jerf

11 ms·

121.
by jerf 2mo ago
To a first approximation, this doesn't matter anymore. "Valid HTML" used to be a big deal because when you left the HTML spec you were inviting the various browsers to interpret your non-standard HTML in differing ways, somet
122.
by jerf 2mo ago
There are posts to that effect. How many of them source to real humans, though... who can tell anymore. That number is certainly non-zero, though. To a first approximation every stupid thing you can imagine happens. But it may not happen as
123.
by jerf 2mo ago
Given coding agent's demonstrated difficulties with concurrent code, even relatively simple concurrent code, it would be interesting to see how they do with temporal logic. I don't know enough to throw AI at the problems in that s
124.
by jerf 2mo ago
There is an old koan in the old hacker literature: "A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on. "Knight[, one of the principle designers of the Lisp machine], seeing what the student was doing
125.
by jerf 2mo ago
It isn't entirely clear to me how that relates to what I said. errcheck prevents you from dropping errors or catching them but then overwriting them before doing anything else. There's a flag you can twiddle to throw a lint error
126.
by jerf 2mo ago
You seem to be implying, based on the rest of the thread, that Go has some sort of special defect that keeps it from implementing Raft correctly. But the "special defect" that Go has is that it in practice implements the same prim
127.
by jerf 2mo ago
"The only thing I haven't found is something to enforce error handling." errcheck, generally as manifested in golangci-lint, ensures you can't forget to do something with them. It would be odd for you to know about forbi
128.
by jerf 2mo ago
No, Goodhart's Law isn't about teaching to the test. It's about the fact the measure will always end up gamed and not measuring what you originally intended it to measure. You can't create a measure that won't be ga
129.
by jerf 2mo ago
The same thing for both: Goodhart's Law.
130.
by jerf 2mo ago
"why no one talks about [all the other alternatives]" Expanding the question because it's the same answer for all of them: The relatively steady exponential progress of transistors murdered all the competition. Nobody had any
131.
by jerf 2mo ago
I feel like there's this assumption that some people picked up a few months back and never examined, that the big guys were going to keep plodding along with the same old methodologies and the little nimble guys with AI might be able t
132.
by jerf 2mo ago
That's not a new flip side, though. That's always been with us. SaaS will be more able to take on more requirements then they used to be but no one SaaS will ever be able to take on everything. And the decision between "roll
133.
by jerf 2mo ago
This is a great example of a general trend, which is why I don't think SaaS is going anywhere. The bar may be raised, but it's not going anywhere. HackerOne and SaaS in general makes problems go away for money. If you use your own
134.
by jerf 2mo ago
I think so, I just can't prove it. We don't have any frontier models right now that aren't being optimized to be coding agents too to compare to. In this case though I don't just mean that the agent is good at coding. I
135.
by jerf 2mo ago
This is a bit of a long shot on my side but I wonder if the training the models have to go through in order to be good code agents and pass all the coding tests with one-shot prompts is going to bleed over into the non-coding use cases as n
136.
by jerf 2mo ago
'“People do bad things because they are encouraged and rewarded for doing bad things.” Well, why else would you do them?' Since the author seems genuinely baffled, the answer is "because they are just bad people". They&#
137.
by jerf 2mo ago
A few weeks ago I saw the first QR code I've personally witnessed that I'm pretty sure is completely unscannable. The company logo stretched well out of the center block. It was on the back of a semi in the Chicago area. I didn&#
138.
by jerf 2mo ago
Oracle, the law firm with a tech business attached, probably wants to retain the option to sue other people for AI-washing their proprietary code, and that doesn't work if they're also publicly accepting AI contributions to their
139.
by jerf 2mo ago
Yes, strong agree, normalcy resumes at some point. But you want the hook in first. I mean, I'm phrasing that in marketing terms, but in this case it's in harmony with what your users want anyhow. We want to know ASAP why we should
140.
by jerf 2mo ago
I love the ambition and the fact that this is not just another "state of the art in 2015" language like I see so often. It's trying to do something genuinely different. The field of "taking stuff out of academia and maki
141.
by jerf 2mo ago
Yeah, IIRC my django site was 3 queries, all correctly indexed, for a main page hit, and 2 for the actual posts. I don't recall the exact perf numbers, but I'm pretty sure it was easily in the 50/rps range for a small dual-CP
142.
by jerf 2mo ago
"A $5/month VPS won't cut it anymore." Are you speaking from experience, or inferring from articles like this? I serve a static site on the lowest Linode $5/month VPS and it is grotesquely overprovisioned for that u
143.
by jerf 2mo ago
Yes, I don't mean to imply that this is some sort of clear majority situation or anything. I just mean that I've definitely both seen on HN and participated in real life in some conversations in which it was taken as given that we
144.
by jerf 2mo ago
In this context, a capability is something that allows the code, or the transitive closure of the code that it may call, to access some particular function, to put it very briefly. So you could have a single function that, if accessed in on
145.
by jerf 2mo ago
A language that revives capabilities, brings them up-to-date, and works in the modern environment is my #1 request from the programming language community right now. I don't need another language with sum types and higher-order functio
146.
by jerf 2mo ago
"What a serious security model for a meatbag agent looks like?" Yes, I think that's very related. Humans can be punished for their crimes but they can also experience benefits that have no applicability to an LLM, so for a fi
147.
by jerf 2mo ago
What would a serious security model for an agent even look like? I'm sure I've already got a dozen people reaching for the reply button, but slow down there, cowboy. I don't think it's even remotely as easy to define as
148.
by jerf 2mo ago
This is a really important concept for developers. One aspect for developers that I see quite often is the assertion that "We can't have X without giving up more Y", most commonly "we can't have more security withou
149.
by jerf 2mo ago
I think you misunderstand. The idea is not that one feeds a cryptographic text to LLMs and they crack it. The idea is that one feeds a cryptographic algorithm to an LLM and they break it somehow. Bear in mind that cryptographers consider
150.
by jerf 2mo ago
Rovo has my favorite example of AI misfeature. Just checked, it's still there in Cloud Confluence. In Edit mode for a page, you can select a range of text and a menu will pop up, with Ask Rovo being a drop down on it. There's a fe

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