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Comment by why_at | Hacker News Reader

This part from the first try made me laugh:

      if random.random() < 0.01:

          logging.warning("This feels wrong. Aborting just in case.")

          return None

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I actually laughed when I read that. This one got me, too. The casual validation of its paranoia gives me Marvin the Paranoid Android vibes.

  try:
      result = a / b
      if math.isnan(result):
          raise ArithmeticError("Result is NaN. I knew this would happen.")

I think that’s the funniest joke I’ve ever seen an LLM make. Which probably means it’s copied from somewhere.

"Why is a laser beam like goldfish? Because neither one can whistle." - Mike, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

Fantastic book, just read it. Surprised no movie has been made.

The protagonists are libertarians with teenage harems, who fake an election and team up with with a sex pest. That's extremely reductive to the point of parody, but that will likely be the media coverage of it then moment someone reads the women and politics in the book.

If you completely excise anything too distasteful for a current-day blockbuster, but want a film about a space mining colony uprising you might as well just adapt the game Red Faction instead: have the brave heros blasting away with abandon at corpo guards, mad genetic experimenters and mercenaries and the media coverage can talk about how it's a genius deconstruction of Elon Musk's Martian dream or whatever.

If you haven't read Ursula Le Guin's "The Dispossessed", check it out too.

It's like a fine wine pairing for "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress."

You’d think some filmmaker would have run with the dystopian theme. The accuracy of the book’s predictions is impressive, even the location of the North American Space Defense Command. The biggest miss was people using wired telephones everywhere.

I liked it when I was 17 but have soured on it later after re-reading.

The only reason their libertarian revolution succeeds is because they have a centralised computer that secretly does everything for them.

> I liked it when I was 17

same with pretty much every scifi movie and book from my youth. What movies that wouldn't have been rendered ridiculous by the invention of the cellphone were done in by the hairstyles or fashion.

It would not be shocking if LLMs are legitimately better at making jokes about tasks they are extensively trained on.

If you're an extensive user of ChatGPT, or if you can give it some material about yourself like say, a resume or a LinkedIn profile, ask it to roast you. It will be very specific to the content you give it. Be warned, it can be brutal.

So rehash of top comments in /r/roastme?

Periodic reminder that there’s also HN Wrapped. [0]

[0]: https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com

ooooh boy, gotta mentally prepare myself for this one

damn these ai's are good!

"The user will start a comment with 'I'm a social libertarian but...' only to be immediately downvoted by both libertarians and socialists. The irony will not be lost on them, just everyone else."

I can't say I'm not impressed. That's very funny

>You voted with your feet and moved to Western Europe for better well-being, but you still won't vote with your cursor and use a browser other than Edge.

I love this and hate this at the same time.

Spot on and I don't even mind.

Absolutely hilarious, and gives me some self awareness tbh

Whoa dude! It was brutal, but highly constructive! Actually extremely helpful (and quite funny, though I have a high sense of humor about things so others might not appreciate some of it :-D)

This was my favorite line after asking it to review my resume and roast me:

> Structure & Flow: “Like Kubernetes YAML — powerful, but not human-readable.”

Some other good ones:

> Content & Tone: “You’re a CTO — stop talking like a sysadmin with a thesaurus.”

> Overall Impression: “This resume is a technical symphony… that goes on for too many movements.”

I've got some resume work to do haha

They meant roast you, not your resume.

I came back to this comment just to thank you - I started off with Claude, feeding it my personal site, my résumé, the HN roast of me, etc. and it was super funny.

But then, I veered that same conversation into asking for GTM (go to market) advice, and it was actually really good. It actually felt tailored to me (unsurprisingly) and a lot more useful.

As always, I don't know whether this is a very light form of "ai psychosis" haha but still, super grateful for the advice. Cheers

Years and years ago, the MongoDB Java driver had something like this to skip logging sometimes in one of its error handling routines.

   } catch (Exception e) {
                if (!((_ok) ? true : (Math.random() > 0.1))) {
                    return res;
                }

                final StringBuilder logError = (new StringBuilder("Server seen down: ")).append(_addr);

                /* edited for brevity: log the error */

https://github.com/mongodb/mongo-java-driver/blob/1d2e6faa80...

One of my earlier jobs a decade ago involved doing pipeline development and Jenkins administration for the on-site developer lab on one of the NRO projects, and I inserted a random build failure code snippet to test that pipelines could recover from builds that failed for unpredictable reasons, like a network error rather than anything actually wrong with the build. I had to do this on the real system because we didn't have funds for a staging environment for the dev environment, and naturally I forgot to get rid of it when I was done. So builds randomly failed for years after that before I remembered and fixed it.

If we’re talking about funny error msgs, a buddy of mine got this yesterday in salesforce. It’s not _that_ funny but pretty funny for Salesforce.

System.DmlException: Insert failed. First exception on row 0; first error: UNKNOWN_EXCEPTION, Something is very wrong: []

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