MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JonChesterfield | 2025-05-01 19:22:26+00:00
> As a result - asking an LLM to review its own code is looking at it with a fresh set of eyes.

I wonder how persuasive that line of reasoning is. It's nonsense in a few dimensions but that doesn't appear to be a blocker to accepting a claim.

Anyone remember explaining to someone that even though the computer said a thing, that thing is still not right? Really strong sense that we're reliving that experience.
by 999900000999 | 2025-05-01 19:22:33+00:00
If anything, it's a good sign that these tools are no where close to replacing us.

I was trying to get postgres working with a project the other day, and Claude decided that it was going to just replace it with SQL lite when it couldn't get the build to work.

All I want is "I don't know how to do this." But now these tools would rather just do it wrong.

They also have a very very strong tendency to try and force unoptimized solutions. You'll have 3 classes that do the exact same thing with only minor variable differences. Something a human would do in one class.

For my latest project I'm strongly tempted to just suck it up and code the whole thing by hand.
by zoogeny | 2025-05-01 19:22:53+00:00
Honestly, that backlog management idea is probably the first time an MCP actually sounded appealing to me.

I'm not in that world at the moment, but I've been the lead on several projects where the backlog has became a dumping ground of years of neglect. You end up with this tiered backlog thing where one level of backlog gets too big so you create a second tier of backlog for the stuff you are actually going to work on. Pretty soon you end up with duplicates in the second tier backlog for items already in the base level backlog since no one even looks at that old backlog anymore.

I've done a lot of tidy up myself when I inherit this kind of mess, just closing tickets we definitely will never get to, de-duping, adding context when available, grouping into epics, tagging with relevant "tech-debt", "security", "bug", "automation", etc. But when there are 100s of tickets it is a slog. Having an LLM do this makes so much sense.
by PorterBHall | 2025-05-01 19:23:08+00:00
Thank you for sharing that link. This whole question has been on my mind a lot lately. I am 55 years old, and my son is 11. Both of my parents died in nursing homes. I don’t yet know how I want to die, but I have a good idea of how I don’t want to die. The idea of being in an institution that essentially holds me prisoner while depleting anything left I have saved for my son keeps me awake at night. I’d rather take a long walk into the woods on a cold night, but I’m afraid that I will lose my nerve and miss my chance. I hope that time is still a few decades away. Sallekhana seems like a more intentional, natural way to die than the way most Americans do today.
by gamblor956 | 2025-05-01 19:23:30+00:00
30% was a great deal when KDP launched..several decades ago..Prior to KDP, self-published authors would have costs of about 90% to print and distribute their own books. Traditional publishers generally take 85% but in exchange handle the editing, marketing, and physical logistics of book printing and distribution.

Similarly, when Steam launched, its biggest competitor was retail. Studios got paid a % of the wholesale price (after the publisher recovered its costs), which worked out to an average of approximately 10-15% of the retail price for successful games and 0% for unsuccessful games. (Note: this does not include the milestone payments to the studio during the development of the game.)

But markets have changed. 30% may or may not be a great deal anymore. (For KDP, many authors say that the 30% is worth it because the volume of their Amazon sales dwarfs all other-channel sales combined. Some relatively famous sci-fi authors have said that about 90% of the sales of their self-published works were through Amazon.)
by carlgreene | 2025-05-01 19:23:45+00:00
This will surely get some skepticism as it's a Waymo study, but it's nice to see a real‐world dataset this large at 56M miles. An 85 % drop in serious‐injury crashes and 96 % fewer intersection collisions is a strong signal that Level 4 ADS can meaningfully improve safety in ride-hail settings. Still curious about how much of that comes from operational design versus the core autonomy, but it’s a big leap beyond “novelty demo.”

Really excited for autonomy to become more and more common place. People drive more and more like distracted lunatics these days it seems
by jancsika | 2025-05-01 19:24:03+00:00
> Signal’s encryption algorithm is fine.

At least in the case of the leak the culprit was the UX, no?

Suppose a user wants the following reasonable features (as was the case here):

1. Messages to one's contacts and groups of contacts should be secure and private from outside eavesdroppers, always.

2. Particular groups should only ever contain a specific subset contacts.

With Signal, the user can easily make them common mistake of attempting to add a contact who already is in the group. But in this case Signal UI autosuggested a new contact, displaying initials for that new contact which are the same initials as a current group member.

Now the user has unwittingly added another member to the group.

Note in the case of the leak that the contact was a bona fide contact-- it's just that the user didn't want that particular contact in that particular group. IIRC Signal has no way to know which contacts are allowed to join certain groups.

I don't know much about DoD security. But I'm going to guess no journalist has ever been invited to access a SCIF because they have the same initials as a Defense Dept. employee.
by reneherse | 2025-05-01 19:24:43+00:00
SEEKING WORK | ATL, USA | Remote (UTC -4)

Hey! I'm Scott, a "designer who codes." Product designer/builder, consultant and SaaS founder working remotely from Atlanta, GA, USA (previously San Francisco & Berkeley, CA).

I'm equally at home in a text editor or Figma file, a stakeholder meeting or collaborative workshop, and I love complex problems. If you're solving something interesting, let's have a chat!

I consult as a designer for engineering teams and dev shops, leading UX and product design for B2B and B2C SaaS products. As a generalist with over 10 years of experience, I get to wear several hats as we go from idea to launch.

→ Here's a summary of the services & benefits I bring to the table:

• On demand "Design Counseling": Short, live sessions to help teams & execs with unexpected design, product and process issues.

-- Once I'm familiar with your company and product, you can book a session any time you need advice from a staff level designer. (Let's connect now so that I'm GTG when you need me!) :)

-

• Product design for SaaS products, with a focus on user retention and product led-growth.

-- Exploring opportunities for AI integration is a passion of mine, and the optimal AIX will be different between B2B and B2C products.

-- I love building MVPs for early-stage companies as well as enhancing existing products with features that users demand and stick around for.

-

• UX & UI design that inspires user adoption & retention. Great UI is based on UX systems thinking that prevents the problems that cause churn.

-- I utilize methodologies like Object Oriented UX, Jobs to be Done, and Design Build Use to unravel complexity and understand what really motivates users and helps them get shit done.

-

• Designing in the browser using markup & CSS. This workflow allows us to rapidly iterate prototypes for user testing.

-- When I hand off clean, shippable frontend code that's customized to your stack (instead of just Figma files), your devs are free from getting bogged down in visual style and CSS. And pesky cross-platform visual bugs never have a chance.

-

→ If you've read this far, let's connect and see if we'd be a good fit!

I'd love to learn about your product vision and the challenges you're facing. And once I'm in your rolodex (or on your speed dial?) you'll have a design partner at the ready for quick consults or more extensive work.

Cheers!

Email me: scott [at] designerwho [dot] codes

Portfolio: https://designerwho.codes
by fc417fc802 | 2025-05-01 19:25:14+00:00
> There's simply no way for employers to fairly go through them.

Sure there is. Randomly sample N, filter down to M, go through preliminary interview stages. Depending on how many that leaves you with rinse and repeat.

The important thing here isn't fairness from the perspective of the applicant. It's a process that works reliably for the company and doesn't unfairly waste applicant's time.

If the very first stage (application plus resume) is no longer a reliable signal then accept that fact and rework the process to match.
by JonChesterfield | 2025-05-01 19:25:37+00:00
I love having loads of unit tests that get regenerated whenever they're an inconvenience. There's a fantastic sense of progress from the size of the diff put up for review, plus you get to avoid writing boring old fashioned tests. Really cuts down on the time wasted on understanding the change you're making and leaves one a rich field of future work to enjoy.
by timewizard | 2025-05-01 19:25:51+00:00
The US drives about 3.2 trillion miles per year. Waymo has 56.7 million miles over several years. Their percentage data is essentially useless.

50% of fatalities involve alcohol or drugs and are often single vehicle accidents.

25% involve youth or inexperience.

15% involve motorcycles.

15% involve pedestrians.

What I really need to see is a complete breakdown of every accident a Waymo has had. Then I can start to compare their actual performance to the previously known outcomes.
by cryptonector | 2025-05-01 19:26:07+00:00
> 2) You cannot govern exclusively from a SCIF, hence 1.

(1) doesn't have to be Signal. It should be some "enterprise" solution that DoD can own and operate, and it should federate with the same thing used in other executive agencies, and the WH itself. And it should have military grade authorization (meaning labeled, multi-level security).

That said, (2) is quite right: you cannot govern from a SCIF. SCIFs are mainly tools of control to access to long-ago classified information. New classified information cannot be born in a SCIF for the simple reason that SCIFs cannot scale to the needs of those who govern.
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-05-01 19:26:07+00:00
News from February? C'mon OP.

Also mostly a 2024 story.

Related / connected Nashville case from last year:

US dismantles laptop farm used by undercover North Korean IT workers

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41356483

Also:

We found North Korean engineers in our application pile

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41353079
by isomorphic | 2025-05-01 19:26:20+00:00
This line in the article is horrifying:

> The researchers were surprised that when they activated VTA dopaminergic inputs into the aBLA they could reinstate fear even without any new foot shocks, impairing fear extinction.

That... seems like the first step in being able to literally induce fear without having to bother with pesky things like finding the subject's triggers. Although I suppose if one has direct access to the subject's amygdala, the point is somewhat moot.

Still, it's sort of like a reverse wirehead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_(science_fiction)
by spidermonkey456 | 2025-05-01 19:26:46+00:00
Location: Greater Noida, India Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: .NET, Vue.js, SQL Server Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ECDAkfVzQ7oJidUp13uT_tkrPPJVaSSU/view?usp=sharing Email: snehansh@pm.me
by vkou | 2025-05-01 19:27:00+00:00
Or that they are doing legal shit that has the appearance of doing illegal shit, and will get into a lot of trouble more trouble than they want if it ever goes to trial.

Nobody stops you from texting your friends about buying ten pounds of cocaine, (when you actually meant confectioner's sugar), but putting it in writing may make your life more difficult if at some point, by happenstance, you might end up the defendant in a narcotics trial. Even if you are completely innocent.
by zoogeny | 2025-05-01 19:27:26+00:00
JIRA is more than just ticket management for most big orgs. It provides a reporting interface for business with long-term planning capabilities. A lot of the annoying things that devs have to do in JIRA is often there to make those functions more valuable. In other cases it is a compliance thing as well. Some certifications necessary for enterprise sales require audit trails for all code changes, from the bug report to the code commit. JIRA provides the integration and reporting necessary for that.

Unless you can provide the same visibility, long-term planning features and compliance aspects of JIRA on top of you sqlite db, you won't compete with JIRA. But if you do add those things on top of SQLite and LLMs, you probably have a solid business idea. But you'd first need to understand JIRA well enough to know why they are there in the first place.
by antirez | 2025-05-01 19:27:45+00:00
I said exactly that's a win of the community. But money are needed to pay the folks that work at open source software, and the companies that went for the SSPL were trying to protect their business (and, as a side effect, wanted or not, the ability to pay for such work). I believe the software world failed to protect open source software in the cloud era, but in general the environment that we collectively created made the open source software won.
by unionthrowaway | 2025-05-01 19:29:14+00:00
This exact exchange (Unions are great for fungible labor but computer programming isn't like that / But Hollywood A-list actors are unionized and they're the polar opposite of fungible labor / Oh but SAG is a Guild not a Union) plays out in every HN thread I've seen which mentions unions.

As a union member (not SAG-AFTRA), I find this curious. SAG-AFTRA is a Union. They have a cool name but, like many other groups with Guild in their name, they are recognized by the NLRB as a Union. There's no special classification for Guild, at least in America.

When you look at Wikipedia's list of largest unions in the US, only 2 of the top 10 have Union in their name, but that doesn't mean the other 8 aren't actually Unions. Or that the ones with Brotherhood in their name don't allow women, or any other silly extrapolation one wants to concoct. It's just a name.

We're not in the 13th century any more. There is no longer any functional difference between Guild and Union. Of the alleged benefits of Guilds enumerated in HN threads (vetting and certification of members, continuing education, ability to be paid above scale, etc), literally every single one is already offered by unions today. And if you thought of a new one that wasn't, you could bring it up at your next union meeting and vote on it.

It's frustrating to read discussions of unions by online commenters who have never been union members or paid dues, never read a union contract, never attended a union meeting or voted with their coworkers, never worked similar jobs in both union and non-union workplaces. It's like a bunch of people who have never lived in a free society arguing over whether they should form a Democracy or a Republic, by picking countries with these words in their names, and selecting attributes of those countries they do or don't want to emulate. That's not how it works.
by gonzan | 2025-05-01 19:29:33+00:00
I think it absolutely makes sense. Especially if the bot and prompts that go in the code review are different from the bot/prompts that wrote the code. But sometimes even the same one can find different errors if you just give it more cycles/iterations to look at the code.

We humans (most of us anyways) don't write everything perfectly in one go, AI doesn't either.

AI tooling is improving so the AI can write tests for its own code and do pre-reviews but I don't think it ever hurts to have both an AI and a human review the code of any PR opened, no matter who or what opened it.

I'm also building a tool in the space https://kamaraapp.com/ and I found many times that Kamara's reviews find issues in Kamara's own code. I can say that I also find bugs in my own code when I review it too!

We've also been battling with the same issue greptile has in the example provided where the code suggestion is in the completely wrong line. We got it kind of under control, but I haven't found any tool that gets it right 100% of the time. Still a bit to go for the big AI takeover.
by Nevermark | 2025-05-01 19:29:34+00:00
> Overall, it feels like folks who idealize bygone eras of computing didn't witness or have forgotten how slow Windows, VS, Office etc. used to feel in the 90s.

Let’s normalize speed over time like we do dollars, so we are talking about the same thing.

Given the enormous multiplier in CPU and storage hardware speeds and parallelism today vs. say 1995, any “slow” application then should be indistinguishable from instant today.

“Slow” in the 90’s vs. “Slow” in 2025 are essentially different words. Given unclarified co-use pushes several orders magnitude of either speed or inefficiency difference under the rug.
by dtagames | 2025-05-01 19:29:42+00:00
People are the harder problem. A game server is not a box you turn on and it just runs. The platforms themselves change under you all the time as do all the SaaS tools you rely on. Clients change all the time, too, and one missed update can make your game unrunnable. Folks don't want to train or pay the humans needed to keep server-based games alive.
by PorterBHall | 2025-05-01 19:29:44+00:00
I heard a podcast interview with the doctor recently who said that we have technology that can be implanted into someone who is at risk for dying of sudden cardiac arrest that will prevent it from happening. It tends to add a few years onto someone’s life, but it also consigns them to die slowly and painfully from congestive heart failure. The doctor said his patients grasp for anything that might extend their life, if even only for a few months. He often feels conflicted about installing these devices.
by _jsunj | 2025-05-01 19:30:13+00:00
Location: Atlanta, GA, USA Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies: JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Node.js, React, Express, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, AWS (EC2, ECS, S3, ELB, VPC, CloudFormation, IAM), Docker, OpenAI API, LLM, RAG, Linux, Bash Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/10OhRUpQ4-DVTJQ2ocvfiadMUE1QVbtpR/view?usp=sharing Email: jasonjabarjones@gmail.com

Greetings! I'm Jason, a full-stack engineer with an affinity for back-end & cloud infrastructure, plus 8+ years of experience in healthcare & higher education systems administration. I recently created Providence, an open-source session replay framework leveraging AI technologies for user session analytics. Check it out here: https://providence-replay.github.io/
by ultrarunner | 2025-05-01 19:31:06+00:00
This doesn't really address my point, but the ambiguity arises from the fact that there are often implicit understandings tunneled through standard phraseology that may or may not be intended. We don't know exactly what the Blackhawk crew said. Clearly tower thought they'd be staying clear of the CRJ, but the Blackhawk crew (to some degree) thought they'd be staying clear of some other lights in the area.

Regardless, 91.119 applies (harshly, and unambiguously, in some cases) to significantly safer operations than 75 ft visual separation from passenger aircraft in bravo airspace. That is absurd. Failure was built into the design from the beginning.
by Alupis | 2025-05-01 19:31:11+00:00
> source is available, and I will demand you make changes to it for me

There seems to be a disconnect here. I agree, demanding someone else make changes for you is in poor taste. The issue is, some of these projects advertise themselves as being open source while having no meaningful way to contribute changes back upstream - ie. the spirit of open source.

If I use your program for free, and encounter a bug, I should be able to fix it and contribute that back upstream so everyone benefits. That's my way of "paying back" and helping the community. Projects that reject contributions, or make contributing difficult are not in the spirit of open source, even if they are technically open source via their license.

That's what I call "fake" open source - you want the positive image of being Open Source only.
by kfarr | 2025-05-01 19:31:15+00:00
This is great and there’s another area of influence that I’ve heard other traffic engineers discuss: platoon pacing. A platoon is the word that traffic engineers give to a group of cars traveling together. A platoon is most explicitly visible on a corridor with signals timed for a green wave, but occurs in many other contexts.

Human drivers often race when in a platoon— not even on purpose it’s just an instinct to go as fast or faster than other cars which has a feedback effect to increase platoon speed.

Waymos, following the exact speed limit, don’t do this. On 1 lane streets they literally set the platoon pace to the legal speed limit.

The effect of this is hard to study and quantify but it’s a real and positive impact of self driving cars on city streets. Haven’t seen research on this topic yet.
by acdha | 2025-05-01 19:31:31+00:00
> was a regular SWE who got cancelled. Granted I have not followed him closely but I haven't seen him claim to be a genius or special.

He did more than that. It wasn’t that he had the opinion that women were innately less qualified but that he tried to repeatedly discuss that at work after being told not to. It wasn’t just that he was wrong about the biology (to be clear, he was[1]) but that he wanted to have a public forum where he could say that some of his colleagues were less qualified.

If he’d just been some guy wrong in the internet on his own time, he almost certainly wouldn’t have been fired. Doing it at work in public changes things because any future lawsuit alleging discrimination could cite that as tacit approval. Whatever Google’s senior management felt about the merits of the piece, I’m sure their lawyers were saying it’d be a lot cheaper to hire another early-career engineer. The NLRB upheld the firing, too, so it’s not like good lawyers haven’t reviewed it.

(To be clear, I don’t think he’s Satan or anything - just some young guy who got some bad science out of the manosphere and had an unfortunately high-profile learning experience about why boundaries between your personal and professional lives are important)

1. https://medium.com/@tweetingmouse/the-truth-has-got-its-boot... https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-...
by int_19h | 2025-05-01 19:31:36+00:00
In US it's basically "whether there's harm to the consumer", which is so nebulous that large monopolists can often successfully argue that their abusive practices are a net benefit (usually by arguing that prices are lower).

It wasn't always like that, though. We used to have antitrust with serious teeth in this country. And then it literally got borked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox
by stale2002 | 2025-05-01 19:31:41+00:00
No, we don't have to do that. The current system works well as it is.

> You want LOTS of laws specifying all kinds of unacceptable behaviors in great detail.

I don't have a problem with detail. Instead, I am rejecting the idea that mass amounts of details is always necessary, or that the law somehow completely collapses when it doesn't have detail.

No, the law is perfectly able to handle vague situations all the time, and you are the one trying to claim that it all falls apart for some reason. It doesn't. It works out quite well, and it worked out quite well in this case.

> You only differ from me

No, you are demanding that a completely pervasive and common concept of "reasonableness", which exists in all parts of the law be changed.

No, we don't need to do that. The law deals with that concept all the time and isn't falling apart.