MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by t0mas88 | 2025-09-28 17:18:10+00:00
I use YOLO mode all the time with Claude Code. Start on a new branch, put it in plan mode (shift + tab twice), get a solid plan broken up in logical steps, then tell it to execute that plan and commit in sensible steps. I run that last part in "YOLO mode" with commit and test commands white listed.

This makes it move with much less scattered interactions from me, which allows focus time on other tasks. And the committing parts make it easier for me to review what it did just like I would review a feature branch created by a junior colleague.

If it's done and tests pass I'll create a pull request (assigned to myself) from the feature branch. Then thoroughly review it fully, this really requires discipline. And then let Claude fetch the pull request comments from the Github API and fix them. Again as a longer run that allows me to do other things.

YOLO-mode is helpful for me, because it allows Claude to run for 30 minutes with no oversight which allows me to have a meeting or work on something else. If it requires input or approval every 2 minutes you're not async but essentially spending all your time watching it run.
by meesles | 2025-09-28 17:18:10+00:00
I do not, but it took me and a coworker all of an hour to setup. Create a CI workflow, vibe code it to load up the PR contents + any rules you want (we maintain a directory of individual rules that people can tweak), and ship it off to GPT for a response. Add some input/output schemas, and it's pluggable back into the CI hooks to notify of failed build steps (Github in my case).
by rootusrootus | 2025-09-28 17:18:12+00:00
It's a bit of a cliché, but remains true -- the existence of competition just means someone else proved the market exists already. They've done good research for you. You only need a truly novel idea (with a market) if you want to be a unicorn. If you just want to be successful, then jump in. Find ways to differentiate, even if it's just on price.
by zenoprax | 2025-09-28 17:18:33+00:00
> they've not NOTICED any poor results

This is a good enough bar for me to take a chance on someone. If I'm satisfied with the result... I proceed. My "car guy" has a track record of saving me from over-spending on things that don't matter. I don't have a good enough reason to try someone else.

There's a infinite regression in your logic that can only be broken by either:

1. trust in the person, or somewhere along the chain of referrals or;

2. simply possessing the skill and knowledge to assess the work yourself (but lacking the time, energy, or other resources to do it yourself)
by jonahx | 2025-09-28 17:18:57+00:00
This diagram (which resonated):

Traditional Coding: [ Thinking & Coding ....................... | Fixing ] AI-Assisted Coding: [ Coding | Thinking & Fixing ................ ]

suggests a workflow where AI is used almost exclusively to speed up the writing of known, targeted code whose structure has already been thought out. And possibly as a (non-coding) sounding board during the thinking out.
by NetMageSCW | 2025-09-28 17:19:13+00:00
Strange to see this come up now - when Accounting was cleaning out some office space down the hall a couple of weeks ago, I noticed a Friden electromechanical calculator, sadly without power cord. I didn’t think I needed more history stacked in my house, and my boss “gave” it to our new CFO for budget time as a joke. It is similar to the one used in the movie Hidden Figures. Surprised not to see Friden mentioned at some of the other web sites posted.
by bri3d | 2025-09-28 17:19:33+00:00
I have never seen someone make a distinction between Secure Boot and boot verification on UEFI/x86, although I suppose it’s a valid one? I suspect the parent post is referring to Secure Boot in the colloquial sense it’s usually used for on x86: validation of the UEFI boot binary using Secure Boot keys followed by OS level trust chaining, usually accomplished by entangling PCR state with disk encryption in some way.

And I think this would deliver a slight level of protection from the BMC: tampering with the firmware image or key enrollment / secure boot state _should_ both break the UEFI root of trust and alter the PCR state and break everything downstream. Of course, all UEFI implementations are holier than Swiss cheese and there are probably a lot of ways to use the BMC to dump or modify memory post-boot anyway, but it does do something.
How is TPU v3-8 different from v5e-8
by sr5434 | 2025-09-28 17:20:08+00:00
Kaggle announced that they are replacing their TPU v3-8s with v5e-8s, but for some reason I get an OOM when running my code on v5e-8 and not when running it on v3-8. Does anybody know why this might be happening? For reference, I am training a 1.5b GPT model using Torch XLA
by motbus3 | 2025-09-28 17:20:36+00:00
I don't agree. You can have a good life from Open source. The problem is that people assumes the money that keeps rails and whatever going is guaranteed and that no one should contribute too because it is free.

Sidekiq has all the right to remove the support for someone they find troublesome and can harm their image.

Now if another company is able to take full control is because there were never anyone else doing that. It seems pure luck that Sidekiq never pushed their own coup themselves, probably they are just good guys.
by guy_5676 | 2025-09-28 17:20:39+00:00
Code isn't an "artifact", it's the actual product that you are building and delivering. You can use flowery language and pontificate about the importance of the problem domain if you like, but at the end of the day we are producing a low level sequences of instructions that will be executed by a real world device. There has always been, and likely will always be, value in understanding exactly what you are asking the computer to do
by zahlman | 2025-09-28 17:21:13+00:00
> If you dislike chess because you don't like abstract total information strategy board games you will not like go

If you think this is equivalent to the description in GP then you are quite simply incorrect.

If you think it's just the actual reason you personally don't like chess, then I'm not sure why you asked in the first place; of course go is an "abstract total information strategy board game".

Yes, in principle such a game has such an algorithm for perfect play. In practice, computers cannot and do not do that for chess (although they make a reasonable approximation) and approach go quite differently (in much the same way that earlier attempts at computer chess did, before Deep Blue's much more brute-force approach proved effective given enough computing power). Getting AI for go to its current superhuman level involved multiple complete revolutions in how the systems were programmed.

Even Connect Four wasn't strongly solved until 1995, and checkers is only weakly solved and that not until 2007 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solved_game).
by fuzzfactor | 2025-09-28 17:21:36+00:00
There were some Asian-made PC cameras that old which connected to the 25-pin traditional parallel printer port for better data rates than a serial COM port would have. Way before USB was invented.

Document scanners also connected to the parallel port originally too, but the cam was only 320x240 and black & white only.

Low framerates too but it didn't take up much bandwidth.
by lukaslalinsky | 2025-09-28 17:21:47+00:00
This depends entirely on how you use said AI. You can have it read code, explain why was it done this or that way, and once it has the context you ask to think about implementing feature X. There is almost no gambling involved there, at best the level frustration you would have with a colleague. If you start from blank context, tell it to implement full app, you are purely just gambling.
by coldtea | 2025-09-28 17:22:03+00:00
>Except it’s not been five years, it’s been at most three,

Why would it be "at most" 3? We had Chat GPT commercially available as private beta API on 2020. It's only the mass public that got 3.5 3 years ago.

But those who'd do the noticing as per my argument is not just Joe Public (which could be oblivious), but people already starting in 2020, and includes people working in the space, who worked with LLM and LLM-like architectures 2-3 years before 2020.
by rdrd | 2025-09-28 17:22:29+00:00
Even outside of AI coding I have found a tremendous amount of value in using AI to produce a requirements and spec document for me to code from. The key unlock for me is asking AI to “interview” me about how this system/feature should work. As part of that process it will often ask a question that gets me thinking about interesting edge cases.

I will say I always provide an initial context document about the feature/system, to avoid us starting with trivial questions. After about 45minutes I’ll often feel I’ve covered enough ground and given the problem enough thought to really put pen to paper. Off the back of this I’ll ask it to summarise the spec and produce a document. This can be a good point to ditch AI if you are so inclined but still get value from it.
by renewiltord | 2025-09-28 17:23:01+00:00
I wonder if there's a term for this kind of thing where people use the word "including".

As an example, I might have a non-profit that serves soup at soup kitchens and also pays me to manage it. If someone gives $100k, suppose I pay myself $90k and use $10k to serve soup.

When someone threatens to cut the contribution, I say "This will affect the non-profit's mission since the $100k a year goes to critical things like all the soup served at kitchens".

The impression is to imply that the majority of it goes to the soup. But the majority doesn't, in fact, go to the soup.

It would be useful to have a concise term for this particular kind of deceitfulness.
by queenkjuul | 2025-09-28 17:23:23+00:00
Are filenames likely to include those representations? I feel like probably not (can you even include commas in Windows filenames?)

More to the point of the article--if you want things sorted by date, sort by date. I think most laypeople aren't looking at long CHAR1234_5678 filenames anyway, they're looking at thumbnails and dates.
by SkiFire13 | 2025-09-28 17:23:52+00:00
> and the situation where someone wants "10" to be before "9" is far more common.

I guess you mean "after"? Otherwise it seems to me you're agreeing with OP.

> desktops don't label this sorting "alphabetical" (E: and it would really be "lexicographic"*), they label it "by name" (an informal criteria), so technically they're not lying.

FYI the more formal name for the "by name" order is "natural sort order".
by mathgeek | 2025-09-28 17:23:52+00:00
Determine what level of risk and lifestyle you are comfortable with and act accordingly. There’s no shame in working a blue collar job if you want to prioritize putting food on the table, for example. You are not defined by your title unless you want to be.

The saying I have tried to live by is “only a young person thinks the last downturn was the last”. Also as Game of Thrones puts it, “my sweet summer child”.
by OutOfHere | 2025-09-28 17:23:54+00:00
Effective AI coding is actually extremely slow if you take into account an exhaustive planning stage where the task specification is laid down in sufficient and unambiguous detail. I had to get the LLM to review my spec over twenty times, always freshly, before I thought it was good enough to be implemented well. Also, it really helps for multiple diverse LLMs to review the spec, as they all have their unique insights. In this way, AI coding also helps me avoid numerous bugs that could have left me in trouble if not for the AI.

Once the planning is done, the actual coding is very fast. The human review that follows is again slow, often also leading to minor new tickets.
by ACCount37 | 2025-09-28 17:24:04+00:00
"Once you remove 97% of human nature, what remains is quite logical and reasonable."

That's what I'm talking about. That one person who seems way more rational than most might be 95% irrational - just outperforming the "97% irrational" baseline. And those 2% that make up the difference? How much of this is teachable skills, things you and me could learn and apply, and how much of it is just some weird brain wiring?

That appearance of reason may be deceiving too. You'd expect an atheist to outperform the average by a lot - but is this true? How many atheists are atheists because they carefully examined the case for God's existence and found it lacking - and how many are instead atheists because of something like an innate contrarian streak, or just because of conformism paired with non-religious upbringing?

I happen to remember the reason why I ended up an atheist quite well. I just didn't like the idea of God existing, at all. I didn't get there by being reasonable - I got there by being lucky.
by jacquesm | 2025-09-28 17:24:06+00:00
Well, then Apple should do it, tomorrow. For sure it won't even register on their annual report then.

> In the end the EU consumer gains nothing from all of this but loses their beloved Apple devices.

I don't think I have an emotional connection with my phone, it serves to call people, message them and to perform other useful functions and if it does not it gets replaced. I'm happy with it, it's a solid piece of gear and it has served me well. But emotional connections with brands or pieces of easily replaceable hardware are unhealthy.
by clickety_clack | 2025-09-28 17:24:31+00:00
We have to trust that parents generally make the best decisions they can for their kids. Society has gone too far towards prescribing what a parent must or must not do. We’re in a world now where in many places a parent can’t let their kids walk to school by themselves, or can’t let them sit in a car for 5 minutes while they run into a store to pick something up. Sometimes it is better for a parent to shield a child from something that would scare them, and it should be up to the parent to decide where that line is.
by t0mas88 | 2025-09-28 17:24:37+00:00
I've seen reasonable results from letting Claude Code apply test driven development and having a good e2e test suite on top of that (with Playwright). In that setup giving it Playwright MCP to access the app and verify why e2e tests are working or not working, and for writing new tests helps.

Just giving it an MCP to test changes also didn't work for me. But the combination with e2e tests was better.
by Nevermark | 2025-09-28 17:24:50+00:00
I am curious when you think we will run out of atoms to make information systems.

How many billions of years you think that might take.

Of all the things to be limited by, that doesn't seem like a near term issue. Just an asteroid or two alone will provide resources beyond our dreams. And space travel is improving at a very rapid rate.

In the meantime, in terms of efficiency of using Earth atoms for information processing, there is still a lot space at the "bottom", as Feynman said. Our crude systems are limited today by their power waste. Small energy efficient systems, and more efficient heat shedding, will enable full 3D chips ("cubes"?) and vastly higher density of packing those.

The known limit for information for physical systems per gram, is astronomical:

• Bremermann’s limit : 10^47 operations per second, per gram.

Other interesting limits:

• Margolus–Levitin bound - on quantum state evolution

• Landauer’s principle - Thermodynamic cost of erasing (overwriting) one bit.

• Bekenstein bound: Maximum storage by volume.

Life will go through many many singularities before we get anywhere near hard limits.
by bchasknga | 2025-09-28 17:25:42+00:00
At the end of the day, you need to put food on the table and a shelter over your head. That doesn't mean you cannot pursue your profession and dreams. It's just harder.

One way I was told how to find product (your service) and market (labor market) fit is to focus on the problem. Sell yourself as a problem solver rather than a software developer. The software is just a tool, and software engineering is a framework to apply those tools in practice. Although the current state of your locale lacks software dev opportunities, it might also be that most people aren't aware of their needs for digitization yet. Software is also in a lot of things. Don't limit yourself to web development.
by danielmarkbruce | 2025-09-28 17:25:44+00:00
Are you in Iraq? If so, understand the legalities involved - most companies simply won't hire someone or do business with someone in Iraq because "can't be bothered to figure the sanction situation out".

So - solve it for them. Figure out all the answers, set up all the stuff that will make it easier for a prospective employer and have it all at the ready.
by bornfreddy | 2025-09-28 17:25:44+00:00
I noticed this with booking.com. When we asked people for recommendations we got way worse sleeping arrangements than when using booking.com. I believe that the first reason, as you outlined, is that we followed many persons' recommendations instead on a single person's, but there is also fear of bad online review that keeps the service providers on their toes. It's a pity though that the 3rd party is needed for this.
by motbus3 | 2025-09-28 17:26:51+00:00
I guess all you said is correct but there is one important point. Data has being systematically being gathered and analysed to have an individual profile of your behaviour and needs without people understanding. It is not about knowing how much people needs to buy dog biscuits from people searching for dogs, but knowing that John Doe is 33 years, has 2 dogs, votes to democratic party, has chronic gastritis and commented on the internet that he does not agree with current presidential policies.

The level of identification and tracking possible today is scary even across devices.
by al_borland | 2025-09-28 17:26:55+00:00
What is it you like about programming? If you get to the root of what you enjoy about it, there are likely many seemingly unrelated careers that can scratch that same itch. It would also free up programming to become a fun hobby again, or something you just did to elevate your work, rather than the core job.

Is moving to an area with more jobs a possibility on the table?

Also keep in mind that pay is relative to where you live. While some hit the jackpot making Silicon Valley wages in developing counties with very low costs of living, that’s not the norm and shouldn’t be the expectation. Those wages are high, in part, because the cost of living is high. I work for a large company and pay scales are region dependent to account for cost of living. I think the idea being that two people doing the same job have a relatively similar lifestyle. Are you turning down otherwise good opportunities because you’re looking to make California wages outside of California and the US?
by armchairhacker | 2025-09-28 17:27:02+00:00
Another part of the article mentions him "wasting" money

> Andre needed an adapter, so I ran up to lend him mine. As he was giving it back, I recall him making a half-joking, flippant remark about either his dongle or his computer, saying that "Ruby Together will just buy me another one." It really rubbed me the wrong way. Over the years to follow, more than one person told me stories of Andre paying for shared meals on behalf of Ruby Together without an apparent legitimate justification.

The article also accuses him of misrepresenting if not lying where certain donations went when soliciting more. Presumably, if he had justified reasons to need more funds, he could've said them.

Granted, we don't know how much Andre was making and what his expenses were, and the article seems to have its own biases. But I think at least the general outline of Andre's (and his organization's) funds/expenses should be public and accurate, so potential donors can decide whether he really needs their funds or another project needs them more.
by budro | 2025-09-28 17:27:21+00:00
I think what the article gets at, but doesn't quite deliver on, is similar to this great take from Casey Muratori [1] about how programming with a learning-based mindset means that AI is inherently not useful to you.

I personally find AI code gen most useful for one-off throwaway code where I have zero intent to learn. I imagine this means that the opposite end of the spectrum where learning is maximized is one where the AI doesn't generate any code for me.

I'm sure there are some people for which the "AI-Driven Engineering" approach would be beneficial, but at least for me I find that replacing those AI coding blocks with just writing the code myself is much more enjoyable, and thus more sustainable to actually delivering something at the end.

[1] https://youtu.be/apREl0KmTdQ?t=4751 (relevant section is about 5 minutes long)
by mcswell | 2025-09-28 17:27:35+00:00
Be glad you don't have to deal with non-ASCII characters: acute/grave/tilde/umlaut/diaresis/etc. accented characters, dotted vs. dotless 'i' (Turkish), barred i (an 'i' with a sort of dash through the middle, used in some languages for a sort of schwa-like vowel), thorn, not to mention non-Roman characters. And different languages sort the same characters differently, so you can't just pay attention to their Unicode values. (@cubefox has a post here pointing to the Unicode Consortium's doc about sorting)
by spankalee | 2025-09-28 17:27:45+00:00
Have you missed the entirety of the evolution of software development?

What is Winforms itself if non "non-utilitarian"? Most of an OS is non-utilitarian. Compilers, libc, databases, web servers, browser APIs, ffmpeg, OpenGL, Unity, etc., etc., etc...

2014 is a wild year to pin the end of "utilitarian" programming on, since all of the things you appear to complain about already existed by then. If anything the beginning of making programs for other programs and programmers was 1951/52 with the invention of the compiler. It's been downhill from there.
by bikelang | 2025-09-28 17:27:55+00:00
I’ve been trying to re-orient for this exact kind of workflow and I honestly can’t declare whether it’s working.

I’ve switched to using Rust because of the rich type system and pedantic yet helpful compiler errors. I focus on high level design, traits, important types - then I write integration tests and let Claude go to town. I’ve been experimenting with this approach on my side project (backend web services related to GIS - nothing terribly low level) for about 4 months now and I honestly don’t know if it’s any faster than just writing the code myself. I suspect it’s not or only marginally faster at best.

I often find that I end up in a place where the ai generated code just has too many issues collected over iterations and needs serious refactoring that the agent is incapable of performing satisfactorily. So I must do it myself and that work is substantially harder than it would have been had I just written everything myself in the first place.

At work - I find that I have a deep enough understanding of our codebase that the agents are mostly a net-loss outside of boilerplate.

Perhaps I’m holding it wrong but I’ve been doing this for a while now. I am extremely motivated to build a successful side project and try to bootstrap myself out of the corporate world. I read blogs and watch vlogs on how others build their workflows and I just cannot replicate these claims of huge productivity gains.
by karmakaze | 2025-09-28 17:28:09+00:00
Each specific technology can be S-shaped, but advancements in achieving goals can still maintain an exponential curve. e.g. Moore's law is dead with the end of Dennard scaling, but computation improvements still happen with parallelism.

Meta's Behemoth shows that scaling number of parameters has diminished returns, but we still have many different ways to continue advancements. Those who point at one thing and say "see", isn't really seeing. Of course there are limits, like energy but with nuclear energy or photon-based computing were nowhere near the limits.