Hacker News: stephendause

New comment by stephendause in "Ask HN: How do you safely give LLMs SSH/DB access?"

stephendause — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 19:49:21 +0000

I don't know; I've never done something like that. If no one else answers, you can always ask Claude itself (or another chatbot). This kind of thing seems tricky to get right, so be careful!

New comment by stephendause in "Ask HN: How do you safely give LLMs SSH/DB access?"

stephendause — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 19:11:55 +0000

There is an example of [dis]allowing certain bash commands here: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/settings

As for queries, you might be able to achieve the same thing with usage of command-line tools if it's a `sqlite` database (I am not sure about other SQL DBs). If you want even more control than the settings.json allows, you can use the claude code SDK.

Six Principles for More Rigorous Evaluation of Cognitive Capacities

stephendause — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 19:07:54 +0000

Article URL: https://aiguide.substack.com/p/on-evaluating-cognitive-capabilities

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46621014

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by stephendause in "The next two years of software engineering"

stephendause — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 15:55:16 +0000

Your story sounds similar to mine. There are some parts of programming at which I know I will never excel. I also don't have time in my life to spends lots of hours outside of work developing my skills. I think it's important to realize that the median software engineer is probably not doing these things either. Maybe the top 10% are? Something like that would be my guess. It's okay to not be in the top 10%!

New comment by stephendause in "A website to destroy all websites"

stephendause — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 02:17:17 +0000

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. My personal taste for the presentation of a piece of writing is that less is more. I usually find artwork that accompanies a text to be distracting. I love reading work that can stand on its own, invoking images in the mind. I also dislike animations that seem to be made for a certain scroll speed.

Having said all of that, I certainly don't think it's bad, nor is it a commentary on the arguments being made. It's just not my cup of tea.

New comment by stephendause in "How uv got so fast"

stephendause — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 20:03:19 +0000

Why? To me, hosting previous versions of an article in a public git repo adds transparency. Or perhaps you are talking about GitHub specifically?

New comment by stephendause in "Two kinds of vibe coding"

stephendause — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 12:31:17 +0000

> - Is the work faster? It sounds like it’s not faster.

The author didn't discuss the speed of the work very much. It is certainly true that LLMs can write code faster than humans, and sometimes that works well. What would be nice is an analysis of the productivity gains from LLM-assisted coding in terms of how long it took to do an entire project, start to finish.

New comment by stephendause in "It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts"

stephendause — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 20:30:49 +0000

This is total speculation, but my guess is that human reviewers of AI-written text (whether code or natural language) are more likely to think that the text with emoji check marks, or dart-targets, or whatever, are correct. (My understanding is that many of these models are fine-tuned using humans who manually review their outputs.) In other words, LLMs were inadvertently trained to seem correct, and a little message that says "Boom! Task complete! How else may I help?" subconsciously leads you to think it's correct.

New comment by stephendause in "A definition of AGI"

stephendause — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 15:11:48 +0000

This is a good insight, but do you know of better ways to measure machines' abilities to solve problems in the "messy real world"?

New comment by stephendause in "A definition of AGI"

stephendause — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 14:23:19 +0000

I think it's not only the potential for self-improvement of AGI that is revolutionary. Even having an AGI that one could clone for a reasonable cost and have it work nonstop with its clones on any number of economically-valuable problems would be very revolutionary.

New comment by stephendause in "SWE-Bench Pro"

stephendause — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 17:12:55 +0000

This is a key question in my opinion. It's one of the things that make benchmarking the SWE capabilities of LLMs difficult. It's usually impossible to know whether the LLM has seen a problem before, and coming up with new, representative problem sets is time-consuming.

New comment by stephendause in "US High school students' scores fall in reading and math"

stephendause — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 15:54:11 +0000

Jonathan Haidt has a lot of good material on this. He is leading the charge in encouraging parents to delay giving their child a phone until high school and not allowing them to have social media accounts until age 16.

https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/family/story/author-sugge...

New comment by stephendause in "Google debuts device-bound session credentials against session hijacking"

stephendause — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 14:40:17 +0000

I could be wrong, but I believe the author is referring to cookies being used for session authentication as opposed to general session management.

New comment by stephendause in "Babies made using three people's DNA are born free of mitochondrial disease"

stephendause — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 16:32:09 +0000

> There is almost no children available for adoption

This is not true, at least in the United States. For one thing, there are many children in foster care who want to be adopted. It is also possible, though difficult and expensive, to adopt infants from mothers giving up their children for adoption as well. I am not saying it's an easy option or that everyone should do it, but it is an option.

Why Are Computers Still So Dumb?

stephendause — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 13:29:01 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/07/why-are-computers-still-so-dumb/683524/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44582117

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by stephendause in "What Trump's Big Beautiful Bill means for Wi-Fi 6E and 7 users: It's not pretty"

stephendause — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 18:50:57 +0000

I am interested whether anyone knows how precedented this sort of situation is. It seems like a certain portion of the spectrum was intended to be used for one thing, and now part of it might be sold for another purpose, causing the original users to have to adapt to the reversal. How often has this sort of thing happened?

New comment by stephendause in "I'm dialing back my LLM usage"

stephendause — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 18:17:18 +0000

One point I haven't seen made elsewhere yet is that LLMs can occasionally make you less productive. If they hallucinate a promising-seeming answer and send you down a path that you wouldn't have gone down otherwise, they can really waste your time. I think on net, they are helpful, especially if you check their sources (which might not always back up what they are saying!). But it's good to keep in mind that sometimes doing it yourself is actually faster.

Cloudflare Introduces Default Blocking of A.I. Data Scrapers

stephendause — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 13:28:56 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/01/technology/cloudflare-ai-data.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44443480

Points: 429

# Comments: 331

New comment by stephendause in "Programming on 34 Keys (2022)"

stephendause — Sun, 25 May 2025 14:01:09 +0000

My coworker has a similar setup and loves it. Personally, it feels diametrically opposed to the way that I like to use my keyboard. I don't even like holding Shift to type `{`, `_`, etc when programming. I wish I had dedicated keys for those and other common symbols. I don't mind moving my hands a few inches at all, but for some reason, it feels cumbersome to me to hold down a key to activate another layer. To each their own, of course.

New comment by stephendause in "Tesla driver arrested for homicide after running over motorcyclist on Autopilot"

stephendause — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 22:31:42 +0000

Yes. You can be judged to be intoxicated even if you are under the limit.