MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by theshrike79 | 2025-12-09 12:45:17+00:00
Use the best tools, the lowest tier of Claude Code is perfect for the stuff you do at home in the evenings and weekends. It's also by far the best at being a "pair coder" as it's chatty and tells you what it's doing and doesn't get confused if you hit ESC and tell it to do something else.

Build your own tools, need a small utility? Use an LLM to create it with you.

Create LLM-focused tools and adjust your workflows to be LLM-friendly.

I personally have a Taskfile setup that follows the same formula regardless of language. "task build" runs lint+test+build. Test and lint are kinda self-evident. All output is set to minimum, only errors are verbose (don't waste context on fancy output).

I also have tools for LLMs to use to find large code files, large and overly complex functions etc.

All project documentation lives in docs/ as markdown files with Mermaid charts.

This way I can just have the general "how to use a taskfile" instructions in my global WHATEVER.md and it'll work in every project.

Learn project management. Working with LLMs is exactly like project managing a bunch of smart and over eager junior coders who want to use every trick and pattern they learned at school for every tiny shell script.

Do a few test projects where you just pretend you're a non-techinical project lead and know WHAT you want but not HOW you want it done. Plan the project, split it into tasks (github tasks or beads[0] both work pretty well). Then have the LLM(s) tackle the tasks one by one and test the end result like a non-techical PM would do in a demo. Comment, critique and ask them to change stuff that doesn't work.

If you can afford it, bring in an outside consultant (Codex or Gemini), both of which are _really_ good at evaluating large codebases for duplication, test coverage, repetition, bad patterns etc. Give their responses verbatim to Claude and ask what it thinks about them.

Working with LLMs is a skill you just need to use to get a feel for it, it's not a science and more like an art. For example I can "feel" when Claude is doing its thing and being either overeager or trying to complete a task while ignoring the burning pile of unit tests it leaves behind and interrupt. it before it gets too far.

[0] https://github.com/steveyegge/beads
by usr1106 | 2025-12-09 12:45:33+00:00
My account is from 2007ish and even cheaper. I just hope there won't ever be a problem with my yearly payment because obviously they won't reopen it on old terms.

Well, it's good business for them and for me. I can access books when it comes to my mind (not that often). They get the money. I would certainly never subscribe again at current rates.
by henwfan | 2025-12-09 12:46:01+00:00
Thank you, I really appreciate you signing up.

I agree with you on pattern recognition. AlgoDrill is built around taking patterns people already understand and turning them into something their hands can write quickly under pressure. You rebuild the solution line by line with active recall, small objectives, and first principles explanations after each step, so it is more than just memorizing code.

You are also right about the language gap. Right now the drills are Python first, but I am already working on full support for JavaScript, Java, and C++ across all problems, and I will have all of those in by the end of this year. I want people to be able to practice in the language they actually use every day, so your comment helps a lot.
by akimbostrawman | 2025-12-09 12:46:11+00:00
>Extreme kindness and respect for fellow human beings?

I hope not towards people that disagree with you or are labeled with an ism since they are monster.

>Extreme acceptance of people from all backgrounds, religious beliefs and sexual orientation?

Does that include Jihadists and child molester/groomer?

>So on this so-called extreme left, what exactly was/is so bad?

That is left as an exercise for the reader if you manage to answer truthfully.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-09 12:47:22+00:00
> We know for a fact that most of the people that master intellectual problems do so via pattern recognition, not by reasoning.

Where is this fact stated, and who are "we" here? Sounds like an opinion or guess at best.

> Not really understanding the negativity here

There are two comments that could be read negativily, the rest is neutral or positive. I don't really understand the constant need for people to bring up what (they think) the rest of the comments said. Post your piece adding positivity if you want, but most of the time comments end up a fair mix so any time someone adds a snippet like that, it turns outdated in a few hours.
by dcrimp | 2025-12-09 12:47:36+00:00
I've been messing around with GA recently, esp indirect encoding methods. This paper seems in support of perspectives I've read while researching. In particular, that you can decompose weight matrices into spectral patterns - similar to JPEG compression and search in compressed space.

Something I've been interested in recently is - I wonder if it'd be possible to encode a known-good model - some massive pretrained thing - and use that as a starting point for further mutations.

Like some other comments in this thread have suggested, it would mean we can distill the weight patterns of things like attention, convolution, etc. and not have to discover them by mutation - so - making use of the many phd-hours it took to develop those patterns, and using them as a springboard. If papers like this are to be believed, more advanced mechanisms may be able to be discovered.
by alkonaut | 2025-12-09 12:48:34+00:00
I think this, as with many user interfaces, comes down to the use case.

A rarely used UI needs to be easy to navigate. Remove clutter, place the often used feature front and center and the rarely used features behind multiple navigation steps. The user primarily _navigates_ this UI, they don't _memorize_ it.

A constantly used UI such as an application that a professional uses from 9 to 5 five days a week (An IDE, a Cad Program, a video editing thing) is a completely different beast. The speed of accessing a feature is more important than the discoverability. The user internalizes the UI and the UI needs to aid the user in doing so. Icons in menus means the user eventually doesn't need to read the text label.
by machomaster | 2025-12-09 12:48:56+00:00
You misunderstood. This is how the conversation went:

1. Is there steady progress in AI?

2. What example do you need? In every single benchmark AI is getting better and better.

3. Job satisfaction and human flourishing.

Hence my answer "AI is very satisfied in doing the job, just ask it". It came about because of the stupid comment 3, which tried to link and put a blame on unrelatable things (akin to refering to obesity when asked what metrics make him say that agriculture/transportation have not made progress in the last 100 years) and at the same time anthropomorphed AI. I only accepted the premise and continued answering on the same level in order to demonstrate stupidity of their answer.
by bko | 2025-12-09 12:49:11+00:00
Maybe it's just me, but I want people that are reasonably competent and you can work with. Maybe there are some jobs that require deep understanding of maths/proofs etc, but those are what, maybe 1 in 100 engineering jobs?

More often than not a deep interest in a particular technical domain is a liability. It's like that guy that insists on functional programming design patterns that insists on a fold with tail recursion where simple mutation could have easily sufficed. Or endless optimization, abstraction and forced patterns. Bro, you're working on building a crud app, we don't need spacecraft design.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-09 12:49:24+00:00
This is true. The three consulting companies/departments I have worked for have had T&M projects that are SOW based and staff augmentation projects.

I said in another reply (don’t remember whether it was to you or not) that I avoid staff augmentation projects for a lot of reasons.

But if you are in consulting and doing SoW based work, it’s a dereliction of duty by your tech lead not to insist on signed change order if the requirements veer materially from the SOW. It puts your company at risk of not being paid and/or having to do free work.
by api | 2025-12-09 12:49:28+00:00
Find some images of the entire huge scale structure of the universe. It looks a bit like… a brain.

What does this mean? Probably not nothing, but probably not “the cosmos is the mind of god.” It probably means that we live in a universe that tends to produce repeating nested patterns at different scales.

But maybe that’s part of what makes it possible to evolve or engineer brains that can understand it. If it had no regularity there’d be no common structural motifs.
by nticompass | 2025-12-09 12:49:36+00:00
I never played the 1st Grandia, but I had Grandia II on the Dreamcast and I absolutely loved that game. I'll admit that I was never the best with (J)RPGs and never played it for that long per-session as a kid, but I did eventually finish it. Though, it did take many years to finally get to the end and finish the game, but I enjoyed it! (I also enjoyed Evolution 2: Far Off Promise).
by scirob | 2025-12-09 12:49:44+00:00
Last i talked to RedPanda sales while working at a big name client they would not offer us anything below $100k per year for enterprise support etc (us running on our kubernetes). Looks like they added some "serverless" pricing thing now, but at the time Azure Eventhub (kakfa client compatible) was cheapest enterprisy option if I remember correctly.
by sofixa | 2025-12-09 12:50:10+00:00
> IME on a Pulumi for IaC team, writing infra in a real language (TypeScript) is MILES better than- you can do conditions, have typed outputs, etc and not have it be a bastardized imperative YAML mess.

You can have conditions and types without having the full flexibility allowing madness of a full language with HCL.
by znort_ | 2025-12-09 12:50:43+00:00
> They focus on objects when we should focus on morphisms.

if you're building real systems you should focus on both.

> Coupling as Hom-Set Size ... The second interface is easier to implement, test, mock, and evolve.

i would doubt that. this just hides the complexity of multiple interfaces inside single, more general interfaces. if those "arrows" actually exist you will have to test and evolve them anyway, and adding some extra classification level does little apart from adding complexity.

> Pipelines ... Why This Matters ... Testability: Each morphism can be tested independently

i agree ... and this just contradicts the previous point about hom-set size.

> The arrows are what matter.

everything matters. i'm aware of the benefits and appeal of category theory, but i don't see the need to shoehorn it into everything, this just seems an example of evangelization of extremes. iow: if your only tool is a hammer everything looks like a nail, and that's not conducing to good design.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-09 12:51:06+00:00
Precisely, and the 'myth' is worded in such a way that the effect of stress relieving pre-quakes is set to a big fat zero and that seems to be a thing more related to the composition of what is underground than the fact that it does not happen at all, and if it happens at what magnitude you would expect the effect to show up.

To me a myth is something that isn't true at all, not something that we do not have data on to be able to rule it out completely or that may be an influence just not a capital one. I think the most generous reading of the 'myth' claim would be that the energy available in the smaller quakes is too low to have a meaningful effect on releasing energy from a larger quake and I'll buy that. But at the same time an absence of such fore-shocks in an area where earthquakes are known to happen indicates that stress may be been building up over a longer time and that stress would be released in the next bigger quake if and when it happens.

This too may not be a big enough difference due to the immense increase in energy present in larger events (the scale is logarithmic). But its effect is quite probably still non-zero and for it to be a myth it would have to be zero.

Myth = the sun rotates around the earth

Myth = unicorns exist

Myth = the earth is 6000 years old

Those are directly falsifiable, and we know all of these to be categorical falsehoods.

Smaller earthquakes can - depending on local crust composition and other environmental factors - affect the amount of energy released in a larger one following, is not necessarily a significant effect (though even this would be tricky to establish) but I find it hard to believe they are completely unrelated though the effect may not be large.

Insignificant effect != Myth
by lynndotpy | 2025-12-09 12:51:07+00:00
If you're seriously doing deep learning research, it's very very nice to own your own GPU.

For four years of AI PhD research I worked with a 1050Ti on a personal laptop and a 2060 on a personal desktop. You can do a lot of validation and development on consumer GPUs.

That said, the OP does not train an LLM from scratch on a 3090. That would not be feasible
by phantasmish | 2025-12-09 12:51:20+00:00
FFX’s balance is awful if you go straight from point to point and don’t take some long grinding breaks. You’ll hit exactly the kinds of boss-walls you mention, and yeah, the cutscene placement is simply abusive.

Last couple plays I’ve used zig-zag approach when traveling through random encounter zones, effectively ~doubling distance traveled, and encounters. Stretches those out, but removes most of the separate, dedicated grinding.

(Not defending the game design that makes this necessary, mind you)
by azath92 | 2025-12-09 12:51:33+00:00
For small models this is for sure the way forward, there are some great small datasets out there (check out the tiny stories dataset that limits vocab to a certain age but keeps core reasoning inherent in even simple language https://huggingface.co/datasets/roneneldan/TinyStories https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.07759)

I have less concrete examples but my understanding is that dataset curation is for sure the way many improvements are gained at any model size. Unless you are building a frontier model, you can use a better model to help curate or generate that dataset for sure. TinyStories was generated with GPT-4 for example.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-09 12:52:03+00:00
Yeah, it's a great idea. If nothing else, taking a job that is non-ideal will expose you to real people with real problem, even if the domain you all are working on is boring/sucky/whatever. Notice when people complain about stuff, try to see the patterns, ask probing questions what could have helped them, and eventually you'll discover patterns of problems that you could potentially solve by leaving and building your own thing.
by throwaway91827 | 2025-12-09 12:52:09+00:00
How do you square your directive that leaders use X as a way to get an option poll or pulse of a nation with phenomena like this: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/23/rightwing-in...

where a huge amount of influential accounts posing as American patriots were actually essentially content-farmers from the global south?

For my 2 cents, I consider X in 2025 (which is very different from Twitter in 2011!) to be basically an anonymous imageboard like 4Chan, mostly full of straight-up noise and largely decoupled from reality, with the only reliable signal being a bias towards information that is personally flattering or aligned with Elon Musk.

I don't know that I'd ever seriously listen to a place like 4Chan for guidance about how to tie my own shoes, much less how to govern an entire nation.
by UncleMeat | 2025-12-09 12:52:18+00:00
I have been completely shocked by the number of people in the tech industry who seem to genuinely place no value on humanity and so many of its outputs. I see it in the writing of leaders within VC firms and AI companies but I also see it in ordinary conversations on the caltrain or in coffee shops.

Friendship, love, sex, art, even faith and childrearing are opportunities for substitution with AI. Ask an AI to create a joke for you at a party. Ask an AI to write a heartfelt letter to somebody you respect. Have an AI make a digital likeness of your grandmother so you can spend time with her forever. Have an AI tell you what you should say to your child when they are sad.

Hell. Hell on earth.
by jawns | 2025-12-09 12:52:30+00:00
It sounds like this person has a hobby that they want to get paid to do.

Which is fine, if you can find a way to make it happen.

But for the majority of us, work means work. It's not always aligned with your own interests, it can feel like drudgery, and we accept the uncomfortable reality that our labor is probably making somebody else richer than it's making us.

I'm a fan of cooperatives, where at least you know that you have part ownership over your endeavors. But even then, you often need to work to satisfy clients and customers, rather than to satisfy your own interests.

Ultimately, I've learned to separate my hobby interest in programming and my work. I accept that work will always feel like work, but a few things (like good coworkers) can make a big difference. I try to make the experience tolerable for myself and my coworkers, and then I do what I really love on the side.
by sofixa | 2025-12-09 12:52:58+00:00
But you're talking about a free open source application without guarantees, that's not comparable to a SaaS vs self-hosted "paid" software in model.

And even for the cases where you it is, even with a modern language like Go that makes it easy, you still have tons of OS specific complexity. Service definitions, filesystem operations, signal handling, autoupdates if you want them, etc etc.
by rs186 | 2025-12-09 12:53:09+00:00
There are a bunch of mid-sized companies that

* are mostly B2B oriented

* are (usually) private

* have a healthy balance sheet

* have their own niche so they don't have to fight for survival but don't have to aggressively expand either

if you know where to look.

The caveat is that they probably are not hiring many people right now, and the bar is not low at all (even though most employees are mediocre). In the current market, many people want to work at those companies.
by ahartmetz | 2025-12-09 12:53:14+00:00
RenderDoc is very cool, but more of a high level debugger, I guess? It's also good to analyze performance issues, e.g. when working with QML and QSG_VISUALIZE=overdraw / batches (both very high level) don't cut it anymore, or to get a different perspective. Watching a scene getting drawn API call by API call is fun.
by reactordev | 2025-12-09 12:53:19+00:00
In a world of lead actors, there’s nothing wrong with being a career supporting actor.

Same is true for software. There’s so many smaller, rural companies that lack the knowledge. There’s so many out of the box opportunities to add a little IoT into the field. There’s so many little wins to be had NOT following the boomer path of career servitude to an omnipotent leader Boss. You don’t have to go down the that road, you can always pivot or be supporting those efforts.
by rindalir | 2025-12-09 12:53:35+00:00
As someone who raises horses and other animals, I can say with pretty high certainty that most of the horses were not allowed to "retire". Horses are expensive and time-consuming to care for, and with no practical use, most horses would have been sent not to the glue factory but (at that time) to the butcher and their non-meat parts used for fertilizer.
by dsnr | 2025-12-09 12:53:43+00:00
Too little too late. Used to be a JetBrains user and subscriber when IDEA was the best Java IDE. They lost me with the excessive product segmentation in the pursuit for profits.

For example, Python is heavily used for web dev where you need to do both backend and frontend. Neither PyCharm nor WebStorm alone offers what I need in one app.

VS Code with clangd is what I use now when I need to code C++.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-12-09 12:53:53+00:00
I've looked a few times at this space. Most of the documentation seems to devolve into a depth first deep dive into here's a bunch of tags and attributes without laying out a coherent goal of what you should be doing.

My observations:

- most web developers have never seen a screen reader version of their application; or any application.

- most teams don't have visually handicapped people that use a screen reader that could provide feedback

- so, no bugs ever get reported regarding accessibility

That is, unless developers go out of their way to use proper tools and do proper testing for this. And testing practices for Aria probably is at the same level as it is for other application features: sketchy to non existent at best.

Let's face it, mostly Aria is pure box ticking for developers. There has to be some (regulations, and PMs insisting because of that). But it doesn't have to be good since nobody really checks these things. Including the PM.

Without a feedback loop, it's not surprising that most web apps don't get this even close to right. IMHO, over time, agentic tools might actually be more helpful to blind people as they can summarize, describe, and abstract what's on the screen. Agentic testing via a screen reader might also become a thing. I've done some testing via the agent mode in chat gpt and it was shockingly good at figuring out our UI. Not a bad process for automating what used to be manual QA. I've been meaning to put more time in this.

I actually have as a very low priority target to start driving some of this in our own application. Mostly that's just a hunch it might come up because of some government customers. But this is Germany and they seem to have lots of blind spots on software quality. I don't actually expect any feedback whatsoever from actual customers or anyone on this. I just want to pre-empt that.
by m0llusk | 2025-12-09 12:54:02+00:00
That isn't realistic at all. Customers change and their needs change with them. Sometimes customers die. Products that stay the same change their fit over time and eventually fall away. A business that is not growing is dying. That is okay. It can be fine to let things fall away when they have run their course, but some prefer to endure. But the absolute fact remains that a business that is not growing is dying.

It seems like what you are perceiving is a common market delusion. An unfortunate fact of hiring is those workers who are not employed and satisfied are often less experienced and skilled than those who are well placed and not looking. The same logic applies the other way around to companies. Those who are looking to hire juniors who haven't yet found their way are often companies that lack a solid center and just want to squeeze some money out of whatever customers they can find using whatever tool is at hand.

With the current state of things if your needs are truly modest then there is a good chance that you can get by with some independent offering. Find something you are interested in and make it work for someone willing to pay for it. Make sure to lean more into sales and actually making things work for customers than the engineer tendency to envision mechanisms and focus entirely on that. This way you can set the balance for yourself, and I can absolutely guarantee that you will experience the realities of growth or death up close, though in a more personal way that you can take control of and manage for yourself using criteria that have meaning for you.