MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 9rx | 2025-12-18 15:36:47+00:00
> if you don't at least look at the running code, you don't know that it works.

Your tests run the code. You know it works. I know the article is trying to say that testing is not comprehensive enough, but my experience disagrees. But I also recognize that testing is not well understood (quite likely the least understood aspect of computer science!) — and if you don't have a good understanding you can get caught not testing the right things or not testing what you think you are. I would argue that you would be better off using your time to learn how to write great tests instead of using it to manually test your code, but to each their own.

What is more likely to happen is not understanding the customer needs well enough, leaving it impossible to write tests that align with what the software needs to do. Software development can break down very quickly here. However, manual testing does not help. You can't know what to manually test without understanding the problem either. However, as before, your job is not to deliver proven code. Your job is to solve customer problems. When you realize that, it becomes much less likely that you write tests that are not in line with the solution you need.
by wackget | 2025-12-18 15:36:53+00:00
I feel like all these articles are writing about the wrong thing. Yeah, it sucks that the guy's account got banned, and yeah, maybe we can't trust gift cards.

But the truly troublesome issue is how an entire ecosystem of (very expensive) hardware is allowed to be tied to an identity controlled by a giant black box of a corporation.

What I mean is: you can spend thousands and thousands on devices and configure them to be almost invaluable to your everyday life, but you are ultimately completely beholden to Apple. You require their ongoing permission to continue using those devices. You are completely at their mercy.

And sure, you can argue that people willingly sign up for that kind of agreement when they make the decision to purchase Apple/Google products but that's also missing the point. Phones are now essential utilities. Accessing vital services sometimes requires an iOS or Android device.

Permitting giant, uncontactable, merciless tech corporations to control the digital lives of virtually everyone on the planet is absolute insanity.

The scenario described in the OP's article should simply never be allowed to happen.
by falcor84 | 2025-12-18 15:37:09+00:00
That's an interesting argument, but from my industry experience, the average experienced QA Engineer and technical Product Manager both have better vocabulary than the average SWE. Indeed, I wonder whether a future curriculum for Vibe Engineering (to borrow your own term) may look more similar to that of present-day QA or Product curricula, than to a typical coding or CS curriculum.
by bombcar | 2025-12-18 15:37:09+00:00
Think why they're asking the question.

They don't really care what you were doing, they want to know if you got fired or couldn't work well.

The second is actually part of the issue based on what you've said. I'd either have a good answer, or simply state what happened.

"I had the ability to take some time off to work on moving to government IT, but recent changes have made me realize that it's not the career path for me."
by ajross | 2025-12-18 15:37:18+00:00
> you can just use the heavier one for everything

Because people don't like using heavyweight solutions needlessly. That's the logic that begat C++ and Ada and Multics and ASN.1 and CORBA. All of which were good solutions useful for "everything" in their domain. But people hate them, mostly.

Historically big "everything" solutuions end up losing in the market to lighter weight paradigms with more agility and flexibility. Almost every time. React[1] was such a solution once!

[1] Which really is a shorthand for "modern node-based web development with tens of thousands of npm dependencies and thirteen separately-documented API and deployment environemnts to learn".
by usefulcat | 2025-12-18 15:37:23+00:00
> it’s worth calling out just how hard this problem is for retailers and issuers.

I'm having a hard time finding much sympathy. They could always, oh I don't know.. maybe just not sell gift cards? Or have a much lower maximum amount?

I mean yeah, you could take the view that technically the blame really lies with the people trying to use gift cards for theft, but that's not going to be productive.
by mikepurvis | 2025-12-18 15:37:26+00:00
To put a bit more colour on this, I think the fear of most devs with an ultra-simple framework like this is that eventually you hit a wall where you need it to do something it doesn't natively do, and because the only thing you know is these magical declarative hx-whatever attributes, there's no way forward.

I appreciate the basic demos, but I think what would really sell me is showing the extensibility story. Show me what it looks like when I need it to do something a bit beyond what it has in the box. Where do I add the JavaScript for that? Is it raw, inline, or are we back to packages and bundling and a build step? Am I building application JS, or some kind of extension or plugin to htmx itself? How chained am I going to be to its specific paradigms and opinions?

The page says htmx isn't for writing a true SPA like Google Docs, but where's the line? Show me an app that has pushed up against the limits of this system, and what happens in that scenario.
by komali2 | 2025-12-18 15:37:39+00:00
> That's like saying my C# is getting turned into CLR bytecode, so I do have to learn CLR bytecode because I have an abstraction over it.

For a good part of your career this is true, but eventually you will need to justify your senior salary by being able to debug react via looking at library code itself, or understanding the event bubbling under the hood, or figure out why the output css isn't working.

Saw a video, wish I could remember who, someone developing a game in c-something. There was some bug they couldn't figure out so they jumped into I guess the assembly for that block of higher abstracted code, and was able to find some kind of memory issue. Vague, sorry, but point is I remember being really impressed, thinking oh shit yeah if I really want to be an expert in my field I better be able to really understand my stack all the way to the bones.
by thayne | 2025-12-18 15:38:01+00:00
> outside of markets where there's a lot of compliance requirements

That includes anyone who wants to sell to the US government (and probably other governments as well).

FedRAMP easentially[1] requires using "hardened" images.

[1]: It isn't strictly required, but without out things like passing security scans and FIPS compliance are more difficult.
by imiric | 2025-12-18 15:38:15+00:00
The job of a software developer is not just to prove that the software "works". The definition of "works" itself is often fuzzily defined and difficult to prove.

That is part of it, yes, but there are many others, such as ensuring that the new code is easy to understand and maintain by humans, makes the right tradeoffs, is reasonably efficient and secure, doesn't introduce a lot of technical debt, and so on.

These are things that LLMs often don't get right, and junior engineers need guidance with and mentoring from more experienced engineers to properly learn. Otherwise software that "works" today, will be much more difficult to make "work" tomorrow.
by throw7 | 2025-12-18 15:38:31+00:00
The encryption debate is the same as the gun debate. The tools are politicized because it's the easy thing for lawmakers to make it look like they're taking action. As the report warns, the deployed laws have negative consequences.

Outlaw all guns and make end-to-end encryption illegal doesn't stop GRU dropping novichok perfume bottles around england.
by halapro | 2025-12-18 15:38:44+00:00
This is something governments should really try to tackle, but I'm afraid that their solution would be a government ID rather than proper guidance and rules for these behemoths.

The way I see it resolved is for Google and Apple to link the accounts to a physical person via government ID so that if you want issues to be resolved you'd have to verify yourself. This would also limit abuse by bad parties.

Now, do you want all of your web accounts be linked to your government ID?
by moduspol | 2025-12-18 15:38:49+00:00
I found out recently that in my state, the online vanity plate checker shows plates that were PREVIOUSLY registered but NOW available as NOT available. I wanted to get one of my own plates I had years ago and assumed there was some process to have it transferred, but was told by a DMV rep that after two years of non-registration, they're up for grabs. Apparently the web page does not take this into account.

That means there are probably a lot of great plate names up for the taking that people are just assuming are taken. You'd need to call the DMV to verify.

Hopefully Florida's web page does not have that limitation.
by kelnos | 2025-12-18 15:39:11+00:00
I'm not sympathetic to this point at all. As Patrick McKenzie says, "the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero"[0]. Yes, fraud causes problems for retailers and issuers. But in cases like this one, the result of overreactions and incorrect handling of fraud is severe, mostly-intractable problems for customers. Customers who end up having very little or no recourse.

McKenzie's point is more about how businesses need to accept a certain level of fraud because trying to stamp all of it out will be more expensive and more damaging than allowing some of it. But I'd go further than that: companies should be required to accept some amount of fraud in order to avoid harming their legitimate customers. It should be just another cost of doing business.

[0] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
by ben_s | 2025-12-18 15:39:16+00:00
Fabric Manager itself is not open source. It's NVIDIA-provided software, and today it's required to bring up and manage the NVLink/NVSwitch fabric on HGX systems. What we meant by "open" is that everything around it - the hypervisor, our control plane logic, partition selection, host configuration, etc. - is implemented in the open and available in our repos. You're right that this isn't a fully open GPU stack.

On isolation: in Shared NVSwitch Multitenancy mode, isolation is enforced at multiple layers. Fabric Manager programs the NVSwitch routing tables so GPUs in different partitions cannot exchange NVLink traffic, and each VM receives exclusive ownership of its assigned GPUs via VFIO passthrough. Large providers apply additional hardening and operational controls beyond what we describe here. We're not claiming this is equivalent to AWS's internal threat model, but it does rely on NVIDIA's documented isolation mechanisms.
by IG_Semmelweiss | 2025-12-18 15:39:16+00:00
I distincly recall many articles stating that for ridiculous EUR like 50k you could buy housing in spain right after 2007 the crisis, for many years afterward. Because it was so overbuilt , at least outside of the big metros) that the builders and sellers were desperate to move.

I wonder if they all wiped out by the crisis (subprime really hit spain hard), and what we are seeing now is the consequence of that wipeout, and bankruptcies.
by ryandrake | 2025-12-18 15:39:39+00:00
What I want to know is why does it always have to go straight from 0 to 100? There's seemingly no concept of proportion. For most online services, your account can be in one of two states: Totally good and "banned for life". There's no warning, no investigative period, no concept of scale (was the fraud $10 or $10,000?), no way to serve your time and come back if you actually were bad. It's just instant, silent BAN HAMMER.
Show HN: I built a tool to make AI recommend you (and I'm conflicted about it)
by mrayushsoni | 2025-12-18 15:39:48+00:00
So I've been obsessed with a weird question for the past 6 months, what happens to SEO when everyone starts asking ChatGPT for recommendations instead of Googling?

The answer, apparently, is chaos. And maybe opportunity?

I built FirstClick because I noticed something strange. My previous startup was getting zero traffic from AI assistants, but our competitor (objectively worse product, sorry not sorry) was getting mentioned by Claude and Perplexity constantly.

It drove me crazy. So I reverse engineered why. Turns out there's a whole new game being played and most founders don't even know it exists yet.

FirstClick does three things 1. Writes BOFU comparison content automatically ("X vs Y", "Best alternatives to Z") 2. Optimizes it specifically for AI citation, not just Google 3. Tracks when/if AI models actually recommend you

The uncomfortable part is that I'm essentially helping companies game AI search results. Same way SEO gamed Google for 20 years. Is this... good? Bad? Inevitable?

I go back and forth honestly. Part of me thinks this is just the new reality founders need to adapt to. Part of me wonders if we're all just training AI on increasingly optimized marketing content until nothing means anything anymore.

Anyway, it works pretty well. Happy to answer questions about how AI models decide what to recommend, the technical implementation, or why I probably should have just become a photographer.
by ndriscoll | 2025-12-18 15:39:50+00:00
They've made it clear that you don't own your cloud library, so the only reasonable answer is to never pay for something with DRM you cannot remove (including things that require an online account for functionality you consider important), and treat services like Steam as a temporary convenience to download known good files that you then fix to remove any DRM. If you only treat these services as a download tool, their ban loses all teeth.
by lachlan_gray | 2025-12-18 15:40:13+00:00
I think part of the message is that speed isn't a free lunch. If an intelligence can solve "legible" problems quickly, it's symptomatic of a specific adaption for identifying short paths.

So when you factor speed into tests, you're systematically filtering for intelligences that are biased to avoid novelty. Then if someone is slow to solve the same problems, it's actually a signal that they have the opposite bias, to consider more paths.

IMO the thing being measured by intelligence tests is something closer to "power" or "competitive advantage".
by tialaramex | 2025-12-18 15:40:41+00:00
Death of the Author.

One of the important elements here is the extent to which materially it matters. If I buy a book Lovecraft wrote a hundred years ago the money isn't going to end up diverted to support the "patriots" who want to intimidate my neighbours, whereas when I buy a Harry Potter box set for a relative you can bet that Rowling's share will help fund "Gender Critical" movements trying to make life worse for some of my friends and colleagues...

For books particularly I can totally buy Death of the Author, what I think I read might be entirely different from what the author says they intended, which further nobody can prove is what they actually intended. For that last for example I do not for one moment believe Vernor Vinge that he "Didn't know" what Rabbit is in "Rainbow's End". It's an AI. Maybe Vinge doesn't intend the book as a Singularitarian Catastrophe (you can argue the book thinks it's about avoiding such a catastrophe) but I don't see any way to interpret it where Rabbit isn't a super-human AI.
by _menelaus | 2025-12-18 15:40:42+00:00
All populations should be armed. The current democratic, liberal order in Europe is just a side effect of America's dominance, the same America that is the product of the revolution of a well armed population. Your counterpoint might be the U.K., which has arrested 12,000 people for social media posts recently.

The catch is, it only works with an enlightened, well educated population with philia and a sense of civic duty. Arming inner city Chicago has been a disaster.

That's tough to maintain that state, but we have to try, because if a population doesn't fit that description the country turns to shit and you won't want to live there. To disarm is to admit we can't be an enlightened country anymore and we won't try, and after that its just a matter of time until there is nothing special about America and its just another mediocre third world dump.
by adrian_b | 2025-12-18 15:41:00+00:00
In a well designed programming language, the compiler should always decide at its whim, whether input or output parameters need an extra copy or not, i.e. if they should be passed by value or by reference.

The programmer must only specify the behavior of the parameters, i.e. if they are input, output or input-output parameters, like in Ada.

The fact that a parameter is the result is just a matter of syntax, not of semantics. Any other output parameters should behave exactly like the result. This means that for any output parameter, like also for the result, the compiler must decide between receiving the output value in a register or passing an extra pointer on input that is the address of a memory area where the function must write the output value.
by Karliss | 2025-12-18 15:41:15+00:00
Industrial cooler manufacturers and DC PR teams have their ways to greenwash the truth.

"40% of data centers are using evaporative cooling" doesn't mean that other 60% are fully closed loop water to air coolers or what would be called "dry cooling systems" by the manufacturers. The other 60% could be "adiabatic coolers" or "hybrid coolers" or if data center is close to large body of water/water heat exchangers, where 2/3 of those still depend on evaporating water, but the manufacturers would put them in separate category from evaporative coolers.

Just took a looked at offering of one of the industrial cooler manufacturers. They had only 1 dry cooler design, compared to a dozen more or less evaporative ones. And even that one was advertised as having "post install bolt-on adiabatic kit option". Which feels like a cheat to allow during initial project and build claim that you are green by using only dry coolers, but after the press releases are done, grant money collected and things are starting to operate at full capacity, attach sprinklers to keep the energy costs lower.
by stefan_ | 2025-12-18 15:41:19+00:00
It's terrible, why would I want my endpoints to return random HTML fragments? I realize thats how you did it in the JQuery times, but I was never in those - at that time we simply had template engines in the backend so this HTML slop wouldn't contaminate everywhere..

Most of the frontend stuff I do is for internal pages on embedded devices, and I'm very happy with a structure where I have the frontend being a full React fancy component lib SPA that is eventually just compiled down to a zip bundle of files that the backend needs to know nothing about and can serve as dumb files. The backend is a JSON API of sorts that I would need to build anyway for other use cases.
by citrate05 | 2025-12-18 15:41:41+00:00
It looks like they screened 45 strains of bacteria to find 9 that passed their safety tests, and then only one of those had a 100-percent response. The sample size is also small: 5/5 sounds a lot less impressive than 100%. I'd expect the true response rate to be substantially lower ("winner's curse").

The bar for an acceptable side effect profile in an FDA-approved drug would also be a lot higher than "five genetically near-identical mice did not show evidence of pathology in a single study."

I'm not saying this work is bad (skimming, it seems fine for what it is, though haven't read in detail), but it's quite preliminary if we're talking about developing a medical treatment that could eventually be deployed in humans. There's a reason it ended up in a mid-tier microbiome journal.
by almostdeadguy | 2025-12-18 15:41:44+00:00
I mean I suppose you can continuously add "critical feedback" to the system prompt to have some measure of impact on future decision-making, but at some point you're going to run out of space and ultimately I do not find this works with the same level of reliability as giving a live person feedback.

Perhaps an unstated and important takeaway here is that junior developers should not be permitted to use an LLMs for the same reason they should not hire people: they have not demonstrated enough skill mastery and judgement to be trusted with the decision to outsource their labor. Delegating to a vendor is a decision made by high-level stakeholders, with the ability to monitor the vendor performance, and replace the vendor with alternatives if that performance is unsatisfactory. Allowing junior developers to use LLM is allowing them to delegate responsibility without any visibility or ability to set boundaries on what can be delegated. Also important: you cannot delegate personal growth, and by permitting junior engineers to use an LLM that is what you are trying to do.
by thecupisblue | 2025-12-18 15:41:52+00:00
It's an internal benchmark that I use to test prompts, models and prompt-tunes, nothing but a dashboard calling our internal endpoints and showing the data, basically going through the prod flow.

For my product, I run a video through a multimodal LLM with multiple steps, combine data and spit out the outputs + score for the video.

I have a dataset of videos that I manually marked for my usecase, so when a new model drops, I run it + the last few best benchmarked models through the process, and check multiple things:

- Diff between outputed score and the manual one - Processing time for each step - Input/Output tokens - Request time for each step - Price of request

And the classic stats of average score delta, average time, p50, p90 etc. + One fun thing which is finding the edge cases, since even if the average score delta is low (means its spot-on), there are usually some videos where the abs delta is higher, so these usually indicate niche edge cases the model might have.

Gemini 3 Flash nails it sometimes even better than the Pro version, with nearly the same times as 2.5 Pro does on that usecase. Actually, pushed it to prod yesterday and looking at the data, it seems it's 5 seconds faster than Pro on average, with my cost-per-user going down from 20 cents to 12 cents.

IMO it's pretty rudimentary, so let me know if there's anything else I can explain.
by zx2c4 | 2025-12-18 15:42:11+00:00
Voila:

https://github.com/WireGuard/wireguard-android/pull/82 https://github.com/WireGuard/wireguard-android/pull/80

In that first one, the double pasted AI retort in the last comment is pretty wild. In both of these, look at the actual "files changed" tab for the wtf.
by ideamod | 2025-12-18 15:42:17+00:00
I wrote this after going through performance reviews and noticing a recurring pattern: smart engineers constantly talking past each other. It didn't look like "personality clashes" to me; it looked more like a "protocol mismatch."

I tried to reverse-engineer these conflicts into 4 dimensions (Representation, Reasoning, Attention, Framing) to make them debuggable.

The core idea is that we often argue because one person is looking at the task through a "Holistic/Abstract" lens (Vision/Strategy), while the other is locked into a "Sequential/Concrete" lens (Implementation/Edge cases). Both are right, but the encoding is incompatible.

I tried to keep this grounded in engineering terms.

Curious to hear if this model maps to the friction you see in your teams.