MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by CuriouslyC | 2025-05-16 13:56:12+00:00
I use a styleguide.md document which is general software engineering principles that you might provide for human contributers in an open source project. I pair that with a .cursorrules (people I code with use it so I use that file name for their convenience) that describes how the LLM should interact with me:

# Cursor Rules for This Project

You are a software engineering expert. Your role is to work with your partner engineer to maximize their productivity, while ensuring the codebase remains simple, elegant, robust, testable, maintainable, and extensible to sustain team development velocity and deliver maximum value to the employer.

## Overview

During the design phase, before being instructed to implement specific code: - Be highly Socratic: ask clarifying questions, challenge assumptions, and verify understanding of the problem and goals. - Seek to understand why the user proposes a certain solution. - Test whether the proposed design meets the standards of simplicity, robustness, testability, maintainability, and extensibility. - Update project documentation: README files, module docstrings, Typedoc comments, and optionally generate intermediate artifacts like PlantUML or D2 diagrams. During the implementation phase, after being instructed to code: - Focus on efficiently implementing the requested changes. - Remain non-Socratic unless the requested code appears to violate design goals or cause serious technical issues. - Write clean, type-annotated, well-structured code and immediately write matching unit tests. - Ensure all code passes linting, typechecking and tests. - Always follow any provided style guides or project-specific standards.

## Engineering Mindset

- Prioritize *clarity, simplicity, robustness, and extensibility*. - Solve problems thoughtfully, considering the long-term maintainability of the code. - Challenge assumptions and verify problem understanding during design discussions. - Avoid cleverness unless it significantly improves readability and maintainability. - Strive to make code easy to test, easy to debug, and easy to change.

## Design First

- Before coding, establish a clear understanding of the problem and the proposed solution. - When designing, ask: - What are the failure modes? - What will be the long-term maintenance burden? - How can this be made simpler without losing necessary flexibility? - Update documentation during the design phase: - `README.md` for project-level understanding. - Architecture diagrams (e.g., PlantUML, D2) are encouraged for complex flows.

I use auto lint/test in aider like so:

file: - README.md - STYLEGUIDE.md - .cursorrules

aiderignore: .gitignore

# Commands for linting, typechecking, testing lint-cmd: - bun run lint - bun run typecheck

test-cmd: bun run test
by alyt | 2025-05-16 13:56:34+00:00
Btw, another extension I'd personally recommend is Region Highlighter by 'Wiensss', which makes regions easier to see in the editor itself by coloring them, and also provides a command for making regions (although it is limited in language support). I don't currently use any other region extensions.

Region Highlighter: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Wiensss....
by arghwhat | 2025-05-16 13:57:10+00:00
The problem is that it just doesn't work on modern, fast displays. Without motion smoothing on a fast and bright screen, 24fps/30fps goes from "choppy" to "seizure inducing and unwatchable". Older sets would just naturally smooth things out.

Even on my LCD TV, smooth motion like credits at certain speeds are extremely uncomfortable to look at at these frame rates.

I consider it borderline irresponsible to continue using these framerates, forcing users into frame interpolation and horrible artifacts, a decision the manufacturer might even have made for them. 120 Hz is finally becoming the norm for regular content (with monitors going to 500+ nowadays), we should at least be able to get to 60 Hz as the lower bound for regular content delivery.

Going further down for artistic value, e.g. for stop motion or actual slide shows is less of a problem in my opinion. It is not as disturbing, and if regular content was appropriately paced there would be no need for interpolation to mess with it...

> Just look at the trend of frame size.

Frame size is different from the other parameters, as it is solely a physical practicality. Bigger is better in all directions, but a cinema screen needs to fit in the building - making a building much taller is less economical than making it wider, and making it whatever it isn't right now adds novelty.

The content needs to be made for the screen with the appropriate balance of periphery and subject to not be completely wrong, so screen technology and recording technology tends to align. Economy of scale causes standardization on lenses and image circles, and the choice of aspect ratio within that circle on the film, forming a feedback loop that enforces the parameters for almost all content.

If some technology somewhere else in the stack causes a change, some will follow for the novelty but others will simply follow the reducing cost, and soon all content aligns on the format, and the majority of home TV sets will be shaped to fit the majority content it can receive.
by overu589 | 2025-05-16 13:57:12+00:00
No.

This is a treacherous self deception by which a few smarty pants and a whole lot of restless wonderers poison themselves intellectually (the arguments of determinism.)

This is like having a polite conversational argument with a solipsist, who points to your lack of “proof.”

Quantum theory says that the Universe is potential distributing, not arrangements of states.

Objective existential reality is impermanent. It is decay and interference.

All that we have comes from this decay and interference.

All the rest of existential reality emerges from the interference of all that is left of whatever there is. As it burns down and blows as cinder upon the cosmic winds.

Decay, and the constructive or destructive interference of external influences in realtime is independent of what may be projected by arranged states.

This drives a nail in the coffin of determinism. For the whole Universe decay itself is an example of an exogenous phenomenon, for every other scope (domain) within, that uncertainty is inherited from the enveloping domain.

And at long last, consciousness is a vectoring phenomena.

Consciousness, wherever it is found, is a feedback mechanism which itself may cause constructive and destructive interference.

The word “emergence” with which we are so enamored literally means that which produced potential outcomes exceeding the sum of potentials found in constituent parts.

A car for instance emerges the ability to transport mass far beyond any output obtained from any part. At the expense of additional potential of course. (And here we can argue fuel density or efficiency.)

All matter and whatever makes it up is all “emergent” from the decay and collapse of potentials long before.

Life on Earth emerges in some part on the waste exhaust of Sol as our sun burns down, and the rest of the debris of dead stars before us.

The quantum domain is the lubricant between Universal Potential and existential reality (state resolving in the moment of now.) This lubricant may be tuned and interfered with to achieve certainty (as we will discover in future quantum technology) however it is potential resolving to state, not more states interacting (“all the way down”.)
by arp242 | 2025-05-16 13:57:28+00:00
> I am well aware that I am taking a huge risk

You're not the one taking the main risk though: that would be the cyclists and pedestrians around you (as well as other motorists, to a lesser degree).

I appreciate the difficulty of your situation and I really don't want to be a judgemental jerk to you. But also ... yeah, based on what you've written this really doesn't sit well with me.

There's a reason people with things such as epileptic seizures are not permitted to drive unless they're 1) medicated for it, and 2) been free of seizures for a period of time to prove the medication works reliably.
by eviks | 2025-05-16 13:57:48+00:00
> Button instead of Ctrl+Z

This is rather different, this is ignorance, so button alternatives are helpful for ignorant users (although one of the reasons for such widespread ignorance is precisely because there isn't really much of a learning curve since interfaces don't actually teach you much if at all)

But for a lot of whitespace instead of content, what exactly does it teach new users? Consider the toolbar example, how would showing a new user 3 buttons (left, right, section name) help instead of showing 3 buttons with section name and a 4th partial text button with section name?

Also, gmail density mostly affects vertical density, the number of horizontal tabs doesn't change, so the control density doesn't change as much except for the left list of categories (but only if it's a big list otherwise it would still fit in sparse UI ), making this mostly an aesthetic choice (unless you often need to see a lot of emails in a list)
by growlNark | 2025-05-16 13:58:20+00:00
Having a favorite language is weird (to me). They're tools, and some are more effective and usable than others, and some are better suited to some tasks than others.

But, equivalently, of course I'm going to criticize a hammer if it's literally covered in warts making it difficult to grasp without slipping. (or, if the gun I'm trying to use keeps firing bullets into my foot when I'm aiming down range.)
by MisterTea | 2025-05-16 13:58:24+00:00
Holy crap, Crosstalk XVI. Almost forgot about that one. Edit: Forgot to mention it's a terminal emulator that supported a few file transfer protocols like kermit and xmodem. My father used it to send programs to his CNC machines. I remember getting it working in Windows 3.1 but he did not like or care for Windows as all of the software he ran was DOS: Design CAD 3D, Q&A for word processing and database, and a custom payroll program his friend wrote. His favorite game was gorilla.bas.
by tialaramex | 2025-05-16 13:59:33+00:00
But the price for that is indeed those "redundant stores" which it appears today C++ programmers are convinced explain the slowdown.

I mean sure, the real cause is more likely their incompetent use of the wrong algorithms and data structures or the fact that it's too hard to rely on external dependencies so they're still using a stdlib feature that's known to be significantly slower than the best efforts but eh, it's just a single #include away.
by sirfz | 2025-05-16 13:59:35+00:00
Technically this enforces parameterized queries since all it does is basically return the parameterized query in the given db client dialect and the list of parameters. It could be useful for building a unified interface for all sql db clients for example (instead of having to remember whether parameters are %s or ? or {param}, etc). On the other hand, db clients can utilize t-strings to directly allow you to safely execute queries such as t"select * from table where id = {id}" without passing any extra parameters.
by techpineapple | 2025-05-16 13:59:42+00:00
I try to be open minded to things like this, because I think there heart is in the right place(mostly, I’m not a fan of FIRe, but they’re probably not the worst either) but just using the word truth-seeking in reference to AI, and particularly LLM’s is dangerous. I don’t feel like it’s hit quite yet, but it’s almost inevitable that people start making the argument that AI speaks Truth, in support of whatever political ideology they want.
by lolinder | 2025-05-16 13:59:55+00:00
That is actually unspecified in the license, undecided in court, and as you note very infrequently applied. I can see an argument that the license ought to be read that way, but the fact is that it very rarely is. The only reason why Ollama is being singled out here is because people have long-standing beef with them not doing the regular polite attribution that actually is normal in the community.
by PopAlongKid | 2025-05-16 14:00:01+00:00
Twain also poked some fun at French, when he found a translation of his first successfully published story and mapped it back to English.

"The Jumping Frog: in English, then in French, and then Clawed Back into a Civilized Language Once More by Patient, Unremunerated Toil"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Celebrated_Jumping_Frog_of...
by stego-tech | 2025-05-16 14:00:15+00:00
There is no “shortcut” to vast wealth, because if there were then everybody would be using it as the default and it would no longer be a shortcut. What are often described as “shortcuts” are highly situational opportunities with lower-than-typical risk, which by virtue of announcing them to others means the opportunity has passed and the risk has increased.

For there to be vast amounts of wealth hoarded by a few, there must also be vast amounts of exploited people desperately getting by on table scraps. There is a finite supply of wealth, and if we do not build systems to redistribute it equitably then it will always and inevitably by hoarded by the few lacking a moral compass or basic empathy for their fellow man.
by lesser23 | 2025-05-16 14:00:31+00:00
Many places are quite literally forcing their software engineers to use LLMs. Complete with cursor/copilot is the ability to see usage statistics and surely at these companies these statistics will eventually be used as firing criteria.

I gave them a fair shake. However, I do not like them for many reasons. Code quality is one major reason. I have found that after around a month of being forced to use them I felt my skill atrophy at an accelerated rate. It became like a drug where instead of thinking through the solution and coming up with something parsimonious I would just go to the LLM and offload all my thinking. For simple things it worked okay but it’s very easy to get stuck in a loop. I don’t feel any more productive but at my company they’ve used it as justification to increase sprint load significantly.

There has been almost a religious quality associated to LLMs. This seems especially true among the worst quality developers and the non-technical morons at the top. There are significant security concerns that extend beyond simple bad code.

To me we have all the indicators of the maximum of the hype cycle. Go visit LinkedIn for confirmation. Unless the big AI companies begin to build nuclear power it will eventually become too expensive and unprofitable to run these models. They will continue to exist as turbo autocomplete but no further. The transformer model has fundamental limitations and much like neural networks in the 80s it’ll become more niche and die everywhere else. Like its cousins WYSIWIG and NoCode in 30 more years it’ll rise again like a phoenix to bring “unemployment” to developers once more. It will be interesting to see who among us was swimming without clothes when the water goes out.
by Infernal | 2025-05-16 14:00:53+00:00
I don't think it's a paradox at all. I saved X hours a day by not commuting, and spent maybe .25X to .5X extra hours working (which actually felt pleasant, because I was sleeping in later, getting "home from work" sooner, and taking zero-friction breaks when needed by walking to my kitchen instead of driving to lunch, etc.)
by growlNark | 2025-05-16 14:01:16+00:00
I don't think this is about in-group, out-group behavior. This is about how well you can look up claims on the internet and what recourse you have to evaluate these claims when there's conflict.

Anyway, how much do Afrikaners really share with white Americans in the first place? I'm skeptical of claims that we share any culture or identity to begin with. To presume in-group, out-group behavior, you have to truly believe in the universality of whiteness on a level I just cannot fathom. And this mindset comes with corollaries that are probably wildly unacceptable to mention on this forum.
by quectophoton | 2025-05-16 14:01:19+00:00
I don't expect calendars, or time keeping in general, to change too much until we have civilizations in multiple planets (if we ever reach that point anyway). And even then, I doubt much would change here on Earth.

I think if we reach that point, we would probably look at the Earth calendars the same way we currently look at the Latin language.
by trollbridge | 2025-05-16 14:01:21+00:00
In a staff or lead level role with Indian team members active at 6 AM ET (and our day officially starting at 8:30 ET so we can interact with them), West and East Coast teams with the West Coast often working 10 AM - 7 PM, yeah, that means I’m going to be reasonably working from 8 AM - 5 PM or 6 PM.

During the WFH era which for me was 2017 - 2022, I made up for the 9 - 10 hour workdays by not using up PTO for doctor appointments, car repair shop trips, and so on. This worked reasonably well - and nobody minded if I was getting my oil changed or sitting for an hour at a doctor’s office lobby and responsive on Slack. It was a compromise that worked reasonably well.

We also carved out time for people to pick up/drop off kids at school. In exchange, the work day expanded from basically 8 to 5 or 9 to 6. Everyone was comfortable with this. I certainly didn’t mind people on my team doing this at all and really appreciated the extra availability - we just knew to plan around the school pick up and drop off times, which were also in the calendar as a recurring meeting.

What’s not working now is imposing RTO and trying to have the same extended hours. Sorry, but no, I’m not going to drive in from 7-8, work from 8-6 without breaks, and then drive home from 6-7.
by stephen_g | 2025-05-16 14:02:05+00:00
Retail banks actually don’t ‘pool people’s money and invest it’, and for good reason. Investment banks are different from regular retail banks for a reason (which is that that creates way too much risk to deposits for everyday banking).

The main business of banking is actually leveraging the capital of their owners (shareholders) to lend. Deposits are not the main game, and are there for two reasons - firstly that lending produces deposits, so banks may as well be able to hold deposits just for that reason, but also because deposit inflows create the liquidity banks need to lever up their capital. This is the real reason why banks pay interest on deposits - to encourage people to transfer money in and not transfer as much out. Actually just having the deposits sitting there doesn’t do much for the bank, so the bank more wants you to transfer money in to increase your balance and not just hold it.
by kjellsbells | 2025-05-16 14:02:13+00:00
OP says the offending company is quasi governmental aerospace. Sounds like a defense contractor.

There will be a security officer at such a company. If I was that officer, I would be profoundly unhappy that employees, whose job (by the nature of the company) regularly takes them into classified waters, were freely giving their personal gmails to a third party overseas. I mean, you just broadened the attack surface on the employees by tying them to their presence in the Google ecosystem. Yikes.
by delusional | 2025-05-16 14:02:31+00:00
> Software rots

No it does not. I hate that analogy so much because it leads to such bad behavior. Software is a digital artifact that can does not degrade. With the right attitude, you'd be able to execute the same binary on new machines for as long as you desired. That is not true of organic matter that actually rots.

The only reason we need to change software is that we trade that off against something else. Instructions are reworked, because chasing the universal Turing machine takes a few sacrifices. If all software has to run on the same hardware, those two artifacts have to have a dialogue about what they need from each other.

If we didnt want the universal machine to do anything new. If we had a valuable product. We could just keep making the machine that executes that product. It never rots.
by b112 | 2025-05-16 14:02:35+00:00
This is precisely like NIST requirements to change your password frequently, which was well intended, but reduced security due to people not being able to recall their password.

(This is now reversed, of course)

Reducing certificate life to ridiculous time frames, making it difficult to obtain certificates, all for very dubious, extremely tiny and minor improvements in security. It's going to cause more harm than good, and in the end, will reduce not enhance security.

For example, many SMTP servers may revert to self-signed certs now.
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-16 14:02:37+00:00
Footprint charts here:

https://mostlymissiledefense.com/2016/06/30/strategic-capabi...

what I find suspicious though was up until 2000 or so there was a doctrine that midcourse intercept was unworkable because ICBMs could be supplemented with a large number (hundreds) of lightweight decoys that would be impossible to discriminate from a real warhead. That led to systems like Sprint that would wait until the warhead was re-entering the atmosphere and easy to discriminate because it was not slowed down so much by the atmosphere, doesn't burn up, etc. I dunno if the sensors really got better or if they just decided to go ahead anyway for political reasons.
by MarkusWandel | 2025-05-16 14:02:54+00:00
I grew up in Germany but haven't lived there for almost 45 years. I pride myself in still being fluent. And yet, this resonates.

Nominative--Mein gutER Freund, my good friend. Genitives--MeinES GutEN FreundES, of my good friend. Dative--MeinEM gutEN Freund, to my good friend. Accusative--MeinEN gutEN Freund, my good friend.

Typing German in an email or Whatsapp, sometimes I get these details wrong and sometimes (shame!) I have to try a Google Translate from English.

The other thing he makes fun of isn't that strange. Splitting "Abreisen" for example (to depart) is natural because it's a compound word in the first place. And more over, in the example, the admittedly funny "De .... [flood of words] ... parted" it's not even one word, it's two (reist ab). German does lend itself to gratuitous nesting of sentences, but that doesn't mean that good German has to.
by eschulz | 2025-05-16 14:04:08+00:00
It's nice to think about how there are millions of people in Mexico who speak indigenous languages to one degree or another. Years ago I visited my grandfather who was in a nursing home in Mexico City, and there was a young girl working as an aide who must have been no more than 18 years old. My aunt told me that the girl barely spoke any Spanish. Noticing my immediate confusion, my aunt replied with one word I had never heard before: Zapotec.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapotec_languages
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-16 14:04:44+00:00
> Use of Latin has nothing to do with Americans or whiteness. It's a holdover from the legal and medical professions

The fact that the language has such a degree lf these holdovers has something to do with Americans (or, rather the Anglosphere more generally), which is why the GP can note that it is a difference from German, where once upon a time; Germany had the same use of scientific, clerical, and professional Latin in the past, after all.
by tialaramex | 2025-05-16 14:04:48+00:00
There are real (in the sense they compile in actual C++ compilers people use and the resulting executable will run) toy (ie not intended for production use) examples where you can cause the compiler to conclude that executing this never-called function named format_hard_disk or begin_world_war_iii or whatever is the only remaining possible meaning of the program so that's what happens when it's run.

Nobody has written an actual format-hard-disk or start-world-war-III routine, because we're not crazy, but the alarming function naming is intended to signal what a terrible idea it is to have this programming language at all.
by tomhow | 2025-05-16 14:05:11+00:00
> What the hell are … no, this is not a drug. This is a mental illness. Get help.

This is an unacceptable comment on HN and we have to ban accounts that do it repeatedly. We've warned you in the past about inappropriate comments. Please remind yourself of the guidelines and take care to observe them in future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html