MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mothballed | 2025-08-22 13:28:53+00:00
Even so being a nazi or having a feed of a bunch of hitlers or whatever is 1st amendment protected political activity that won't expose your employer to a successful hostile workplace lawsuit.

Having a sexually provocative furry show up is not protected by the first amendment, since it appeals to prurient interest, someone passing by could argue they feel sexually harassed or find it hostile and have a much better chance at causing problems for your employer.

Maybe I've worked for some weird employers but if I was caught on twitter posting Nazi salutes I would expect raised eye-brows, but for the stated reasons, if I was caught with a furry picture on display where someone else could see it I'd expect to be immediately terminated.
by bfrog | 2025-08-22 13:29:19+00:00
AI is hot garbage being used as if its a hammer and everything is a nail. The sooner this house of cards collapses the sooner real value can be gained from it by using it as a tool to appropriately assist.

But we're in the mega hype phase still (1998/1999) and haven't quite crested over to the reality phase.
by sqircles | 2025-08-22 13:29:19+00:00
People love to talk about management skills and how things should be, but in my experience the autonomy to have that freedom is greatly lost upon the manager. At every level of management you'll be barking down orders as a transitory and the main difference is how you do or do not get buy-in from your reports - and often it is next to impossible to gain that buy-in (more work! longer hours! emergency pragmatic fix for an administrative problem!), which is why you're the one presenting the task.
by merelysounds | 2025-08-22 13:29:34+00:00
> the article didn't seem to explain how the prompt injection was actually done...

There is a short explanation in the “Nyquist’s nightmares” paragraph and a link to a related paper.

“This aliasing effect is a consequence of the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem. Exploiting this ambiguity by manipulating specific pixels such that a target pattern emerges is exactly what image scaling attacks do. Refer to Quiring et al[1]. for a more detailed explanation.”

[1]: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/sec20fall_quiring_prepub...
by selecsosi | 2025-08-22 13:29:34+00:00
IME the gap in management between ICs is accountability. It's easy to say you are sorry, or say things won't happen again but good management, and what I strive to do is hold myself accountable.

To me, that means 1. To identify the issue that occurred (especially when you caused it), and much more importantly, 2. Put systems into place that prevent it from happening again.

Employees can feel very clearly when a manager lacks accountability and as part of mid and especially high level management (if your goal is actually improving both output and quality of people's lives) to not just say you did something wrong, but actually put your skin in the game ensuring what happened will not happen again (usually it means being better at saying no or aggressively managing prioritization rather than heaping additional tasks on people).
by giancarlostoro | 2025-08-22 13:29:35+00:00
My biggest nitpick against Go was, is and still is the package management. Rust did it so nice and NuGet (C#/.NET) got it so right that Microsoft added it as a built-in thing for Visual Studio, it was originally a plugin and not from Microsoft whatsoever, now they fully own it which is fine, and it just works.

Cargo is amazing, and you can do amazing things with it, I wish Go would invest in this area more.

Also funny you mention Python, a LOT of Go devs are former Python devs, especially in the early days.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-08-22 13:30:04+00:00
Of course tape isn't the best, but you can actually squeeze more out of tape than you might expect.

One of my latest nerd rabbit holes has been using the Domesday Duplicator, and now the MISRC, to extract higher quality video from old VHS, VHS-C, and 8mm video. Thanks to the vhsdecode project you can now bypass most of the original hardware and use software to reconstruct the video from the raw RF. It's expensive, computationally, but with a proper RF extraction you can now capture better video than the the original hardware ever could.

I haven't tried it yet, but I hear that with dirty tricks like "stacking" multiple passes, or even captures from multiple tapes, you can further enhance it.
by yupyupyups | 2025-08-22 13:30:09+00:00
On other platforms I tend to not use algorithmic feeds that much, and so I don't encounter that problem. That's because I already know some good accounts.

But on Bluesky, I'm new, and I want to get a feel for what's out there, so the Discover feature has been interesting for that purpose. But using it will quickly lead to the types of content that I mentioned, and I don't think users should have to tolerate this until they find interesting accounts to follow and move on to more controlled feeds.

With that said, from the limited experience I've had with Twitter/X's algorithmic feeds, they haven't been that explicit. But that's my anecdote.
by c22 | 2025-08-22 13:30:21+00:00
But then how do we determine who has priority for the couch? The singleton nature of the couch requires some form of access control to prevent disputes. No such restriction exists for a memory of the couch, once we have each been exposed to it we can enjoy the memory perpetually and simultaneously with no conflicts.

Artificially restricting what can be remembered and by whom solely on the basis that some forms of memory produce new physical artifacts ("copies") is absurd on its face.

That said, the ability to monetize a memory is much more like the couch. In theory this is the resource copyright aims to protect. In practice, experts disagree to what extent piracy impacts potential monetization leaving us with two sides of the debate tending to talk past eachother.
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-22 13:30:56+00:00
Not so much magnetism, but maybe that's because I'm trained in cond-mat and I think of magnetism as a kind of order in materials and not that dual of the electric field which people explain with that weird right hand rule. (I remember getting chewed out my students because I'd be drawing on the board with my chalk in my right hand and using my left hand and reversing the direction.)
by jon-wood | 2025-08-22 13:31:14+00:00
In theory, yeah. In many ways that's what test driven development is, you keep breaking down a problem into a function that you can write a unit test for, write the test, write the implementation, move on. In practice writing the functions and verifying their inputs and outputs isn't the hard bit.

The hard bit is knowing which functions to write, and what "valid" means for inputs and outputs. Sometimes you'll get a specification that tells you this, but the moment you try to implement it you'll find out that whoever was writing that spec didn't really think it through to its conclusion. There will be a host of edge cases that probably don't matter, and will probably never be hit in the real world anyway, but someone needs to make that call and decide what to do when (not if) they get hit anyway.
by mustaphah | 2025-08-22 13:31:15+00:00
You're spot on that significant ≠ meaningful effect. But I'd push back slightly on the example. A very low p-value doesn't always imply a meaningful effect, but it's not independent of effect size either. A p-value comes from a test statistic that's basically:

(effect size) / (noise / sqrt(n))

Note that bigger test statistic means smaller p-value.

So very low p-values usually come from bigger effects or from very large sample sizes (n). That's why you can technically get p<0.001 with a microscopic effect, but only if you have astronomical sample sizes. In most empirical studies, though, p<0.001 does suggest the effect is going to be large because there are practical limits on the sample size.
by imiric | 2025-08-22 13:31:20+00:00
> The whole field is about managing complexity. You don't shun complexity, you give tools to people to be able to manage it.

Complexity exists in all layers of computing, from the silicon up. While we can't avoid complexity of real world problems, we can certainly minimize the complexity required for their solutions. There are an infinite amount of problems caused primarily by the self-induced complexity of our software stacks and the hardware it runs on. Choosing a high-level language that deliberately tries to avoid these problems is about the only say I have in this matter, since I don't have the skill nor patience to redo decades of difficult work smarter people than me have done.

Just because a language embraces simplicity doesn't mean that it doesn't provide the tools to solve real world problems. Go authors have done a great job of choosing the right set of trade-offs, unlike most other language authors. Most of the time. I still think generics were a mistake.
by tialaramex | 2025-08-22 13:31:25+00:00
Rust apparently got relatively close to not having &str as a primitive type and instead only providing a library alias to &[u8] when Rust 1.0 shipped.

Score another for Rust's Safety Culture. It would be convenient to just have &str as an alias for &[u8] but if that mistake had been allowed all the safety checking that Rust now does centrally has to be owned by every single user forever. Instead of a few dozen checks overseen by experts there'd be myriad sprinkled across every project and always ready to bite you.
by RyanOD | 2025-08-22 13:31:43+00:00
For me, AI is just a tool. I'm not a high-level developer, but when I'm coding out a personal project and I'm stuck. I present my ideas to AI and ask it for feedback. Then, I take that feedback and move forward. What I do NOT do is ask AI to write code for me. Again, these are my own projects so I can develop them any way I like.

Having AI write code for me (other than maybe simple boilerplate stuff) goes entirely against why I write code in the first place which is the joy of problem solving, building things, and learning.

Edit: Typo
by fuzzzerd | 2025-08-22 13:31:49+00:00
> This looping is a sort of "context-rot" -- the agent has the problem statement as part of it's input, and then a series of incorrect solutions.

While I agree, and also use your work around, I think it stands to reason this shouldn't be a problem. The context had the original problem statement along with several examples of what not to do and yet it keeps repeating those very things instead of coming up with a different solution. No human would keep trying one of the solutions included in the context that are marked as not valid.
by z3c0 | 2025-08-22 13:32:21+00:00
Agreed. All these attempts to benchmark LLM performance based on the interpreted validity of the outputs are completely misguided. It may be the semantics of "context" causing people to anthropomorphize the models (besides the lifelike outputs.) Establishing context for humans is the process of holding external stimuli against an internal model of reality. Context for an LLM is literally just "the last n tokens". In that case, the performance would be how valid the most probablistic token was with the prior n tokens being present, which really has nothing to do with the perceived correctness of the output.
by wolrah | 2025-08-22 13:32:31+00:00
> You can avoid this by not buying a home that is covered by a HOA.

In many areas these either do not exist or are limited to only older construction. I haven't seen a single '90s or newer neighborhood in my home shopping that didn't have one.

Developers love the stupid things because it allows them greater control over how the neighborhood looks to potential buyers while they're still selling lots, and they're mandatory for new developments in some areas where the local government (reasonably) doesn't want to take on more road/utility/etc maintenance but isn't willing to actually stop sprawl.

> Snark aside, it's clear this guy hasn't thought out how condos will operate without a HOA. Going after SFH HOAs may be the best initial play here.

Someone else noted that in Florida the term "HOA" specifically refers to the kind affecting single-family homes. Condos have "COAs" apparently.
by pydry | 2025-08-22 13:32:31+00:00
Hopefully theyll all become plumbers or schoolteachers or something.

There's a glut of junior dev talent and not enough real problems out there which a junior can apply themselves to.

This means that most of them simply arent able to get the kind of experience which will push them into the next skill bracket.

It used to be that you could use them to build cheap proofs of concept or self contained scripting but those are things AI doesnt actually suck too badly at. Even back then there were too many juniors and not enough roles though.
by sfn42 | 2025-08-22 13:32:48+00:00
As a developer I work closely with my managers and designers etc to ensure that our project goes smoothly and that we create a good product. I don't necessarily decide what we build but I have a lot of ways to influence what we build and how.

We talk about stuff, we plan stuff, I chip in and people listen. Whenever I see devs complaining about how terrible their project management is I think to myself that the dev is probably at least partially responsible.

Maybe I'm just lucky to have good colleagues, but when I talk about software engineering topics people listen and take it seriously. I think that's a big part of our job as developers, we know the tech and we guide our managers just as they guide us. We're a team, we work together.
by ptsneves | 2025-08-22 13:33:05+00:00
> These juniors you're complaining about are going to get better in making these requests of AI and blow right past all the seniors who yell at clouds running AI.

I agree with your comment up to a point, but this is pretty similar to pilots and autopilots. At the end of the day you still need a pilot to figure out non standard issues and make judgement calls.

The junior blowing past is as good as how long he will take to fix this issue that all the credits/prompts in the world are not solving. If the impact is long and costs enough your vibe coders will have good instantaneous speed but never reach the end.

I am optimist about AI usage as a tool to enhance productivity, but the workflows are still being worked out. It currently is neither fire all devs, nor No LLM allowed. It is definitely an exciting time to be a senior though :)
by esafak | 2025-08-22 13:33:22+00:00
There is an attribution problem because we don't see the interaction the engineer had with the AI before submitting the work. Maybe the prompt was good, and there was a back-and-forth as the user found mistakes and asked for corrections. Maybe not. We are left to guess. A user who does not steer the AI adds no value at best, and likely makes things worse by creating work for others. There is a product opportunity here for coding agents to check in this work with something like `git notes`. This helps users claim the value they add.
by mjmas | 2025-08-22 13:33:38+00:00
There is Russ Cox's QArt coder [1] that does actually make the code match an image by manipulating the padding (it works by adding a #<padding> on the end). That is a fair bit closer to 'intelligently merged with the QR code's essential data'.

[1]: https://research.swtch.com/qr/draw/
by singularity2001 | 2025-08-22 13:33:51+00:00
That's why there is the Goo language: Go with syntactic sugar and batteries included

https://github.com/pannous/goo/

• errors handled by truthy if or try syntax • all 0s and nils are falsey • #if PORTABLE put(";}") #end • modifying! methods like "hi".reverse!() • GC can be paused/disabled • many more ease of use QoL enhancements
by immibis | 2025-08-22 13:33:55+00:00
You'd be surprised how low the capacity of a lot of internet links is. 10Gbps is common on smaller networks - let me rephrase that, a small to medium ISP might only have 10Gbps to each of most of their peering partners. Normally, traffic is distributed, going to different places, coming from different places, and each link is partially utilized. But unusual patterns can fill up one specific link.

10Gbps is old technology now and any real ISP can probably afford 40 or 100 - for hundreds of dollars per link. But they're going to deploy that on their most utilized links first, and only if their peering partner can also afford it and exchanges enough traffic to justify it. So the smallest connections are typically going to be 10. (Lower than 10 is too small to justify a point-to-point peering at all).

If you have 10Gbps fiber at home, you could congest one of these links all by yourself.

Now this is Cloudflare talking to aws-east-1, so they should have shitloads of capacity there, probably at least 8x100 or more. But considering that AWS is the kind of environment where you can spin up 800 servers for a few hours to perform a massively parallel task, it's not surprising that someone did eventually create 800Gbps of traffic to the same place, or however much they have. Actually it's surprising it doesn't happen more often. Perhaps that's because AWS charges an arm and a leg for data transfer - 800Gbps is $5-$9 per second.
by ndriscoll | 2025-08-22 13:34:06+00:00
Design reviews don't mean you don't write code first. We have a change that we're about to put through security review right now to special case TLS handling when talking to some older clients, but before we put a proposal forward, I validated that the core idea will actually work and that we can heavily restrict the scope of what the change applies to by writing the code and tests to do it. Meetings and asking multiple people to read through and provide feedback on documents very quickly racks up hours. Best to spend an hour or two first validating that what you're proposing isn't nonsense. This lets us be very specific about what the problem is, what the proposed solution is, and what the risks are.

With data classification, you're going to need to think through what data you are using and what you want to do with it. i.e. write a program.

I didn't claim class structure or indentation matters. I'm saying that assuming you are discussing some sort of algorithm or functionality, a formal language is a perfectly fine thing to use for thinking about the problem and writing down your ideas. Writing "what it actually does and how it does it" is just programming. If you write your ideas in a language like Scala, they can easily be more concise (so easier to review) than they would be in English, and you get a compiler helping you think through things.
by shusson | 2025-08-22 13:34:07+00:00
The majority of software engineers today, (mostly in big tech) are not interested in software engineering. They studied it to make money. This happened before LLMs. Add the fact that software development isn’t deterministic. And you have a perfect storm of chaos.

But our discipline has been through similar disruptions in the past. I think give it a few years then maybe we’ll settle on something sane again.

I do think the shift is permanent though. Either you adapt to use these LLMs well or you will struggle to be competitive (in general)
by mrtranscendence | 2025-08-22 13:34:33+00:00
Waar heb je het over? "Welgelegen Buitenrust Nooitgedacht Rustenburg" is volkomen cromulent Engels.

For what it's worth, I do use AI for language learning, though I'm not sure it's the best idea. Primarily for helping translate German news articles into English and making vocabulary flashcards; it's usually clear when the AI has lost the plot and I can correct the translation by hand. Of course, if issues were more subtle then I probably wouldn't catch them ...
by quectophoton | 2025-08-22 13:34:49+00:00
> The only real problem is that you can’t feature-detect share_target support

I didn't know this existed, so the first thing I did is check the caniuse website, and yeah not even they have info about the Web Share Target API[1][2]. As of writing this comment, they only have info about the Web Share API[3].

[1]: https://github.com/Fyrd/caniuse/issues/4670

[2]: https://github.com/Fyrd/caniuse/issues/4906

[3]: https://caniuse.com/web-share
by mfenniak | 2025-08-22 13:34:58+00:00
Not really.

If a program is built with strong software architecture, then a lot of it will fit that definition. As an analogy, electricity in your home is delivered by electrical outlets that are standardized -- you can have high confidence that when you buy a new electrical appliance, it can plug into those outlets and work. But someone had to design that standard and apply it universally to the outlets and the appliances. Software architecture within a program is about creating those standards on how things work and applying them universally. If you do this well, then yes, you can have a lot of code that is testable and verifiable.

But you'll always have side-effects. Programs do things -- they create files, they open network connections, they communicate with other programs, they display things on the screen. Some of those side-effects create "state" -- once a file is created, it's still present. These things are much harder to test because they're not just a function with an input and an output -- their behavior changes between the first run and the second run.
by arp242 | 2025-08-22 13:35:04+00:00
Years ago Quillette claimed to have objective factual proof that Conservatives were being oppressed on Twitter with a data-driven approach. Alright, sounds good, so let's take a look. And ... their data includes shining examples of conservatism such as the American Nazi Party. It continues with more upstanding citizens such as David Duke, Richard Spencer, and similar. Such poor oppressed conservatives.
by qualeed | 2025-08-22 13:35:25+00:00
>It all depends on who was elected and who votes.

If I had to pick one thing I dislike the most about HOAs, it would be this. There is never a guarantee that your quiet HOA will remain that way in the future. Which, to me, seems like a crazy chance to take.

>we have a shared park, community space, and where I live lots of irrigation.

This is where my confusion comes in. My local government handles this sort of stuff. But I understand that we (as countries) have different thoughts on governments and their responsibilities.
by firesteelrain | 2025-08-22 13:35:26+00:00
We have a reserve study completed by a professional company that requires us to hold this much. For example, we are replacing two AC units for $50k total. Pool needs to be resurfaced for $100k. We have roof repairs that will need to be done eventually, gym equipment replacements, various beautification repairs, weir repair ($250k), fish guards/blockers, pond maintenance etc
by giancarlostoro | 2025-08-22 13:35:29+00:00
What's really funny to me is, sometimes it fixes itself if you just ask "are you SURE ABOUT THIS ANSWER?" myself and others often wonder, why the heck don't they run a 2nd model to "proofread" output or spot check it. Like did you actually answer the question or are you going off a really weird tangent.

I asked Perplexity some question for sample UI code for Rust / Slint, it gave me a beautiful web UI, I think it got confused because I wanted to make a UI for an API that has its own web UI, I told it you did NOT give me code for Slint, even though some of its output made references to "ui.slint" and other Rust files, it realized its mistake and gave me exactly what I wanted to see.

tl;dr why dont llms just vet themselves with a new context window to see if they actually answered the question? The "reasoning" models don't always reason.
by nailer | 2025-08-22 13:35:30+00:00
> different how?

Constantly disputed since the partition of India.

> India should ignore US support of a nation that sends terrorists to target their civilans... but should proactively care about a war happening thousands of miles from them?

Straw man. India should care about both. Get the US to pressure Pakistan and ensure the US knows the expense of not buying Russian oil and that is covered by tariffs.

I still think India is better off choosing to make iPhones than buying Russian oil.