I don't read everything I have from start to finish. A lot of this is for future reference.
Since that StackExchange post, I'm now up to about 36.6K PDF files in 4.4K directories, with 14.5K symlinks so I can put files in multiple directories.
I also have a separate version controlled repo with notes a bunch of subjects. I'm planning to eventually merge my PDF hierarchy and the notes to have a unified system. It's going to have to be done in stages.
I'm reminded of something I read recently about disclosure of AI use in scientific papers [1]:
> Authors should be asked to indicate categories of AI use (e.g., literature discovery, data analysis, code generation, language editing), not narrate workflows or share prompts. This standardization reduces ambiguity, minimizes burden, and creates consistent signals for editors without inviting overinterpretation. Crucially, such declarations should be routine and neutral, not framed as exceptional or suspicious.
I think that sharing at least some of the prompts is a reasonable thing to do/require. I log every prompt to a LLM that I make. Still, I think this is a discussion worth having.
If I have a vibe coded project with 175k lines of python, there would be genuinely thousands and thousands of prompts to hundreds of agents, some fed into one another.
Whats the worth of digging through that? What do you learn? How would you know that I shared all of them?
I have a daily journal where I put every online post I make. I include anything I send to a LLM on my own time in there. (I have a separate work log on their computer, though I don't log my work prompts.) Likely I miss a few posts/prompts, but this should have the vast majority.
A few caveats: I'm not a heavy LLM user (this is probably what you're getting at) and the following is a low estimate. Often, I'll save the URL only for the first prompt and just put all subsequent prompts under that one URL.
Anyhow, running a simple grep command suggests that I have at least 82 prompts saved.
In my view, it would be better to organize saved prompts by project. This system was not set up with prompt disclosure in mind, so getting prompts for any particular project would be annoying. The point is more to keep track of what I'm thinking of at a point in time.
Right now, I don't think there are tools to properly "share the prompts" at the scale you mentioned in your other comment, but I think we will have those tools in the future. This is a real and tractable problem.
> Whats the worth of digging through that? What do you learn? How would you know that I shared all of them?
The same questions could be asked for the source code of any large scale project. The answers to the first two are going to depend on the project. I've learned quite a bit from looking at source code, personally, and I'm sure I could learn a lot from looking at prompts. As for the third question, there's no guarantee.
It has 9 "prompts" On just the issue of path re-writing, that's probably one of a dozen conversations, NOT INCLUDING prompts fed into an LLM that existed to strip spaces and newlines caused by copying things out of a TUI.
It's ok for things to be different than they used to be. It's ok for "prompts" to have been a meaningful unit of analysis 2 years ago but pointless today.
No the same question CANNOT be asked of source code because it can execute.
You might as well ask for a record of the conversations between two engineers while code was being written. That's what the chat is. I have a pre-pre-alpha project which already has potentially hundreds of "prompts"--really turns in continuing conversations. Some of them with 1 kind of embedded agent, some with another. Some with agents on the web with no project access.
Sometimes I would have conversations about plans that I drop. do I include those, if no code came out of them but my perspective changed or the agent's context changed so that later work was possible?
I don't mean to be dismissive, but maybe you don't have the necessary perspective to understand what you're asking for.
Btw, I think this is a particularly good point: "You might as well ask for a record of the conversations between two engineers while code was being written. That's what the chat is."
That's a good reframing. I can see why it might be impractical to share all of that, hard to make sense of as a reader, and too onerous to demand of submitters.
Since you have experience in this area, I'd like to hear your view on what we could reasonably require submitters to share, given that the flood of generated Github repos is creating a lot of low-quality submissions that don't gratify curiosity and thus don't fit the spirit of either Show HN or HN in general.
Some people would say "just ban them", but I'd rather find a way to adapt to this wave, since it is the largest technical development in a long time, and the price of opposing it is obsolescence.
"maybe you don't have the necessary perspective to understand what you're asking for"
this is in no way a personal attack. It's just a statement that's true. I didn't imply anything about them or their character or limitations, but they might not have the necessary perspective if that's the question they are asking.
I think it's critically important people figure out what they want to learn from what's being shared.
What do you need from submitters here? Even setting aside the burden of supplying it, what do you hope to learn?
> I think it's critically important people figure out what they want to learn from what's being shared.
> What do you need from submitters here? Even setting aside the burden of supplying it, what do you hope to learn?
I appreciate your comments on this - they are the most interesting responses I've seen so far about this question (so I hope the meta stuff doesn't get too much in the way).
The hope is to make the submissions of AI-generated Show HNs more interesting than they are when someone submits just a repo with generated code and a generated README.
The question is what could, at least in principle, be supplied that could have this desired effect.
(I thought I'd fork my reply to keep the meta stuff separate from the interesting stuff)
I believe you that it wasn't your intention, but when you address someone in the second person while commenting negatively on their perspective and understanding, it's going to land with a lot of readers (as it did with me) as personally pejorative. It's common for commenters (me too of course) not to perceive the provocations in their own posts, while being extra sensitive to the provocations in others' posts. If the skew is 10x both ways, that's quite a combination. It's necessary to remember and compensate for the skew, a la "objects in the mirror are closer than they appear".
> maybe you don't have the necessary perspective to understand what you're asking for.
I disagree. Thinking about this more, I can give an example from my time working as a patent examiner at the USPTO. We were required to include detailed search logs, which were primarily autogenerated using the USPTO's internal search tools. Basically, every query I made was listed. Often this was hundreds of queries for a particular application. You could also add manual entries. Looking at other examiners' search logs was absolutely useful to learn good queries, and I believe primary examiners checked the search logs to evaluate the quality of the search before posting office actions (primary examiners had to review the work of junior examiners like myself). With the right tools, this is useful and not burdensome, I think. Like prompts, this doesn't include the full story (the search results are obviously important too but excluded from the logs), but that doesn't stop the search logs from being useful.
> You might as well ask for a record of the conversations between two engineers while code was being written.
No, that's not typically logged, so it would be very burdensome. LLM prompts and responses, if not automatically logged, can easily be automatically logged.
> LLM prompts and responses, if not automatically logged, can easily be automatically logged.
What will you do with what you’ve logged? Where is “the prompt” when the chat is a chat? What prompt “made” the software?
If you’re assuming that it is prompt > generation > release, that’s not a correct model at all. The model is *much* closer to conversations between engineers which you’ve indicated would be burdensome to log and noisy to review.
This was interesting as I face a lot of issues maintaining my own notes accumulated over the past 15 or so years. The approach discussed might work great for the OP, but I'm skeptical this would work for me. I've found a lot of value in the "boring" maintenance tasks. Thinking about where to place something has caused me to make exactly the sort of connections the OP wrote about wanting to find. I work with a combination of a directory hierarchy, text search, and links (symlinks, URLs, bibliographic citations) which serve the same purpose as the tags and links the OP discussed. Links are how I express a lot of connections, in fact. So I don't see the organizing as some sort of non-core operation that's "labor" and not "thinking". For me, it's both.
Personal website: http://trettel.us/ (out of date, hopefully will be updated soon)
Experienced mechanical engineer with a PhD, specializing in computational fluid dynamics, design optimization, and verification & validation of computer simulations. Knowledgeable about patent law from time spent at the USPTO as a patent examiner.
I am particularly interested in opportunities to build cutting-edge physical products where computational simulation and design optimization are key.
I am open to both long-term and short-term opportunities.
Interesting. I had been thinking recently about grep-friendly structured text file formats given the constraints of regex. But I hadn't considered that you could design a structured text file format to be LLM-friendly given token constraints.
I think a big part of the problem is an overly narrow view of what a qualified candidate looks like from the hiring side. Tons of qualified people are rejected because they don't look qualified to the people hiring.
For example, recently a friend had an interview and the guy interviewing him seemed disappointed that my friend didn't have experience solving a problem in a particular way as if that were the only way to solve that problem. In my opinion, the way the interviewer solves that problem is inefficient. But they didn't seem to see any other way.
(Yes, a candidate can communicate their abilities better. But in my experience, this only goes so far, and the people hiring need to make more effort.)
A better process would be more open-minded and test itself by interviewing candidates who the interviewer thinks are bad. In science there's an idea called negative testing. If a test is supposed to separate good from bad, you can't just check what the test says is good, you also need to check what the test says is bad. If good things are marked as bad by the test, something's wrong with the test. If I were hiring, I'd probably start by filtering out people who don't meet very basic requirements and have some fairly open-ended interviews early with randomly selected people (who pass the initial screening) to refine the hiring process and help me realize gaps in my understanding.
I agree with this. What stands out to me is that the hiring process often treats one internal mental model as “correct”, and anything outside of it as a flaw in the candidate.
The example you gave about solving the same problem differently is common; different approaches get mistaken for lack of competence.
I like the negative testing idea a lot. If a hiring process never examines who it’s rejecting, it has no way to know whether it’s filtering quality or just filtering familiarity.
Have you seen teams actually test or evolve their hiring criteria this way, or does it usually stay fixed once defined?
> Have you seen teams actually test or evolve their hiring criteria this way, or does it usually stay fixed once defined?
I'm sure many folks hiring do iteratively improve their hiring criteria, though I'm skeptical of how rigorous their process is. For all I know they could make their hiring criteria worse over time! I have never been involved in a hiring decision, so what I write is from the perspective of a job candidate.
That makes sense, and I think your skepticism is reasonable.
From the candidate side, it’s almost impossible to tell whether criteria are being refined thoughtfully or just drifting based on recent hires or strong opinions in the room.
What strikes me is that without explicit feedback loops, iteration can easily turn into reinforcement, people conclude “this worked” without ever seeing the counterfactual of who was filtered out.
From the outside, it often looks less like a calibrated process and more like accumulated intuition. I’m curious whether that matches what others here have seen from the inside.
I've thought about starting my own community group, but I am pretty skeptical that I could find many folks interested in what I'm interested in. I think this is a real barrier to many. Any advice?
To elaborate, in the US, existing groups tend to be narrow and uninteresting to me. In most places I've lived, it's basically a mix of sports/fitness groups, art groups, "tech" (i.e., programmer; traditional engineers like myself won't feel entirely welcome), social dancing, popular fiction reading group, activism, etc. I can't say that any of these genuinely interest me and/or would be a good place to meet people. At a fitness class, for example, many people aren't interested in casual conversation as far as I'm aware. And without genuine interest in the subject, it's hard to engage.
Personally, I've found that running clubs attract diverse groups and tend toward activities that create ample opportunities for smalltalk and meeting people with shared interests outside of the sport. This doesn't hold true for most other sporting activities, in my experience.
Interesting. I was a decent runner in high school, way back. I'm a cyclist now, but I found that cycling groups tend to either be focused on athletic performance or activism and I don't particularly care for either at this point. I'll have to try some running groups as there are a lot of local ones.
That's interesting, but in my experience cycling groups are the most social individual sports groups (even more social than many team sports even). Even the performance focused groups tend to stop at the coffee shop for some banter after the ride, and some less performance oriented groups seem to be more focused on the coffee than even the ride itself.
Are you talking about road cycling or mountain biking? My experience is definitely with the former. I think it helps that in group rides you automatically end up riding next to someone new and chatting along. Easily breaks the ice.
Hmm... okay, I'll try some more local cycling groups as there are a lot of them. Maybe one lesson to take from all the comments I'm reading here is that there's a lot of variation between groups.
I'm thinking road cycling. When I was in grad school, a decade ago, I briefly participated in a student road cycling group. It was very performance oriented as I recall. I was definitely slower than them and my heavy steel commuter bike contrasted strongly with their lighter racing bikes. I talked to some of them, but not during the rides. I was older than the vast majority of them as I recall and in retrospect that might have prevented me from making friends there.
15 years ago I started cycling, by going to amateur XC races. I did that for almost 10 years and it was fun, I got some friends doing it and it worked great for a while. A combination of cycling injury and many people leaving the country ended that endeavor, but it is an example of some simple and practical approach. I was not even looking to socialize, but improve my sedentary life, I found others with similar interests.
I have a childhood friend that is cycling, but he lives in the Netherlands. There people who are cycling more than daily drivers are interested in athletic performance or activism and it kind of sucks, but he got friends skiing and scuba diving, as long as there are common interests you will find some decent people to socialize with.
My experience was sadly quite the opposite. When I moved to my current city two decades ago, I started attending a run club because I wanted to train for my first marathon and figured it would be a great opportunity to meet new people. Unfortunately, the group was extremely insular and eventually realized I was wasting my time expecting the group to engage with me in any meaningful way.
Funny, I've had the exact same thought, and doubts, as yours. I really dislike communities focused on a certain topic, as I really don't see myself as part of any one thing that defines me. If I were doing rock climbing, I still wouldn't enjoy talking about rock climbing the entire day with my rock climbing friends; my interests are much wider. Which is the reason I do not participate in any community on- and off-line.
I honestly wish social clubs were a thing, and you would get introduced to people from all walks of life. Perhaps this is the reason the Internet is so polarizing: people don't intermingle much, they live in their small niches and echo chambers, and have to put real effort and go out of their way to engage with someone that has a new perspective. Algorithms entrenching us deeper within the same niches are to blame.
I enjoy socialising (sparingly), but I'm not an extrovert and herding people is not my definition of fun, yet I keep feeling I should be the one to form whatever community I and people like me would enjoy participating in. What a conundrum. It's also much easier to make and advertise a club around a topic than an open one for "interesting" people without sounding like a posh cult for elitists.
I relate very closely, having had the same thoughts over the past few years. Social clubs sound good in theory, but in my experience it's difficult to connect with people without a central activity or subject to act as a touchstone. It's a frustrating sort of paradox where the best social groups diverge greatly from their core theme, and yet the core theme is necessary to reach and maintain critical mass.
I think it's possible to get around the problem, but it would take just the right structure; there should be activities, but enough of a variety to have something for people from all walks of life. But also not too much of a variety so as not to appeal only to those interested in constantly trying new things. Perhaps a set of some baseline, fairly universal activities, with space for individual members to share their own hobbies and interests from time to time in a group setting? I don't know exactly, but it's something I've been considering for a while, and it feels like there must be an answer somewhere in there.
I think the problem comes when certain topical groups interpret their mission narrowly. Based on your other nearby comment, you mention your experience with a rock climbing group that doesn't so narrowly focus on rock climbing. I think that's the right way to do it.
There was one group I used to attend where I was definitely not as interested in the topic as others. I recall someone at the meetup said to me something along the lines of "If you don't agree with X then why are you here?" Well, I attended because I found a lot of interesting people there, and I know I wasn't the only one. Some organizers made the meetups unstructured conversation, which was great for me. Honestly, I'd just like to meet other people interested in a particular topic. Other organizers preferred meetups with more specific assigned discussion topics. I rarely cared much about the assigned topics and they made the unstructured conversation I wanted to have much more difficult or even impossible (particularly for the online meetups). I don't attend those meetups any longer in part because of the assigned topics.
If you don't mind, could you share a bit about those meetups with unstructured conversation? I would like to attend something like that, some keywords to look for would be helpful.
If the website/Facebook event/email/etc. mentions an assigned topic, then it's not likely going to have much unstructured conversation. Other than that, I can't think of any reliable ahead of time signs to look for. One thing I think I've learned from reading tons of comments today at HN is that I should try more meetups just to see what they're like because you can't really know ahead of time.
Anyhow, the specific group I was referring to was LessWrong meetups in 3 different cities over a period of about a decade. As I said, I'm not quite aligned with their philosophy, but I did find a bunch of interesting people at those meetups.
I can't speak for anyone else, but in trying to pursue groups with relevant interests, I've run into one of three issues:
1. The club/etc follows its core conceit closely, and discussions and such naturally don't branch off far
2. Connected to 1, the folks who actively engage in a club are typically very invested in the subject; when my interest is more casual, it can be difficult to connect with those more passionate
And 3., most critically, the things I am passionate about are too niche to sustain dedicated clubs anywhere but the most dense of population centers, which for a variety of reasons I have no interest in relocating to.
I would appreciate a group where a variety of unique interests is encouraged. I enjoy interacting with people who are passionate in their own ways, even when they don't necessarily line up with my own passions; I realize there are clubs and such out there which likely fit my preferences, but I have yet to find one reasonably nearby.
You've got gentlemen's clubs of the kind that Phileas Fogg from "Around the World in 80 Days" belonged to. They were leisure spaces where the rich could socialize with each other, dine from a wider menu than their own domestic staff could offer, access a bigger reading library, and organize group activities like automotive clubs and regattas.
Then you've got private societies like the Freemasons and the Rotary Club, which were usually segregated by gender and race, had a religious component, and offered services like mutual aid and insurance.
I think you’re perhaps too narrowly defining what a lot of groups are for. Take climbing for example, as you did - I met tons of folks while climbing, but we talked about all sorts of things. In between attempting routes it’s mostly just shooting the shit.
My point being that a lot of clubs or groups, especially in fitness, don’t have a rule against talking about other stuff. In fact, most are incredibly conducive to it.
> If I were doing rock climbing, I still wouldn't enjoy talking about rock climbing the entire day with my rock climbing friends
Um, have you actually tried? I have a "rock climbing" friends group, and it's rare that we talk rock climbing outside an actual climbing outing. Some of them are at the climbing gym 2-3x a week, some of them 1x a week, some join only once every 1-2 months. But what we do a lot is hang out just for dinner, for some hike on the weekend, going to a concert, whatnot. Climbing was really just the initial excuse to meet, by now it's only a detail we all more or less do now and then.
> I honestly wish social clubs were a thing, and you would get introduced to people from all walks of life
They are. Elks, Knights of Columbus, etc. Not as popular with the younger crowd, but nothing is stopping you from joining or starting your own.
As for the point around feeling like you have to talk about rock climbing all day: you don't. Rock climbing is just the entry point, which allows for a shared conversation topic before you branch into other things.
As another commenter said, at lot of the fraternal organizations are religious. The Elks site says to be eligible for membership, you must 1) Be at least 21 years of age; 2) Believe in God; 3) Be a citizen of the United States who pledges allegiance to and salutes the American Flag; 4) Be of good character. The Knights of Columbus says membership is limited to practicing Catholic men.
That works for some people. I like the activity-based groups. Besides the sports groups, a community garden is also good.
That's strange, I know a bunch of guys in my hometown who hang out at the Elks who aren't religious. Most of them are probably confirmed or at least baptized though.
Yeah, the Eagles Lodge in my town is pretty lax about it - they do want you to do one community service day a year but that to them was basically a "substitute" for "be of good character and righteous" or whatever.
I'll try starting a more niche group just to see what happens. Maybe I'm wrong and I'll find a handful of interesting people. Still, there's a nagging feeling in the back of my mind. If the number of people interested in a topic is small enough, reaching them can be really hard. And only a fraction of them would be willing/able to meet.
As for specific topics, there are many I could pick. My problem isn't a lack of interest in general, just a lack of overlap between my interests and what's available. One I think might have a decent chance of success would be a group based around information searching, both online and in the real world. Despite being an engineer, I've often found a lot of common ground with librarians. I love talking about the subject and could learn a lot about it. It's not going to become irrelevant any time soon either, even with LLMs, due to information siloing.
Here's my experience with (attempted) theft on a train:
I once was on a MARC train at DC Union Station. Some train cars have electrical sockets, so I plugged in a bike light I had since I'd be taking a bike for the last part of the trip. The train hadn't left the station yet. I was standing near the seat with the socket. Some unassuming looking guy was walking through the train car, like probably 100 did before him, when he grabbed the light, unplugged it, and kept walking. I immediately confronted him (I was in his path) saying something like "What are you doing?" Without a word, he handed me the light and walked off the train. I found a conductor like 15 seconds later and they called security, who apparently detained the guy.
This guy was way more brazen about stealing something of little value than I had expected. I was standing near the seat and watching it! I guess he didn't expect me to be the owner.
https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/173314/31143
https://www.reddit.com/r/datacurator/comments/p75xlu/how_i_o...
I don't read everything I have from start to finish. A lot of this is for future reference.
Since that StackExchange post, I'm now up to about 36.6K PDF files in 4.4K directories, with 14.5K symlinks so I can put files in multiple directories.
I also have a separate version controlled repo with notes a bunch of subjects. I'm planning to eventually merge my PDF hierarchy and the notes to have a unified system. It's going to have to be done in stages.
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