MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bitwize | 2025-10-28 03:27:03+00:00
Absolutely write single-function unit tests, if the function has clearly defined inputs and outputs but a tricky implementation. A lot of business rules work this way, so if you have a "functional core, imperative shell" line-of-business application with unclear or changing requirements, unit tests will be your best friend for getting the details right.

But testing each class in the project with a Mockito-encrusted setup featuring cardboard bananas/gorillas/jungles—best practice in Java-land—seems tedious, and tedium is the enemy of a good testing strategy because programmers won't follow it. They'll bodge in a solution, get their teammates to lgtm it, and roll it out under the slightest bit of deadline pressure.
by jalapenos | 2025-10-28 03:27:32+00:00
Is the news-worthy surprise that so many people find life so horrible that they are contemplating ending it?

I really don't see that as surprising. The world and life aren't particularly pleasant things.

What would be more interesting is how effective ChatGPT is being in guiding them towards other ideas. Most suicide prevention notices are a joke - pretending that "call this hotline" means you've done your job and that's that.

No, what should instead happen is the AI try to guide them towards making their lives less shit - i.e. at least bring them towards a life of _manageable_ shitness, where they feel some hope and don't feel horrendous 24/7.
by KPGv2 | 2025-10-28 03:27:49+00:00
It would take a lengthy essay to explain all the ways you've misunderstood how the law works in the United States, but in summary FHA rules only apply to FHA cases,

Furthermore, you seem to be conflating different meanings of the word "advertisement" where the one you've chosen to support your point is a broad meaning that would seem to make Barbie commercials that feature only girls illegal (which is obviously not the case).
by robocat | 2025-10-28 03:27:52+00:00
But they may well be overreporting suicidal ideation...

I was asking a silly question about the toxicity of eating a pellet of Uranium, and ChatGPT responded with "... you don't have to go through this alone. You can find supportive resources here[link]"

My question had nothing to do with suicide, but ChatGPT assumed it did!
by Forgeties79 | 2025-10-28 03:27:56+00:00
> Not all content needs to be real. A huge portion of what humans appreciate is fiction. There's a huge amount of that content and hallucination is the name of the game in these contexts.

I didn’t realize this was you as I was pulling this up as an example. You literally said “we appreciate fiction” as a defense of LLM’s giving us bad results. I don’t know how that isn’t glossing over it - if anything it doesn’t accurately communicate how wild of a take that is. You’re functionally saying false information is desirable.

Unless you were taking the piss there and I totally missed it, it was truly baffling to read.
by makeitdouble | 2025-10-28 03:29:14+00:00
I'm not sure what it actually means. For instance Apple Pay is probably not supposed to replace your actual credit card, but if you can live your life without ever using the physical one, that's just legalese.

If it really doesn't do much (i.e. only help to pass TSA lines), then perhaps it should be called something else. If it effectively can act as a passport in 80%+ more situations, "not a replacement for xxxx" will just be legalese for most users.
by anonymous908213 | 2025-10-28 03:30:36+00:00
This doesn't apply to a demo with a full product behind it. You can release your "demo" combined as one app, with a small subset of content available for free and the rest locked behind a macrotransaction. Which is what OP already does, except they also have microtransactions targeting children on the side. This essentially only prohibits you from releasing a demo if the demo is for an unfinished product.
by nekusar | 2025-10-28 03:30:52+00:00
Its not 100% what you're looking for. Probably an 80% case..

But try looking into QubesOS. You create domains where applications can do whatever in the domain (a contained VM). So your personal domain is separate from your bank domain, which is separate from your media domain.

Of course, domains themselves can do naughty things. But they cant cross over to others.

And system resources are a separate domain, as is networking.

Some downsides - gaming is a no go mostly. And if you do SDR stuff, the USB domain is a heavy hit on performance. You really need dedicated machines for those things.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-10-28 03:31:23+00:00
Library authors don’t really provide custom analyzers. heck, the best we can hope for are some regex based linting rules, anything that involves local data flow analysis is very rare, and anything inter procedural is non-existent. Program analysis is a dark hole, you are better off just making stronger type systems, but then type inference starts to bite you if you want to support it (and you will given how annoying type annotations are to write, unless you go with something simple like a purely structural type system so you can use Hindley Milner).
by FloorEgg | 2025-10-28 03:32:16+00:00
I became aware of the legal contradictions last summer and spent a few hours doing searches and reading through the relevant regulatory language for a few industries. I don't have all the references handy.

I don't work for you. It's not my job to do research for you. If you're genuinely curious and interested in the truth it won't be hard for you to find. Literally go search and read the regulatory language in a few major industries. Start with the department of education. It doesn't seem like you're curious though, it seems like you're combative.
by MarkMarine | 2025-10-28 03:32:59+00:00
I've watched LPL videos and practiced on regular locks, I can pick something that is about 10$ or less, but these expensive locks with good tolerances (Abus) or disc detainer cores (kryptonite locks,) no amount of practice and fiddling with the correct tools has ever opened one of these. I lack the skill or touch.

I can hold a 18v grinder with a cutoff wheel just fine though, I lost the keys to one of those kryptonite locks on my bike and I was riding my bike again 30 seconds later.
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-10-28 03:33:51+00:00
The problem is — nobody commits code that fails tests.

The bugs occur because the initial tests didn’t fully capture the desired and undesired behaviors.

I’ve never seen a formal list of software requirements state that a product cannot take more than an hour to do a (trivial) operation. Nobody writes that out because it’s implicitly understood.

Imagine writing a “life for dummies” textbook on how to grow from a 5yr old to 10yr old. It’s impossible to fully cover.
by jongjong | 2025-10-28 03:34:05+00:00
I still can't believe my own eyes that when I show an LLM my codebase and I tell it what functionality I want to add in reasonable detail, it can produce perfect looking code that I could have written myself.

I would say that AI is better at coding than most developers. If I had the option to choose between a junior developer to assist me or Claude Code, I would choose Claude Code. That's a massive achievement. Cannot be understated.

It's a dream come true for someone with a focus on architecture like myself. The coding aspect was dragging me down. LLMs work beautifully with vanilla JavaScript. The combined ability to generate code quickly and then quickly test (no transpilation/bundling step) gives me fast iteration times. Add that to the fact that I have a minimalist coding style. I get really good bang for my bucks/tokens.

The situation is unfortunate for junior developers. That said, I don't think it necessarily means that juniors should abandon the profession; they just need to refocus their attention towards the things that AI cannot do well like spotting contradictions and making decisions. Many developers are currently not great at this; maybe that's the reason why LLMs (which are trained on average code) are not good at it either. Juniors have to think more critically than ever before; on the plus side, they are freed to think about things at a higher level of abstraction.

My observation is that LLMs are so far good news for neurodivergent developers. Bad news for developers who are overly mimetic in their thinking style and interests. You want to be different from the average developer whose code the LLM was trained on.
by derefr | 2025-10-28 03:35:02+00:00
> encase your metal box in concrete

FYI, most safes already have a decently thick concrete layer — that’s most of why safes are heavy! (Or, I guess you could say, adding a concrete layer is cheaper than making the steel thicker.)

But they also have a rubber or foam (often styrofoam in cheaper safes) layer, to “smooth out” the force from a sledgehammer, jackhammer, or just dropping the thing out the window.

And a layer of compressible wet(!) sand, to spread out the point stress from a hammer and chisel, impact gun, gunshot, or small explosive configured for concussive force. (The goal here is essentially to replicate the behavior of a bulletproof vest.)

Plus, they often contain a layer to bind and foul and dull (or even break) the teeth of drill bits and reciprocating/chain/band saws. This can be any number of things — low-melting-point plastics, recycled broken glass, etc — but look up “proteus” for a fun read.

If the safe’s designer is clever, just a few materials can serve several of these functions at once. But more is always better. Which is why good safes (and vaults) are so dang thick. It’s not to solve one problem really well; it’s to mitigate N problems acceptably well, for a frighteningly large value of N.
by fragmede | 2025-10-28 03:36:48+00:00
It depends on how precisely you want do definite that situation. Specifically, with the memories feature, despite being the same model, ChatGPT and now Claude both exhibit different interactions customized to each customer that makes use of those features. From simple instructions, like "never apologize, never tell me I'm right", to having a custom name and specifying personality traits like be sweet or sarcastic, so one person' LLM might say "good morning my sweet prince/princess" while another user might choose to be addressed "what up chicken butt". It's not a custom model, but the results are arguably the same. The question is, how many of the 800 million users of ChatGPT have named their ChatGPT, and how many have not? How many have mentioned their dreams, their dreams, and fears, and have those saved to the database. How many have talked about mundane things like their cat, and how many have used the cat to blackmail ChatGPT into answering something it doesn't want to, about politics, health, cat health while at the vet or instead of going to a vet. They said 100 million people mentioned suicide in the past week, but that just raises more questions than it answers.
by Aperocky | 2025-10-28 03:37:13+00:00
I found that mastering LLM is no less complex than getting to learning a new language, probably between python and C++ in terms of mastery.

The learning curve is very different - with other languages, the learning curve is often upfront, with LLM, it seems linear/even rear loaded, maybe because I've not gotten to the other side.

I've been able to make LLM do more and more, some of it is undoubtly due to the improvement in model, but most of it is probably paradigm and changes in my approach. At the beginning, I run into all of the same complaints that I have eventually found workarounds to many.
by r14c | 2025-10-28 03:37:29+00:00
We know how to cure addiction though, and its really low tech. People (and rats) with adequate social lives and decent living conditions are able to consistently overcome addiction. In fact, addiction has come to be understood as a coping mechanism for living in an unpleasant environment. Imo the issue with phones is really a symptom of our lack of leisure time, pleasant outside settings, and affordable third places.
by jchw | 2025-10-28 03:37:35+00:00
If there really are attempts at standards that sound like roughly what I am describing, I am definitely interested in hearing about them, FWIW. All I am aware of is the W3C Payment Request API, which is definitely very interesting and in a similar vein, but I really want something that works between parties on the web rather than between web entities and platforms/browsers...
by btilly | 2025-10-28 03:39:05+00:00
We don't know how that search was done. For example, "I don't feel my life is worth living." Is that potential suicidal intent?

Also these numbers are small enough that they can easily be driven by small groups interacting with ChatGPT in unexpected ways. For example if the song "Everything I Wanted" by Billie Eilish (2019) went viral in some group, the lyrics could easily show up in a search for suicidal ideation.

That said, I don't find the figure at all surprising. As has been pointed out, an estimated 5.3% of Americans report having struggled with suicidal ideation in the last 12 months. People who struggle with suicidal ideation, don't just go there once - it tends to be a recurring mental loop that hits over and over again for extended periods. So I would expect the percentage who struggled in a given week to be a large multiple of the simplistic 5.3% divided by 52 weeks.

In that light this statistic has to be a severe underestimate of actual prevalence. It says more about how much people open up to ChatGPT, than it does to how many are suicidal.

(Disclaimer. My views are influenced by personal experience. In the last week, my daughter has struggled with suicidal ideation. And has scars on her arm to show how she went to self-harm to try to hold the thoughts at bay. I try to remain neutral and grounded, but this is a topic that I have strong feelings about.)
by extr | 2025-10-28 03:43:05+00:00
> Humans generally don't do that when their goal is clear and aligned (hence deterministic).

Look at the language you're using here. Humans "generally" make less of these kinds of errors. "Generally". That is literally an assessment of likelihood. It is completely possible for me to hire someone so stupid that they create a reference to a non-existent source. It's completely possible for my high IQ genius employee who is correct 99.99% of the time to have an off-day and accidentally fat finger something. It happens. Perhaps it happens at 1/100th of the rate that an LLM would do it. But that is simply an input to the model of the process or system I'm trying to build that I need to account for.
by basilyusuf1709 | 2025-10-28 03:46:09+00:00
I built an open source (https://github.com/Octree-AI-Latex-Editor/octree) AI Latex Editor.

A little bit about it: Octree is an open source AI powered LaTeX editor that compiles instantly in the browser using a hosted TeXLive 2025 engine. It helps researchers write papers faster with Cursor like editing for equations, diagrams, and error fixing using AI.
by solid_fuel | 2025-10-28 03:46:15+00:00
> If you found something wrong in that article you should submit some fixes.

Why? This site isn't run by people who are interested in factual accuracy.

If they think Wikipedia articles are inaccurate, they could always propose changes and have a proper discussion with the rest of the contributors. Grok was trained on Wikipedia so realistically this is just a jumbled regurgitation of Wikipedia articles blended with other sources from across the web without the usual source vetting process that Wikipedia uses.

This is a politically motivated side project being run by the worlds richest man, and frankly I doubt many people are interested in helping him create his own padded version of reality.
by btilly | 2025-10-28 03:46:16+00:00
Yes. Most would benefit from more exercise. We need to get sufficient sleep. And more sun. Vitamin D deficiency is shockingly common, and contributes to mental health problems.

We would also generally benefit from internalizing ideas from DBT, CBT, and so on. People also seriously need to work on distress tolerance. Having problems is part of life, and an inability to accept the discomfort is debilitating.

Also, we seriously need to get rid of the stupid idea of trigger warnings. The research on the topic is clear. The warnings do not actually help people with PTSD, and can create the symptoms of PTSD in people who didn't previously have it. It is creating the very problem that people imagine it solving!

All of this and more is supported by what is actually known about how to treat mental illness. Will doing these things fix all of the mental illness out there? Of course not! But it is not downplaying serious mental illness to say that we should all do more of the things that have been shown to help mental illness!
by schmichael | 2025-10-28 03:46:58+00:00
Who orchestrates the orchestrators? is the question we’ve never answered at HashiCorp. We tried expanding Consul’s variety of tenancy features, but if anything it made the blast radius problem worse! Nomad has always kept its federation lightweight which is nice for avoiding correlated failures… but we also never built much cluster management into federated APIs. So handling cluster sprawl is an exercise left to the operator. “Just rub some terraform on it” would be more compelling if our own products were easier to deploy with terraform! Ah well, we’ll keep chipping away at it.
by maest | 2025-10-28 03:47:30+00:00
> The problems it creates are mostly for programmers who can't be bothered to write good software

Myopic and ill informed.

> A 2017 study in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics estimated that "the transition into DST caused over 30 deaths at a social cost of $275 million annually", primarily by increasing sleep deprivation.[128]

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time, Effects on Health section. That section mentions many more negative effects of DST.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-10-28 03:47:40+00:00
These jobsite storage boxes [0] are typically too heavy to steal (and can also be anchor-bolted), and the locks are highly-recessed within an enclosure... practically the only exposure is the keyway... and then there's thousands of dollars of tools inside.

Worth it for smarter crooks. I'm a former IBEW electrician, and I've seen both stranger and more-miraculous occurrences — but I've seen it all.

[0] https://www.uline.com/Product/Detail/H-10011/Tool-Storage/Kn...
by DanHulton | 2025-10-28 03:48:13+00:00
This is incorrect for a lot of reasons, many of which have already been explored, but also:

> with every new iteration of the AI, the internal code will get better

This is a claim that requires proof; it cannot just be asserted as fact. Especially because there's a silent "appreciably" hidden in there between "get" and "better" which has been less and less apparent with each new model. In fact, it more and more looks like "Moore's law for AI" is dead or dying, and we're approaching an upper limit where we'll need to find ways to be properly productive with models only effectively as good as what we already have!

Additionally, there's a relevant adage in computer science: "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." If the code being written is already at the frontier capabilities of these models, how the hell are they supposed to fix the bugs that crop up, especially if we can't rely on them getting twice as smart? ("They won't write the bugs in the first place" is not a realistic answer, btw.)
by ggm | 2025-10-28 03:48:13+00:00
People get very reductionist about language in these things. I think she is right that the most logical choice was to partner with an existing hyperscale backend, they had choices of which and went with AWS for reasons which made sense to them. "no choice" isn't a literal statement of fact, its a choice they made, sure. There may be price, or jurisdictional, or complexity, or understanding, or willingness to sign a specific kind of contract, all kinds of reasons. The alternates all come with their burdens too.

They had choices beyond just other hyperscalers. Rolling their own probably would have meant both capex and opex, which reduced to opex in AWS and so made both logical and financial sense. In risk terms you might have said (before the incident) it was also the best way to lay off risk, but it turns out "too big to fail" actually doesn't mean what it says on the label.

I still back signal over all the other choices. I wasn't looking for an excuse to leave, and as a strawman if you leave signal because chosing AWS as a backend "was unwise" or "was the wrong choice" I think you're reading the signal wrong (sorry)

I would add that "the register" has a house style, and it's not tending to damp down. It likes to be inflammatory, it's tagline "biting the hand which feeds IT" rings true. I enjoy reading it, and I've had work repeated in it, but I also read it with a jaundiced eye. I don't like the comments section it's a minefield of in-group language, memes, bad behaviour.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-10-28 03:50:15+00:00
>what should instead happen is the AI try to guide them towards making their lives less shit

There aren't enough guardrails in place for LLMs to safely interact with suicidal people who are possibly an inch from taking their own life.

Severely suicidal/clinically depressed people are beyond looking to improve their lives. They are looking to die. Even worse, and what people who haven't been there can't fully understand is the severe inversion that happens after months of warped reality and extreme pain, where hope and happiness greatly amplify the suicidal thoughts and can make the situation far more dangerous. It's hard to explain, and is a unique emotional space. Almost a physical effect, like colors drain from the world and reality inverts in many dimensions.

It's really a job for a human professional and will be for a while yet.

Agree that "shut down and refer to hotline" doesn't seem effective. But it does reduce liability, which is likely the primary objective...

Refer-to-human directly seems like it would be far more effective, or at least make it easy to get into a chat with a professional (yes/no) prompt, with the chat continuing after a handoff. It would take a lot of resources though. As it stands, most of this happens in silence and very few do something like call a phone number.
by ajross | 2025-10-28 03:52:21+00:00
Some product decides not to use it. Someone loses a contract supporting it. Someone doesn't get a job because their work isn't favored anymore.

I think you're trying to invoke a frame where because dnsmasq is "open source" that it isn't subject to market forces or doesn't define value in a market-sensitive way. And... it is, and it does.

Free software hippies may be communists at heart but they still need to win on a capitalist battlefield.
by user_7832 | 2025-10-28 03:52:25+00:00
From what I've heard, the way to go about it is to not have a very nice bike, make it identifiable and loud (eg ripped up neon tape and graffiti), and then use both a chain lock as well as a U lock that're both thick enough. Also perhaps throw on extra locks to make other bikes look attractive.

Of course none of these work if the thief is part of a ring that is targeting your bike because it's high value.
by jongjong | 2025-10-28 03:53:11+00:00
>> hey, I have this vibe-coded app, would you like to make it production-ready

This makes me cringe because it's a lot harder to get LLMs to generate good code when you start with a crappy codebase. If you start with a good codebase, it's like the codebase is coding itself. The former approach trying to get the LLM to write clean code is akin to mental torture, the second approach is highly pleasant.