MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cturner | 2025-06-03 08:00:34+00:00
UI concerns need to be in service to the full set of requirements and the data model.

UIs are easily accessible to end-users and product-managers, and can allow people to focus on a subset of the requirements. The trap is to allow the UI perspective to direct the development process.

It is vital to set an expectation with customers that allows discussion about UI matters as part of requirements discovery, but where they expect it to churn. During early development UI should be rough and should churn constantly in response to changes of more foundational matters: the business requirements, the data model, concurrency matters, interactions with other systems and the deployment.
by einpoklum | 2025-06-03 08:00:41+00:00
> LLMs can write a large fraction of all the tedious code you’ll ever need to write.

For most software projections, they cannot even remotely do that - at least not today and as far as I can tell.

And that is to say, it's not that they can write a not-so-large fraction. They cannot write any significant fraction of it. They can often write you a draft that helps you get there faster, though. They can also facilitate web search result consolidation etc. which can also help. But - they can also lead you down wrong paths and dead-ends, on occasion.
by closewith | 2025-06-03 08:01:39+00:00
> Tell that to Europeans who can't afford a home and who are struggling to pay the bills. HN users constantly pulling out a random statistic off Google to dispute the reality people actually live in is the bane of this forum.

Are you suggesting the housing situation is better in the US of all markets?

> People don't care about meaningless statistics or graphs, they care about what's in their bank account and how that number has evolved(or devolved) compared to the past.

People actually care about much more than that, including family life, health, and human rights, which are all better in the EU than the US.

People's finances are _also_ better in the EU than the US in real terms.

> What matters is how people feel about their situation.

If this is true, people in the EU are _much_ happier with their lives than in the US.

At this point, I'm not sure if you're trolling or completely disconnect with the reality of life in the US?
by risyachka | 2025-06-03 08:02:55+00:00
If the guy knew how to properly implement oauth - did he save any time though by prompting or just tried to prove a point that if you actually already know all details of impl you can guide llm to do it?

Thats the biggest issue I see. In most cases I don't use llm because DIYing it takes less time than prompting/waiting/checking every line.
by 0x70dd | 2025-06-03 08:04:34+00:00
Until very recently, at the company I work for, we were running one of the largest (if not the largest) replica set cluster in terms of number of documents stored (~20B) and data size ~11TB. The database held up nicely in the past 10 years since the very first inception of the product. We had to do some optimizations over the years, but those are expected with any database. Since Mongo Atlas has a hard limit on the maximum disk size of 14TB we explored multiple migration options - sharding Mongo or moving to Postgres/TimescaleDB or another time series database. During the evaluation of alternative database we couldn't find one which supported our use case, that's highly available, could scale horizontally and that's easily maintainable (e.g. upgrades on Mongo Atlas require no manual intervention and there's no downtime even when going to the next major version). We had to work around numerous bugs that we encountered during sharding that were specific to our workloads, but the migration was seamless and required ~1h of downtime (mainly required to fine-tune database parameters). We've had very few issues with it over the years. I think Mongo is a mature technology and it makes sense depending on the type of data you're storing. I know at least few other healthcare companies that are using it for storing life-critical data even at a larger scale.
by fuzztester | 2025-06-03 08:04:34+00:00
by first learning practical electronics.

you have to know how to make it before you can break it or repair it.

jk, but dammit, man, sometimes I wish that I had learned practical electronics in my school and college days.

in fact, iirc, there was a book by that exact name, practical electronics, by an author named bernard grob. it was in our school library.

I just googled. the book is still around.

https://www.amazon.in/Grobs-Basic-Electronics-Mitchel-Schult...

but it's very expensive for India these days.

also it my day had good Synergy with software development
by throwanem | 2025-06-03 08:04:42+00:00
Sorry for the delay in response. I wanted to reread Chapter 8.

I still don't think it is more fair to characterize either of the story's sexual dynamics as more poorly written for the sake of fetishism. If you're going to charge the author and more importantly the audience with being problematic in consequence of one but not the other, there still remains work to achieve the goal, because as I noted in a nearby comment the writing is mediocre at best, invariably didactic and workmanlike, frequently an outright slog. This is true in all sex scenes also, no more one than any other.

> I'm sorry you had to go through that.

Don't try to speak to that. You don't know how. The point is that you don't know how and I would like you please to stop trying. It makes sense to me why people would become uncomfortable when they are titillated by writing that deliberately strives to titillate, but you're supposed to think about it, not call for a book burning.

I'll say that again. You're supposed to think about it. Not call for a book burning. And certainly not in my name!

I'm pretty sure no one here is anything like my father, who never knew shame for anything he did. I'm pretty sure the author of this mediocre but nonetheless compelling work of high-concept science fiction is nothing like my father, also. I don't blame the author disappearing given the fundamental misunderstanding he must have known his work would meet, or maybe saw it meet; I read it when it still earned the name "novel," but didn't take much interest in the contemporary analysis, which I found little less superficial then than now. In any case its author must have known it would cause a moral panic among people afraid of being accused of not caring enough for victims of pedophilia. He would also remember the McMinnville trial, better indeed than I, who was then actually suffering the real equivalent of what always develops when these ignorantly prurient fantasies get out of hand.

What you do to each other I could care very little less about, and with effort. But actual victims also suffer in every moral panic, and we, at last, deserve better. Someone therefore needs to check this behavior, and I see no one else bothering.

So here I am, in any case the genuine article, a "victim" by anyone's standard though I will not wear that term other than for argument, and as such I hereby confer permission to talk about the work, rather than how embarrassing everyone finds it to have had a phase of fascination with what, honestly, is chickenshit. Honestly. I could tell you about the reality but it has made people retch before and I know no ill of you. This is your pass, and everyone's. This thread has been blessed. You all can chill.

Ask your damned questions, even, which I would never normally encourage. Better pester me than whoever in your life I've brought to your mind just now, who you could ignorantly hurt. Ask me instead! Whatever you like. I promise to answer honestly and completely or not at all. If you think that constitutes generosity, try me.
by altacc | 2025-06-03 08:04:59+00:00
I refer to it as "designed by programmers". It's so prevalent that the Silicon Valley TV show used this as one of it's story lines.

When I worked for a consultancy in early internet days I also often repeated "the customer doesn't know what they want until they see what they don't want". People weren't used to web GUIs and there weren't the common patterns we see today, so it wasn't until they had a half working version they could actually give feedback, so getting early feedback was essential to reduce the frustrating of building something that is immediately changed. It still applies today but less to do with usage patterns and more to do with missing requirements the customer forgot to tell you about.
by kamaal | 2025-06-03 08:05:18+00:00
>>It also ends up undermining faith in true content, which may be outlandish.

In all honesty, art in some form or the other has always been simulated to some extent. Heck, the whole idea of a story, even if in a book is something you know hasn't happened in real life, but you are willing to suspend belief for a while to be entertained. This is the essence of all entertainment. It is not real, but it makes you feel good.

Like action movies have had cgi, cartoon shows, magic shows and even actors putting on make up itself can be considered deviation from truth.

I guess your idea is that news can be manufactured and one could rig public opinion to all sorts of bad things. But again, once you are here, a good amount of public already knows this to be false enough to be wary of it. Come to think of it, a lot of news is already heavily edited to a point it doesn't represent the original story. This is just a continuation of the same.
by roenxi | 2025-06-03 08:05:26+00:00
A fun party game is to get some pure mathematicians together, speculate loudly that they must be motivated in their work by the numerous practical applications of maths and watch cheekily to see which of their faces fail to conceal the spasm of fury. 1 point per asymmetric eye twitch.

They're academics, their job is to make true statements and maintain a culture that cares a lot about whether their colleagues can prove them false. Beyond that, it is hard to figure out what purpose they might be fulfilling.
by Leo-thorne | 2025-06-03 08:05:47+00:00
At first I didn’t think LLMs were that impressive, but ever since I started using them, I’ve pretty much stopped writing for loops by hand. It’s not that I forgot how. I just don’t feel like doing it anymore. The time it saves me on boilerplate lets me focus on other things. Sometimes the code isn’t perfect and I need to fix it, but it’s still way easier than starting from scratch.
by kmarc | 2025-06-03 08:07:10+00:00
To your main point: it feels like CH is losing a lot of "in-house" knowledge and mostly the managerial / leader positions are growing here. This is somewhat masked by the fact that the universities show top notch research (mainly with foreign students tho), and there are many startups that eventually make some noise. But classical business will suffer a lot from off-shoring literally any real knowledge and know how that is normally needed to create a product. As one of my ex-managers said: "it's crazy that we cannot even produce aspirin anymore in Switzerland".

And then some more anecdata:

I happened to be part of Acronis during the time when they tried helping escape all the Engineers in Moscow to Bulgaria. (I have stories, yes, I was in the HQ in Moscow too). The engineers, who made Acronis (the product) were always in Bulgaria for the past 5+ years, so that one is not like the other examples.

I also ended up working for a small banking startup, 20 of us tried to do business on the regional banking sphere. I left during the time when the company was inflated with 40+ offshore (Balkans) engineers.

To be precise, the ex googlers are not clueless about engineering (or at least I hope so), but about how the unemployment system in CH works, and they are also out of touch salary-wise.
by munksbeer | 2025-06-03 08:07:16+00:00
>IR35 wasn't about fairness. It was about shutting down small, skilled independents so big firms could lock in the profit stream

That is way too sophisticated. The simpler explanation, governments look for ways to squeeze more tax out of people. IR35 was an easy win for them, since it typically impacted only people who were effectively already employees by using tax loop holes to pay less. I know, I was one of them.
by whazor | 2025-06-03 08:07:18+00:00
The key is that manual coding for a normal task takes a one/two weeks, where-as if you configure all your prompts/agents correctly you could do it in a couple of hours. As you highlighted, it brings many new issues (code quality, lack of tests, tech debt) and you need to carefully create prompts and review the code to tackle those. But in the end, you can save significant time.
by mulmen | 2025-06-03 08:07:54+00:00
The men with badges didn't "suddenly become brave". This was a planned operation to capture the leaders of the Malheur standoff. I can find no evidence or even claim that the passengers in LaVoy Finicum's truck were his family. He was transporting Ryan Bundy along with Shawna Cox, Victoria Sharp, and Ryan Payne. Ammon Bundy was in a trailing Jeep. Ammon surrendered in the initial stop but Finicum fled.

After crashing his truck avoiding a roadblock during the high speed pursuit Finicum got out and attempted to draw on officers. He was literally yelling "shoot me" as they shot him.

There's video from the air: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZWX3Tz1tQI

And inside his truck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEswP_HSFV4

Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Malheur_Nati...
by thedevilslawyer | 2025-06-03 08:07:57+00:00
The article is chefs_kiss.jpg. the author is core-hn, in spirit and in karma.

imo that tone is exactly what's needed to set right the entitlement that we SWEs have developed over the last decade. The key line in the article gets to the heart of the actual concern developers have imo.

> LLMs really might displace many software developers. That’s not a high horse we get to ride. Our jobs are just as much in tech’s line of fire as everybody else’s have been for the last 3 decades.
by wczekalski | 2025-06-03 08:08:44+00:00
Dialo | ONSITE | Warsaw, Poland | https://dialo.ai | Full-Time

We build voice AI agents for customer service over the phone. We are currently conducting hundreds of thousands of calls every day. Dialo is profitable.

We develop and self host every component across speech-to-text, text-to-speech, LLMs, real-time audio processing, and voip.

Our strategy centers on developing an open-source foundation and propriatery vertical-specific products on top of it.

tech stack: AI (wav2vec2, llama, styletts2), OCaml (systems eng), Nix, k8s, TypeScript, React, Node.js

Roles:

- Applied AI research (Speech LLMs)

- AI engineer

- UI Engineer (a full stack role with frontend focus)

How to apply: mail me at wojtek@dialo.ai with the coolest thing you build and tell me what you want to work on! (github link and/or resume optional
by thanksgiving | 2025-06-03 08:09:23+00:00
> Far more importantly, though, artists haven't spent the last quarter century working to eliminate protections for IPR. Software developers have.

I think the case we are making is there is no such thing as intellectual property to begin with and the whole thing is a scam created by duck taping a bunch of different concepts together when they should not be grouped together at all.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html
by bilbo0s | 2025-06-03 08:09:37+00:00
Which is why you never join prime.

And if you think damages are less than 10k from some kid getting hit in the head by a drone crashing through his/her window, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. In the US, healthcare alone is not that cheap.

Finally, you suing AMZN is not how things work in the US. In the US, the relevant insurance companies work it out with each other. What I mean by that is, it is AmFam suing AMZN. And believe me, AmFam is gonna get every penny it's owed.

You're the one living in fantasy land if you think homeowners sue liable parties for money in the US rather than filing claims with their home insurance company.

If everyone just keeps that full coverage, it will work itself out. AMZN will be paying those claims. Or rather, AMZN's insurers will be paying those claims.
by wongarsu | 2025-06-03 08:09:45+00:00
The issue is that step 2 is wrong. Step 1 is to make a design, step 2 is to test it. Make a paper prototype and have your customer simulate working with it. If you feel fancy make a pretty prototype in Figma.

If you have a good designer and cooperative costumer you can even combine step 1 and 2 with a whiteboard prototype. Ask the customer what a common task is. Draw the interface the whiteboard and ask the consumer where they would click or interact, then draw the next UI state, and so on.

After a couple rounds of iterating that way you can start writing actual code. You will still need a couple iterations once people can try the actual software but you will have a much better starting point
by account42 | 2025-06-03 08:10:56+00:00
The airlines are dealing with the size people are by, in your example, preventing those oversized for their chosen seat from negatively impacting others.

> And while my being fat is definitely a result of my life choices, that's certainly not the case for all of us.

It literally is. No matter the genetic predisposition, you need a caloric surplus to get fat.

> They could have just plastered "no fatties" at the ticket counter, or maybe had a section of seats reserved for fat people at a somewhat higher price point and required people over a certain size to use them, but instead they've chosen to sit us all together.

They do provide bigger seats at a higher price point though. You have chosen not to make use of them and then blame the airline. If you are big enough that sitting next to someone your own size causes you discomfort then you would be encroaching the space of someone smaller sitting next to you. That wouldn't be fair to them.
by VidText_AI | 2025-06-03 08:11:14+00:00
In this era of AI-generated image tools, maintaining style consistency and character continuity in multiple rounds of editing has always been a "stuck point" in the minds of users. On May 29, Black Forest Labs released the new FLUX.1 Kontext, claiming that it can complete complex tasks such as image editing, generation, and style transfer through a unified model, finding a balance between accuracy and consistency. I conducted in-depth tests as soon as possible and compiled the results into this article, hoping to provide you with a reference for judging whether it is worth a try.
by oggy | 2025-06-03 08:12:03+00:00
Funny to see this posted on HN, just last week I finished writing a blog post about a project I did for checking that code matches the TLA+ specs so I have to shamelessly plug it :) [1] I was aware of the MongoDB paper, but I ended up actually doing exactly what they suggested wouldn't work: I instrumented Rust programs to log traces and checked them against the specification. Even though the models were largely also post-factum models as in their case (i.e., the code was there first, and models were built later on), this worked for us since the models really were aimed at capturing the implementation's behavior. Our target implementation is possibly smaller than what they had to deal with, though (it's only around 5kLoC of Rust smart contracts) so that's a factor.

My technique was slightly different, though. First, I ended up ignoring the initial states, because tests would often manually create fixtures that would serve as a starting point. So I only ended up checking that trace steps obey the transition predicate, which is weaker, but hey, all this is best-effort only anyways. Second, I ended up using the Apalache tool instead of TLC; the reason being that my transitions were sometimes of the form "there exists a number between 1 and N". While model checking you would pick a small N, but in the test runs where the traces come from the N was sometimes huge. TLC ends up enumerating all the possibilities between 1 and N, whereas Apalache translates the whole thing into an SMT formula which is generally trivial to check. Apalache also has the side benefit of requiring type annotations (and providing a type checker) which makes the models a lot easier to refactor when the code changes.

I also ended up creating a small library for helping instrument Rust programs to collect such logs. The idea here was to minimize the amount of logging statements in the production code, to keep it out of the way of the people working on the code base who aren't familiar with TLA. It's somewhat specific to our code base, and there's a fair amount of unsafe nastiness that works only because our code is of certain shape, but in case someone's interested, it's open source: https://github.com/dfinity/ic/tree/master/rs/tla_instrumenta....

I wasn't aware of the 2024 paper they reference though, so curious to see what approach they took.

[1] https://www.mongodb.com/blog/post/engineering/conformance-ch...
by sothatsit | 2025-06-03 08:12:46+00:00
You have misunderstood this "common wisdom".

The idea is that people will spend 10x more time reading your code in all future time stacked together. Not that reading and understanding your code once takes 10x the effort of writing it, which is obviously untrue.

Here is the quote from Clean Code, where this idea seems to originate from:

> Indeed, the ratio of time spent reading versus writing code is well over 10 to 1.
by teaearlgraycold | 2025-06-03 08:13:55+00:00
The issue is we’re too early in the process to even have a solid education program for using LLMs. I use them all the time and continue to struggle finding an approach that works well. It’s easy to use them for documentation look up. Or filling in boilerplate. Sometimes they nail a transformation/translation task, other times they’re more trouble than they’re worth.

We need to understand what kind of guard rails to put these models on for optimal results.
by UncleMeat | 2025-06-03 08:14:58+00:00
> If we don't learn from history, why do we do history?

Historians uncover and communicate the story of humanity in as rich and diverse of a way as possible. This is, in my mind, somewhat comparable to the process of doing pure math research or fundamental physics research. While there may be practical outcomes for today (either unexpected or intended as a goal of a particular research direction), we also understand that doing math for its own purposes is valuable.

The process of doing archival research, putting sources in dialog with other research, and even simply reading secondary source writing achieves some positive outcomes. It widens and deepens empathy for the rich diversity of human behavior. It builds skills for critical analysis of media and communication. It can provide narrative and argument for people advocating for change today (both good and bad). But these do not need to be the reasons why we embark on history research. They are side outcomes of undirected analysis.

I'll also add that concern about "history departments funded by tax dollars" is just factually unfounded. My wife is a history and the size of grants is hilarious coming from my background in CS. Like, a grant for $2,000-$5,000 would be considered chunky. And grants are often coming from weird places like random corporations or donor funding rather than from the government. The NEH was already basically dead before Trump 2.0 and now is dead and buried. People upset about academic history can rest easy knowing that there aren't historians living large on your tax dollars.
by mnky9800n | 2025-06-03 08:15:14+00:00
I always thought that Data had an innate ability to learn emotions, learn empathy, learn how to be human because he desired it. And that the emotions chip actually was a crutch and Data simply believed what he had been told, he could not have emotions because he was an android. But, as you say, he clearly feels close to Geordi and cares about him. He is afraid if Spot is missing. He paints and creates music and art that reflects his experience. Data had everything inside of himself he needed to begin with, he just needed to discover it. Data, was an example to the rest of us. At least in TNG. In the movies he was a crazy person. But so was everyone else.