Won’t this lead to long-term everyone using the same prompt? It seems like this already naturally happens.
It doesn’t pick your prompt, just evaluates your response. AFAIK it doesn’t suggest other prompts
Readit Newsjakevoytko commented on Ask HN: What are you actually using LLMs for in production? · Posted by u/Satam
jakevoytko commented on Ask HN: What are you actually using LLMs for in production? · Posted by u/Satam
Doesn't this create a signal problem long term?
If everyone is using it now prompts aren’t a good gauge.
It's optional and doesn't generate responses for you, instead just nudging you in better directions. So it's certainly not generating a bunch of indistinguishable profiles. Quite the opposite, it gives people a second chance to expand on their own views or experiences.
jakevoytko commented on Ask HN: What are you actually using LLMs for in production? · Posted by u/Satam
I work for Hinge, the dating app. We use them for our "prompt feedback" feature, where the LLM gives constructive feedback on how to improve your prompts if it judges them as low-effort or clichéd.
jakevoytko commented on AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/kjhughes
Huh? Look at the hottest topic at the moment:
https://www.twz.com/news-features/u-s-has-attacked-irans-nuc...
and see for yourself if Twitter is dead.
I was literally just comparing my Twitter and Bluesky feeds. The only discussions worth reading were on Bluesky.
It's a shame. Twitter used to be the undefeated king of breaking news.
How do you handle the lack of commutativity? I've always wondered about the practical implications.
I asked an ex-Bloomberg coder this question once after he told me he used floating points to represent currency all the time, and his response was along the lines of “unless you have blindingly-obvious problems like doing operations on near-zero numbers against very large numbers, these calculations are off by small amounts on their least-significant digits. Why would you waste the time or the electricity dealing with a discrepancy that’s not even worth the money to fix?”
And what is your strategy regarding commenting?
I don't spam (like commenting "good post") but my logical arguments get downvoted sometimes, don't understand the culture of HN properly.
I have a light touch. I think it comes from the foundation of having confidence in what I write. My three goals are to be entertaining, to be educational, and to stand by everything that I write. I don't have any emotional stake in being right or wrong; I'll make a correction if I'm wrong or have a typo, but I rarely have to do that. I don't really care if people disagree with me, because again, I stand by everything that I write. If I notice a trend in negative feedback I'll respond to it once and then check the thread again 2 or 3 days later to see how it shook out.
"Don't argue about the definitions of words online" is my "Never get involved in a land war in Asia." If people know what you mean but ignore it in favor of picking a fight, they're arguing for sport and I don't want to get involved with it.
How often do you share your posts in HN? How do you decide which posts to share?
If one gets any traction (like 10 upvotes or more), I wait a month or so. I know the site values pacing out content from the same source. If something was on the front page in the past week, I don’t post it. This eliminates probably 80-90% of my posts; “news + reaction as a staff software engineer” is my primary format. Beyond that, it’s mostly feel.
I am writing a newsletter, https://www.clientserver.dev. It started with the writing prompt “what if someone tried to make Money Stuff for software engineering?” My time is constrained since I have a kid, and I’m still iterating on the format a bit. But I recently crossed 250 subscribers and have made the Hacker News front page twice in the 6 months I have been running the newsletter, so I feel like I’m on the right track.
In the past few months, I've learned that (a) writing a bulleted outline is a cheat code for producing decent work quickly, (b) every newsletter is a reminder that people could unsubscribe, so skip publishing issues that you're not proud of, (c) people really like stories, and (d) it's okay to have a mix of formats.
That would explain his rather obvious lack of energy these days.
Adams has become a controversial figure in recent years. Regardless of what you think of him, as someone who has worked in Corporate America for over a decade, there really isn't anything quite like Dilbert to describe the sort of white collar insanity I've had to learn to take in stride. My first workplace as a junior developer was straight out of Dilbert and Office Space. I have a gigantic collection of digitized Dilbert strips that best describe office situations I've run into in real life – many of them including the pointy haired boss.
He's expressed a lot of what I would consider... stupid opinions these days, but I would be sad to learn he's no longer with us.
It was a little sad to watch him get radicalized in real time. I really enjoyed reading his blog before this started to happen. But then a few publications started quoting blog posts of his out of context as rage bait -- I remember he was particularly butthurt about some Jezebel posts that took things he said out of context.
At this point, he basically started leaning into controversy for pageviews. He'd start linking to the controversial section of each post right at the top of the post. After a few months or so I had to unsubscribe, after years of reading his blog and Dilbert cartoons/books.
He's become such a gremlin that I won't be 100% sure he's serious about this until he actually dies.
jakevoytko commented on Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room clientserver.dev/p/malici... · Posted by u/jakevoytko
This is not really malicious compliance because it is not aimed at the boss who ordered the policy. It’s more like chaotic neutral compliance.
I did hem and haw over whether it was appropriate, but I eventually went with it because it felt in line with the first 2 sentences of the Wikipedia page defining the phrase as "Malicious compliance (also known as malicious obedience) is the behavior of strictly following the orders of a superior despite knowing that compliance with the orders will have an unintended or negative result. It usually implies following an order in such a way that ignores or otherwise undermines the order's intent, but follows it to the letter."