HN user
Would be better if it had some technical explanation rather than just yet another public transport map. This:
https://vgcgroup.co.uk/news/signalbox-for-train-locations/
suggests the data mostly comes from railway signalling information, plus a bit of "AI" in some way. I wonder how far apart railway signals usually are, or what the AI is trained on, or anything really vs just looking at a map.
Repeatedly following a fixed algorithm by hand can be relaxing - simple Sudoku problems, Solitaire, simple Rubiks cube solutions, simple crosswords and math problems, word searches, etc.
Meanwhile social games are fun even if they are extremely simple - rules-lite RPGs, Guess Who, Pictionary, etc.
This seems to exist at an intersection of the two. It's interesting that following a mindless algorithm with a group of people sounds so ridiculous and pointless in principle, but it's actually fun. Our brains are somehow wired to find it rewarding.
Extreme luck has the benefit of bringing everyone to the same level regardless of age or background, whereas e.g. chess, Counter-Strike or boxing is much less fun if one person is 10x better than the other. The more skill a game requires, the more it needs separate leagues for differing levels of ability.
Maybe there's also ironic enjoyment in playing a horse-race gambling game when most people playing have likely never watched a real horse race, let alone bet on one.
Similar but a bit different https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWm0Yasp9qA
France, Germany, Sweden, Estonia and India already have government id. However, this being hackernews there will never be a link to a well researched article on the pros and cons of introducing id cards (digital or otherwise), only conspiracy theories and confident declarations that id cards are a surefire symbol of authoritarian states. I don't know what I think, I lack sufficient knowledge to have an opinion. But I still know approximately 10,000x more about UK politics, economics and immigration than 99% of the people commenting here.
The original author submitted it, then when it didn't get traction it looks like two fans of his blog both submitted it around 12 hours later. Whether for internet upvote points or because they personally thought the article particularly great, I don't know.
Personally I generally enjoy the blog and the writing, but not so much this post. It has a very clickbaity title for some results which aren't particularly impressive.
Same here, my numbers come from "how much progress do I make with a single day spent working on a given project".
Previously: make a little bit of progress, realize I'd need a year's worth of weekends to complete it, give up after one day.
With vibe-coding assistance: make 10x+ progress, realize that with a few more weekends I could finish it, keep going.
It's hardly original, but my take is that vibe coding works brilliantly for personal projects (or potentially for tiny startups that need to rapidly churn out CRUD boilerplate, API integrations, etc), but terribly for most large commercial systems.
I'm having fun with Claude Code and Vibe Kanban on personal projects, and before that I spent a lot of time with both the Windsurf and Cursor agents. It's making me literally 10x more productive on personal projects, maybe even 50x.
On personal projects:
- no-one but me needs to decide on requirements
- no-one but me needs to make decisions
- no-one but me needs to maintain the code going forward
- much of the time I'm intentionally using languages and frameworks that I am somewhat clueless about, and an LLM providing continuous ideas (even if sometimes entirely silly ones) stops me getting stuck
- I don't mind if there are large chunks of useless or half-working code
On commercial projects:
- every line of code is a massive liability. Every line needs to be reviewed by another engineer, and every developer who joins the project needs to be aware of it, take it into consideration when making changes elsewhere, and potentially debug it if something goes wrong
- senior engineers are almost always hired to work with languages and technologies they are already very familiar with, meaning for many tasks it's often quicker to write out the code by hand (or perhaps with Cursor's auto-complete) than guide an LLM to do it
- much of the time is spent in meetings trying to unearth the real product requirements or providing updates to stakeholders
- much of the time is spent reading old code and working out how to implement things in extremely large and complex systems in a minimally disruptive way
- a lot of time is spent reviewing other people's PRs, and getting infuriated when people (often either very junior or very senior) produce 1000 line PRs consisting of unnecessary changes, excessive boilerplate, half-finished experiments, and things that clearly haven't been tested properly. This was the case long before LLMs, AI just makes it ever more tempting for people to act this way.
- trying to avoid or gently negotiate political games over who is in control of the project, or who gets to makes technical decisions
ah cool great idea, I've now done the same
www.linkedin.com##[aria-label="Main Feed"]
Yup entirely this. The biggest sign of this is Tommy Robinson, who has blatantly committed outrageous cases of stalking, harassment, and contempt of court, for which he has been convicted. But because his schtick is complaining about Muslims he is then treated as a hero of the US right, gets invited on right-wing talk shows and gets bigged up by Elon Musk. I recently had a guy sit next to me on a plane bring him up as supposed proof of the UK being an authoritarian state.
I go absolutely out of my way to avoid politics nowadays, which makes it all the more frustrating when this nonsense is shoved in my face by idiots on HackerNews or dimwits sitting next to me on the plane.
Black Mirror is the new 1984. Right wing people think "this is a parable of what left-of-centre politics gets you, look how clever I am". Left-of-centre people know that the author of 1984 fought for the socialists in the Spanish Civil War and that the author of Black Mirror is a Guardian journalist.
Agreed, how in 2025 is an OCR model reading this as "Bobbins"?
https://www.alltext.nyc/panorama/z0SOvmU-5_yuspnsFvjVuA?o=16...
I like the animations and general appearance, and how snappy it feels. Would prefer if mistakes required a backspace though, and also more than one word at a time. Also unclear if the timer starts when the word is shown or when you start typing.
The Scala community soap-opera was a total shit show. Both of the women involved later ended up in relationships with Travis Brown, another prominent and extremely controversial Scala figure. Travis then entered a long running war against John De Goes and a bunch of other people in the Scala community before rage-quitting.
I don't believe the women entirely made it up, or that Jon Pretty is entirely guilt-free. Likely he is a narcissist who took advantage of his status to pursue sexual relationships where there was a huge imbalance of power. Maybe this strayed into manipulative gaslighting, I don't know. But it also seems entirely plausible that the women in question desired a relationship with a powerful older man and that the relationships were essentially consensual. It's a mess of power, sex, alcohol, a lack of shared social norms, and overlapping social and professional relationships. Quite where the truth lies between "totally non-consensual gaslighting" and "consensual relationship with large imbalance of power" I don't claim to know.
I presume lots of people are flagging it but no action is being taken. It really damages the wholesome vibes.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/31/from-the-river...
I don't get why he is so determined to stick with Scala. It's just a programming language. The Scala community is forever going to hold extremely negative associations for him. For someone with his level of experience and motivation it presumably wouldn't be too hard to switch to Rust or something. Some people will still reject him out of hand due to his googleable name, but I still feel like he'd be happier and better off leaving.
I just bought my first synth, not very originally a Minilogue XD. A much cheaper mid-life toy then a sports car or pilot's licence! I'm interested in any recommendations for learning resources. Synthorial is often mentioned, and various videos on YouTube, plus just messing around or focusing on general music theory. But I'd love a comprehensive website or blog post series that I could gradually work through.
What security features are in place to ensure nothing is capturing or logging user API keys?
Interesting, I'll take a look when the rate limit issue is sorted. There are loads of projects springing up around using LLMs for text adventures. My prediction is that at some point soon one of them is going to get good enough to gain mainstream appeal, but we're not there yet. I suppose Death By AI was a breakout AI text hit, but I'm not sure that really counts.
The people behind AI Dungeon have been making AID: Heroes for ages, maybe that will turn out to be great when it's finally released. There's also Friends and Fables that seems to be making rapid progress. And a thousand side projects on GitHub and Steam.
I briefly started my own, hoping to build something more like a traditional visual novel choose-your-own adventure with set paths, dice rolls, and limited AI elements. However, I soon realised that if you show people a large amount of text and only occasional user interaction they rapidly check out. The alpha version is here for the time being: https://prismaticnoun.xyz but I'm unlikely to do any more work on it.
Fair enough, substitute "unlimited" for "extremely high limits that most people very rarely hit"
The huge positive publicity boost that Claude Code gained during its unlimited phase was surely easily worth the slight negative publicity it is getting now. This post is just marketing copy by a small competitior that can't afford to do the same thing.
If you scroll down it also says 60% of the code is automated. Both percentages are essentially meaningless. If you require customers to type all their requirements into a static web based form does that also count as 80% automated information gathering? If 60% of an application is templated components does that mean code generation is 60% automated?
It's meaningless, and I suspect intentionally so. It clearly implies that they were doing things in a more advanced way than a standard Indian outsourcing firm, an implication heightened by hiring people to build impressive tech demos. But the impressive tech demos and the work on real client projects were two entirely separate things.
My inside information is both outdated and minimal, I was there for a short time a few years ago.
As far as I know all the development work on client projects was done by developers in India. I was too far removed from the details to know quite how they were employed and paid - I literally never had any interaction with them - but I suspect this is the main source of the LinkedIn employees.
As far as I know customers were aware apps were being built by human developers, the "80% by AI" was prominent on the website and the sign up process but it was never claimed the whole thing was automated.
It looks like Craig Saunders joined only a year ago, in June 2024, which is long after I left. Given how much AI has advanced over the last few years, and given his LinkedIn shows he previously held a senior AI role at Amazon, I wouldn't be remotely surprised if he and other employees built some impressive tech demos over the last year or two.
Regarding Natasha assigning developers to projects, I don't know to what extent it was really automated, I wasn't involved in that.
I am a former employee from a few years ago. I didn't stay very long at all though.
In 2019 its former Chief Business Officer sued them for fraud, claiming that apps were built by Indian developers despite the claim that it was "80%" done by AI. There were detailed articles in the Wall Street Journal and The Verge at the time. I've found one reference saying it was settled out of court (the Telegraph), though I thought I'd previously read the case was dismissed.
When I was there 3 years later:
- the company had been renamed from Engineer.ai to Builder.ai
- the marketing materials still heavily pushed the claim that apps were 80% built by AI, curiously the exact same figure as it had been 3 years earlier
- there was a bunch of automation around small parts of the software development process. When customers went to create a new project there was an AI chatbot assistant (Natasha), which amongst other things asked the customer for their requirements, and created some estimates for how long things would take. There was also some automation for turning UI mockups into CSS styles and then merging the styles with templated React components. These various small bits of automation did have teams of real engineers working on it in the UK and the US. However, by and large it didn't really work. It seemed to me that the Indian outsourced programmers working on client projects totally ignored this technology anyway, and just went about their jobs as though it didn't exist. Despite being employed to work on this tech, I never had any interaction with the Indian developers building real client projects.
- a new team was spun up to use Generative AI to create frontend mock ups of an application from template components. This was integrated into the flow when potential clients were chatting with the Natasha AI chatbot. Some people worked genuinely hard on this project, and to some extent it did function. However, it didn't do much beyond the many other "create a frontend mockup from a single prompt" projects out there, other than having access to the company's internal React component templates. As far as I'm aware these frontend mockups were never used by the Indian developers who built the final projects.
In the tech world there is a very wide blurred zone between "outright fraud, which leads to a conviction in court" and "exagerrated claims". Given the extent to which Builder.ai committed literal fraud with their revenue figures and accounting, and given the hundreds of millions of dollars they raised on very limited real sales, I believe their claims about AI could plausibly also be literal fraud. However, the standards of a court case are much higher than my personal use of the word "fraud". I'm tempted to believe Musk is also bordering on fraud with e.g. the Boring Company, or his repeated claims about how close Tesla is to fully automated self-driving robo taxis. But given Tesla is building a genuine product with genuinely high sales and revenue, and given how much other crazy stuff Musk does that makes these exagerrated claims pale in comparison, it's not something that's ever going to lead to a court case.
I hate lying to such an extent that the moment an interviewer starts digging into why I left past roles I just accept I'm not going to get the job. If the interviewer is trying to find out how much I am willing to play political games, then the answer is not at all. My experience is that something like 25 to 50 percent of people in leadership positions are there because they enjoy lying and playing games, are fundamentally difficult to work with, and are at best utterly mediocre at other aspects of their role. Perhaps the ratio is better at more prestigious companies, I wouldn't know. If interviewers (or anyone else) believe that makes me the problem because it's my duty to suck it up and smile then I no longer care (well, other than the amount of money such an attitude costs me...)
Pretty cool, though like others I had some slight technical issues. On Firefox mobile I got a black screen (that was yesterday, maybe it's been updated since then). Firefox desktop today it worked once I figured out that:
a) the keyboard doesn't work until after I click to fire, and this state resets itself every time I press f5 to restart the game (presumably a browser focus issue)
b) both up/down and w/s work for back and forward, but a and d don't work for left and right, you need to use the left/right arrows.
The combination of the two had me scratching my head for a little while!
The names of their researchers are on this recent paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.15664
Their terms of service say "The DeepSeek Open Platform is jointly owned and operated by Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd., Beijing DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd. "
And they're funded by https://www.high-flyer.cn/en/fund/ which the FT did an article on: https://www.ft.com/content/357f3c68-b866-4c2e-b678-0d075051a...
In terms of the personal data you share when using their models, I can't see why they would be any more or less nefarious than big Western tech companies.
That said, if you're using a model based in China then by providing them with data and feedback you are in a very small way helping researchers in China catch up with/keep up with/overtake researchers in the West. Maybe in the long term that could end badly. And if you are concerned about the environment, it's entirely possible their training and inference is run using coal power stations.
That's interesting! Where it says that is will "learn iteratively from the results until it arrives at a final output" I assume it's therefore trying multiple LLM generations until it finds one that works, which I didn't know about before.
However, AFAIK it's only ever at inference time, an interpreter isn't included during LLM training? I wonder if it would be possible to fine tune a model for coding with an interpreter. Though if noone has done it yet there is presumably a good reason why not.
Well, that's a long rant. Some parts are interesting, others less so.
Job Openings vs. Interest Rates
Everyone already knows this
Company Level to Compensation Scale
Everyone already knows that over the last 20 years employees at LASAGNAFAANG big tech companies in the US have made absurd amounts of money relative to how much skill is actually required. If you work in tech in San Francisco it must be easy to compare yourself to these people and be envious all the time. Outside of the US (or outside of tech) it's more normal to view these jobs as a weird aberration, not the norm. Why not compare yourself to public school teachers, lorry drivers, nurses, enlisted infantry soldiers, etc? Many of them could probably have earned absurd amounts in Silicon Valley too, had they been in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.
Coding interviews
If you are failing leet code interviews and you're unemployed then why not just spend a week or two practicing leet code questions? There are some egregious examples of small companies using algorithms questions on graphs as a hazing exercise, but most places are just using easy or medium coding tests as a basic filter on people who are able to do arbitrary programming tasks whilst communicating their thought process. If you have US citizenship and enough experience to get an interview, you are already extremely lucky. Whining that getting a job also requires practicing a few coding questions because you see it as beneath you is silly.
"We find the midwit problem in job interviews all the time where interviewers think they are “elite special evaluators” needing to gatekeep the unwashed hoards of desperate candidates, but interviewers often can’t reliably judge or measure people who have better answers than they expect"
Isn't that exactly what standard coding tests avoid? People who think they are elite special evaluators ask off-the-wall questions about particular technologies or processes, or abstract logic questions, thinking they are so clever they can infer the inner workings of the candidates mind. The low IQ and high IQ solution is to realise that as an interviewer you aren't very special, and that assessing candidates in the space of an hour or two can never be more than a very lossy, rough filter. Under these circumstances, generic coding tests aren't such a bad idea.
Field Report: Job Experience Notes
My experience of work have been similar. That's just what it's like at the average mediocre tech job. Hence the The Daily WTF running since 2004
"At some point, a switch flipped in the tech job market and “programmer jobs” just turned into zero-agency task-by-task roles working on other people’s ideas under other people’s priorities to accomplish other people’s goals"
Yup I agree it sucks, but it pays the rent.
wow the job market sucks right now
HN has huge numbers of articles on the technical side of software engineering but very few on the people side. Even if this is just one slightly idiosyncratic take, I still gained more from it than yet another article on LLMs, or the most efficient low level code possible in C++ or Rust, etc. Hopefully there are more similar submissions. Also, when people complain that it talks in idealised, simplified models rather than real world messy people: there's obviously no way the author could write up details of real people, so non-personal generalizations is the best that's possible.