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- Hacker News
- I think it's a great approach. I checked the repo and saw that each contributor onboarding triggers the full CI pipeline, which is visible from the CI logs, including a Docker image build, GCP authentication, and a full Helm deploy. Aren't you guys wasting GCP compute and other things?
I am no expert in this, it's just something I noticed.
by iiTzSYREX - > Should we stop giving fun test tasks to our job candidates?
Yes
by zer0tonin - Yeah, fun for who exactly?by Chaosvex
- Developers: stop doing whiteboard interviews, they don't measure anything relevant to the real job
Also devs: stop giving us real world problems to solve
by jbellis - It seems this particular company makes a payment for completing those tasks, so it might not be that bad.
- I stopped most spam with a simple AGENTS.md. It actually seems to work (for now).
https://github.com/LibreTranslate/LibreTranslate/blob/main/A...
by pierotofy - could you explain please?by riponcm
- > It's not a contract job— it's our optional way of saying thank you to the community.
The writing style in their onboarding doc has common AI tells (in the quote: em dashes, “it’s not A, it’s B” sentence).
I can understand that, perhaps they want to fight fire with fire or don’t have time as they already say. Still, it all feels like inadequate half measures to me.
by thih9 - Using AI for your own project is different than being overwhelmed by AI contributions from other people/botsby nlarew
- The entire post is clearly LLM generated. I get that a person clearly put together some thoughts, but prompting an LLM to 'turn this into a blog post' is the kind of low effort content I thought was not appropriate for HN.
At least bringing up the underlying method (restrict to contributors) has spawned the discussion about how that's probably a bad idea on the security side.
by ZoneZealot - The irony of the .ai domain.by hiccuphippo
- also, could the website plz fix its scrolling code? its annoying. i can't read the articleby dbgrman
- Not just the domain: it's an agentic stack! In other words, I could use their product to create the exact type of PRs they're lamenting here.
- "I never thought AI would slop my project!" Says company centered around AI slopby bakugo
- Thanks for pointing it out. It has eluded me and it's incredibly funnyby wafflemaker
- I dont think anything is ironic about it because they aren't suggesting AI is bad. Just that it can be misused.by nonethewiser
- This is what we get for telling everyone how amazing AI is at writing code. It started with the people selling AI and for some reason tons of independent developers, some quite well respected in our field, piled on. Facebook now laying people off and saying it's because AI is just so good adds more fuel to the fire. Now you have a bunch of people fully confident that their AI friend is pumping out amazing code and submitting it to projects that are completely overwhelmedby krupan
- The astroturfing successfully broke a lot of people's brainsby heavyset_go
- No, this is a result of unintended consequences.
We made "Github contributions" a metric for people applying for dev jobs. So, of course, because devs are the kind of people we are, they started working out how to game that metric.
Some folks decided to start paying bounties on bug fixes, features, etc. Those bounties are fairly trivial by western standards, but are significant for developing countries. This creates a new career for developers; racing to collect the bounties on offer.
LLMs have exacerbated these problems by allowing existing people doing this to do it faster, and also allowing more people to pretend to be software developers and get in on the action.
If we stopped allowing LLM-authored contributions we'd still have too many shitty PRs. It would just be back to pre-LLM levels of "too many".
The answer is to make Github contributions valueless. Stop paying bounties, and stop using them to assess candidates.
- > and for some reason tons of independent developers
Cowboy coders got a virtual cowgirl coder and sold it to everyone, hmm, maybe... (respected or not, solo devs don't always have the requisite skills to not be a cowboy, either due to lack of experience or lack of innate skill)
I don't know that I completely buy this narrative, though. There has been a strong, top-down push for this since the "beginning".
by smaudet - Makes me wonder if an ELO-based system would work to mitigate these issues. People who merged PR successfully onto a project, that had real issues acknowledged, the quality of their responses measured by other users reactions or something, etc, multiplied possibly by the degree of importance of the project where their activity has been made. Won't be about human vs AI, but actual helpful effective being vs low effort/spammy contributions. Issues and PRs could be sorted and filtered by their ELO score. I'm saying ELO as analogy to "score based given the context", not really a 1:1 translation of the ELO system.
Negative score would be reports from other users because of spammy content or not acknowledged issues, with a middle ground of neutral score (+-0) or little positive score to issues or whatever with clear good intention, but couldn't reach a proper merged PR or were not issues (e.g. issue existed but wasn't the correct repo to be addressed, PR was good but needed other stuff to be implemented prior to it, maybe in the long run, etc)
by arecsu - The problem is you want the ELO score based on work on other community projects - you can't assume good faith here.by philipwhiuk
- Some kind of vouching or scoring might make sense to help qualify contributions and many people have suggested similar recently. If by "ELO-based system" you meant "some kind of scoring system (not based on Elo)".
The Elo rating system doesn't make sense in this context; it's designed around collecting zero sum game results for a given community of players and building a model around it.
by naet - This would just hurt new users similar to how you are unable to comment on 90% of subreddits on Reddit as a new user, because you don't have enough karma points, or how on Stackoverflow your permissions are severely limited until you do certain jobs. The incentives aren't very good in systems like this. Bots can be made to easily game the system while regular users are discouraged from even participating.
- Sounds a bit like Mitchell Hashimoto’s Vouch: https://github.com/mitchellh/vouchby JimBlackwood
- I have built something like this and in process of collecting the data.
Frontier users: 527,865 Light indexed: 527,865 Ready to queue: 9,083 Fast scores ready: 0 Activity events 24h: 30,266 Fast scores completed 24h: 19,123 Deep jobs completed 24h: 3,043 Fast-score ETA: n/a Deep-hydrate ETA: 69h Stale running jobs: 0 GitHub backpressure jobs: 19,113 High automation signals: 4,608 Medium automation signals: 1,327 Completed jobs: 74,714
Biggest challenge is Github's rate limits. At this pace it will take two more months to have 98% coverage. But after that the maintenance should be quite straight forward.
by doh - It's Elo not ELO. Elo is not an acronym.by sebastiansm7
- For those wondering what Elo means, it is a person's last name, not an acronym (not all caps). More info here:by ElijahLynn
- ELO is shockingly easy to manipulate. For example there was a literal jail with a decent chess player in it. He created a pool of players who got great ELOs by beating him, then used them to boost his rating higher. Wash, rinse, and repeat.
Given any manipulatable scheme, AI will figure out how to manipulate it. For the OP, what happens if a single AI manages to get through to contributor? Then it starts elevating other AIs to contributor, and we're off again. There doesn't have to be a purpose to this. Trolls will troll, and trolls armed with AI bots can devote endless energy to doing so. The more you work to keep them out, the more fun it becomes for them.
I wish I had an answer for that problem. But I don't.
by btilly - Is the solution to everything simply more catgirls [1]? Proof-of-work was, after all, about countering email spam. PR spam is but the latest in that long tradition.by infinitifall