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codesectionson Ask HN: Do you say please and thank you to your LLMs?

I don't think I've ever spent a whole round on it. More typically

> please do $x

>> $x

> thanks. Now do $y

If I have ever spent a whole turn on something that could be called a thank you is was something like "the way you answer that [in specific way] was very helpful – thanks. Can you please remember to raise that sort of point in the future?" So still not an extra round

codesectionson Ask HN: Do you say please and thank you to your LLMs?

I do. I justify the action via mechanical / prompting logic (my instructions are to treat me as an informed peer and my understanding is that keeping the whole conversation in "two peers talking" register makes it easier for the LLM to maintain that mode).

But, more honestly, it's just a social habit and saving keystrokes isn't worth training myself out of it.

codesectionson Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

> At some point you stop being a passenger and start being cargo.

It’s much worse than that – FedEx would never treat cargo like that. If they took cargo further away from its destination than it started and then left it there for the customer to sort out, that would break so many SLAs …

codesectionson Can LLMs write better code if you keep asking them to “write better code”?

> “Planning” is a long-used trick to help align LLM output for a first pass — the modern implementation of “let’s think step by step.”

I hadn't seen this before. Why is asking for planning better than asking it to think step by step?

codesectionson You Don’t Know Jack about Bandwidth

And the "they" in question is Warren Buffet, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2009/06/you_cant_make_a_baby...

codesectionson You Don’t Know Jack about Bandwidth

How does OpenWRT fair on these metrics? Does it count as a "debloted router" is the sense used in TFA? Or is additional software above and beyond the core OpenWRT system needed to handle congestion properly?

codesectionson International Reply Coupon

Quoting for context:

“ In 1920, Charles Ponzi made use of the idea that profit could be made by taking advantage of the differing postal rates in different countries to buy IRCs cheaply in one country and exchange them for stamps of a higher value in another country. His attempts to raise money for this venture became instead the fraudulent Ponzi scheme.[24] In practice, the overhead on buying and selling large numbers of the very low-value IRCs precluded any profitability. The selling price and exchange value in stamps in each country have been adjusted to some extent to remove some of the potential for profit, but ongoing fluctuations in currency value and exchange rates make it impossible to achieve this completely, as long as stamps represent a specific currency value, instead of acting as vouchers granting specific postal services, devoid of currency nomination.[25]”

codesectionson Lenovo's Project Crystal is first laptop with a transparent MicroLED display

But what would you stick the wallpaper to? If it's on the screen, then you'd just be looking at the blank part of the wallpaper, right?

codesectionson Scientists discover underlying cause of "brain fog" linked with Long Covid

This is a press release issued by the Trinity College, the employer of the study authors. Thus, it represents more of a claim than an independent assessment.

I suggest editing the headline to reflect this - maybe "Scientists claim to have discovered underlying cause of Long Covid linked 'brain fog'"

codesectionson Ask HN: How does Hacker News avoid (successful) DDoS attacks?

> It does have a rate limit, it's just very very high. I've hit it sometime when trying to download every single item since day 0.

Interesting. The API README states:

> There is currently no rate limit.

I guess that's wrong/out of date. I wonder when that changed?

codesectionson Ask HN: How does Hacker News avoid (successful) DDoS attacks?

Yeah, I thought of that. But (especially given political polarization) I would expect that there'd be at least someone with an axe to grind and the necessary technical skills. I mean, there's certainly no shortage of criticism of Hacker News/some HN moderation actions even on HN (or "the orange site" as it's known in some circles).

codesectionson Overlapping markup

If I'm understanding you correctly, in that model a Paragraph should have a parent Page (and there should be a clear answer to the question "what page is this paragraph on?"). Is that correct? If so, that doesn't match how most paginated texts are formatted, where paragraphs frequently start on one page but finish on another

codesectionson Ask HN: Technical forums that are not dominated by pedantry?

Find small communities.

In my experience, everything you said is 100% true -- once groups get big enough. But each of those points is, equally, 100% false for small groups.

For example, the Raku community is fairly small, so the r/rakulang subreddit is friendly. For that matter, even the [raku] StackOverflow tag is friendly! Last I checked, the same was true of the corresponding Rust tags, though I know they've grown a lot since I was a regular there.

codesectionson Elon’s Out

> This is an appeal to authority that is not valid

I'm open to that criticism; I'm typically pretty skeptical of appeals to authority myself.

But to be clear: the appeal to authority I'm making isn't "legal opinion of a lawyer" (I agree that's very weak) but rather "opinion on corporate law by a Wachtell attorney who practiced corporate law" (Wachtell is probably the best corporate law firm in the world, and clearly in the top handful)

codesectionson Elon’s Out

> This is such an absurd thing [for Matt Levine, a former 3rd Circuit clerk, Yale Law grad, and Wachtell M&A attorney] to say it's hard to find a way to charitably respond.

If your interpretation of the post suggests that a highly qualified attorney is getting the basics of US law absurdly incorrect, you might want to reconsider whether you're understanding the intended meaning.

(Here, Levine is making a specific claim about the remedies that the Delaware chancellory court typically employs, not about the authority of US courts)

codesectionson Detecting unauthorized physical access with beans, lentils and colored rice (2021)

> The other thing that comes to mind would be quantum systems that can only be measured once. Unfortunately I think that practically you would need a system that is "only twice" so that it can be compared, but I have this sense that anything that can be measured twice can be measured 3 times.

Just spitballing, but you could do it with a "once only" system if you could generate it reliabilly/deterministically enough that you don't need to measure it post-generation

codesectionson The Victim Cloud: Gullibility in the golden age of scams

> From banking law about 10 years back now, I would expect that the bank would be on the hook for Deborah's transfers in the first story. … I would have taken that case if I were a plaintiff's lawyer.

I disagree, for two reasons. First, an outside-view argument: lawyers who currently practice in that field apparently disagree:

> Deborah reached out to more than thirty attorneys. Only one called her back. Deborah’s eldest brother consulted another, who called her situation “a terminal case.” “There’s no life here,” he said. Her claim was dying, if not already dead.

Second, on the merits: most of the fraud protections have requirements that the defrauded customer notify the bank promptly (either after the fraudulent transfer or after the next bank statement). See, e.g. [0]. It looks like that didn't happen here.

[0] https://www.consumerfinance.gov/rules-policy/regulations/100...

codesectionson Don't just shorten your URL, make it suspicious and frightening (2010)

The fact that shadyurl.com is only available over HTTP is perfect icing on the cake. Attention to detail like that really sells the joke

codesectionson Git.io deprecation: Active links to be maintained in a read-only state

That's a good point. For .cc in particular, it's the TLD for an Australian territory and is managed by Verisign so I'd expect the risks to be lower than with some TLDs. Still, though, a lot can happen in "forever" and you're right that it adds an (unnecessary?) risk

codesectionson Git.io deprecation: Active links to be maintained in a read-only state

In case you're looking for an alternative: consider using Perma.cc links, which both serve as a URL shortener and an archive of the current page.

(Plus they're expressly intended to last "forever" and are maintained by one of the few organizations with the multi-century history to credibly make that claim (Havard Law School))

https://perma.cc/about

codesectionson Show HN: Favicons for HN

For the curious, this is powered by DuckDuckGo's favicon service, which takes significant steps to preserve request privacy. Details at https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/fa...

codesectionson Ask HN: Software That Insults You?

Running `feh` in an ssh session (or other terminal session without a graphical display) will print

    "Can't open X display. It *is* running, yeah?"

That's not quite an insult, but seems to be the in the same spirit

codesectionson CA bar says attorney records leaked through database flaw, not hack

> Honestly I’m surprised they admitted this.

I think it's because they're lawyers.

I have decidedly mixed feelings about the legal profession, but most lawyers (especially the "establishment" types most likely to be involved in the CA bar) are *very* unlikely to make deliberately false statements (or to fail to correct a past statement, one they learn it was false).

In defiance of thousands of lawyer jokes, in my experience lawyers lie the *least* of any large group of humans I've encountered – at least if "lying" refers only to the specific denotation of the words, since lawyers also love to split hairs to say something that's technically true. But the distinction between a "hack" and a "database error" is _exactly_ the sort of hair that lawyers love to split!

Source: I'm a lawyer-turned-programmer

codesectionson Transforming cities with superblocks

Previous "Superblocks" discussion on HN:

Superblocks: how Barcelona is taking city streets back from cars[0] (2016) - 236 comments

What New York Can Learn from Barcelona’s ‘Superblocks’[1] (2016) - 133 comments

Superblocks: Barcelona’s plan to take back streets from cars[2] (2019) - 31 comments

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12237966

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20200760

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12633414

codesectionson How we end up with different intuitions about problems