japhyr (u/japhyr) - Readit News

japhyr commented on Software factories and the agentic moment factory.strongdm.ai/... · Posted by u/mellosouls

dist-epoch · 2 days ago

I wouldn't be surprised if agents start "bribing" each other.

japhyr · 2 days ago

If they're able to communicate with each other. But I'm pretty sure we could keep that from happening.

I don't take your comment as dismissive, but I think a lot of people are dismissing interesting and possibly effective approaches with short reactions like this.

I'm interested in the approach described in this article because it's specifying where the humans are in all this, it's not about removing humans entirely. I can see a class of problems where any non-determinism is completely unacceptable. But I can also see a large number of problems where a small amount of non-determinism is quite acceptable.

japhyr commented on Software factories and the agentic moment factory.strongdm.ai/... · Posted by u/mellosouls

japhyr · 2 days ago

> That idea of treating scenarios as holdout sets—used to evaluate the software but not stored where the coding agents can see them—is fascinating. It imitates aggressive testing by an external QA team—an expensive but highly effective way of ensuring quality in traditional software.

This is one of the clearest takes I've seen that starts to get me to the point of possibly being able to trust code that I haven't reviewed.

The whole idea of letting an AI write tests was problematic because they're so focused on "success" that `assert True` becomes appealing. But orchestrating teams of agents that are incentivized to build, and teams of agents that are incentivized to find bugs and problematic tests, is fascinating.

I'm quite curious to see where this goes, and more motivated (and curious) than ever to start setting up my own agents.

Question for people who are already doing this: How much are you spending on tokens?

That line about spending $1,000 on tokens is pretty off-putting. For commercial teams it's an easy calculation. It's also depressing to think about what this means for open source. I sure can't afford to spend $1,000 supporting teams of agents to continue my open source work.

japhyr commented on See how many words you have written in Hacker News comments serjaimelannister.github.... · Posted by u/Imustaskforhelp

tombert · 6 days ago

Apparently I can spend many, many words expanding on things!

I just looked it up, and apparently War and Peace is about 590,000 words. A book that is a joke in every 90's cartoon as something "really heavy to drop on someone's head", and apparently I've written almost that much arguing with people on a programmers forum.

I've been on here for about 10.5 years, so averaging about 48,515 per year. My favorite book is The Go Between by LP Hartley, and that's 98,621 words [1], so I'm basically writing the equivalent of about half of my favorite novel every year.

So it's a bit weird to me. A large part of me thinks I should have written five novels instead.

[1] https://howlongtoread.com/books/779942/The-GoBetween

japhyr · 6 days ago

> A large part of me thinks I should have written five novels instead.

I don't know, you have 10 years in this writing, I have 15 years. I've gained so much from 15 years of conversations with people about the topics that come up on HN. That's a lot different than writing an equivalent amount by yourself on a topic you hope others will find meaningful.

So many geographic maps turn out to be just population maps (1). I wonder how much different these rankings would be if you divided the number of words by the account's lifespan. We're all talking about the most "prolific" commenters here, but are we really just talking about the oldest accounts?

I'd love to see two overlaid graphs. One is the top 1000 as currently implemented. The other is the age of that account.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1138/

japhyr commented on See how many words you have written in Hacker News comments serjaimelannister.github.... · Posted by u/Imustaskforhelp

tombert · 6 days ago

Yeah, I'm not sure how I feel about it. I love HN but maybe I need another hobby or three.

japhyr · 6 days ago

Can you expand a bit on how you feel about it? :)

japhyr commented on See how many words you have written in Hacker News comments serjaimelannister.github.... · Posted by u/Imustaskforhelp

Imustaskforhelp · 10 days ago

Hey Hackernews, You can read my previous comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46827731#46828331 where I was suddenly writing until I realized that on Hackernews I have written way too many words.

I then got the idea of actually figuring out how many. Then I first wanted to try out algolia but then later, I found out about clickhouse and how it had a play and the api for playing is so simple, I am definitely gonna make more projects on top of clickhouse play for HN (seriously my mind got blown because I was assuming that the browser -> api was gonna be hard but it seriously wasn't)

Then decided to think to write a github page about it for other people as well.

Anyways, this was one of the most fun project I had. So it turns out that I personally have written 0.64 Game of thrones words in Hackernews itself.

Dang has written 11.15 Volumes equivalent to game of thrones which is actually really crazy.

When I searched dang I was shocked haha. Anyways Dang, If you are reading this, I know that we all like to talk about how moderation of HN has issues but seriously man, the amount of efforts you put in is really lovely & respectable. We all love you.

I still feel like there are some issues where people flag anything they dislike which can be frustrating and other things but that still doesn't really impact the moderation and the moderation team (dang) is pretty awesome in my opinion even if the website does have this flaw in my opinion but Hackernews is one of the best websites man!

Dang today's your day! We can discuss the issues of flagging and others some other day, Have a nice day now!

(Also a little side fact but I picked game of thrones because my name of github is SerJaimeLannister because I was watching game of thrones in my brother's dorm room once in his college room and I literally just thought one or two episodes and started watching from s4 or something and then literally the second I got home, I binge watched Game of thrones till end and then s1 s2 but I think that I haven't watched some seasons I think s3 iirc more but still I loved the show so much and I think I had lost my old github account and naming is always hard especially in programming so picked SerJaimeLannister but this is the reason why I picked the novel equivalent to be game of thrones!)

japhyr · 6 days ago

Holy heck. The first person I looked up was tptacek, who happens to be #2 in the global rank. 4.3 million words!

I'm nowhere near that (~125k words), but for many of us, it's a good part of our life's corpus. :)

japhyr commented on Why I left iNaturalist kueda.net/blog/2026/01/06... · Posted by u/erutuon

gyomu · a month ago

> They insisted the app needed to be simpler, to cater first to incidental users who wanted a quick answer, to be a friction-less path to a feeling of contribution. I don’t believe that’s possible while also serving existing users who value (don’t laugh) the power and nuance of iNat, including, among many other things, the way it doesn’t give you a quick answer, forcing you to consider options when making an identification.
[...]
> iNaturalist the product is fundamentally complicated, and I have watched many, many people bounce off that wall of complexity over the years, even as I’ve seen so many people enrich their lives after they climb over it.

Oof, as someone working on consumer facing creative software, I feel that.

There is some sort of higher calling to making tools that truly teach things to people, augments their mental models and knowledge of the world, taps into their curiosity and creativity - but demands some sort of effort in return.

All those aspirations are kind of "dirty words", as they go against the currently accepted playbook of software that's as "frictionless" and "intuitive" as possible - the goal being a viral product with the potential to gather 10 million users overnight, which requires superficial, immediate results, and not really asking anything from your users unless it fits in a single screen/single tap flow.

Especially relevant in the current context of generative AI, where I've heard some argue that actually expecting people to build skill or knowledge is akin to discrimination, and anyone should be able to generate a novel without knowing how to write, a song without knowing how to compose, a painting without knowing how to draw.

japhyr · a month ago

Like so many others, I've gotten into birding in the last few years. I've known so many people who choose eBird over iNaturalist because it's "easier to use". But that's exactly why I don't really enjoy eBird. So many people are just running Merlin, and dumping whatever it picks up to eBird.

There are way fewer observations on iNaturalist, but I know how much to trust every one of them.

japhyr commented on I switched from VSCode to Zed tenthousandmeters.com/blo... · Posted by u/r4victor

ErroneousBosh · a month ago

I can't say I've noticed any "nudges" to use AI tools in VS Code. I saw a prompt for Copilot but I closed it, and it hasn't been back.

I'm probably barely scratching the surface of what I can do with it, but as a code editor it works well and it's the first time I've ever actually found code completion that seems to work well with the way I think. There aren't any formatters for a couple of the languages I use on a daily basis but that's a Me Problem - the overlap between IDE users of any sort and assembly programmers is probably quite small.

Are there any MS-branded features I should care about positively or negatively?

japhyr · a month ago

I'm a teacher, so I help people get started setting up a programming environment on a regular basis. If you take a new system that hasn't been configured for programming work at all, and install a fresh copy of VS Code, you'll see a number of calls to action regarding AI usage. I don't want to walk people through installing an editor only to then tell them they have to disable a bunch of "features".

This isn't an anti-AI stance; I use AI tools on a daily basis. I put "features" in quotes because some of these aren't really features, they're pushes to pay for subscriptions to specific Microsoft AI services. I want to choose when to incorporate AI tools, which tools to incorporate, and not have them popping up like a mobile news site without an ad blocker.

japhyr commented on I switched from VSCode to Zed tenthousandmeters.com/blo... · Posted by u/r4victor

weikju · a month ago

> I believe Microsoft builds VS Code releases by building VS Codium

Isnt vscodium a specific product built strictly from open-source VS Code source code? It's not affiliated with Microsoft, they simply build from the same base then tweak it in different ways.

This is somewhat unlike my understanding of Chromium/Chrome which is similar to what you described.

japhyr · a month ago

The clearest explanation I've seen is on VSCodium's Why page:

https://vscodium.com/#why

japhyr commented on I switched from VSCode to Zed tenthousandmeters.com/blo... · Posted by u/r4victor

japhyr · a month ago

I've been frustrated by the constant nudges to use specific AI tools from within VS Code, but I made a different change. Rather than moving to a different editor altogether, I started using VS Codium. If you're unfamiliar, it's the open core of VS Code, without the Microsoft-branded features that make up VS Code.

I believe Microsoft builds VS Code releases by building VS Codium, and then adding in their own branded features, including all the AI pushes. If you like VS Code except for the Microsoft bits, consider VS Codium alongside other modern choices.

https://vscodium.com