HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

vova_hn2

759 karma · joined September 3, 2025

submissionscomments
vova_hn2··on Rotating home owners boast of 360-degree views and energy benefits
Wouldn't it be easier (and cheaper) to just move to a different room?
vova_hn2··on Exploring JEPA for real-time speech translation
I've just tried the demo. It's impressive, but not that impressive. Cloned voice sounds nothing like my voice and also there are subtle errors in the translation.

I'm not sure if it works much better than STT -> LLM -> TTS pipeline would. Also, this is of course just a first impression and not serious testing.

vova_hn2··on How do you capture WHY engineering decisions were made, not just what?
I suppose you are trying to "warm up" the audience before announcing you product, which is... fine, I guess.

I also had a an idea for a solution to this problem long time ago.

I wanted to make a thing that would allow you to record a meeting (in the company I where I worked back then such things where mostly discussed in person), transcribe it and link parts of the conversation to relevant tickets, pull requests and git commits.

Back then the tech wasn't ready yet, but now it actually looks relatively easy to do.

For now, I try to leave such breadcrumbs manually, whenever I can. For example, if the reason why a part of the code exists seems non-obvious to me, I will write an explanation in a comment/docstring and leave a link to a ticket or a ticket comment that provides additional context.

vova_hn2··on Run NanoClaw in Docker Sandboxes
I don't see, how is it relevant in this case. We are talking about writing an integration with an HTTP API (probably) in a high level language (TS/JS, Python, etc). We have already abstracted hardware away.
vova_hn2··on E2E encrypted messaging on Instagram will no longer be supported after 8 May
I hope so, but I just don't understand what exactly causes such massive price difference.

Is it because this kind of phones are a very niche product so they can't benefit from the economy of scale?

Maybe android phone manufacturers can get better deals from chip manufacturers because they buy chips in large quantities?

vova_hn2··on E2E encrypted messaging on Instagram will no longer be supported after 8 May
I find it really off putting, how weak is their hardware, compared to a normal Android phone in a similar price range.
vova_hn2··on OVH forgot they donated documentation hosting to Pandas
Sorry, couldn't resist
vova_hn2··on Run NanoClaw in Docker Sandboxes
> having skills for how to write a (slack, discord, etc) integration, instead of shipping an implementation for each

I'm not sure what is the advantage. Each user will have to waste time and tokens for the same task, instead of doing it once and and shipping to everyone.

vova_hn2··on OVH forgot they donated documentation hosting to Pandas
Vibecoders messed with billing service again
vova_hn2··on Okmain: How to pick an OK main colour of an image
Nearest-neighbor interpolation may pick just one pixel closest to the center.
vova_hn2··on Can I run AI locally?
It says "RAM - unknown", but doesn't give me an option to specify how much RAM I have. Why?
vova_hn2··on Okmain: How to pick an OK main colour of an image
> simple 1x1 resize

How is it "simple"? There are like a ton of different downscaling algorithms and each of them might produce a different result.

Cool article otherwise.

vova_hn2··on Show HN: Algorithms and Data Structures in TypeScript – Free Book (~400 Pages)
Just ask an LLM summarize it for you, lol

What was the point of first asking an LLM to expand prompt/"specs" into a book and then asking it to compress it back to a summary? Well, I'm glad you asked! To promote this Z*n tool, of course.

vova_hn2··on Shall I implement it? No
I used the word "context" in a purely technical sense in relation to LLMs: the input tokens that you send to an LLM.

Every time you send what appears as a "chat message" in any of the programs that let you "chat" with an "AI", what you really do is sending the whole conversation history (all previous messages, tool calls and responses) as an input and asking model to generate an output.

There is no conceivable scenario when sending "<tons of tokens> + no" makes any sense.

Best case scenario is:

"<tons of tokens> + no" -> "Okay, I won't do it."

In this case you've just waisted a lot of input tokens, that someone (hopefully, not you) has to pay for, to generate an absolutely pointless message that says "Okay, I won't do it.". There is no value in this message. There is bo reason to waste time and computational resources to generate this message.

Worst case scenario is what happened on the screenshot.

There is no good scenario when this input produces a valuable output.

If you want your "agent" or "model" or whatever to do nothing you just don't trigger it. It won't do anything on it's own, it doesn't wait for your response, it doesn't need your response.

I don't understand why, in this thread, every time I try to point out how nonsensical is the behavior that they want is from technical perspective (from the perspective of knowing how these tools actually work) people just cling to there anthropomorphized mind model of the LLM and insist on getting angry.

"It acts like a bad human being, therefore it's bad, useless and dangerous"

I don't even know what to say to this.

P. S. If you wind this message hard to read and understand, I'm sorry about it, I don't know how to word it better. HN disallows to use LLMs to edit comments, but I think that sending a link to an LLM-edited version of the comment should be ok:

https://chatgpt.com/s/t_69b423f52bc88191af36a56993d55aa8

vova_hn2··on Shall I implement it? No
My point is that I don't see any scenario in which sending a ton of input tokens (the whole past conversation) and expecting output that literally does nothing is absolutely pointless.

Like, sure, if the model were "smarter" it would probably generate something like "Okay, I won't do it.". What is the value of the response "Okay, I won't do it."? Why did you just waisted time and compute to generate it?

> Do you never have a second thought after looking at your output, or realize you forgot something you wanted to include? Could it be that they saw "one new function", thought "boy, there should really be two... what happened?" and changed their mind?

Sure, all of those are totally valid. And in each of this cases it would be better to just don't make the request at all or make the request with the correction.

> like calling your intern

LLM is not human. It can't act on it's own without you triggering it to act. Unlike the intern in your example who will be wasting time and getting frustrated if they don't receive a response from you. With model you can just abandon this "conversation" (which is really just a growing context that you send again and again with every request) forever or until you are ready to continue it. There is no situation when just adding "no" to the conversation is useful.

vova_hn2··on Shall I implement it? No
> What an odd question.

I don't see anything odd about this question.

What kind of response did the user expect to get from LLM after spending this request and what was the point of sending it in the first place?

vova_hn2··on Shall I implement it? No
Drones do not use LLMs to make such decisions.
vova_hn2··on Shall I implement it? No
I kinda agree with the clanker on this one. You send it a request with all the context just to ask it to do nothing? It doesn't make any sense, if you want it to do nothing just don't trigger it, that's all.
vova_hn2··on Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
> We passed the no return sign miles ago > we passed the point of no return miles back

Unrolling a metaphor into its literal meaning is one of the most annoying features of the "AI voice", IMO

vova_hn2··on NASA's DART spacecraft changed an asteroid's orbit around the sun
It depends on the size of the asteroid and precision with which it can be aimed...
vova_hn2··on The purpose of Continuous Integration is to fail
> The dirty little secret in CS is that unit, functional, and end-to-end tests are all the exact same thing.

I agree that the boundaries may be blurred in practice, but I still think that there is distinction.

> visible, public interface

Visible to whom? A class can have public methods available to other classes, a module can have public members available to other modules, a service can have public API that other services can call through network etc

I think that the difference is the level of abstraction we operate on:

unit -> functional -> integration -> e2e

Unit is the lowest level of abstraction and e2e is the highest.

vova_hn2··on What monotheism means is surprisingly hard to pin down
https://archive.is/tLk1S
vova_hn2··on The purpose of Continuous Integration is to fail
> IMO, good tests are relatively immutable. You should be able to have multiple valid implementations. You should add new tests to describe the new functionality of that implementation, however, the old tests should remain relatively untouched.

Taken to extreme this would mean getting rid of unit tests altogether in favor of functional and/or end-to-end testing. Which is... a strategy. I don't know if it is a good or bad strategy, but I can see it being viable for some projects.

vova_hn2··on Show HN: We analyzed 1,573 Claude Code sessions to see how AI agents work
This is so sad that on top of black box LLMs we also build all these tools that are pretty much black box as well.

It became very hard to understand what exactly is sent to LLM as input/context and how exactly is the output processed.

vova_hn2··on Galaxy Zoo
How do they make sure that their training dataset is not poisoned by someone using a model to submit the data to them?
vova_hn2··on How much of HN is AI?
> Is it possible the language will converge towards AI mannerism when writing

As a non-native English speaker leaving in a non English-speaking country I thought about this too, but in a more selfish and practical manner: what if my English in particular converges towards AI mannerisms?

You see, if you live in an English speaking country and your family speaks English you still have some amount of guaranteed-to-be-human language input from taking to people face-to-face in real life.

But for me, 99.9% of English input I receive is online. So I wonder, how much of it is already AI and how much has the non-artificial neural network inside my brain has retrained itself to mimick AI.

This is scary, because before I was absolutely sure that consuming content online improves my ability to understand and use English. Now I'm not so sure anymore.

vova_hn2··on How much of HN is AI?
> hasn't let up since

eternal AItember

vova_hn2··on Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
Well, you haven't really answered the question.

I think that if you actually try reading someone else's conversation with LLM, you'll find out that it's less exciting than it seems.

For the one who has the conversation the excitement comes mostly from the ability to steer it the way you want. Reader doesn't have this ability, so they are just forced to endure the excessive wordiness, that is so typical for most LLMs.

If you learned something interesting, then why not express this knowledge in a normal article/blogpost? What advantage does a conversation between you and LLM has over just a normal text or, perhaps, text with pictures, diagrams, maybe some interactive illustrations etc

vova_hn2··on Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.
> HN AI comment detector game

Looks cool, but how exactly do you gather proven-to-be human comments?

I think it would be better if you used pre-ChatGPT (Nov 30 2022, I think?) stories.

vova_hn2··on Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.
vital robust teapot

delve into noteworthy realm

leverage tapestry

← PreviousPage 9 of 10Next →