MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vidarh | 2025-06-17 07:30:24+00:00
> The second portion of your statement is either confusing (something unsaid) or untrue (you are still ultimately on the hook).

You're missing the point.

tptacek is saying he isn't the one who needs to fix the issue because he can just reject the PR and either have the AI agent refine it or start over. Or ultimately resort to writing the code himself.

He doesn't need to make the AI written code work, and so he doesn't need to spend a lot of time reading the AI written code - he can skim it for any sign it looks even faintly off and just kill it if that's the case instead of spending more time on it.

> My previous point stands - if it was that cut and dry, then a (free) script/library could generate the same code.

There's a vast chasm between simple enough that a non-AI code generator can generate it using templates and simple enough that a fast read-through is enough to show that it's okay to run.

As an example, the other day I had my own agent generate a 1kloc API client for an API. The worst case scenario other than failing to work would be that it would do something really stupid, like deleting all my files. Since it passes its tests, skimming it was enough for me to have confidence that nowhere does it do any file manipulation other than reading the files passed in. For that use, that's sufficient since it otherwise passes the tests and I'll be the only user for some time during development of the server it's a client for.

But no template based generator could write that code, even though it's fairly trivial - it involved reading the backend API implementation and rote-implementation of a client that matched the server.
by ThisNameIsTaken | 2025-06-17 07:31:19+00:00
Wow, that book sounds like a mix of Johan Harstad's footnote riddled Forsaken/The Red Handler (and who's Max, Mischa & Tetoffensiven even is about 'idling') and George Perec's An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris[1]. As you say, the almost childlike fascination with the mundane is really valuable, it helps to guide my own eyes when wandering the city.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Attempt_at_Exhausting_a_Pla...
by arnsholt | 2025-06-17 07:32:28+00:00
Apparently salmon was considered dubious in Japan as sushi. I forget the details, but I think something about freshwater fish being inappropriate for sushi due to the possibility of a parasite in the meat that only lived in fresh water, not salt. So salmon for sushi was apparently pushed hard in Japan by Norwegian authorities and the salmon industry, I think in the late 80s or the 90s?
by ReptileMan | 2025-06-17 07:33:13+00:00
>so I understand Meta's appetite to become the West WeChat

Revolut will probably get there first

>It's 100% unrealistic that a global, always on, high availability, high security service is free. These things are expensive and they need to be monetized.

Do you have any information how much whatsapp costs per user per month? Threema seems to be doing fine with just one 5$ forever.
by muzani | 2025-06-17 07:33:13+00:00
I like to point back at an ancient pattern in engineering: prototypes.

Prototypes are built to learn. They're not optimized nor efficient. They don't scale. They discover what needs to be built and are then thrown away. They should not be sold into production. Learning also includes getting user feedback, or finding out whether all the systems play together well.

Once the prototype is valid, pass it to an engineer to build it in properly and efficiently.

Another variation might be turning the engineers into ops. I did that early on at a startup. We built the whole delivery management system in 3 days - who ordered what, the state of it being delivered (packed/in delivery), informing buyers of product tracking number, asking them whether it was received in good condition, flagging things that have exceeded delivery time, etc. This was before AI and I built it so damn fast because it's a pain to handle this process on spreadsheet. The downside was that orders in those 3 days were delayed by 3 days.

But the big downside to engineers doing these is that you have to pay them engineer salaries. If it leads to a world where marketers can be given engineer salaries and engineers can be given marketing jobs, maybe we're in a better place?
by sameerds | 2025-06-17 07:33:52+00:00
I didn't mention any particular sense about application inside an application. I did say how it "feels like to me" and how my brain fails to handle it. There is a clear shift of modes when I click on a link on a website and suddenly the contents of the current browser window are replaced by a pdf with its own back and forward buttons, its own page layout, its own toolbar and so on. If it stopped feeling different like that, I would not even notice it and wouldn't even bother to find out if what I am seeing is a pdf or an html based website.
by flir | 2025-06-17 07:34:04+00:00
I don't believe Vonnegut beleived that for a minute.

> Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind."
by vidarh | 2025-06-17 07:34:13+00:00
Auto-complete means having to babysit it.

The more I use this, the longer the LLM will be working before I even look at the output any more than maybe having it chug along on another screen and occasionally glance over.

My shortest runs now usually takes minutes of the LLM expanding my prompt into a plan, writing the tests, writing the code, linting its code, fixing any issues, and write a commit message before I even review things.
by pointlessone | 2025-06-17 07:34:42+00:00
There are quite a few HTML include components out there. A quick GH search return a lot of results.

From very simple (https://github.com/include-html/include-html.github.io/blob/..., from 3 years ago), to more sophisticated, including script execution (https://github.com/SirPepe/html-import/blob/master/src/html-..., from 4 years ago; or even https://github.com/webcomponents/html-imports/blob/master/sr..., dating back 9 years). I haven't checked all of them but there's a decent chance there's something that covers each feature of OP, maybe even at once.
by filleokus | 2025-06-17 07:34:53+00:00
As mentioned in the thread and expanded on the blog [0] moxie is also against the whole idea of federation and multiple clients.

I think my perception has changed in the last ≈ 10 years, to be more leaning in moxie's direction. It's hard enough to design something secure and usable, having to try and support all different implementations under the sun makes most federated approaches never reach any mass adoption.

Even though it's not a one-to-one analog I also think e.g the lack of crypto agility in Wireshark was a very good decision, the same with QUIC having explicit anti-ossification (e.g encrypted headers). Giving enterprise middle boxes the chance to meddle in things is just setting things to hurt for everyone else.

https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
by lmm | 2025-06-17 07:35:31+00:00
> Not much of a secret, but clicking the unsubscribe links in emails helps. Anything new I sign up to I'm pretty religious about it. Some new email I didn't ask for -> instant unsubscribe. Works way better than one might expect.

I usually do that and it works for a lot of things, but small hotels are one of the things that seems to slip through. And even when it works, I still resent having to do it at all, and would rather book via a big aggregator where I've already done the unsubscribe years ago.
by piva00 | 2025-06-17 07:36:04+00:00
Why would they create a bespoke abstraction layer instead of just relying on k8s?

There is only pain on the path of recreating it, it will end up almost as complex as k8s and it will be hell to hire and train for. Best to just use something battle-tested that works with a large pool of people trained for it, even better: their own LLM has gobbled up all the content possible about k8s to help their engineers. K8s complexity came to be for reasons discovered during growing the stack which anyone doing a bespoke similar system might run into, and it's pretty modular since you can pick-and-choose the parts you actually need for your cluster.

Wasting manpower to recreate a bespoke Kubernetes doesn't sound great for a company burning billions per quarter, it's just more waste.
by karlgkk | 2025-06-17 07:36:13+00:00
> Do you expect candidate to memorize all theorems up to date.

Completely missing the point. I expect them to have enough knowledge to briefly study the theorems and understand how to apply them. I’m not trying to quiz people, I’m trying to get things done - and done well.

And for the stuff I’m doing, it’s required that any engineer understand what they’re building and why.

> Using LLM without understanding disqualifies the candidate, even monkey can do it. But if he deeply understands the subject and uses LLM for like handbook for minor details.. that's different

The problem is that they don’t understand the subject and overly rely on LLMs. Completely falling apart during in person interviews. Surface knowledge of everything and no depth.

Using LLMs isn’t inherently bad but I’ve seen severe side effects from students and junior engineers who over rely on it.
by noiv | 2025-06-17 07:36:55+00:00
I've started to finish some abandoned half-ready side projects with Claude Pro on Desktop with filesystem MCP. Used to high quality code, it took me some time to teach Claude to follow conventions. Now it works like a charm, we work on a requirements.md until all questions are answered and then I let Claude go. Only thing left is convincing clients to embrace code assistents.
by TrackerFF | 2025-06-17 07:37:07+00:00
If I had to guess...they're going to implement some system that works on the air-gapped military infrastructure. As for exactly what? Could be for compiling data / generating reports / updating those pesky matlab files / what have you.

When you work in defense, you have the option of rolling out heavily modified systems yourself, or go directly to a vendor, and purchase it from them. And depending on the size, it might not be feasible to do the former one.
by quchen | 2025-06-17 07:37:14+00:00
Losing control is something that happens at higher doses. It’s hard to quantify this without prior experience, but most substances can be taken on a level of »three beer drunk« where you’re very clearly not sober, but you can still talk, and take care of the essentials of life like going to the toilet and walking home in public without attracting attention.

For example, the average person will feel altered mood states and mild visual hallucinations (patterns on surfaces, think very detailed mandalas or fractals), in the 50-75μg range of LSD. They will not see pink elephants, they will not try to call their dog on the phone, they will not strip naked, they will not make growling sounds at trees.

Now, I do voluntary work in drug education, and there’s one important thing to say, it’s that everyone’s different, and it’s fine not to do psychedelics, or any other substance.
by vidarh | 2025-06-17 07:38:35+00:00
If you let it paint you into a corner, why are you doing so?

I don't know what you mean by "a lot of guidance". Maybe I just naturally do that, but to me there's not been much change in the level of guidance I need to give Claude Code or my own agent vs. what I'd give developers working for me.

Another issue is that as long as you ensure it builds good enough tests, the cost of telling it to just throw out the code it builds later and redo it with additional architectural guidance keeps dropping.

The code is increasingly becoming throwaway.
by SunlitCat | 2025-06-17 07:38:35+00:00
But the larger issue is, if Microsoft Windows is able to grab DRMed content, there is some path to grab DRMed content at all. Which means that if someone with lots of time, passion and talent on their hand might be able to exploit that path to get more then just a screenshot without audio every 0.2 fps.

The promise of DRMed content at the moment is that (technically) no one is able to do so as there are no backdoors into it, for nobody.
by safety1st | 2025-06-17 07:38:45+00:00
FOSS and open protocols are the answer of course. Signal is unimpeachable enough for me, but for the true believers there is Matrix with a bunch of third party clients.

Once you internalize the how and why (such as "forks are good" and "the more publicly auditable code the better"), there's really no going back and for the rest of your life you prefer FOSS even when you can't use it.

That's why I think that for some future generation there will be a FOSS equivalent of the waves of democracy that spread across the world starting in the 18th century. Once a country becomes democratic and people understand the benefits, they never really want to roll that change back. Our current generation is probably not going to double down on the "right to fork," but once an individual gets it they get it for good, so I feel it's just a matter time before a sea change occurs, even if we're all dead when it happens.
by tsurba | 2025-06-17 07:40:27+00:00
Gambling is where I end up if I’m tired and try to get an LLM to build my hobby project for me from scratch in one go, not really bothering to read the code properly. It’s stupid and a waste of time. Sometimes it’s easier to get started this way though.

But more seriously, in the ideal case refining a prompt based on a misunderstanding of an LLM due to ambiguity in your task description is actually doing the meaningful part of the work in software development. It is exactly about defining the edge cases, and converting into language what is it that you need for a task. Iterating on that is not gambling.

But of course if you are not doing that, but just trying to get a ”smarter” LLM with (hopefully deprecated study of) ”prompt engineering” tricks, then that is about building yourself a skill that can become useless tomorrow.
by pyrale | 2025-06-17 07:40:33+00:00
First off, I’d like to state that the following post is about the challenges of handling residential production, not about industrial renewable setups.

The grid going down is game over. Once you’re at this point, there are already people going hurt. The way inverters react to this is irrelevant.

The thing making home setups not a source energy utilities would want to pay much for is that they bring no service to the grid (frequency and voltage management, ability to be turned off when the grid manager wants, reactive production management).

The part where people get hurt is that in overproduction events, the grid manager has no way to cut that production or even single homes, so they sometimes have to cut whole neighborhoods. That did happen already, even if it’s not a common thing.
by mort96 | 2025-06-17 07:40:37+00:00
I don't think it's a problem that they're against federation. I think federation is nice, but it has some clear trade-offs, and I don't feel like it's something Signal needs.

I don't even think they have to officially support third party clients or provide a stable API. I'd have no problem if they just occasionally made API changes which broke unofficial clients until their developers updated them.

But I really don't like that they're so openly hostile to the idea of other people "using their servers for free", with the threat of technical blocks and legal action which that implies. Especially not when their official client is as bad as it is. (Again, it's fucking blurry!)
by arp242 | 2025-06-17 07:41:32+00:00
If you look at he numbers then the kernel was never all that swear-heavy.

68 instances of "fuck" at the peak in 2005, in how many million lines of code? And turns out 24 of those were in repeated instances of "IOC3 is fucking fucked" in the MIPS driver, so at least some of it is fairly "clustered" too.
by LukasKrupa | 2025-06-17 07:41:44+00:00
I built a minimalist web app to help makers and small 3D print farms track filament usage and avoid unexpected outages.

Upload an STL file → the app auto-estimates filament needed (g/meters) using bounding box & volume → updates inventory → suggests when to reorder based on usage trends.

Clean dashboard with a print job list, inventory, and AI restock alerts + CRM. I use OpenAI's API and basic STL volume parsing (numpy-stl).

Would love feedback from makers, devs, and anyone automating physical workflows.
by robin_reala | 2025-06-17 07:43:55+00:00
Reminder that for a surprisingly large number of sites, you’re legally required to be accessible starting in 11 days time in the EU under the European Accessibility Act.[1] Any e-commerce system has to meet WCAG 2.1 level AA, where e-commerce is defined as an online system designed to conclude a contract for a product or service between a business and a consumer.

The only real get-out clause is if you’re a microenterprise: “an enterprise which employs fewer than 10 persons and which has an annual turnover not exceeding EUR 2 million or an annual balance sheet total not exceeding EUR 2 million”.

[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/882/oj/eng (Edit: fixed URL from Y-bar)
by piva00 | 2025-06-17 07:44:54+00:00
I paid for WhatsApp, USD 1 for year for a few years. They dropped the fee back in 2016.

If WhatsApp wasn't part of Meta they would have found a way, even more it was a very small team before the acquisition already supporting hundreds of MAU, promises were made there wouldn't ever be ads but of course that corporate-consolidation doesn't care about any of that.
by chii | 2025-06-17 07:44:56+00:00
at the beginning, they "charged" $1 (or £3 as you said), but this "fee" was often just waived. You never really had to pay it to use whatsapp. The money was there as a form of advertising, to differentiate whatsapp from the others - because by making it seem more premium via attaching a price, it makes the people using it feel more superior and thus the platform more easily propagates; and it's also why they "secretly" let you use it for free if you refused to pay.
by berkes | 2025-06-17 07:45:23+00:00
Drugs' build up and tolerance varies wildly between the drugs, the person and the experience one seeks.

Chemically and physically, LSD for example is gone in a few days and certainly weeks. But taking two days in a row needs "insane" amounts to get you the same (physical, chemical) effect. MDMA is almost entirely gone in months, after which a normal dose will get the same (physical, chemical) effect. Good documentation with even calculators for this can be found online (be aware that it may not be allowed to even visit such sites in some countries!)

I deliberately emphasis the "physical and chemical" because the experience itself may be something you get used to. First time MDMA is wildly different from any time thereafter for many people. For many this is even stronger with LSD or Psilocybin. Many people report that the (first) experience opened up their mind and being profoundly and lasting. The more one gets used to the feeling the more this feeling itself becomes routine.

The intense love and euphoria from e.g. MDMA may be the same on an objective level, after letting the chemicals disappear over months, so technically one can achieve this level a few times a year. But the feeling itself is something one could get "used to" and "become bored by". Similar to how experiencing a rave sober for decades, or even how after decades of traveling it could get boring and a routine.

My point is: indeed first times are important. Even if the textbooks say that tolerance is gone after X time.
by flomo | 2025-06-17 07:45:27+00:00
Just some blatantly obvious examples: Select Multiple was some Windows 3 garbage, and HTML didn't have a 'combobox', much less a 'multi-combobox'. (MDN says datalist is not supported on Firefox, so maybe it still doesn't.) So write it yourself, or use a library. The form validation stuff is still bad, and idk if modern desktop browsers have a good date control.
by SunlitCat | 2025-06-17 07:45:40+00:00
Although being too young to be really have seen gopher, i can still remember the (comparatively) simple "Internet" from mid to late 90s.

IRC for chatting, ICQ for instant messaging (which didn't work because my ISP at that time used a strange firewall / proxy setup and IRQ wasn't able to get through), newsgroups as a kind of discussion board, picture viewers for all kind of image formats (like wise video players), real player (Buffering...:D) for streaming....and most importantly web browser(s) when you want to grab information from all around the world (but dang having only a 33.6kbit modem, was really a test of patience sometimes).

Oh! I forgot! WinAmp which can whip the llama's...yeah you surely know what it does whip! ;)
by southernplaces7 | 2025-06-17 07:46:03+00:00
Yes but we shouldn't be depending on "stable systems" for civilization on this planet. Firstly, because that's a recipe for a brittle little civilization and secondly, because such stability is in any case a myth. Nature itself is subject to catastrophic transformations by its own dynamics, and among these is the phenomenon of species transplantation and invasion.

The supposed equilibrium and "balance" of nature that many environmentalists harp about are fabricated human myth with little bearing on reality.

Also, curiously, we could theoretically owe our entire modern existence as living things, to a particularly giant example of nature randomly facilitating the invasive expansion of one type of life at the cost of many others.

That's right, i'm talking about the Great Oxidation Event

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
by gneissguise | 2025-06-17 07:46:20+00:00
Start off small, you gotta know your underlying API. For this demo it's JavaScript and the HTML5 canvas API (which is MUCH easier to learn than the languages of the 90s except for BASIC)

https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/drawing-on-a-canvas-elemen...

From there, you'll need a good understanding of loops, control flow, data structures like arrays to store the pixels, lines, shapes, and colors, wiping and redrawing the screen between "ticks" (a single pass of the main loop), and refresh timing to control the speed of the animations.

On a side note there's actually a refresh bug in my plasma demo I just noticed a moment ago... if you leave it open for too long on plasma it starts redrawing faster and faster until it looks like glitch-art!
by ggambetta | 2025-06-17 07:46:36+00:00
In retrospect, it was the limitations that made it so fun. The system was so simple that it was entirely knowable by a single brain, which has become enormously more challenging nowadays.

I recently ported my teaching raytracer to the Spectrum [0], not even using assembler, but the horribly slow native BASIC. It was a ton of fun! It's super slow especially when run on the original hardware, but even then I can't remember something like this from back in the day (and I'd bet something like Microhobby would have listed this as some kind of curiosity); makes me think the Spectrum's limitations weren't even fully explored. Raytracing people were probably working on beefier machines and more serious projects.

[0] https://gabrielgambetta.com/zx-raytracer.html
by matsemann | 2025-06-17 07:48:32+00:00
Working on a huge government form application (lots of pages, sub sections, modals, validations etc), we of course had strict rules about making it accessible. But that made it so much easier to work/debug/test it. It being keyboard accessible made it a breeze to quickly test stuff or get to the needed state. Had muscle memory of like tab, tab, type a letter, tab, enter.

The things I did most often I had bookmarklets for.