skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In some ways, refusing to use LLM's to assist with coding is like that funny commercial where they show a guy trimming grass one blade at a time using a nail clipper. Using LLM's responsibly is a massive force multiplier. You still have to know what you are doing or the result could be in a range between not maintainable to disastrous.

In my experiments with LLM's one of the most obvious issues is project structure and organization, particularly in the context of future objectives. It is way too easy to have an LLM go in circles when analyzing ideas for project structures. I have seen them propose layouts that, while workable, are far from ideal.

The same applies to code. It can write usable code faster than a human. However, and, again, in my experience, you are constantly refactoring the results.

In all, this is a new tool and, yes, it is useful. It's amazing to me considering the idea that the whole thing is based on guessing the next token. It doesn't really understand anything, yet, you'd be hard-pressed to prove this to those who don't know how we got here. I've had a few of those conversations with non-coders using ChatGPT for a range of tasks. It's magic.
> It's currently really hard for newbies to break into the software industry as it's still recovering from the en-mass layoffs two years ago. With coding assistants this good, now, and getting better daily I'm left wondering...

This can definitely help with some of the tech debts. But I wonder how do we deal with changing requirements? Use Cases? Experiments & new directions from Product? Software has a life after building.
Scientists steer the development of stem cells to regenerate and repair organs
I haven’t looked into these coding LLMs, but I wonder—they’ll hit diminishing returns or the limit of the model at some point. It might be before they are just, like fully sentient fellow developers that we can describe our wishes to in vague terms to get working code.

Maybe it is far enough along that we can at least see what the final form would look like and start getting comfortable with working inside those constraints? I don’t know.
I feel similar levels of cognitive dissonance when a Floridian governor claims he cannot simply stop a hurricane. What the hell do we even have politicians for if they can’t change the weather!? Have we considered the use of nuclear weapons on the fire? Dear leader trump had a great idea on dat last time there was danger cuming for Florida.
yeah very similar. chatgpt and esp. copilot are pushing me to new heights of productivity. But in an interview I'm getting progressively uselesser. e.g. in the VSCode python debugger where copilot isn't active, I often don't know what to type. I'll sometimes even move back to the editor and type a comment with what a I want, let Copilot fill it in, then paste it into the debugger.

It's maybe sad, but from a business perspective it's excellent.
Stick a book under your laptop.
Have you tried asking it to do something useful rather than ask it to solve gotcha word problems?

> I read all of these amazing things that they supposedly all can do.

You seem to be implying people are confused (or lying?) about the things they are able to get LLMs to do.

If you give it an honest effort to solve some real problems you are facing then you may be able to speak with more authority. Often it comes down to prompting skill. Try to read about different prompting approaches as that may help you.

In general, you need to be specific about what you need, and you need to give all relevant details. Like the post author said, treat it like a junior programmer or an intern.
The most powerful hands in Balatro aren't real poker hands.
> why I maintain the discipline that all commits to the "real" branch, however you define that term, should all individually build and pass all (known-at-the-time) tests and generally be deployable in the sense that they would "work" to the best of your knowledge, even if you do not actually want to deploy that literal release

You’re spot on.

However it’s clearly a missing feature that Git/Mercurial can’t tag diffs as “passes” or “bisectsble”.

This is especially annoying when you want to merge a stack of commits and the top passes all tests but the middle does not. It’s a monumental and valueless waste of time to fix the middle of the stack. But it’s required if you want to maintain bisectability.

It’s very annoying and wasteful. :(
I mean, an LLMs ability to solve a logic puzzle seems like a weird way to gauge how it could be USEFUL to you (even if it otherwise would be a good test of how 'intelligent' the LLM is).

Do you search Google or Reddit and wish you could just 'get the answer' instead of wading into pages/posts?

Do you compare two long documents together and not want to invest a few hours into a close reading of them?

Do you write code that consists of trivial functions or trivial text manipulation?

Do you want a 3-hour podcast summarized into a few bullet points for a particular audience?

Do you want to send a saucy limerick to your friend on their birthday?

Do you want to compare Kant's view on <topic> with <new_metaphysical_school_of_thought>?

Do you want to analyze 250k rows in an Excel file of user support tickets and summarize the top issues?

etc etc etc.

Totally fine if you don't do any of these things, but these are the things most people are using LLMs for.
Sharing requires actual time…? Certainly more than zero.
Even when you have an expensive contract with Microsoft and a direct account manager to help you run the gauntlet you still end up having to deal with awful support people.

Years ago at a job we were seeing issues with a network card on a VM. One of my coworkers spent 2-3 days working his way through support engineer after support engineer until they got into a call with one.
He talked the engineer through what was happening. Remote VM, can only access over RDP (well, we could VNC too, but that idea just confuses Microsoft support people for some reason.)

The support engineer decided that the way to resolve the problem was to uninstall and re-install the network card driver. Coworker decided to give the support engineer enough rope to hang themselves with, hoping it'd help him escalate faster: "Won't that break the RDP connection?"
"No sir, I've done this many times before, trust me"
"Okay then...."

Unsurprisingly enough, when you uninstall the network card driver and cause the instance to have no network cards, RDP stops working. Go figure.

Co-worker let the support engineer know that he'd now lost access, and a guess why. "Oh, yeah. I can see why that might have been a problem"

Co-worker was right though, it did finally let us escalate further up the chain....
> We can learn from the US’s and EU’s approach - delivering the dynamism, flexibility and long-term stability that we know businesses want.

At least for AI regulation, the EU is the last place I'd want the UK to learn from.
Either their sales team absolutely screwed this up, or they just don't want to bother with the VMware platform anymore. Maybe both?
Perhaps similar strategy as spammers employ today? Where they try to filter away people quickly who wouldn't fall for it when they need it to.

So do something slightly outrageous today, so you filter away the ones that won't stick around for the future more outrageous changes.
it’s super easy though. i had a hard time getting into rrt games.
My argument accepts the idea that you're likely to come across object-oriented code in your first jobs in the field, the same way you're going to come across complicated SQL joins, which is also something a CS curricula is unlikely to prepare you for. I would advocate for delegating OO concepts to that kind of level of "trade knowledge" rather than elevating it to a "fundamental" of computer science.

Rust and Go have concepts that approximate class-based object-oriented programming (and: if you look at NEU's OO syllabus, that's what they're doing), but only barely. You could teach someone how to use an interface without teaching "polymorphism" as a concept. Encapsulation as a language feature is an example of an OO-ism that I think is done and dusted. We hid implementation details in C, too! The notion of an abstract data type is fine to hold on to. The idea of "friend classes" and "protected" fields and other ACLs for variables, though, I don't think we're going to see come back.
> lot of things might clear up once you remove the assumption that Big Bang was true begining of matter, energy and time, with everything isotropic

Sure, but now you’ve created a magic variable the literal size of the universe. Why do we have the timescape that we do?
For better or worse, I don't think much practical possibility stems from this insight, and I wish PG had considered the possibility that the enforcement of some orthodoxy is unavoidable, and that the liberal environment he's describing is a vacuum into which some orthodoxy will inevitably insert itself.
> Who do you imagine thought of it this way, and how does an objection to shipping trash require you to think this way?

The argument being presented by the person I replied to said verbatim: "ignoring the fact that this was likely air shipped from Korea and then delivered by multiple trucks to you."

> What you seem to be theorizing is that if these weren't being shipped, some other product would have been invented to take up the volume that it uses, or all other products would expand in order to fill the space.

We don't need to theorize or invent, the plastic products already exist. Go to Amazon and search for "laptop stand" and you'll find a glut of them. So I ask again, if you're going to buy a laptop stand anyway and you have the choice between A) a plastic stand or B) this recycled stand, is it better, in terms of environmental impact, to buy one of the hundreds of plastic stands shipped from South Korea, or this recycled stand shipped from South Korea?
Ask HN: How are you backing up your password managers?
Migrating to a new browser (back to Firefox after a 10 year hiatus) and setting stuff up again. Bitwarden and Authy have made the migration easy and secure but it got me thinking that if I lost access to one or both of those, I would be totally screwed.

How do you protect against these single points of failure?
You're completely ignoring that the individuals have a high risk when doing this, even more so when they are the first to take this step. It can often happen that individuals make choices to minimize risk, which lead to increased risk for the whole group. It's just game theory. But it sounds like you're ignoring this deliberately to make people angry, so I'll leave you with one last thought:

You're legitimizing Matt's bullying (by telling people "well, if you don't act counter to game theory and deliberately worsen your own standing, you obviously want to be bullied!") and thus actively telling people "they can't possibly anything ever". What you're doing does far more harm than good.
FWIW even with machine translations (on GPT-4o) I do get occasional hallucinations. Like, it'll add an additional sentence or relative clause that wasn't in the original. It'll still make sense in context, so the overall meaning is the same, but it's not what I'd expect from, say, a human translator. (For context, I know enough of both languages—English and Japanese—to be able to verify this myself.)

It doesn't happen very often—maybe 1 out of 50 times?—but it's definitely a somewhat regular occurrence. And ofc, it's not just a result of the fact that every language is different and so the same meaning will need to be expressed differently—it's actually hallucinating bona fide content.
I don't think it is possible to usefully deliver what you want, but if you can do that I'm all for it. Just having the code in my documentation checked that it compiles (which often means assumptions because I shouldn't have to put in boilerplate)
We traded one convenience for others. I can play the same music in sync across every room in the house and the backyard, and I didn't have to run speaker wires to 23 locations to do that. I can play any of millions of songs without having a room full of physical copies of the music. I can plug in an aux cord into the system if I need to do so.
There is no reason to assume that say C compiler generates the same machine code for the same source code. AFAIK, a C compiler that chooses randomly between multiple C-semantically equivalent sequences of instructions is a valid C compiler.
> as well as a lack of algorithmic curation, which a lot of people deem very important.

Twitter ran for enough of its early years without that and it still had "mainstream appeal". (Blogs and RSS for even more years.) I'm happier without algorithmic curation. I think a lot of people over-estimate what algorithmic curation is worth to them. Partly because algorithmic curation is a big business, tied in pretzel knots with advertising, and is marketed by major companies as a huge "improvement" or "user need" (to sell more ads).
If you can't compete on quality, you compete by being difficult to compare to better things.
How is this bad advice?

> keep up your software engineering best practices

It's not a best practice to over-engineer solutions, and indeed, it is a best practice to find the right solution.
Airplanes in Spain test fuel made from used cooking oil [video]
"The game dicks you at the last possible moment by expecting the year to be sensible"

Great read on how to actually hack. Takes you through the walls he hits and then how by hitting that wall it "opens up a new vector of attack"
This is a tired trope, that engineers who don’t use software assistants will be left in the dust and need to hop onboard asap.

It’s really easy to learn how to use software assistants. Those engineers can hop on or off any time. It’s really hard to build up fundamental engineering skills.
Shervin Pishevar: What Happened in the Firing of Travis Kalanick [video]
So the take away is that we had all the resources we needed, lots of money for firefighters and plenty of water in reservoirs. So either the situation is impossible and no plausible human effort could have saved these neighborhoods, or these resources were mismanaged and the planning was incompetent.

Does anyone know what the issue is? Is it the lack of sufficient controlled burns and forest thinning, leaving so much fuel that these fires become impossible to contain? $3.8B seems like plenty of money? Maybe it isn't?

If the answer from govt officials is to yell "climate change!" and then disappear in a puff of smoke well I think that's going to have a substantial effect on Southern CA property values.
> Maybe it's like with Apple and I am using it wrong.

Well, yeah. You are. It's built to answer questions people actually ask, not solve new logic puzzles.

Despite what the marketing says, it's not a perfect-infinite-knowledge oracle. You should think of it more as a really, really big database with all of the Internet's "knowledge". When you ask it "2 + 2 = ?", it isn't parsing those into numbers and math operations, it's searching its database for occurrences on the Internet where someone answered the question "2 + 2 = ?" and filling in the closest answer it found. If you ask it what "120938120938120931 + 1209389120381208390" is, it'll probably get it wrong, because no one has asked that before. But you should probably be using a calculator instead.

If you ask it something it hasn't seen before such as your logic puzzle, it's not going to parse it like a person would and synthesize an answer. It's going to try to find something similar to what it's seen before and return that. Odds are good this will be a wrong answer, since it's not addressing what you actually asked.

However, if you ask it something it has seen before, like a programming problem, it will return something appropriate. It turns out the Internet is pretty big, so it has seen a lot of stuff, and so often works pretty well. Hence the success you're seeing from others who are using it as-intended, i.e., asking it real questions, not logic puzzles.

It's not very hard to come up with a scenario that has never been put on the Internet, so it's pretty easy to make it dig up the "wrong" answer and do something stupid, as you've found.

The real trouble is that it can't tell you whether it's guessing, or found an actual match. Hence the "confidently wrong" thing, which absolutely destroys user trust. If it's confidently wrong about this thing I know a lot about, how can I trust it to be accurate for something I know little about?
Psst. An opinion does not need to be premised with "don't worry, sensitive reader, this is an opinion" for it to be an opinion.
>There's a youtube channel out there that used to be a sort of nature channel, but seems to have devolved into 'Get stung/bit by painful animal X'. I haven't watched their stuff in ages, but I'm very aware that the original channel host isn't the one getting stung anymore.

Brave Wilderness?
If you wrote better commit messages you might look at them more because they're a lot more useful.

At work I see it as explaining why the code is there so when people check the blame layer they can find out and not delete my code if my reason is still relevant.

At home it helps a lot to write changelogs later when I do a release and it helps so much to see the last few commits when I pick a project up again after a month or two.
> The type of people are different.

That’s what happens when you have more of them. It’s not that the type of people is any different, there’s more total types of people. If we’re talking the early 90s, we’re talking academics, programmers and some of the more forward thinking, and some of the patrons at early Internet cafe’s. Most of them in Anglophone and European countries.

By 1999 which is when I was first online as a kid, the web had 150M people. In 2005 we had 1 billion users on the web. In 2024, it’s still not 100%, but there’s 5.5B people on the web.

> Back in the 90s, you could do random chat on ICQ and 95% of the people were friendly.

Back in the aughts this was true too on AIM, on Google Talk, on Skype (who remembers SkypeMe?) and eventually we had Omegle, Tumblr and Snapchat. Friendly people abound in community-spaces. You can still find friendly people on the web, I just find them in different—notably not dead—places now, and exercise the same caution I did in 2005.

> Microsoft Netmeeting had a global directory of everyone using the software.. like a big phone book where you could call anyone in the world.

Facebook’s and Discord’s phone book is bigger, and I’m not saying that just to be facetious. You have to go through the step of mutually adding someone, but that’s less of an ask than setting up Netmeeting and there’s more total people to add than there were people on the web in 1999, and if not there, any of the billion and a half social networks people also use.
Getting a full payment bypass on PayU India, provider with with 500k+ customers
I agree, but many of the software companies that force you to "talk to sales" don't actually have enough info on the site for buyers to conduct a basic evaluation of product capabilities. There's a difference between making someone talk to sales in order to buy the product and making them talk to sales in order to learn anything meaningful about it. A lot of the "you're not the customer" folks in this thread seem to imagine that only the former exists.
Policing the language to avoid harming oppressed people. This is not a real virtue though as there's no actual harming and the only thing it does is creating animosity, annoyance and pointless arguments and causing people to hate each other needlessly, without helping any oppressed people in any way.

> It seems like you'ld have to have access to their mental state, no

Of course, absent communication, that would be the only way. Fortunately, communication - such as written text - allows us to let others to witness certain aspects of our mental state, this is one of the points of communication. So, present the communication, we can make certain conclusions about the mental state of the communicator.
Show HN: Automated GitHub release with SemVer, changelogs and deployment mgmt
After releasing the updated website and docs this morning, want to Show HN a DevOps tool that was born out of my open-source enthusiast friend's frustration with manual release processes - RollingVersions.

He started building it back in 2020 after making a few critical mistakes while manually updating a widely-used open-source project (breaking code for hundreds of projects, including some used by React Native) - we've now been working hard for the last 6 months to take it to the next level.

Simply install the GitHub app to any of your repos to test it out (click "Get Started" to go to docs) - all feedback is much appreciated.
I think it certainly depends on the organization. Some companies seem to only allow coders to be widget makers.

On the other hand, I worked with widget makers at companies where you had more freedom and sometimes it seemed like they were more interested in malicious compliance… it can really shaft coworkers too.
That's exactly what subsidizing insurance in fire-prone regions would do!
Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant
Agree, but, the discussion it triggered around the initial post was of interest nonetheless.

Plus, I've seen several posts flagged in the past few days that would have been worthy of discussion; although being on the fringe of social/political, they are related to the tech sector and YC, which may, or may not explain why they were flagged.
Well.......if you weren't able to walk, you would be moving differently, not exactly pretending would it be?

I mean hell it's not even a less accurate description, you're not able to walk but you're able to move around using crutches or a wheelchair or other mobility device. A person who isn't able to walk may still be able to do almost everything day to day (well aside from walking) that a non-disabled (or non-differently abled person, ok that sounds kinda weird) person would be able to, albeit in a different way.
Just tried it and ChatGPT’s 4o model got it wrong like you said until I added the line “think step by step”, which is always a good idea for these kinds of logic puzzles.

ChatGPT o1 got the answer correct with no tweaks to the prompt.
> this is an incredible achievement

If it was real, why aren't all the unicorns in this space worth $100B already?
Sonos Amp / Port act as airplay receiver to analog out (with amplifier in the case of Amp). They're meant to act as an input for existing ‘dumb’ speakers/amplifiers/home audio systems, and is extraordinarily fit for that purpose.

How do else could one Airplay to a ‘dumb’ stereo without something to act as an airplay receiver?
Some time spent now learning how they perform will mean you're better prepared when they're ready.
Does this have an "instruct" version? Or it's already sort-of like that, as it was trained more on Q&A scenarios?
What's the carbon cost behind buying and shipping the book, or cutting down the tree to make the book?