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Side question... how much is it costing you to run Claude Code on a regular basis?

I'm not a heavy user by any means. I use it for project setup and routine-but-hard-to-automate refactoring, package upgrades, config files, fiddly stuff like that, for which it has been awesome. For me it's ~$30/mo.

FYI: Claude Code was just added to the Pro Plan ($20/month). I just switched. My usage was roughly the same.

https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/11145838-using-cla...


Thanks, good to know!

What's working for me now is just deciding what I want to weigh, but I couldn't do that for years. First I had to learn to actually control my eating, like not eating every time I felt like stuffing my face, getting enough sleep so I wasn't constantly fighting urges, and figuring out how much I need to walk to burn off extra calories.

'Just eat less and exercise more' never worked because I needed to learn how to do these smaller skills myself first. Once I learned what it actually takes to eat less and actually exercise more, that simple advice started becoming possible. It's still a work in progress.


Would you hire someone known to be a hallucinating liar?

It is not intended as a wordplay, but if they are delusional, are they really a liar? I think our language may need to evolve a little, because we keep building new language of llms by anthropomorphizing them. They hallucinate. They lie. It is thinking.

The worst part is that the imprecise language is here to stay the same way cyber came to mean something very different. So we are likely stuck with AI, hallucinations and all that silliness.

And besides, corps have a record of hiring liars, delusional people and anything in between so the analogy breaks on every level anyway.


I've been to Tunisia several times since 2021.

If you like Roman ruins, here's my favorite sites that I've personally visited:

- Amphitheatre of El Jem - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphitheatre_of_El_Jem

- Dougga - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dougga

- Bulla Regia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulla_Regia

While itself not an amazing Roman building, I also enjoyed going to Ksar Ghilane - https://maps.app.goo.gl/Ru5sEqEtJDEWNg3R7. There's a small touristic oasis where you ran rent a quad bike, zip over some dunes in the Sahara, and then stop at the small Roman fort. It's fun to imagine being a Roman stationed at one of the southern most outposts of the empire. It's also fun to rent a 4x4 w/ driver and drive through the desert from Douz to Ksar Ghilane.


I once wrote a personal’s ad in SQL on Craigslist, back when they had that section. A DBA replied and asked if I wanted hawking. She had a Cooper’s hawk. I met her at a commercial park in a Saturday morning. She was driving a Honda CRV, the hawk was in the front passenger seat, and I hopped into the back seat.

She started driving and spotted some crows. The hawk saw them as well. Wearing a “don’t kill me either your claws” glove, she moved her hand to the hawk, who gleefully jumped on. She rolled down her window, stuck the hawk outside, and it was basically a drive by shooting with a bird bullet. This happened three times.

My most vivid memory of this was her ripping the crows apart into pieces and putting the then into a bucket, like it was sushi you’d order from KFC.


I've reread this a few times and I still can't figure out if there's something wrong with me or something wrong with this post.


I once wrote a personal’s ad in SQL on Craigslist, back when they had that section. A DBA replied and asked if I wanted hawking.

I feel I have to reply, but I have no idea what to say.


For starters he could post what the hell his SQL query was.

Reading the first paragraph of this made me think how LLMs must feel when someone tries prompt injection on them

This is one of those stories that just keeps escalating into "am I in a dream or a side quest?" territory... Also, "sushi you’d order from KFC" is going to haunt me

And you didn't get married!?

Not OP, but I'm friends with crows. Imagine having to try to explain that...

Very intelligent birds.

"Baby, those body parts mean nothing to me! I love crows!"

Don't hate the player, baby.


They have a much stronger sense of propriety than most humans. So really do most animals other than us and perhaps some close relatives. I'm not actually sure that says anything in our favor.

I bet she was a very good database administrator.

Probably the hawkish type.

I feel like I’ve just taken someone else’s medicine.

And this, kids, is a Markov chain.

I know this person IRL, and I'm certain it's not.

Prove it with SQL.

  DO $$
  BEGIN
      ASSERT (
          SELECT
              COUNT(1)
          FROM
              friends JOIN posters ON friends.id = posters.id
          WHERE
              posters.username = 'devoutsalsa'
      ) = 1,
      'He''s in there, I swear it!';
  END;
  $$;

I would dearly love to see that ad; any chance you still have it or could more or less reconstruct it?

I was looking for it in my email, but I think it's long gone.

Thanks for looking! It just sounded like the kind of clever I love.

That's really horrible. Crows can feel pain too, you know.

Whatever this is, write more.

This is peak HN.

Just for fun, I used ChatGPT to reverse a string as my first test of using their API. I was amused at how much work it took to get the LLM to give me just the reversed string, and even then I didn't feel I could fully trust it. I learned my lesson, and now I have multiple LLMs check to see of the string has actually been reversed. Soon I'll be spinning up a data center to host the GPUs necessary to correctly count the number of Rs in strawberry.


There are a lot of careers with no formal training on-ramp. If demand for software engineers continues and there’s no practical way to get enough on the job experience, there will be plenty of self taught developers that grind long enough to get the experience they need. I became a software engineer at age 40. No one would take me seriously as a junior developer, so I just kept leveling up my skills until I could get a mid-level role at a company that was desperate enough to hire me.


I just finished a recruiting contract & helped my startup client fill 15 position in 18 week.

Here's what I learned about using LLMs to screen resumes:

- the resumes the LLM likes the most will be the "fake" applicants who themselves used an LLM to match the job description, meaning the strongest matches are the fakest applicants

- when a resume isn't a clear match to your hiring criteria & your instinct is to reject, you might use an LLM to look for reasons someone is worth talking to

Keep in mind that most job descriptions and resumes are mostly hot garbage, and they should really be a very lightweight filter for whether a further conversation makes sense for both sides. Trying to do deep research on hot garbage is mostly a waste of time. Garbage in, garbage out.


> the resumes the LLM likes the most will be the "fake" applicants > the strongest matches are the fakest applicants

How do you know that you didn't filter out the perfect candidate?

And did you tell the LLM what makes a resume fake?


I don't think an LLM will be good at spotting fake resumes. I was trying to point out that if you use an LLM to screen for matches to the job, you can expect to find a lot of people that used ChatGPT to customize their resume to your role. As more & more people realize that using an LLM gets you passed AI resume filters, you can expect all positive resumes to be LLM output, so using an LLM as a way of identifying potential applicants will be less & less useful over time.


I was skeptical that you knew with confidence what made a resume fake, other than it being "too good to be true". Which I don't blame you for, it's an optimization.

But it also means that the perfect candidate, while probably unlikely, would be rejected.


There's are wooden escalators...

Stairway to haven: Antwerp’s wooden escalators are among the last in use in the world -- https://www.belganewsagency.eu/stairway-to-haven-antwerps-wo...

How about wooden space escalators?!


You can write a single file Elixir app if you want to. There's nothing preventing this. Setting up a simple web server w/ Plug is straightforward. You'll have the same problems you'd have with a non-trivial Flask app, which is that scrolling through a huge file is a pain.


My only issue when it comes to Erlang and Elixir (or Java and Kotlin) is that there are just so many files I need to open and keep track of. I do not blame the languages, of course, but it is the reason for why I use Go for less serious projects instead of Erlang / Elixir, because in Go it would typically be contained in one file, whereas in Elixir it would span across multiple files.


You gotta be trolling...

You're literally responding to someone pointing out you don't need multiple files in elixir.

And the same is true for Java and kotlin. Heck even the official spring boots demo videos define everything in a single file nowadays.

Multiple files is just a convention, because otherwise your project will become unhandy eventually. That applies to Go as well.


I am talking about the typical / usual case. In fact, you typically use "mix phx.new" for projects using Phoenix in Elixir, and it creates lots of files, as opposed to "import ..." in a single Go file. I never said that it is impossible to do in Elixir (or Java), but it is not the typical case.


That's the typical use case if you want a web server. If you're writing for low-level devices, you'd use `mix nerves.new project_name`. If you're writing an Elixir app that won't be a web server, you'd use `mix new project_name`. If you're writing an elixir script, you'd use `touch script_name.exs`


Yes, of course. You are right.


I tend to build my prototypes as single file Elixir scripts. These are sometimes rather bulky with a bunch of logic and IO modules with some helper modules on the side. It's only when I believe in the idea that I reach for phx_new and start writing tests and copying in code into a full Phoenix project.

When I started out with Phoenix I learned a lot from studying the boilerplate it can generate. If you just need a route and serve some JSON or a file on it you can turn off most of the code generation and do precisely that, in case you're sure that's what you want. I think the default being that you can immediately flesh out auth and CRUD for whatever tabular data model you want is rather sensible.


I typically use specific flags to "mix phx.new" that gets rid most of the files, especially JavaScript and whatnot. I am not at my PC right now and I forgot the flags, but I am sure you know what I am referring to.

I never tried starting with Elixir scripts, I will give that a try.


Someone linked the Plug docs elsewhere in this subthread, those show you how you can quickly launch a web server from a single file, including one with WebSocket capability.

In my opinion Elixir scripts punch way above their weight. It's trivial to pull in the same dependencies as you would in a full project and you can easily keep a set of five or ten template scripts just laying around and copy those when you want a quick start with some boilerplate for a set of dependencies that often comes in handy. You could do something similar with mix plugins but it requires a bit more effort.


Side-note: considering you like Prolog, how come you are not writing Erlang instead of Elixir?


I actually like Erlang, but I personally feel it has a lot of rough edges. I'd probably spend a lot of time polishing them to the point where I'd just reinvent Elixir, so I prefer Elixir for that reason alone.

The other reason I wouldn't use Erlang is that Elixir has a much more vibrant & active community. A lot of the Erlang libraries (as of a few years ago when I last looked) were quite old & there wasn't a lot of active development being doing on them. I like being able to track down answers to questions & documentation that is more current. And of course there are more likely to be off the shelf Elixir libraries available for download, too.


It's harder to teach to juniors with a background in stuff like JavaScript and Python. While it has a rather nice elegance and simplicity to it Erlang is a bit more demanding from a business and organisational perspective.

A clever intern with a rather shallow two year 'bootcamp' education and no work experience picks up Elixir and Phoenix in a couple of months. People with background in enterprise algolians like Java and C# can also get productive in Elixir kind of fast since it allows similar patterns.

In my experience Lisp-like languages prepare well for Erlang, and that's a very rare background where I live.


Where do you live if you do not mind asking? Europe? Western Europe, Eastern Europe?


A sparsely populated part of Sweden.


Are you comparing Elixir with a framework as extensive as Phoenix to Go and "just" its standard http library? If so I'm not sure that would be a good comparison then.


No, you could import a full-blown framework and have it set up within one single file, in fact, that is how you usually start, typically... Unless you like having lots of files, of course. I have used such Go libraries / frameworks before, and it all started out as a single file, but with Phoenix, you start with lots of files. I am not saying it is a bad thing, I am just expressing my preference to fewer files. Organization and modularity are great, but in the case of Go, I create the files myself (so I am more aware of everything that is going on). In case of Phoenix ("mix phx.new"), it is done for you. Again, not saying it is a bad thing. I am fine with it by now, but it was overwhelming and demotivating in the beginning, as opposed to, say, Go.


Typical no one writes a large web app in a single Go-file.


Well, that is unfair, because you added "large". If we compare large web apps between Elixir and Go, I am pretty sure Go would still have fewer files overall.


If you are just doing a script in Elixir it is just one file. You have no experience with Elixir so not sure why you keep arguing when people tell you that you are wrong.


I do have experience with Elixir though, I am not sure where you have gotten your conclusions from. What do you think are my claims? I know it is possible to do everything in a single file, but that is NOT the typical case, and you know it. Additionally, I really did not consider myself arguing.

I prefer fewer files, usually, especially when I am just trying to show something up as soon as possible. I do not mind having a serious project written in Elixir (which I have) that spans across multiple files, though.

At any rate, what am I wrong about? I expressed my preference. When I want to get things done ASAP, I stick to Go these days (one file). If I know it is going to be a serious project, I stick to Elixir (multiple files). There is not much to it really. I apologize if I came across as argumentative.


I thought you claimed that you just asked AI and you mistakenly thought elixir requires a lot of files (something that is 100% false). How many years jave you been an elixir developer if you claim to have experience?


I did not ask AI about this (not sure where you got this from, it was probably someone else), nor have I thought that Elixir technically requires a lot of files, but typically you do have more files, just like in Erlang, which is why I said I use Go for less serious projects. Challenge: find me any serious projects in Erlang or Elixir that consists of less than 4-6 files. And I mean, we are talking about web frameworks, so, "mix phx.new" alone creates a lot of files (100% true, even with specific CLI flags).

If you have experience with these languages yourself, then you know that separation of concerns is a core principle. Elixir (and Erlang) projects, especially those built with Phoenix or OTP principles involve a multitude of files, even for relatively small applications. This is not because the languages require them per se, but rather because the conventions and idioms of both languages, especially within the OTP framework encourage modular, isolated units of behavior spread across separate files, which I do not think is a bad thing in itself.

> If you are just doing a script in Elixir it is just one file.

I know! I already left a comment agreeing with someone else saying that, which I have known already anyways.

Again, I was voicing my frustration with keeping track of a lot of files, which is not what I want to do in the case of not-too-serious projects, which is why I use Go for less serious projects, as I have previously mentioned. I do not always mind having a lot of files, but there are cases when I do, just like how one may not prototype in a low-level language as opposed to a high-level one.

In any case, I hope I could clarify well enough for you. Do we still disagree?


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