MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gspencley | 2025-08-05 17:04:53+00:00
> making tests

What I'm about to discuss is about me, not you. I have no idea what kind of systems you build, what your codebase looks like, use case, business requirements etc. etc. etc. So it is possible writing tests is a great application for LLMs for you.

In my day to day work... I wish that developers where I work would stop using LLMs to write tests.

The most typical problem with LLM-generated tests on the codebase where I work is that the test code is almost extremely tightly coupled to the implementation code. Heavy use of test spies is a common anti-pattern. The result is a test suite that is testing implementation details, rather than "user-facing" behaviour (user could be a code-level consumer of the thing you are testing).

The problem with that type of a test is that is a fragile test. One of the key benefits of automated tests is that they give you a safety net to refactor implementation to your heart's content without fear of having broken something. If you change an implementation detail, and the "user-facing" behaviour does not change, your tests should pass. When tests are tightly coupled to implementation, they will fail and now your tests, in the worst of cases, might actually be creating negative value for you ... since you every code change now requires you to keep tests up to date even when what you actually care about testing "is this thing working correctly?" hasn't changed.

The root of this problem isn't even the LLM, it's just that the LLM makes it a million times worse. Developers often feel like writing tests are a menial chore that needs to be done after the fact to satisfy code coverage policy. Few developers, at many organizations, have ever truly worked TDD or learned testing best practices, how to write easy to test implementation code etc.
by spankalee | 2025-08-05 17:05:00+00:00
I think it was two things:

1) The original web components proponents[1] there were very heavily into "vanilla" web components. Web components are low-level APIs and just don't have the ergonomics of frameworks without a library to help. For a few elements built by a few true believers, this is ok, but when you scale it out to every component in a complex app with company-wide teams you need the ergonomics and consistency-setting of a declarative and reactive API.

2) The GitHub Next team built their work in React because they required the ergonomics to move fast and they were operating independently from the production app teams. I think the first thing of theirs to be integrated was Projects, and they could probably show that their components had much better DX. Starting from the ergonomics argument, the hiring argument would take hold.

I've seen this happen a few times where web components teams believe that the whole point of them is to not have to use dependencies, hamstring themselves by not using a helper library on that principle, and then get web components as a whole replaced for a proprietary framework in search of ergonomics. If they had used an ergonomic web component helper library, they could have stuck with them.

The irony is that these transitions are usually way easier than a framework-to-framework migration because of web component's inherent interoperability. I still consider that a plus for web components: morally and pratically, technologies should be as easy as possible to migrate away from.

[1] GitHub was so into web components that they regularly sent representatives to W3C meetings to work on them, but a lot of the original team has left the company over the last 10 years.
by 0xTJ | 2025-08-05 17:05:11+00:00
As an interesting example of the opposite UI experience, this video goes into why the McMaster-Carr website is so incredibly snappy to use: https://youtu.be/-Ln-8QM8KhQ.

It's different from GitHub in many ways (no user-generated content, day-by-day mostly static pages), but it's interesting to see how good a browsing experience can be. It makes sense given that their value as a company depends so much on making it quick and easy to find exactly what you need.
by munificent | 2025-08-05 17:05:15+00:00
Compare the Redmonk rankings in 2020 to 2025:

https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2020/02/28/language-rankings-1-2...

https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2025/06/18/language-rankings-1-2...

I think of languages as falling in roughly 3 popularity buckets:

1. A dominant conservative choice. These are ones you never have to justify to your CTO, the "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" languages. That's Java, Python, etc.

2. A well-known but deliberate choice. These are the languages where there is enough ecosystem and knowledge to be able to justify choosing them, but where doing so still feels like a deliberate engineering choice with some trade-offs and risk. Or languages where they are a dominant choice in one domain but less so in others. Ruby, Scala, Swift, Kotlin.

3. Everything else. These are the ones you'd have to fight to use professionally. They are either new and innovative or old and dying.

In 2020, Haskell was close to Kotlin, Rust, and Dart. They were in the 3rd bucket but their vector pointed towards the second. In 2025, Kotlin and Dart have pulled ahead into the second bucket, but Haskell is moving in the other direction. It's behind Perl, and Perl itself is not exactly doing great.

None of this is to say that Haskell is a bad language. There are many wonderful languages that aren't widely used. Popularity is hard and hinges on many extrinsic factors more than the merits of the language itself. Otherwise JavaScript wouldn't be at the top of the list.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-08-05 17:05:29+00:00
I don't think the junior developer comparison holds up too well ...

1) The junior developer is able to learn from experience and feedback, and has a whole brain to use for this purpose. You may have to provide multiple pointers, and it may take them a while to settle into the team and get productive, but sooner or later they will get it, and at least provide a workable solution if not what you may have come up with yourself (how much that matters depends on how wisely you've delegated tasks to them). The LLM can't learn from one day to the next - it's groundhog day every day, and if you have to give up with the LLM after 20 attempts it'd be the exact same thing tomorrow if you were so foolish to try again. Companies like Anthropic apparently aren't even addressing the need for continual learning, since they think that a larger context with context compression will work as an alternative, which it won't ... memory isn't the same thing as learning to do a task (learning to predict the actions that will lead to a given outcome).

2) The junior developer, even if they are only marginally useful to begin with, will learn and become proficient, and the next generation of senior developer. It's a good investment training junior developers, both for your own team and for the industry in general.
by ptorrone | 2025-08-05 17:05:41+00:00
@ryukoposting - i am the founder of hackaday, but do not run the site now, and i am also the managing director of adafruit and editor of the adafruit blog. the adafruit does not use generative text, etc. unless clearly indicated https://www.adafruit.com/editorialstandards ... appreciate a correction to your post, hard to combat misinformation with ai, but you can email and i can prove i am human if ya want... pt at adafruit dot com
by roboboffin | 2025-08-05 17:05:44+00:00
Depends what you mean by creativity. In some ways, AI is not creative at all, everything is generated by mapping text to visuals using diffusion modelling via a shared latent space. It has no agency or creative thought of its own.

Humans have demonstrated time and again, even things beyond our experience can be explored by us; quantum mechanics for example. Humans find a way to map very complex subjects to our own experience using analogy. Maybe AI can help us go further by allowing us to do this on even more complex ideas.
by aaronius | 2025-08-05 17:05:58+00:00
Hmm, staying with iSCSI. You should create one large LUN that is available on each node. Then it is important to mark the LVM as "shared". This way, PVE knows that all nodes access the same LVM, so copying the disk images is not necessary on a live migration.

With such a setup, PVE will create LVs on the same VG for each disk image. So no handling of multiple VGs or LUNs is necessary.

The multipathing PVE wiki page lines out the whole process: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Multipath
by ashwinaj | 2025-08-05 17:06:02+00:00
Contrarian opinion: What exactly is the point of "fast" internet?

Most people use the internet for entertainment, people can survive watching Netflix at 1080p/720p, it isn't debilitating. If I'm wrong in my assessment, give me use cases where you require fast internet in a rural area.

If the question is cost, I don't see how laying fiber and equipment for hundreds, if not, thousands of miles is a solution to reducing cost (unless it's subsidized by the government).

Spending billions on mostly "entertainment" is a waste.
by autoexec | 2025-08-05 17:06:02+00:00
Today there are still cartoony cartoons like The Dragon Prince, Miraculous, and Bluey but generally the decline in animation quality because of "3D" is noticeable. I keep hoping that Disney will make a comeback and bring us more shows like amphibia, owl house, and gravity falls (Hailey's on it was pretty good too). Cartoon network had adventure time, steven universe, infinity train, over the garden wall, Craig of the creek, Iyanu, etc. Streaming services like netflix put out cartoons too like Kipo and Hilda.

The cartoon landscape is different now, but it's not gone and if you wanted to you could easily wake up early on a Saturday morning and binge great cartoons all day.
by whatshisface | 2025-08-05 17:06:24+00:00
That's not quite right. Academics do grow the pool through public outreach and demonstrating value to companies which lobby the government to fund them, but since there is usually one big pool (such as the NSF budget), it is impossible for people to grow their own pool directly. It's closer to working at a large company, where your impact on earnings is next to nonexistent and your career is determined by the beliefs of the people around you about your impacts on them.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-08-05 17:06:37+00:00
(IMHO) The correct way to limit "abuse", e.g., by "bots", is to rate limit. But as other commenters point out, Cloudflare routinely (and knowingly) blocks humans sending only a single GET request, e.g., with Javascript disabled. Needless to say, this does not exceed any reasonable rate limit. It is not "abuse". By Cloudflare's own admission, and as demonstrated by the case of Perplexity AI, this "bot protection" does not stop "bots".

It does stop any humans not using popular advertising-sponsored web browsers.
by thepryz | 2025-08-05 17:07:13+00:00
It’s easy and popular to hate on pop music, but even pop music has value and requires a certain skill to understand what resonates with people.

This is taking a monkeys on a typewriter approach to all music. Click a button, see what the monkeys made and then click another button to publish to Spotify while you figure out a way to either market the music or just game search and digital assistants by creating an artist with a similar or slightly misspelled name as someone popular. Rinse and repeat.
by mbirth | 2025-08-05 17:07:25+00:00
From what I can find, the original Wipr was released for iOS in Sep 2015 and the macOS version followed in Aug 2018.

Wipr 2 is a complete rewrite and was released in Nov 2024. So, in theory, for £1.99 you could've gotten 9 years of ad-blocking on iOS and for another £1.99 the same on macOS for 6 years.

And since this requires maintenance of the blocklists and associated code, I am totally fine with paying a small amount once every few years. And I'm not even forced to pay as the older versions usually continue to run - albeit on life support.
by nathan_compton | 2025-08-05 17:07:26+00:00
This is a weird way to think of it, making it seem as thought its just a matter of chance whether the founder is right or not. The difference, if there is one, is that some founders can pivot when they see their approach won't work or, at least, throw in the towel before people die or too much many is wasted.

Maybe that makes them bad startup founders? I don't know. In my opinion "Startup Founder" is a role which should play second to "ethical human being."
by bayindirh | 2025-08-05 17:07:32+00:00
> That is a great way to view it, thank you.

You're welcome. I'm glad it helped.

> I want to run a JS-free blog, just plain old static HTML.

If you want to start fast until you find a template you want to work with, I can recommend Mataroa [0]. The blog have almost no JS (it binds a couple of keys for navigation, that's it), and it's $10/year. When you feel right in your self-hosted solution, you can move there. It's all Markdown at the end of the day.

> I plan to use GoAccess to parse the access logs but that's it.

That's the only thing I use, too. Nothing else.

If you want to look at what I do, how I do, and reach out to me, the rabbit hole starts from my profile, here.

Wish you all the best, and you may find bliss and joy you never dreamed of!

[0]: https://www.mataroa.blog
by hcurtiss | 2025-08-05 17:07:36+00:00
As a relatively long-time Kagi user (March of 2022) I would encourage people to give their LLM aggregator, Kagi Assistant, a try. It won't suffice for everyone, but having access to all of the major LLMs is super useful to me. With one subscription, you can have premium search and an excellent LLM aggregator that cites sources using Kagi search. It's pretty rad. Both my wife and I pay for Ultimate subscriptions, and we have child accounts for our daughters.
by cootsnuck | 2025-08-05 17:07:44+00:00
I think you raise a good point. But I also think you're talking past OP's point.

The post is about what do we lose when we no longer have human intent behind interpersonal communication.

Nowhere did OP specifically say what labor they were for or against partial or full automation. That's a different conversation that it seems you really want to have.
by peterfirefly | 2025-08-05 17:07:52+00:00
The DC-X was stupid, dumb, insane, bunkers, and a waste of money and not replicable.

"sure, let's put four RL-10 hydrogen engines on it! They are expensive and the worst possible for the low-altitude flights we are going to do so some sucker will believe we can do multi-stage reusable flights to orbit".

"sure, we don't actually need to go to orbit anyway. That was always a dumb idea. Who said we ever wanted to do that? No, suborbital is really useful, we promise. And we are going to do it with a single stage (using hydrogen) cuz we are so smart and the future and everything!"

"sure, let's build a specialized hydrogen tank in a stupid shape."

"sure, let's give the whole single-stage low-altitude rocket a k00l shape that makes it more expensive."

"People knowing it can't be done shouldn't interrupt people doing it wrong."
by dmurray | 2025-08-05 17:08:05+00:00
This doesn't sound true given what we know about asymmetric warfare in general. What if we discovered the object really was an artillery shell sent to destroy us, but the civilization at the other end only has the resources to fire one every ten years with an accuracy of 1% to hit the Earth?

We might be like a primitive tribe facing an attacker with battleships - a technology that might as well be magic, but still one we can adapt to by abandoning the seafront village and retreating into the jungle.
by mooreds | 2025-08-05 17:08:28+00:00
Interesting approach! (Full disclosure, I work for a Stytch competitor.)

Some initial thoughts:

* nice to ship an OSS version and I appreciated that the OSS limits were clearly called out (only supports node, 1MB limit on XML payload size, you have to update it regularly)

* the docs were helpful and it's great they provide a bad saml response to test with https://samlshield.com/examples/unsigned_saml_response.txt

* critically important to understand that a solution like this isn't the whole enchilada (and they declare that a couple of places): "important to enforce critical checks such as strict Audience and Issuer validation" from https://samlshield.com/docs/get-started-open-source So this isn't a set -and-forget solution.

* if you use the proxy ( https://samlshield.com/docs/get-started-proxy ), it won't be able to check encrypted SAML assertions (how could it, it won't have the key)

* you should definitely read the security coverage page to see what it helps with and what it does not: https://samlshield.com/docs/security-coverage

* replay attacks better protected against by using unique identifiers and invalidating when you've seen one before (they just check for time based validity). But I get that's hard to do with a proxy!

* great to see a transparent pricing page! https://samlshield.com/pricing

I'm all for improving security. SAML unfortunately is going to be around for a long long time and the protocol won't see any updates. This seems like a good step forward in examining SAML requests/responses, even if there are limits to the proxy approach.
by throwawaymaths | 2025-08-05 17:08:36+00:00
i just don't get why people say they don't reason. It's crazy talk. the kv cache is effectively a unidirectional turing machine so it should be possible to encode "reasoning" in there. and evidence shows that llms occasionally does some light reasoning. just because it's not great at it (hard to train for i suppose) doesn't mean it does it zero.
by podgietaru | 2025-08-05 17:08:40+00:00
99.99% of people, really? You think there isn't a huge swath of the economy that are made up of professional writers, artists, musicians, graphic designers, and all the other creative professionals that the producers of these models aim to replicate the skills of?

Why am I so "hung up" on the livelihood of these people?

Doing art is a Hobby is a good in and of itself. I did not say otherwise. But when I see a movie, when I listen to a song, I want to appreciate the integrity and talent of the people that wrote them. I want them to get paid for that enjoyment. I don't think that's bizarre.
by smileysteve | 2025-08-05 17:08:44+00:00
This particular ice cream had 17g of sugar, but the sweetened Greek yogurt (Greek gods vanilla) had 23g!

Both for ⅔ cup

Other factors, 7g protein in yogurt (4g in ice cream), 2g dietary fiber in ice cream (cookie crumble) 0g in yogurt, 3.5g fat in ice cream 0g in yogurt
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-08-05 17:08:48+00:00
That is such ridiculous nonsense, but par for the "every time something happens that I disagree with, it must be because of bias/cabal/conspiracy on the other side" course that you see everywhere in online discourse these days.

"pro-Israel narrative"??? On HN? You must be reading a different site.

While I didn't flag this, it's really not hard to see how (a) there is nothing about it that is relevant to tech, hacking or entrepreneurship, but more importantly (b) it's the topic that predictably leads to a dumpster fire of comments.
by dwheeler | 2025-08-05 17:09:19+00:00
> The thing that I find amazing about this sub, is that the final hull survived all those trips, and then before the final one let everyone know it was toast, and Stockton ignored it. He was careless with peoples lives, but his sub actually did what he set out to do, and if he listened to the instruments, he'd still be alive...

I disagree. In fact, I think that's quite unlikely.

First, unlike a metal hull, carbon fiber hulls accumulate subtle damage on compression that's hard to detect. Then, when they fail, they tend to fail catastrophically. So "this hull worked before" isn't evidence of success in this case, as it normally would be, it's evidence that you're getting closer & closer to the disaster.

Second, I think Stockton would have just kept diving, even if this event hadn't failed. He might have even gotten more reckless (though per the report he was already extremely reckless). If you keep playing Russian Roulette, and occasionally add another bullet, eventually the game will end. There is no evidence he was going to stop until he was killed by his own decisions.

None of this takes away the tragedy of it. It's sad, and will remain so.
by two-sandwich | 2025-08-05 17:09:24+00:00
If you consider that Entertainment gives the viewer what they want, and art intends to challenge, none of what's created here is "art". It doesn't push boundaries, create new genres, or satisfy an uncomfortable curiosity.

The tech here is fantastic. I love that such things are possible now and they're an exciting frontier in creation.

It's very dystopian to feel that the robots are making generic human-music with indescribably lifeless properties. I'm not an artist, so I don't feel personally attacked. Much like image gen, this seems to be aimed at replacing the bare-minimum artist (visual or auditory) with a "fill in the blanks" entertainment piece.
by lenerdenator | 2025-08-05 17:09:28+00:00
> Most people use the internet for entertainment, people can survive watching Netflix at 1080p/720p, it isn't debilitating. If I'm wrong in my assessment, give me use cases where you require fast internet in a rural area.

Lots of desire for more automation and data surrounding agriculture, for starters.

More generally, people work through internet applications. If you want to check your email, type up a document, have Zoom calls, etc., you need to do so through the internet. If you don't have fast internet, you can count on being less productive.
by x187463 | 2025-08-05 17:09:29+00:00
Seems to be a significant number of people who have deemed LLM responses 'good enough' and completely dropped search engines altogether. I would imagine that works fine for people whose queries are simple and/or the accuracy of the result is not actually important. We may be discovering many people just wanted Google to tell them what they want to hear and LLMs are much better at that than scanning a handful of garbage Quora posts.
by WorldMaker | 2025-08-05 17:09:33+00:00
The article addresses this pretty well.

Quick summary: Hack used $$ (aka T_BLING) as the implicit parameter in a pipeline. That wasn't accepted as much fun as the name T_BLING can be. PHP looked for a solution and started looking for a Partial Function Application syntax they were happy with. That effort mostly deadlocked (though they hope to return to it) except for syntax some_function(...) for an unapplied function (naming a function without calling it).

Seems like an interesting artifact of PHP functions not being first class objects. I wish them luck on trying to clean up their partial application story further.
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-05 17:09:42+00:00
I think it's not ideal in the same way that plastics don't belong in an automotive engine bay and concrete doesn't belong" in tension. Add a little bit of fancy chemistry or some steel and fancy math and they both work fine for cheap.

With care and engineering trickery CF in a submersible (compression) probably can work. They still managed to make a few good dives with it despite comically bad decisions in just about every key area. The manufacturing process was primitive, the QC basically nonexistent and procedures didn't make any allocations for the materials (they beat on the thing like it was made of steel). Imagine what a well funded company with experience in CF, robust QC and careful operating procedures could do.
by deadbabe | 2025-08-05 17:09:51+00:00
What you just said about free-climbing is perfectly applicable to building something solo. Except unlike climbing solo, building a product is easier because you could get support the whole way. Also you won’t die if you fail.

You should never expect enthusiasm to last. How many people are just as enthusiastic about going to the gym for years compared to when they first start out? These are all the things people need to realize before embarking on these solo journeys.

You may not like it, but if a person was drowning and they actually do start to “just swim better”, they will survive. Just do what you need to do.