MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dingnuts | 2025-08-30 19:17:11+00:00
If you want them to not make shit up, you have to load up the context with exactly the docs and code references that the request needs. This is not a trivial process and ime it can take just as long as doing stuff manually a lot of the time, but tools are improving to aid this process and if the immediate context contains everything the model needs it won't hallucinate any worse than I do when I manually enter code (but when I do it, I call it a typo)

there is a learning curve, it reminds me of learning to use Google a long time ago
by opan | 2025-08-30 19:17:29+00:00
I can never seem to tell fonts apart or appreciate them unless they're bitmap fonts. I love a sharp, crisp, clean font. I can tell apart Terminus, Tewi, and Lemon. Everything else just falls into a blurry "other" category, it seems, unless it's very highly stylized. I had high expectations opening this article and then was kinda like "Where's the font? Is he using it in those screenshots? Looks pretty normal".
by s1mplicissimus | 2025-08-30 19:19:06+00:00
Exactly the expectation value for "analysis of types of developers done by people who really don't care about people"

"so, there's 3 boxes. no more, no less. why? i have a gut feeling. axis? on a case by case basis. am i willing to put my money where my mouth is? heallnaw!"
by bofadeez | 2025-08-30 19:19:12+00:00
Psychometrics has clear value. Cognitive ability predicts academic/job performance (Schmidt & Hunter 1998, Psych Bull), and standardized tests reliably forecast college outcomes (Kuncel, Hezlett & Ones 2004, Science). Conscientiousness adds further predictive power (Poropat 2009, Psych Bull). The science is robust. The issue is the discomfort it causes, not lack of benefit or predictive power.
by toast0 | 2025-08-30 19:19:37+00:00
It's not just kernel development. In the lwn thread, he mentioned and then demonstrated difficulty working with Debian developers as well.

IMHO, what his communications show is an unwillingness to acknowledge that other projects that include his work have focus, priorities, and policies that are not the same as that of his project. Also, expecting exceptions to be made for his case, since exceptions have been made in other cases.

Again IMHO, I think he would be better off developing apart with an announcement mailing list. When urgent changes are made, send to the announcement list. Let other interested parties sort out the process of getting those changes into the kernel and distributions.

If people come with bug reports from old versions distributed by others, let them know how to get the most up to date version from his repository, and maybe gently poke the distributors.

Yes, that means users will have older versions and not get fixes immediately. But what he's doing isn't working to get fixes to users immediately either.
by 1dom | 2025-08-30 19:19:48+00:00
From the article:

> All too often, we end up creating lots of shallow modules, following some vague "a module should be responsible for one, and only one, thing" principle.

This is what I'm talking about: this writing is too smart for me, because I can't take any simple answers from it like "modularity" without feeling another part of the article contradicts it with other smart sounding ways of saying don't listen to smart stuff.
by GMoromisato | 2025-08-30 19:19:50+00:00
Honestly, four hours spent programming is my idea of heaven.

I totally agree with you that most people should not implement their own XML parser, much less an Excel importer. But I'm grateful to have the luxury of being allowed/able to do both.

The specific choice I made doesn't matter. What matters is the process of deciding trade-offs between one approach and another.

My point is that the OP advice of "do the simplest thing that could possibly work" doesn't help a junior engineer (who doesn't have the experience to evaluate the trade-off) but it's superfluous for a senior engineer (who already has well-developed instincts).
Show HN: Tool that helps you find domains for your idea
by penttinen | 2025-08-30 19:20:25+00:00
I built a simple tool that suggests good domain names based on your idea, something I usually spend way too long on myself. It's free, no sign-up needed, 5 searches / day (a bit wonky, working on that part).

Mainly built it for myself but would love some feedback and tips for improvement! :)

Thanks!
by SilverElfin | 2025-08-30 19:20:45+00:00
Shocking. Not only did Trump play no part in de-escalating the conflict between India and Pakistan but he wanted both sides to support his bid for a Nobel peace prize? Shameless.

But also - the implication is that the current trade war with India and high tariffs of 50% are a result of Modi refusing to support Trump’s Nobel peace prize bid. Who would throw away decades of relationship building with India that others before worked hard on? And he’s also destroying the chance of an alliance with the most important partner America could have in this century. Especially to compete with China.

In other words, Trump may have destroyed the chance of sustaining an American hegemony for his own ego. But probably most Americans don’t realize this.
by holysoles | 2025-08-30 19:20:53+00:00
Great read. At my last job, everything was quite monolithic when I joined, and I led the crusade to move to more segmented, module-driven development. There was definitely a period where I eventually swung too far in that direction and only realized it after a dependency issue led to an escalation.

Hopefully someone can learn from this before they spin a complex web that becomes a huge effort to untangle.
Show HN: Yet another daily word game – wotd
by szidev | 2025-08-30 19:21:00+00:00
Howdy HN. I wanted an excuse to do some lightweight JS/TS development and to get reacquainted with the Cloudflare stack, so I put together a daily word game. It's partially inspired by NYT's Spelling Bee and Wordle. The main goal is to find a specific word each day that uses each provided letter at least once. There's a secondary goal of finding as many words as possible. Right now progress is all stored on-device, but in the future I might add leaderboards or other competitive elements. Hope y'all enjoy!
by germandiago | 2025-08-30 19:21:31+00:00
Depending on the task the most effective way I found sometimes is a hand-written paper stuck on a wall.

Why so? It is always in front of you, it reminds you what you need to do and does not get out of sight, which helps keep the focus.

When you bury it or set it somewhere else it is very easy to bury it.
by fullstackwife | 2025-08-30 19:22:23+00:00
"Workflow" is the aspect we should try to eliminate, and a LLM+VM combo allows you to do that. Workflow means you provide tools to the LLM, and ask to make use of them to achieve the goal. This works well already, but it fails whenever an unusual problem appears that is not covered by your predefined set of tools. Another issue is that the workflow based approach is always linear even if it is a DAG, or even if you have some kind of loop.

The next step is to not provide any tools to the LLM, and ask it to invent them on-the-fly. Some problems need to be brute-forced.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-08-30 19:22:57+00:00
Good thought, but corporations don't care, and a whole lot of folks that play the corporate game won't, either. Money will still be made. Careers will still be advanced.

It think it was Theodore Sturgeon that said "90% of everything is crap."

For myself, I enjoy what I do. I write software that I want to use, in a way that makes me feel good.

I have no illusions that I would be allowed to work like this, if I were still in the workforce, though.
by throwboy2047 | 2025-08-30 19:23:03+00:00
My first month at Amazon someone reported me for laughing at them…I didn’t even know they existed, on the other end of the open floor. I was laughing at something completely unrelated.

That made me really think about how fragile and toxic people can be.

Another Amazonian almost got fired for reacting with a monkey covering eyes emoji to a post shared by a black person (no malintent, of course, just an innocent “mistake” most normal people wouldn’t even think twice about).
by beacon473 | 2025-08-30 19:23:38+00:00
LLMs are decent at providing feedback and validation. I often have few sources of that from humans, and long periods without it are bad for my motivation and sense of well-being.

LLMs filling that hole is great if it's done in discrete and intermittent bumps. TFA shows the psychological risks of binging on artificial validation.

All things in moderation, especially LLMs.
by latexr | 2025-08-30 19:24:00+00:00
> Amanda

Am I missing a reference? If not, may I suggest “Ada”?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace

Or even better, “Grace”. Seems to fit your description better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYqF6-h9Cvg
by prerok | 2025-08-30 19:24:01+00:00
Indeed and I have seen it happen many times in my career.

Shoehorning things into working systems is something I have seen juniors do. I have also seen "seniors" do this, but in my view, they are still juniors with more years working on the same code base.

I have once heard it described as "n-years of 1 year experiences". In other words, such a person never learns that program design space must continuously be explored and that recurrence of bugs in the same part of code usually means that a different design is required. They never learn that cause of the bug was not that particular change that caused the unintended side effect but that the fact that there is a side effect is a design bug onto its own.

I do agree, though, that TFA may be proposing sticking with simpler design for longer than advisable.
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-08-30 19:25:09+00:00
On scientific front, it's very useful. Its use outside of academia is has however been very problematic.

There are studies that empirically measure drop change cognitive ability from lead poising, oxygen deprivation, sleep deprecation, post-burnout, environment distraction, noise pollution, temperature, aging, drug and alcohol use during puberty, smoking, school teaching style, etc. etc.

Notable is that these are either population metrics or compare each individual with themselves. This is what IQ and other similar tests were meant for. Comparing one person with another is nonsensical and a flawed use of these metrics.

This is where where IQ has fallen and become a rather bad metric. People are familiar with the problems scewing results. IQ test performance and education level is highly correlated, which is supposed to be compensated for in the final score. But poor education quality in certain regions make the statistics easily used to argue quite unsavory ideas.
by toast0 | 2025-08-30 19:25:57+00:00
Backups are great, but don't help much if you backup corrupted data.

You can certainly add verification above and below your filesystem, but the filesystem seems like a good layer to have verification. Capturing a checksum while writing and verifying it while reading seems appropriate; zfs scrub is a convenient way to check everything on a regular basis. Personally, my data feels important enough to make that level of effort, but not important enough to do anything else.
by opan | 2025-08-30 19:26:23+00:00
This reminds me, I wanted the class of device that an iPod Touch falls into to be called "nano tablets" for a while in the early 2010s. It bugged me that it was basically a "phone" without the phone part. I hate to think you can only call something by its official branded name. Also, if you're using an actual phone without a SIM, it feels similarly silly to call it a phone.

That being said, I don't recall if anyone else did make something quite like an iPod Touch, and now it's dead as well.
by jama211 | 2025-08-30 19:26:42+00:00
I mean, they could just as easily hire a bad candidate that happened to cram that specific interview knowledge the day before but is otherwise a bad developer.

Personally I don’t agree with the crazy tech interviews at all, no other job on the planet does it like this, even high skill jobs like doctors or professors. They hire based on your experience, your references, and a good chat to make sure you’d be a culture fit. If there’s a serious problem with a doctor once they start the job, they’d be let go, but they’re professionals so this isn’t a super common occurrence.

The exact same process could be taken with developers IMO. If I have a seasoned career, you should hire me based on that, not because I jumped through hoops you set up.
by fsckboy | 2025-08-30 19:27:24+00:00
>i feel like a website like this goes against that

what do you mean "a website like this", HN? or the destination of the link at the top of this discussion?

The link for this discussion goes to the test on the same site that you link to.

Are you saying people need to make their way to that test from the front page of the site following particular breadcrumbs? that people from HN shouldn't go there till they're ready to participate in a scientific manner? i just don't understand your point...
by germandiago | 2025-08-30 19:28:01+00:00
I vote for Amanda. Really, there is no substitute for seeing something easy to understand.

I have been most of my career working with C++. You all may know C++ can be as complex as you want and even more clever.

Unless I really need it, and this is very few times, I always ask myself: will this code be easy to understand for others? And I avoid the clever way.
by socalgal2 | 2025-08-30 19:28:11+00:00
There is a return, it's disguised as "await"

*simplified*, the symantics of "await" are just syntactic sugar

const value = await someFunction() console.log(value);

is syntactic sugar for

return someFunction().then(function(value) { // this gets executed after the return IF // something else didn't remove all events like // loading a new page console.log(value); });
by creesch | 2025-08-30 19:28:27+00:00
> switch to brave

Fun suggestion to switch to a browser that has a company behind it that has pulled a lot of shady stuff related to ads and tracking. A company where privacy is more marketing than a core value.

Edit: Since people are going to ask anyway, here is an article that covers a lot of the shady stuff brave pulled https://thelibre.news/no-really-dont-use-brave/

If you are one of those folks who don't care about the political arguments, feel free to skip over paragraph one and two. Paragraph three till ten cover actual shady stuff done by brave the company itself.

There is one more thing I can add to the list, though it wasn't as widely published about. At some point the team behind Brave decided to implement browser extension support from scratch and only support specific extensions. Which sounds okay in theory until you realize how they did so. Without involving the extension creator they would fork a version of the extension and bake that into Brave. They did so without informing the extension creator, meanwhile users would still go to the extension creator for support who couldn't fix a thing.

Every time one of these things come up, the Brave team either is irked (but changes it anyway) or goes "oh, yeah we'll remove it in the future". This to me indicates a company culture where there is no thinking ahead about the impact of features or where they simply don't care as long as they aren't called out on it.

This consistent pattern over a period of years has, to me anyway, shown that issues such as privacy or even being user centered are not a core part of their thinking but merely a marketing gimmick.

And to be ahead of the curve on some other things I have heard people say over this. Just that Mozilla sucks doesn't mean alternatives can't be worse.
by impossiblefork | 2025-08-30 19:29:07+00:00
This is one of the most humiliating aspects of living here:

That the government is unwilling to genuinely protect its own interests, for example, by preventing ordinary people's data from leaking abroad or ensuring real internet privacy, because without these things we are so unbelievably vulnerable, not just to influence operations designed with this data, but they'll know literally the whole economic structure of the EU, how many people work where, where a particular person works, etc.

They're not even preventing foreign countries from getting access to bank transactions.

When they're denied they cry terrorism, but reality is that if you have this knowledge you can say 'Oh, impossibleFork just moved to X, and he's an expert in Y, he's probably doing Z and W. Let's hire some guys to try the exact same thing, so that it'll be a business here instead of there'.

I don't understand how a government can expect the country it governs to have an economy when it allows this kind of data leakage.
by 8note | 2025-08-30 19:29:58+00:00
i just had it do a "set up the company styled auth, following a few wikis and a lot of trial and error until you get to the right thing"

in the olden days, id imagine getting that right to take about a week and a half and something everyone hated about spinning up a new service

with the LLM, i gave it a feedback loop of being able to do an initial sign in, integration test running steps with log reading on the client side, and a deploy and log reading mechanism for the server side.

i was going to write out an over-seer-y script for another LLM to trigger the trial and error script, but i ended up just doing that myself. What i skipped was the needing to run any one of the steps, and instead i got nicely parsed errors, so i could go look for wikis on what parts of the auth process i was missing and feed in those wiki links and such to the trial and error bot. i skipped all the log reading/parsing to get to what the next actionable chunk is, and instead, i got to hang around in the sun for a bit while the LLM churned on test calls and edits.

im now on a cleanup step to turn the working code into nicely written code that id actually want commited, but getting to the working code stage took very little of my own effort; only the problem solving and learning about how the auth works
by vaxman | 2025-08-30 19:30:06+00:00
DoesHaveManyCasesOf80sMagazinesStackedFloorToCeilingForSeveralYards == YES They're part of the alternate universe before the series of unfortunate events (MFNforDaCCP, MS-DOS, FSF, PPP/MSRAS, The Sculley, The Gould, The Cutler, That Face and InfoSys) that left us in the current dystopia: Three trillion dollar what? who?

I'm afraid even https://jonudell.net couldn't save us.
by amiga386 | 2025-08-30 19:30:34+00:00
Problem one _is_ about AI.

It was a similar problem with cryptocurrencies. Out comes some kind of tech thingy, and a million get-rich-quick scammers pop out of the woodwork and start scamming left, right and center. Suddenly everyone's in on the hustle, everyone's cryptomining, or taking over computers and using them for cryptomining, they're setting the world on fire with electricity consumption through the roof just to fight against other people (who they wouldn't need to fight against if they'd just cooperate).

A vision. A gold rush. A massive increase in shitty human behaviour motivated by greed.

And now here we are again with AI. Massive interest. Trillions of dollars being sloshed around, everyone hustling to develop something so they'll get picked and flooded with cash. An enormous pile of deeply unethical and disrespectful behaviour by people who are doing what they're doing because that's where the money is. The AI bubble.
by opan | 2025-08-30 19:31:23+00:00
Thank you. I've been telling people this for years and mostly get treated like I'm crazy or told to try other browsers, but browsers are pretty personal and lived-in, I consider it quite uncomfortable to use a different one even to temporarily access a given site, and it always leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I am very comfortable in qutebrowser and I feel a bit disabled when I have to load up LibreWolf or Ungoogled Chromium. The vim addons don't help, they're not even half as good. Plus most sites I use regularly work fine, so when something I don't use often doesn't work right, I'm definitely blaming cloudflare or the site operator, not my browser that works fine otherwise.

Honestly, just let the bots or whatever through. It's absolutely ridiculous locking out real people who did nothing wrong.
by layer8 | 2025-08-30 19:31:23+00:00
My point is there’s a whole software stack that determines what character is actually output when you hit that key, based on locale and IME, and also depending on the application. You meant to indicate a specific character, but specifying a key is a bad way to do that. Keyboard controllers don’t work in terms of characters. I could easily configure my OS to output U+2010 HYPHEN for that key by default, for example, and might actually do that for a typesetting application.
by skibbityboop | 2025-08-30 19:33:40+00:00
Anecdotal but btrfs is the only filesystem I've lost data with (and it wasn't in a RAID configuration). That combined with the btrfs tools being the most aggressively bad management utilities out there* ensure that I'm staying with ext4/xfs/zfs for now.

*Coming from the extremely well thought out and documented zfs utilities to btrfs will have you wondering wtf fairly frequently while you learn your way around.
by Zigurd | 2025-08-30 19:34:24+00:00
I wrote the lawful intercept spec for a 3G GGSN node. So keep in mind that my knowledge of present day systems might be outdated. The spec was derived from pre-existing specifications for telephone equipment. One of the interesting things about lawful intercept is that it was supposed to hide from network management. Intercepts aren't logged at the network operator. The node being used in an intercept gives no indication that the intercept is happening.

IIRC the standard at the time was to enable intercepting up to 3% of traffic, without the surveillance target of course knowing, but also without their carrier knowing. Law-enforcement agencies used LI consoles on their own premises to order intercepts.

So it's not that lawful intercept was particularly easy to hack, it's that once it's compromised, detecting that it's being used nefariously is especially difficult. I would question whether anyone knows for sure when the compromise began, and how long it lasted.
by peterhunt | 2025-08-30 19:34:29+00:00
Let's see:

- Variable scoping https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/XML/XSLT/Refere...

- Function definition and application https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/XML/XSLT/Refere...

- Flow control https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/XML/XSLT/Refere...

- Loops https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/XML/XSLT/Refere...

- Module system https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/XML/XSLT/Refere...

Yep, it's a programming language. And not a great one!
by gadflyinyoureye | 2025-08-30 19:34:34+00:00
I haven't seen anyone talking about low T. My doctor has found that many millennials and z have T under 300. One of his patients was about to divorce because he didn't want sex. A San ball change in diet and exercise saved that marriage.

Now look at the world of singles. T increase risk taking. What if we have several generations of low T and therefore loss desire for risk. Let's exclude the modern reality of women posting men who approach them to social media as if they are creeps. No T means no risk taking.
by nharada | 2025-08-30 19:34:52+00:00
Yeah speed is definitely a weakness right now. One option is to switch the models around and try a faster one, that will probably give you some speed-up at the potential expense of accuracy. You can do that in the .skipperrc file. There's some gains to be made for prompting most likely, as well as in the Omniparser model.

A more future thing I'd like to do is have a model specifically for the action selection task which could be a much smaller network. That would really improve the latency.