bblcla
Claude Code is not making your product better
Oh, this one is very doable and makes sense! We track this internally anyway so it's just a matter of surfacing it on the fleet information.
> how stale does the tail assignment data get in practice, and do you have a way to detect when an enthusiast spreadsheet goes unmaintained?
These are updated almost every day so far, so they seem very up-to-date. Internally we track all changes/removals, so I'm not that worried about spreadsheets being abandoned yet. It's a good thought though.
> And what happens to your probability estimate when an airline swaps aircraft last minute, which seems to happen pretty often on regional routes?
Honestly our estimate right now is pretty crude. At the scale we're at right now it works, but I think you're right that we could make this more accurate by tracking equipment swaps & really drilling into the details of which aircraft get assigned to which routes.
Not quite sorry, we only track the frames that do have Starlink. But if you check back a few days beforehand you can see if yours matches!
It turns out the demand for really good internet everywhere is huge.
Oh I actually didn't know this! Do you know why?
Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?
Hey HN, If you’ve been lucky enough to be on a flight with Starlink, you understand the hype. It actually works!However, its availability on flights is patchy and hard to predict. So we built a database of all airlines that have rolled out Starlink (beyond just a trial), and a flight search tool to predict it. Plug in a flight number and date, and we'll estimate the likelihood of Starlink...
After that, he become well-known to the general public through his Sarah Paine podcasts (which are excellent).
Trying to craft AI images that are worth displaying to end users
I have! I agree it's very good at applying abstractions, if you know exactly what you want. What I notice is that Claude has almost no ability to surface those abstractions on its own.
When I started having it write React, Claude produced incredibly buggy spaghetti code. I had to spend 3 weeks learning the fundamentals of React (how to use hooks, providers, stores, etc.) before I knew how to prompt it to write better code. Now that I've done that, it's great. But it's meaningful that someone who doesn't know how to write well-abstracted React code can't get Claude to produce it on their own.
> I'm not entirely convinced by the anecdote here where Claude wrote "bad" React code
Yeah, that's fair - a friend of mine also called this out on Twitter (https://x.com/konstiwohlwend/status/2010799158261936281) and I went into more technical detail about the specific problem there.
> I've seen Claude make mistakes like that too, but then the moment you say "you can modify the calling code as well" or even ask "any way we could do this better?" it suggests the optimal solution.
I agree, but I think I'm less optimistic than you that Claude will be able to catch its own mistakes in the future. On the other hand, I can definitely see how a ~more intelligent model might be able to catch mistakes on a larger and larger scale.
> I expect that adding a CLAUDE.md rule saying "always look for more efficient implementations that might involve larger changes and propose those to the user for their confirmation if appropriate" might solve the author's complaint here.
I'm not sure about this! There are a few things Claude does that seem unfixable even by updating CLAUDE.md.
Some other footguns I keep seeing in Python and constantly have to fix despite CLAUDE.md instructions are:
- writing lots of nested if clauses instead of writing simple functions by returning early
- putting imports in functions instead of at the top-level
- swallowing exceptions instead of raising (constantly a huge problem)
These are small, but I think it's informative of what the models can do that even Opus 4.5 still fails at these simple tasks.
Claude is not a senior engineer (yet)
Hi HN - I'm the founder of Stardrift, and we're looking for a founding engineer to join our team of 3.
We are building a world-class travel agent experience. In the future, you won’t book travel by opening ten tabs in Google Flights; you’ll book through a personalized AI assistant that understands everything about you and automatically arranges your trip for you.
You'll tackle everything from optimizing LLM performance and building evals to integrating with APIs for rail and flight networks around the world. We care about moving fast and writing high-quality code; your job will be to take customer feedback and improve our product, working with me & the rest of the founding team.
Here's a tech blog we wrote about some of the systems engineering we do: https://stardrift.ai/blog/streaming-resumptions.
You can find more info at https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/stardrift/jobs/nC7cjhB.... Email [email protected] to apply.
What *Is* Code? (2015)
LLMs have bad taste at where to draw abstraction boundaries
Is resumable LLM streaming hard? No, it's just annoying, but we built it anyway.
The bug that taught me more about PyTorch than years of using it
Hi HN - I'm the founder of Stardrift, and we're looking for a founding engineer to join our team of 3-4. (Fun fact: I got my first coding job through 'Who is hiring?', almost 12 years ago!)
We are building a world-class travel search experience. In the future, you won’t book travel by opening ten tabs in Google Flights; you’ll book through a personalized AI assistant that understands everything about you and automatically arranges your trip for you.
You'll tackle everything from optimizing LLM performance and building evals to integrating APIs like Amadeus and Duffel. We care about moving fast and writing high-quality code; your job will be to take customer feedback and improve our product, working shoulder-to-shoulder with me & the rest of the founding team.
More info at https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/stardrift/jobs/nC7cjhB....
Please reach out to [email protected] to apply.
Frontier language models have become much smaller
He replied with, roughly, "Those of you who work here probably couldn't do anything else other than perhaps math research. Arguably, working here is the economically efficient use of your time."
I think about whenever I see a comment like this. Quant firms select for a very specific set of skills. In particular, I've found that many traders/software engineers in quant are very smart but not very self-directed. Places like Jane Street work well for people who can excel, but only when given a lot of structure and direction. I think this is not unrelated to why so many people 'accidentally' end up as traders after going to an Ivy League school!