MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by potamic | 2025-09-23 19:08:02+00:00
There are a lot of people declaring this, proclaiming that about working with AI, but nobody presents the details. Talk is cheap, show me the prompts. What will be useful is to check in all the prompts along with code. Every commit generated by AI should include a prompt log recording all the prompts that led to the change. One should be able to walkthrough the prompt log just as they may go through the commit log and observe firsthand how the code was developed.
by buremba | 2025-09-23 19:08:13+00:00
It's hard to believe customers are happy with it. I find it shady if you were to try all the cards I added to the product without my permission.

I'm okay with you sending me an email before you try, as long as explicit consent is given. However, if I don't care to change my primary card after the first attempt, that means I don't really care about continuing the subscription.

Happy to be wrong if you prove it with the data, though.
by leakycap | 2025-09-23 19:08:21+00:00
> things that happened over the course of over a decade

Bad things happening to contributors year after year for a decade shows a toxic community that doesn't change even over a long period of time

The latest harm is just the continuation of what has been happening since the beginning

> some of which are well resolved

Resolved? Decisions were made, but the tensions were never resolved and people were hurt.

> He left public programming [...] entirely.

Yeah. That's what happens when someone is destroyed after years of their hard work is treated like nothing.
by CalRobert | 2025-09-23 19:08:22+00:00
Believe it or not, parking reformists tend to agree! The fact we even have a parking "fine" indicates that it isn't really priced right; if you park somewhere you should just pay the market rate for doing so, whether it's for 30 minutes or 30 days.

The legendary Donald Shoup (who sadly died this year) https://www.shoupdogg.com/ - writes about this in The High Cost of Free Parking
by Dylan16807 | 2025-09-23 19:08:31+00:00
> The task at question. Seeing if "hyperlink" returns a case the citation.

So that's per citation? Then two minutes each is a waste of time for basic checking.

> who knows so much about the legal profession that they've never heard of LexisNexis, WestLaw, the Federal Reporter or the Blue Book.

This accusation is not supported by what they said.

> Legal citations are already a format you can plug into a legal database to get a result, so the idea that it'd be some sort of improvement to see if a citation actually exists when your AI makes up complete bullshit isn't an advancement, it's back to the status quo. Because an attorney needs to actually read the cases they cite to be sure they stand for the proposition they are relying upon.

Again a lot of that comment is about getting a document from someone else and quickly checking validity.
by infamouscow | 2025-09-23 19:09:21+00:00
The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012, which effectively gutted the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act’s restrictions on domestic propaganda, was passed under a blue team controlled executive and senate. This wasn't a bipartisan effort—it was a deliberate move by the blue team to dismantle a post-WWII safeguard designed to prevent the U.S. government from targeting its own citizens with state-crafted narratives.

The original act ensured the U.S. Information Agency’s output, like Voice of America, stayed outward-focused. The 2012 repeal, slipped into a defense spending bill and opened the door for domestic dissemination of government-produced content (read: propaganda).

Why would a single party push this through? Draw your own conclusions, but the implications for information control are hard to ignore. Look at the timing: right as social media was becoming a primary news source.
by MonkeyClub | 2025-09-23 19:09:47+00:00
Got to this after perusing Mitchell Hashimoto's writings (https://mitchellh.com/writing) following the recent libghostty-vt discussion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45347117).

Interestingly enough while looking for HN commentary there was none,so I thought others may also find it interesting :)
by kybernetikos | 2025-09-23 19:09:54+00:00
It took 100 million to get to falcon 1, and the company was probably not viable until NASA gave space X the crs1 contract for >1billion...

And where did that initial money come from? Musks sale of PayPal shares, which he got when PayPal acquired his payments company... Would that have happened if he'd started his payments company in Europe? Would Compaq or an equivalent have been interested in paying for zip2, which provided the initial money to found x.com if he'd built zip2 in Europe?

Musk deliberately and intentionally moved to silicon valley, and I think a big part of the reason was almost certainly that the US is more prepared to invest money in these kinds of ventures.
by dh2022 | 2025-09-23 19:10:28+00:00
Well, yeah, sure, they are building lots of shitty weapons. Meanwhile they cannot take over an adversary a third of its size. About resource extraction - the West stopped giving Russia extraction technology. Which means Russia is coasting on what they had up to 2022. Meaning in a few years Russia will do what it did in the 70s: over-extract its most productive fields. To see how that movie ended read Gaidar's Collapse of an Empire.
by em-bee | 2025-09-23 19:11:00+00:00
yes, the limits are economical. not cultural. you can't control the effect on culture by limiting immigration. economics is a different issue. the problem of course is that these issues get mixed, and people use economics as a reason when culture is their problem. and they are blaming their own economic situation on to much immigration when often that is simply not true.

germany has 200.000 open positions in IT right now. what would happen if we invited 200.000 experienced IT people from india? half the people without a job would complain that the indians are taking away their jobs. and lots of people would rant about how all these indians change our culture.

and what about the civil war in syria that produced 5 million refugees leaving the country? or ukraine, another 5.7 million refugees?

do you want to reject them just because you feel they threaten your culture?

since you claim that not having a limit is not ethical, let me quote the german chancellor merkel at the time: "The fundamental right to asylum for the politically persecuted knows no upper limit; that also goes for refugees who come to us from the hell of a civil war."

when merkel said "everyone is welcome" this was literally the first time in my life that i was proud of germany. and you should know that in germany being proud of germany is a politically very sensitive statement usually associated with extreme-right groups.

so when it comes to refugees there can't be an upper limit.and beyond that, the limit depends on the economic situation. if we need the workers, the limit goes up. it has to. culture doesn't factor into it at all. you can't have it both ways.
by bikenaga | 2025-09-23 19:11:05+00:00
This paper by Gilens and Page (2014) is referenced in the original paper and is interesting in its own right (if someone has a better link, please post):

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

"Each of four theoretical traditions in the study of American politics—which can be characterized as theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic-Elite Domination, and two types of interest-group pluralism, Majoritarian Pluralism and Biased Pluralism—offers different predictions about which sets of actors have how much influence over public policy: average citizens; economic elites; and organized interest groups, mass-based or business-oriented.

A great deal of empirical research speaks to the policy influence of one or another set of actors, but until recently it has not been possible to test these contrasting theoretical predictions against each other within a single statistical model. We report on an effort to do so, using a unique data set that includes measures of the key variables for 1,779 policy issues.

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism."
by robenkleene | 2025-09-23 19:11:12+00:00
`cd foo` is useless in history if you're not already in foo's parent directory. This is the problem Zoxide solves, `z foo` will still do something useful in that case. (Side note about fzf, recursively fuzzy finding subdirectories fine for some use cases, but it doesn't scale as well as Zoxide.)
by phkahler | 2025-09-23 19:11:41+00:00
License: This is a perfect example of a project I think should be LGPL licensed and not MIT. Why? Let's suppose he's successful and libghostty become ubiquitous. What happens then? At some point you will be using a closed source version of it on Windows or MacOS or whatever - how do you know it's not logging in the background? The potential for this exists today in every commercial terminal emulator, but why make it easy to take something ubiquitous and backdoor it? On the flip side, what's a good reason for it to be MIT licensed?
by terminalbraid | 2025-09-23 19:11:56+00:00
A lot of this seems to stem from "unit tests slow you down" vs "unit tests make you faster". Unit tests DO slow you down at the start of a project and I'm sure Uncle Bob et al would not argue against this. It will take anyone more time to write fizzbuzz with tests than without it.

It's only when you've brought together enough code or developers or overlapping features or bitrot where tests will start catching undesired changes in behavior. If the authors of the first pass of the Mozilla browser say it would have slowed them down on that initial release, I don't think anyone can credibly argue otherwise if they weren't there. I'll also let the long term stability of that browser speak for itself.
by heffer | 2025-09-23 19:12:40+00:00
> I also happen to know this data is being transferred out of country to CDSI; ASN 23498

CDSI is Cogeco Data Services, Inc., a Canadian ISP, which later became Aptum, which in turn was acquired by Beanfield, also a Canadian ISP (the founder Dan Armstrong is actually well known in the internet community in Canada) that operates AS23498.

So I don't see how this would prove your data is leaving the country.
by Dumblydorr | 2025-09-23 19:12:46+00:00
Buddha would probably say it’s very easy to “be” a Buddha. To become one, on the other hand, is hard in my opinion, takes thousands of hours of practice. Once you’re there however, it is open effortless awareness and not hard to maintain, so they say!

Most practitioners get tiny glimpses of aspects of enlightenment, but to integrate and sustain it all is very rare indeed. I wonder if there even 100 Boddhisatvas in the world
by cestith | 2025-09-23 19:12:53+00:00
I’ve been telling people for years that a reasonably workable initial, simplified mental model of a large language model is a Markov chain generator with an unlimited, weighted corpus trained in. Very few people who know LLMs have said anything to critique that thought more than that it’s a coarse description and downplays the details. Since being simplified is in the initial statement and it’s not meant to capture detail, I say if it walks like a really big duck and it honks instead of quacking then it’s maybe a goose or swan which are both pretty duck-like birds.
by avidiax | 2025-09-23 19:12:54+00:00
Every time I drive in SF, I pay for parking, and then get a parking ticket.

Apparently I'm supposed to know that a red parking meter is for trucks. The "trucks-only sign", if there was even supposed to be one, wasn't attached to that meter or the parking sign.

The other time I was the first to arrive on a block, and paid the wrong meter out of confusion.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-09-23 19:13:23+00:00
Show you exist. Go to rallies if you can, if you can't then cheer them on if you see them. Sign petitions. If your representatives are doing things you support, contact and let them know. If your friends post something you are scared to, let them know you saw it, that they aren't speaking into a void.

When I was in a bad place, I had a black friend who would always tell me 'I see you <deadfred>' and 'keep your head up'. Do that. Anywhere where you can be a feedback loop to give others a little support, a little strength, a feeling they aren't alone is huge.

Don't post negative if possible, that adds to their maximal pressure on society to look like they are winning, that supports them and their narrative. Post about your grandparents overcoming this stuff. Post america rejected it before. Post a small act of defiance you did, instead of conforming in advance. They will mock you, because all they have is mockery and pressure to conform to give the illusion that everyone has given in, that they have won. Their mockery is weakness. Is admitting they don't have control.

These people only win when we give up. It's why the have maximal pressure everywhere. In the hopes it overwhelms us and makes us think they have already won.
by nzach | 2025-09-23 19:13:46+00:00
What is you opinion on what is the "right level of detail" that we should use when creating technical documents the LLM will use to implement features ?

When I started leaning heavily into LLMs I was using really detailed documentations. Not '20 minutes of voice recordings', but my specification documents would easily hit hundreds of lines even for simple features.

The result was decent, but extremely frustrating. Because it would often deliver 80% to 90% but the final 10% to 20% it could never get right.

So, what I naturally started doing was to care less about the details of the implementation and focus on the behavior I want. And this led me to simpler prompts, to the point that I don't feel the need to create a specification document anymore. I just use the plan mode in Claude Code and it is good enough for me.

One way that I started to think about this was that really specific documentations were almost as if I was 'over-fitting' my solution over other technically viable solutions the model could come up with. One example would be if I want to sort an array, I could either ask for "sort the array" or "merge sort the array". And by forcing a merge sort I may end up with a worse solution. Admittedly sort is a pretty simple and unlikely example, but this could happen with any topic. You may ask the model to use a hash-set but a better solution would be to use a bloom filter.

Given all that, do you think investing so much time into your prompts provides a good ROI compared with the alternative of not really min-maxing every single prompt?
by nerdsniper | 2025-09-23 19:13:50+00:00
Different neighborhoods may want different types/amount of enforcement as well. Some neighborhoods may have tiny driveways and are happy that a lot of cars can get away with parking "illegally" due to non-enforcement and put up with the resulting narrow paths where one car has to pull aside to let another car past. Other neighborhoods might have almost no cars ever parked on the street and people get angry if anyone parks in front of "their" curb, even though it's a public street and anyone can "legally" park there.

This kind of difference in desire from area to area should be reflected in municipal codes and have clear signage. But sometimes these neighborhood norms are only reflected in de facto enforcement, not in de jure written legal code.

This has a parallel in the form of HOA's. Most of the justifications I hear for HOA's are that they prevent "$THING_1", "$THING_2", and "$THING_3" ... but all of those are already prohibited by municipal code and can be addressed by making a call to 311. However, citizens of many cities often don't have faith in police / code enforcement to respond with a proper ticket. Sometimes I wonder if all those HOA fees were going to the city if that would pay for diligent non-HOA enforcement.
by rixed | 2025-09-23 19:14:01+00:00
> "Just don't write (memory) bugs!" hasn't produced (memory) safe C

Yes it did, of course. Maybe it takes years of practice, the assistance of tools (there are many, most very good), but it's always been possible to write memory safe large C programs.

Sure, it's easier to write a robust program in almost every other language. But to state that nobody ever produced a memory safe C program is just wrong. Maybe it was just rethoric for you, but I'm afraid some may read that and think it's a well established fact.
by lapcat | 2025-09-23 19:14:07+00:00
> Google's monopoly is more aligned with the interest of web users', yes they will try to throw anti user and anti-competitive things in there (and they should be shamed for that), but they have also done a ton of work to move the platform forward

I disagree, and it appears that you're approaching this mainly from the perspective of web developers, whose interests are not necessarily aligned with web users either. In fact, web developers nowadays are notoriously user-hostile.

As a web user, I'm perfectly fine with continuing to miss many of the features that the article author believes are "missing".
by foysavas | 2025-09-23 19:14:29+00:00
I wrote a book on Merb and was an active contributor. Before that I had developed several apps with Rails.

That said, the Rails vs Merb era was mostly good natured competition and I don't view the Rails vs Merb period as itself having been problematic.

Merb devs believed we could make app development both simple to start (as a single file like Sinatra) and easy to evolve (into a modular codebase with Rails-like conventions). Existing outside of the Rails ecosystem allowed Merb to pursue that distinct vision.

The Merge between Rails and Merb, accreted many of Merb's modular architectural enhancements to Rails, but sadly deprecated the overall Merb vision. To me that was a shame, but I still wouldn't describe any of it as toxic.
by awesome_dude | 2025-09-23 19:14:49+00:00
> Everyone is assigned a pay band that corresponds to their title. Everyone can go on to the portal and see approximately how much someone else earns (within a narrow range) based on their level and geographical location.

> It hasn't brought compensation up. If anything, it has kept it down. My wife was objectively underpaid for a while and on the verge of leaving,

Can you expand on this because it's not making any logical sense.

Is the company underpaying everyone with that title, is her work not in line with her title (as compared to other employers), or is there something else (I'm hesitant to call BS, but there is a tendency within these types of conversations for people to invent scenarios to try and portray some sort of political narrative - for the left and right)
by estearum | 2025-09-23 19:15:27+00:00
I’m not arguing from a statistical perspective and nor are buyers using that.

When Tesla came out, its build quality was awful but it succeeded because people wanted EVs.

Now there are EVs that don’t feel like Mattel toys, and Tesla is doing very very badly, in part because its build quality is still very bad which is now a glaring problem in a more competitive field.
by jgilias | 2025-09-23 19:15:30+00:00
I used to do these things manually in Cursor. Then I had to take a few months off programming, and when I came back and updated Cursor I found out that it now automatically does ToDos, as well as keeps track of the context size and compresses it automatically by summarising the history when it reaches some threshold.

With this I find that most of the shenanigans of manual context window managing with putting things in markdown files is kind of unnecessary.

You still need to make it plan things, as well as guide the research it does to make sure it gets enough useful info into the context window, but in general it now seems to me like it does a really good job with preserving the information. This is with Sonnet 4

YMMV
by maffyoo | 2025-09-23 19:15:49+00:00
How do you decide what the basics are? maybe you should outsource answering customer emails instead of spending time doing them yourself? The basics is not a differentiator; strategy is. At best the basics is just a fitness measure of strategy. "Can I still do all the essential non-functional stuff, I must do, whilst pursuing my most valued goals?"

Strategy is about choosing how to achieve a goal, all the tactics, fitness measures/metrics, compromises, challenges to overcome but it's also the goal itself. Strategy should guide you, your tactics at play to deliver your ultimate goal. Execution is just doing that stuff hopefully focussing on the stuff that matters most.
by tasn | 2025-09-23 19:16:11+00:00
If I had to guess: because Rust engineers are like every other engineer that reads HN. They read stories, sometimes comment, and share from their own experience. Rust and Go were created roughly at the same time and are more directly comparable than e.g. Go and Ruby, so you don't see Ruby people writing about not having to use Valgrind. This means you'll see more comments from Rust devs than others in Go threads.

At least that's why I wrote that original comment.
by illuminator83 | 2025-09-23 19:16:38+00:00
Oh, they were not talking about the implementation of these things. Just the the user side:

printf("Error: File `%s` in batch %d failed.", file.c_str(), batch) vs fmt::print("Error: File `{}` in batch {} failed.", file, batch)

One of which is objectively safer and more portable than the other. They didn't care. "I like what I've been doing for the last 20 years already better because it looks better.". "No Its not because I'm just used to it." "If you are careful it is just as safe. But you gotta know what you are doing."

And best of all - classic elitism:

"If you are not smart enough to do it right with printf, maybe you shouldn't be a C++ programmer. Go write C# or something instead."

The same person was not smart enough to do it right in many places as I've proven with a static analyzer.
by wirehack | 2025-09-23 19:16:51+00:00
Their findings on KV-cache invalidation are spot on for a single-context approach.

Strata's architecture is philosophically different. Instead of loading a large toolset and masking it, we guide the LLM through a multi-step dialogue. Each step (e.g., choosing an app, then a category) is a separate, very small, and cheap LLM call.

So, we trade one massive prompt for a few tiny ones. This avoids the KV-cache issue because the context for each decision is minimal, and it prevents model confusion because the agent only ever sees the tools relevant to its current step. It's a different path to the same goal: making the agent smarter by not overwhelming it. Thanks for the great link!
by jcynix | 2025-09-23 19:17:11+00:00
Ah, yes, Markov chains. A long time agoMark V. Shaney https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V._Shaney was designed by Rob Pike and posted on Usenet.

And Veritasium's video "The Strange Math That Predicts (Almost) Anything" talks in detail about the history of Markov chains: https://youtu.be/KZeIEiBrT_w
by cultofmetatron | 2025-09-23 19:17:29+00:00
>For context, this has been going on for 10 years and about a year ago everyone stopped trying.

frankly I'm a little jealous.... I can't imagine anyone, let alone a whole friend group, putting in that level of effort to stay in touch with me. I would probably disappear from everyone's imaginations if I didn't regularly reach out to people.