of SQL. Sometimes I can’t, and it’s both painful and frustrating to explain that the reason the dead-simple single-table SELECT is slow is because they have accumulated billions of rows that are all bloated with JSON and low-cardinality strings, and short of at a minimum table partitioning (with concomitant query rewrites to include the partition key), there is nothing anyone can do. This has happened on giant instances, where I know the entire working set they’re dealing with is in memory. Computers are fast, but there is a limit.

The other way the DB gets blamed is row lock contention. That’s almost always due to someone opening a transaction (e.g. SELECT… FOR UPDATE) and then holding it needlessly while doing other stuff, but sometimes it’s due to the dev not being aware of the DB’s locking quirks, like MySQL’s use of gap locks if you don’t include a UNIQUE column as a search predicate. Read docs, people!
Show HN: Reaktiv – I built Excel-like reactive programming for Python
by buibuibui | 2025-05-13 13:52:23+00:00
Hi HN! I created Reaktiv, a Python library bringing reactive programming to the backend world that recently hit 1,000+ monthly downloads.

I'm actively promoting it because I believe signal-based reactivity (a concept that spread rapidly in frontend development) has huge untapped potential in Python. My breakthrough came when I stopped describing it as "Angular signals for Python" and started calling it "Excel-like computation graphs" - suddenly Python developers understood the value.

The library automatically tracks dependencies between computations, only recalculating values when dependencies change. This eliminates manual dependency tracking, prevents synchronization bugs, and reduces cognitive load when managing complex state.

Interestingly, I've noticed some initial interest from data scientists, though I'm still exploring what specific problems it might solve for them. I also believe the Home Assistant/IoT communities could benefit greatly from this approach.

Would love your thoughts on bringing frontend patterns to backend development!
by cess11 | 2025-05-13 13:52:50+00:00
Many people doing code for money never or only rarely used any form of code generation until it was given to them as a SaaS in exchange for copies of the code they work on.

I've been surprised by this for a long time, having seen coworkers spend days typing in things manually that they could have put there with IDE capabilities, search-replace, find -exec or a five minute script.
by Daviey | 2025-05-13 13:53:15+00:00
Dead Reckoning - Pilots have been using this forever (100+ years). It's just maths: speed + heading + time + wind = position. Still widely used in VFR flying! It was made more accessible with the E6B "computer" from the 1930s, but isn't a computer at all - just a circular slide rule with aviation formulas built in and still used today. Every student pilot still learns this stuff.

Non-Directional Beacon (NDB) / Automatic Direction Finder (ADF) - Introduced 1930s-40s, standard in WWII. Ground station sends signal, aircraft needle points to it. Pretty simple but not super accurate. Still technically operational but barely used anymore. PPLs still learn it in training but honestly who uses this regularly? It's like knowing how to use a fax machine - technically still around but why would you?

Very High Frequency Omnidirectional Range (VOR) & Distance Measuring Equipment (DME) - These work together - VOR gives you direction from a station, DME tells you distance. Developed in the 1940s, and surprisingly still pretty common. Lots of GA pilots use these as primary or backup nav. Created all those "highways in the sky" that formed the airways system. VOR is definitely the most useful of the old-school nav aids, and you'll find these receivers in most cockpits.

Inertial Navigation (INS) - Commercial airliners got these in the 1960s. No external signals needed - just measures acceleration to track position changes from your starting point. Completely self-contained, works anywhere on Earth. Modern versions use laser gyros instead of mechanical parts. The drawback is drift - errors add up over time (1-2 miles per hour). Still used alongside GPS on long-haul flights.

US Postal Arrows: Also, i've not seen them myself - but the US in the 1920s before radio navigation, the US built a system of MASSIVE concrete arrows (up to 70 feet long!) across the country to guide airmail pilots. This was officially called the "Transcontinental Airway System." They were painted bright yellow and paired with beacons/lighthouses for night flying. The system eventually stretched from NY to SF.

Most got dismantled during WWII, but dozens of these concrete arrows still exist today scattered across the western US. It was literally a "follow the yellow brick road" situation for pilots. They'd fly from arrow to arrow during daylight, and at night there were gas powered lights showing them. More info here, https://www.core77.com/posts/25236/what-are-these-giant-conc...
by amarcheschi | 2025-05-13 13:54:11+00:00
I don't know why though, it's quite annoying but not so annoying that I feel I need to switch. Given that I'm just following a uni course which requires code to not be read again - if not by colleagues in my group - I leave the safety slop and put the burden of skipping 70% of the code on the shoulders of my colleagues which will read my code.

Then they put my code into chatgpt or whatever they use and ask it to adapt to their code

After a while we (almost) all realized that was just doing a huge clusterfuck

BTW, I think it would have been much better to start from scratch with their own implementation given we're analyzing different datasets. And it might not make sense to try to convert the code for a dataset structure to another. A colleague didn't manage to draw a heatmap with my code and a simple csv for God know what reasons. And I think just asking a plot from scratch from a csv would be quite easy for a llm
by lyu07282 | 2025-05-13 13:54:47+00:00
> If my country had no mandatory voter ID, I wouldn't trust our elections either.

In terms of conspiracy thinking you have to always be very careful with such statements, ask yourself why liberals oppose voter id laws? Assume no ill intent for the sake of it. Do research for yourself into the subject. Try for example to answer these questions in your research: What is the evidence and magnitude of election fraud? Who benefits from voter id laws and why?

It's one thing to be convinced of something that sounds like common sense, but you should at least try to understand the other side of the arguments.

I like how this thread turned into such a perfect meta demonstration of the article. At the end of the day you can't force people to be curious, they won't research for themselves, they likely lack the media literacy to do so anyway. They are just never exposed to the counter arguments from someone they aren't already biased against. A chatbot that can be perceived as impartial arbiters of truth in all other aspects of their lives, could indeed be helpful to combat all the nonsense people believe to be true. My calculator was always right, let's ask it about this new 2+2=5 conspiracy.
by caseyy | 2025-05-13 13:55:26+00:00
There are many exceptions.

1. Sometimes speed = money. Being the first to market, meeting VC-set milestones for additional funding, and not running out of runway are all things cheaper than the alternatives. Software maintenance costs later don't come close to opportunity costs if a company/project fails.

2. Most of the software is disposable. It's made to be sold, and the code repo will be chucked into a .zip on some corporate drive. There is no post-launch support, and the software's performance after launch is irrelevant for the business. They'll never touch the codebase again. There is no "long-term" for maintenance. They may harm their reputation, but that depends on whether their clients can talk with each other. If they have business or govt clients, they don't care.

3. The average tenure in tech companies is under 3 years. Most people involved in software can consider maintenance "someone else's problem." It's like the housing stock is in bad shape in some countries (like the UK) because the average tenure is less than 10 years. There isn't a person in the property's owner history to whom an investment in long-term property maintenance would have yielded any return. So now the property is dilapidated. And this is becoming a real nationwide problem.

4. Capable SWEs cost a lot more money. And if you hire an incapable IC who will attempt to future-proof the software, maintenance costs (and even onboarding costs) can balloon much more than some inefficient KISS code.

5. It only takes 1 bad engineering manager in the whole history of a particular piece of commercial software to ruin its quality, wiping out all previous efforts to maintain it well. If someone buys a second-hand car and smashes it into a tree hours later, was keeping the car pristinely maintained for that moment (by all the previous owners) worth it?

And so forth. What you say is true in some cases (esp where a company and its employees act in good faith) but not in many others.
by zamadatix | 2025-05-13 13:55:58+00:00
Popcorn (even plain air popped) is more carbs as a percentage of mass (~70%) than eating a bag of Hershey Kisses (60%) so it's no surprise. I've always found starches to be the bigger culprit of my spikes than sweets since it's relatively easy to overlook and much easier to consume a large quantity without thinking about it.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-05-13 13:56:03+00:00
>We made it at least a few thousand years without it.

We did that during a period of peculiar circumstances that won't ever be replicated. Relatively large, distributed population with many different ecological environments that we were already pre-adapted to. A far smaller single-point-failure population that can't just go out and hunt for its food among the vast wildlife might have it pretty rough if industrial civilization were to falter.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-05-13 13:56:04+00:00
VS Code defers a lot of tasks to the background at least. This is a bit more visible in intellij; you seem to measure how long it takes to show its window, but how long does it take for it to warm up and finish indexing / loading everything, or before it actually becomes responsive?

Anyway, five seconds is long for a text editor; 10, 15 years ago, sublime text loaded and opened up a file in <1 second, and it still does today. Vim and co are instant.

Also keep in mind that desktop computers haven't gotten significantly faster for tasks like opening applications in the past years; they're more efficient (especially the M line CPUs) and have more hardware for specialist workloads like what they call AI nowadays, but not much innovation in application loading.

You use a lot of words like "pretty close to", "nearly", "essentially", but 10, 20 years ago they WERE instant; applications from 10, 20 years ago should be so much faster today than they were on hardware from back then.

I wish the big desktop app builders would invest in native applications. I understand why they go for web technology (it's the crossplatform GUI technology that Java and co promised and offers the most advanced styling of anything anywhere ever), but I wish they invested in it to bring it up to date.
by afavour | 2025-05-13 13:56:38+00:00
I think it’s a little more nuanced than the broad takes make it seem.

One of the biggest performance issues I witness is that everyone assumes a super fast, always on WiFi/5G connection. Very little is cached locally on device so even if I want to do a very simple search through my email inbox I have to wait on network latency. Sometimes that’s great, often it really isn’t.

Same goes for many SPA web apps. It’s not that my phone can’t process the JS (even though there’s way too much of it), it’s poor caching strategies that mean I’m downloading and processing >1MB of JS way more often than I should be. Even on a super fast connection that delay is noticeable.
by turnsout | 2025-05-13 13:56:40+00:00
Leaving aside the science, this paper draws the wrong conclusion. Just because many factors influence BG response does not mean CGMs are somehow invalid as a tool for personalized nutrition. Quite the opposite. A good nutritionist does not work in a vacuum. They know the holistic nature of BG and will tailor their recommendations to the patient based on lifestyle. (I worked on a holistic diabetes management platform)
by davidw | 2025-05-13 13:56:53+00:00
I don't think it's necessarily a market for lemons. That involves information asymmetry.

Sometimes that happens with buggy software, but I think in general, people just want to pay less and don't mind a few bugs in the process. Compare and contrast what you'd have to charge to do a very thorough process with multiple engineers checking every line of code and many hours of rigorous QA.

I once did some software for a small book shop where I lived in Padova, and created it pretty quickly and didn't charge the guy - a friend - much. It wasn't perfect, but I fixed any problems (and there weren't many) as they came up and he was happy with the arrangement. He was patient because he knew he was getting a good deal.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-05-13 13:57:08+00:00
I hike on trails in New Mexico, and I find the existing trail data on osmand/OSM to be astoundingly accurate. I had concluded that NSF/BLM must have data.

So few people hike these trails that I do not believe they were entered one by one. The one "trail" I hiked that was entered by someone I deleted later that day, because it should not have been shown as a trail.
by jeroenhd | 2025-05-13 13:57:38+00:00
This permission has been a security issue since its introduction. Random apps have been caught iterating over used media to extract geolocation history based on EXIF information and other such metadata (for no good reason, data collection for data traders), so Google did the right thing and made file access permission-first.

Almost no apps need this permission, so being skeptical makes a lot of sense. File managers and other such apps are routinely permitted to use this permission, so it's not like Google is locking out utility apps or anything.

The current state of Google Play is the result of years of Google being too permissive by default and trying to patch things later while desperately trying to remain backwards compatible. Give advertisers a finger and they take the whole hand. Your average Android phone's internal storage used to be full of dotfiles, hidden directories, not-so-hidden directories, all full of identifiers and cross-identifiers to break the cross-app tracking boundary enforced by the normal API.

As far as I know, Google has made an API available for picking a directory to sync with. I'm not sure why NextCloud needs to see every file on my SD card when it can ask for folders to sync into and can use a normal file picker to upload new files without going through a file manager, but there's probably a feature somewhere hidden in their app that necessitates this permission.

The policy itself makes a lot of sense and I'd argue is beneficial for Google Play's user base. NextCloud's problem seems to be that Google isn't letting a human with common sense review their upload. Because of Google being Google, outcry is the only way to get attention from an actual human being when it comes to app stores (Apple has had very similar issues, though they claim their reviews are all done by humans).

EDIT: NextCloud states "SAF cannot be used, as it is for sharing/exposing our files to other apps, so the reviewer clearly misunderstood our app workflow." as a reason for not being able to use the better APIs, but I'm not sure if that's true. SAF has a dedicated API for maintaining access to a folder (https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage/shared/d...). I think NextCloud misinterpreted Google here.
by lo_fye | 2025-05-13 13:58:23+00:00
I believe some conspiracy theories because I've verified that 2 of them are true (no, I'm not going to get into any details). That made me wonder how many others are true?

Could chatting with an LLM-based AI convince me otherwise? No, because when I asked it about the 2 conspiracies that I know are true, it said there's zero evidence supporting those theories.

Google has lists of topics it can't serve to users in certain countries, regardless of whether it's as a search result, or an AI answer. Other LLM-based AIs must have to follow the same rules. Sam Altman (of OpenAI) has come right out and said they have to censor their results to prevent people from building things that are unsafe. Well, knowledge of certain things can be dangerous, too.

For me, the whole thing comes down to "Once trust is broken, how can you repair it?" -- For many of us, it can't be rebuilt. Once a liar, always a liar.
by palmotea | 2025-05-13 13:58:36+00:00
>> Does the book describe how there's a professional managerial class that took over higher education inflating its costs, degrading its services, undermining its ideals, watering down it's standards?

>> Colleges need to get back to their mission and ditch the sports, drinking, non-academic facilities. Get back to teaching, standards and research and stop ripping off students to backbreaking loan debt.

> Can you explain how cutting research funding achieve these goal?

It doesn't, but I think there's a real connection there. The cutting funding is a backlash, and the correct response to that is to change to achieve a more secure societal position that doesn't invite a backlash. The current cuts to research funding are the direct result of universities allowing themselves to become identified as elements of a particular political faction. But the universities have been weakened and have few allies to call on, because they're now widely perceived to be expensive rip-offs, etc.
by itchyjunk | 2025-05-13 13:58:45+00:00
Nah, realizing I don't have to constantly be thinking about relationship was what made things a lot less stressful for me. It's still stressful. But at least I get to mind my own business. Not saying everyone is like me. Maybe no one is. But it was better for me to mind my own business and internally say fork you to all the superficial relationships.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-05-13 13:58:46+00:00
It's strange, it visibly loading the buttons is indicative they use async technology that can use multithreaded CPUs effectively... but it's slower than the old synchronous UI stuff.

I'm sure it's significantly more expensive to render than Windows 3.11 - XP were - rounded corners and scalable vector graphics instead of bitmaps or whatever - but surely not that much? And the resulting graphics can be cached.
by palata | 2025-05-13 13:59:15+00:00
> Perhaps you should get informed as well.

What did I say that was wrong? The comment I was answering to - that I assume you read - says: "This Nextcloud app seems to be [...] It isn't a file manager, it isn't a backup utility, it's a cloud provider with local mirroring."

Which is wrong, isn't it?