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tpetrina

Re:Some uncomfortable truths about AI coding agents on Saturday March 28, 2026 @05:35AM (#47553035)
One way of framing this is that people that prefer to solve problems are actually bad at tinkering and writing good code. Hence the existence of terrible codebases written by devs thet “liked to solve problems for the customers”. It is not that clear cut that problem-solvers have that in addition to the tinkering part nor it is guaranteed that tinkerers don’t like to solve problems. Two independent axis!

Ask HN: Any team-wide experience with vibe coding?

There is a lot of content out for vibe coding, but it mostly comes from solo devs. Are there teams who are vibe coding and how do they solve the general problem of trust. Sure, vibing for myself is fine as I will suffer the negative consequences - but would you send PRs for code review if you haven't really worked on the code? I like vibe coding for small solo stuff, but I am looking for...

( Read More... | 2 comments | 2 points | on HN )

Can you effectively work with leadership you don't trust?

Let's say you have people higher on the corporate ladder on a technical level whose opinions you do not respect. This can be because they are either fluffy talkers, ivory tower architects, devs promoted beyond their skill level, people with no experience in the current project, and more.Simply put: you don't trust their experience in general and you don't trust that their input for this project...

( Read More... | 12 comments | 3 points | on HN )
Re:I Quit Spotify on Monday August 12, 2024 @08:29AM (#41223630)
I use Deezer - thanks to it I discovered new music that I like. With Spotify if you listened to one Beatles song you got only Beatles recommendations. At least the app is stable and serves the basic purpose of playing music.
Re:The Shitty Technology Adoption Curve (2022) on Monday April 29, 2024 @01:58AM (#40194939)
In EU we now have a time tracking law mandating companies to track and keep track of their employee’s hours. While one can defend it in a good faith, it is not a stretch to see how it enables and empowers the behavior from this article.
Re:AI generated spam for social networks on Wednesday February 28, 2024 @10:47AM (#39539477)
AI is actively being used to build dead internet right now. So many human potential and hours will be squandered by replying to basically spam. Sure, cynics will say that those networks are already spam - but at least you are engaging with a human.
Re:Problems in Gemini's Approach to Diversity on Saturday February 24, 2024 @12:43PM (#39493457)
The simplest take is that “white people are not diverse”. So by asking for diverse group means non-white. Predominantly because diversity is _within a dominating white culture with a surplus of non-white people_. It is basically labeling and contextual issue, not intentional. Imagine asking for a diverse IT office in Zimbabve - is the adjective “diverse” the same as in San Francisco?
sonder (uncountable) (neologism) The profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passing in the street, has a life as complex as one's own, which they are constantly living despite one's personal lack of awareness of it. For them, you are the distant car light, a silhouette in a window, a footprint on a beach, a trash next to the sidewalk.
If blog can be fully AI generated, why even pretend it's _someone's_? Why not simply make it an AI blog for people that want their knowledge to come from LLM, rather than from experience of other people?
Re:Minification Is Evil on Wednesday November 22, 2023 @09:35AM (#38379732)
In the modern era of minifying JS to squeeze out bytes, in certain cases, for smaller, non-commercial sites, it might be better for devs to learn from reading each other's source code.
Re:Why Is the Front End Stack So Complicated? on Monday October 16, 2023 @03:14AM (#37896681)
A somewhat sobering post explaining the background behind all this complexity. It is very easy to rant against complexity on its own, but respecting the background that lead to it - that requires nuance, history and a bit more words.

That said, one of the major problems is that there is no clear explanation for these boundaries in the tooling and code. Yes, you can `npm install lib` and unless it is documented in readme, it won't be obvious will this run in node only or in web too.

Re:Ask HN: Show me your half baked project on Thursday October 12, 2023 @05:52PM (#37863665)
Entity Framework Playground https://efplayground.io A small codepen inspired site for testing and learning about Entity Framework Core with C#. Definitively half baked as barely any features are there such as intellisense or sharing snippets through URLs.
That wouldn't work because n-th digit differing from 1st digit of n-th number doesn't guarantee that the new number isn't accounted for already.
Re:Why free will is beyond physics on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @04:50PM (#25663077)
> we know so little about the universe But free will doesn't fall in the realm of "things to research". It's an escape mechanism devised by religious people wanting a perfect mechanistic universe designed by God with an escape hatch from it in the form of "free will" that somehow enables us to sin. Nothing more, nothing less. It's just a for of saying "universe is mathematic, we are not".

If you are willing to claim "but the universe isn't even causal" then you don't even need free will anymore since the sole intent for it was to claim independence from causality. It's a broken metaphor for explaining the world. So by implying causality is an illusion free will doesn't give you anything that you wouldn't get with such "un-causal" universe. It has exploratory power of zero.

> And yet, you attribute an agency to this humanity Agency is an attribute of source - to differentiate whether this post was written by me or you. The idea that free will is a requirement for agency is not obvious nor true. It is just your requirement, one with which I will never agree.

> they just come to predistined conclusions No, technically they come to whatever they come. The opposite of free will is not determinism. One thing that baffles me even more than proponents of free will is the insistence of determinism as the alternative. Let's repeat, free will is not synonym for indeterminism. At best we can say that things happen and there are bunch of correlations in the system. For all intents of purposes, what we call causality in this universe is a bunch of beliefs in the uniformity of the universe. If the stone fell yesterday, then it sure will tomorrow.

- Free will doesn't explain anything.

- Nor can anyone claim that they "feel" free will - that is such a blatant non-truth.

- Nor you can "prove" free will by raising your hand. You can at most just point to the fact that you raised your hand. Through your existence, reasoning, internal and environmental pressures.

Re:Why free will is beyond physics on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @12:57PM (#25660293)
Wow, to call psychology, sociology and all studies of human behaviour pseudoscience because free will is not true is really just projection - since free will is not even pseudoscience, it is contradiction, a play on words and an utter nonsense.

But humanity will not get rid of this last anthropogenic perspective on the world that soon or that easily.

Ask HN: How do you write customer documentation for your application?

As applications become more complex they start requiring proper FAQ, documentation and more. How would you approach it from the tech/writing side? How to keep screenshots up to date? What about ease of editing/publishing/translating? How should articles be linked from the app itself? I have a feeling that web never got that built in ? Button Win32 apps used to have.

( Read More... | 3 comments | 3 points | on HN )
Another fantastic take on coordination issue is Scott Alexander's Meditations on Moloch [0].

0 - https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

Re:What is emergence? on Saturday May 30, 2020 @05:30AM (#23359783)
This whole article reeks of "science is BS, we need free will for humans to be real and morally responsible".

For all of its smart wording, this amounts to the same old issue Aristotle had with describing the mathematical universe in which somehow humans are different enough to warrant "higher stuff".

Is there any useful criticism of science besides pseudo-attacks always coming from antropocentric, and usually religious, corners? Can't we just do the one, final Copernican shift and frickin' move humans from the centre?

You mean more or less severe than long-term negative effects of sugar or alchocol? And there is greater stigma for non-drinkers than for drinkers in our societies so go figure...
Re:Show HN: Explore Quake/Half-Life maps in your browser on Wednesday March 25, 2020 @04:21PM (#22688163)
Long time ago I was a fan of KZ mod in CS 1.6 and I made this: http://kzplayer.azurewebsites.net. It's open source, but there is no "pipeline" to generate stuff on the fly.

You have demo player and you can explore some maps freely

So it boils down always to moral choices - hence the whole problem is basically a problem of moral systems.

Why do you build wind barriers? Same reason for prisons - to prevent future things. As best as you can. Now is that a deterministic, chaotic, stochastic or purely random but stable process - do we care that much?

Should the fact that you want to punish/reward influence how you interpret the universe and logic?

Human centric always free will is...

But then free will requires you to mentally conceptualise future events like "I want to go to cafe" and then translate them into interaction between trillions of neurons, 10 to the power of 29 atoms in that exact non-linear fashion!

So freely chosen decision is actually a translation of human-level concepts to non-linear highly complex set of neurons/atoms/particles and it is working flawlessly?

Wow!

> in the sense that you cannot easily predict next value

Easily or _in principle_?

Do not conflate our physical constraints with the actual mechanism behind the scene. Free will is not about our own ignorance or inability, it is the principal thing.

Suicide is not the answer to the problem - you need to exist and not decide, not deliberate and not think...or you do accept that some thoughts cannot be _prethought_ by you and they come to you for you to control.

So why control _those_ thoughts? Why deliberate in _that particular way_?

They aren't predetermined, free will is not the opposite of determinism.

You cannot have process interacting with itself in non-random and non-deterministic way. It's a contradiction! I mean, it's basically an infinite regression: either something happens outside of your control or you control what you control what you control...

Does determinism prevent you? Why _would_ you want or feel like it? And when that happens, how do you control the deliberation process itself?

Can you freely choose your deliberations? Why would you choose them exactly like that?

So typical - there is no clear definition, lots of ambiguous terms...People just want to have this free will so much that they always intentionally conflate the terms.

It's not happening, free will is the human-life equivalent of square circle.

1. Determinism or not, free will doesn't exist in either case. 2. Lack of knowledge is not the same as random. 3. Me deciding something doesn't happen because decisions are not points in time - your decision is smeared in space time and it lasts for long. Even when you say "fuck it, it's chocolate" that is not a _single_ moment in time where the decision is made. 4. The whole idea of "me" being a singular, well defined thing is purely an artefact of human language. We are a process, not a thing.

If free will is so real, can you freely choose never to choose again? Of course not. You are forced to choose because the choosing is an unstoppable process which evolves over time. Just like universe. Cannot stop the motion.

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