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Re: Fast

#261

Post by jandrese »

cyanydeez wrote: post #139
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #104

Just want to say how much I thank YCom for not f'ing up the HN interface, and keeping it fast. I distinctly remember when Slashdot committed suicide. They had an interface that was very easy for me to scan and find high value comments, and in the name of "modern UI" or some other nonsense needed to keep a few designers employed, completely revamped it so that it had a ton of whitespace and made it basically impossibl…

Ive wanted tp poll HN about how many people actively track usernames. With IRC its basically part of the task, but every forum i read, its rare that i ever consider whose saying what.

HN goes to some lengths to de-emphasize the usernames, leaving them small and medium grey against a light grey background. It's not easy to track usernames here. Some other forums put far more emphasis on them, even letting users upload icons so you can tell who is who at a glance.

Re: Fast

#262

Post by resonious »

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

Kinda funny but I think LLM-assisted workflows are frequently slow -- that is, if I use the "refactor" features in my IDE it is done in a second, if I ask the faster kind of assistant it comes back in 30 seconds, if I ask the "agentic" kind of assistant it comes back in 15 minutes. I asked an agent to write an http endpoint at the end of the work day when I had just 30 min left -- my first thought was "it took 10 min…

As a counter example (re: agents), I routinely delegate simple tasks to Claude Code and get near-perfect results. But I've also had experiences like yours where I ended up wasting more time than saved. I just kept trying with different types of tasks, and narrowed it down to the point where I have a good intuition for what works and what doesn't. The benefit is I can fire off a request on my phone, stick it in my pocket, then do a code review some time later. This process is very low mental overhead for me, so it's a big productivity win.

Re: Fast

#263

Post by roncesvalles »

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

Kinda funny but I think LLM-assisted workflows are frequently slow -- that is, if I use the "refactor" features in my IDE it is done in a second, if I ask the faster kind of assistant it comes back in 30 seconds, if I ask the "agentic" kind of assistant it comes back in 15 minutes. I asked an agent to write an http endpoint at the end of the work day when I had just 30 min left -- my first thought was "it took 10 min…

All the references to LLMs in the article seemed out-of-place like poorly done product placement.

LLMs are the anti-thesis of fast. In fact, being slow is a perceived virtue with LLM output. Some sites like Google and Quora (until recently) simulate the slow typed output effect for their pre-cached LLM answers, just for credibility.

Re: Fast

#265

Post by scrollaway »

inopinatus wrote: post #251
FlyingSnake wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is literally the website I open to check if I have internet connectivity. HN is truly a shining beacon in the trashy landscape of web bloat.

I like to use example.com/net/org bonus, these have both http & https endpoints if you needed a differential diagnosis or just a means to trip some shitty airline/hotel walled garden into saying hello.

https://neverssl.com :)

Re: Fast

#266

Post by xyzzy123 »

resonious wrote: post #262
PaulHoule wrote: post #2

Kinda funny but I think LLM-assisted workflows are frequently slow -- that is, if I use the "refactor" features in my IDE it is done in a second, if I ask the faster kind of assistant it comes back in 30 seconds, if I ask the "agentic" kind of assistant it comes back in 15 minutes. I asked an agent to write an http endpoint at the end of the work day when I had just 30 min left -- my first thought was "it took 10 min…

As a counter example (re: agents), I routinely delegate simple tasks to Claude Code and get near-perfect results. But I've also had experiences like yours where I ended up wasting more time than saved. I just kept trying with different types of tasks, and narrowed it down to the point where I have a good intuition for what works and what doesn't. The benefit is I can fire off a request on my phone, stick it in my poc…

Thats cool, how are you integrating your phone with your Claude workflow?

Re: Fast

#267

Post by qingcharles »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #104

Just want to say how much I thank YCom for not f'ing up the HN interface, and keeping it fast. I distinctly remember when Slashdot committed suicide. They had an interface that was very easy for me to scan and find high value comments, and in the name of "modern UI" or some other nonsense needed to keep a few designers employed, completely revamped it so that it had a ton of whitespace and made it basically impossibl…

What changes have been made to the HN design since it was launched?

I know there are changes to the moderation that have taken place many times, but not to the UI. It's one of the most stable sites in terms of design that I can think of.

What other sites have lasted this long without giving in to their users' whims?

Over the last 4 years my whole design ethos has transformed to "WWHND" (What Would Hacker News Do?) every time I need to make any UI changes to a project.

Re: Fast

#268

Post by abrookewood »

FlyingSnake wrote: post #156
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #104

Just want to say how much I thank YCom for not f'ing up the HN interface, and keeping it fast. I distinctly remember when Slashdot committed suicide. They had an interface that was very easy for me to scan and find high value comments, and in the name of "modern UI" or some other nonsense needed to keep a few designers employed, completely revamped it so that it had a ton of whitespace and made it basically impossibl…

HN is literally the website I open to check if I have internet connectivity. HN is truly a shining beacon in the trashy landscape of web bloat.

yep, I do exactly the same thing. If HN isn't loading, something is definitely fckd.

Re: Fast

#269

Post by xyzzy123 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #160
pron wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programmers (and I'm including myself here) often go to great lengths to not think, to the point of working (with or without a coding assistant) for hours in the hope of avoiding one hour of thinking. What's the saying? "An hour of debugging/programming can save you minutes of thinking," or something like that. In the end, we usually find that we need to do the thinking after all. I think coding assistants would end…

Sometimes thinking and experimenting go together. I had to do some maintenance on some Typescript/yum that I didn't write but had done a little maintenance. Typescript can make astonishingly complex error messages when types don't match up so I went through a couple of rounds of showing the errors to the assistant and getting suggestions to fix it that were wrong but I got some ideas and did more experiments and over…

Agree, also llms change the balance of plan vs do for me, sometimes it cheaper to do & review than up-front plan.

When you can see what goes wrong with the naive plan you then have all the specific context in front of you for making a better plan.

If something is wrong with the implementation then I can ask the agent to then make a plan which avoids the issues / smells I call out. This itself could probably be automated.

The main thing I feel I'm "missing" is, I think it would be helpful if there were easier ways to back up in the conversation such that the state of the working copy was restored also. Basically I want the agent's work to be directly integrated with git such that "turns" are commits and you can branch at any point.

Re: Fast

#270

Post by cycomanic »

pron wrote: post #152
cycomanic wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've already written about this several times here. I think the current trend of LLMs chasing benchmark scores are going in the wrong direction at least as programming tools. In my experience they get it wrong with enough probability, so I always need to check the work. So I end up in a back and forth with the LLM and because of the slow responses it becomes a really painful process and I could often have done the ta…

Programmers (and I'm including myself here) often go to great lengths to not think, to the point of working (with or without a coding assistant) for hours in the hope of avoiding one hour of thinking. What's the saying? "An hour of debugging/programming can save you minutes of thinking," or something like that. In the end, we usually find that we need to do the thinking after all. I think coding assistants would end…

> Programmers (and I'm including myself here) often go to great lengths to not think, to the point of working (with or without a coding assistant) for hours in the hope of avoiding one hour of thinking. What's the saying? "An hour of debugging/programming can save you minutes of thinking," or something like that. In the end, we usually find that we need to do the thinking after all.

This is such a great observation. I'm not quite sure why this is. I'm not a programmer, but a signal-processing/system engineer/researcher. The weird thing seems that it's the process of programming that causes the "not-thinking" behaviour, e.g. when I program a simulation and I find that I must have a sign error somewhere in my implementation (sometimes you can see this from the results), I end up switching every possible sign around instead of taking a pen and pencil and comparing theory and implementation, if I do other work, e.g. theory, that's not the case. I suspect we try to avoid the cost of the context switch and try to stay in the "programming-flow".

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