MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alphazard | 2025-08-30 20:48:12+00:00
If I had to pin down a singular reason why leadership is almost universally weak across the industry, it would be that everyone prefers to avoid accountability, and no one is willing to bet on their own decision making.

The master algorithm for cultivating strong leadership is just Bayes' rule. If an employee makes good decisions they should have more influence over the organization's resources. If they make bad decisions they should have less influence over the organization's resources. Influence maps to probability.

Most organizations aren't setup to do this well. There is no where for bad leaders to go if they can't also contribute directly, and there is a reluctance to demote people or reduce their influence. A reluctance to demote has to be paired with a reluctance to promote. Consistently making good decisions is likely to be recognized artificially slowly, to prevent wage increases.
by pclmulqdq | 2025-08-30 20:48:57+00:00
Sorry, but when one thing in your benchmark has 50x the performance of the baseline, you probably have a bad baseline. If you used AI to write these, it probably did not use io_uring or aio correctly, or you have some sort of system misconfiguration. You may have also failed to bypass the filesystem with those methods, which would explain a lot of the discrepancy.
by nine_k | 2025-08-30 20:49:40+00:00
My best bet is that the author's voice belongs to a fiction character. Otherwise it's hard to reconcile the purported story of utter and unending failure with the rich, sophisticated language, the lack of even a single mention of money (the dearth thereof), and the absence of depressed, bitter mood anywhere.

I'll avoid opening the author's LinkedIn profile though! :-D
by libraryofbabel | 2025-08-30 20:50:13+00:00
It may be his notes on the Cambridge Part III essay, which contain a lot of insights about mathematical writing that generalize beyond writing the Part III essay, naturally with his trademark wit: https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~twk10/Essay.pdf

I will always be grateful to Prof Körner for advocating that people who did Part III retroactively get awarded MMath masters degrees, thus making the most hardcore year of my academic life at least somewhat comprehensible to people outside Cambridge.
by cjk | 2025-08-30 20:50:50+00:00
This is one of the things that I’ve tried really hard to impress upon engineers new and old while working on various projects, and IMO it applies to just about every layer of the stack; ultimately everything flows up into the UX.

This vibe was pervasive at Apple and could be taken more or less for granted, but elsewhere it’s all over the place.

And, like, sure, there are projects and industries where this doesn’t matter. But giving a shit and feeling it can be a major differentiator.
by exclipy | 2025-08-30 20:51:09+00:00
This was my main takeaway from A Philosophy Of Software Design by John Ousterhout. It is the best book on this subject and I recommend it to every software developer.

Basically, you should aim to minimise complexity in software design, but importantly, complexity is defined as "how difficult is it to make changes to it". "How difficult" is largely determined by the amount of cognitive load necessary to understand it.
by scrubs | 2025-08-30 20:52:20+00:00
Agree. I have repeatedly said one mangement fundamental is control is commensurate to accountability. Thereafter, what you write deals with increasing control or decreasing depending on outcomes.

I also agree with point about canning or demoting senior staff. My better half had to deal with a complete jerk senior manager. It took an act of God to make the organization hold that clown accountable. In the end his team was downsized, but I'm not sure if he ever lost his title. Why? Senior managers + HR are serious believers in the unitary theory of the executive. As I say it takes an act of God to make them see what they did is not right by definition.
by Bender | 2025-08-30 20:53:24+00:00
Not the person you are asking but there are indeed Chinese cops in the USA that harass and threaten Chinese expats and even threaten to hurt or arrest their family members back in the mainland. It is a violation of our nation's sovereignty but some cities are very slow to arrest them if they even try.

Here [1] is one example of a couple Chinese police in NYC but I can not find the links to the groups in Los Angeles.

[1] - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/2-men-arrested-on-char...
by jiggawatts | 2025-08-30 20:54:13+00:00
Yeah, this ain’t happening.

The problem described is the symptom, not the cause. Trying to fix symptoms is futile, especially if one doesn’t even acknowledge the cause.

The cause is power asymmetry. The symptom is unaccountability of management to those they are managing.

Power asymmetry has some partial fixes, but the article mentions none of those and instead naively wishes that the consequences of concentrated power can be magically contracted away.

Who’s going to enforce the contract?

I.e.: Who’s going to arrest the King?
by hirvi74 | 2025-08-30 20:54:13+00:00
> In clinical contexts, cognitive tests are used for diagnostic purposes.

I'm not certain I agree. If anything, cognitive tests can be used as a single point of datum, but to my knowledge, no condition can be diagnosed via a cognitive test alone. Of course, I could be mistaken. I wish administered the WAIS-IV on top of many other tests for an ADHD diagnosis.

> They are important to determine exactly what sort of ongoing care and support the person needs in order to thrive.

Interesting, upon my receiving my diagnosis, I was not provided any support nor would I declare I have thrived. Obviously, n = 1. I was merely given the social approval to take pharma-grade speed and thrown back to the wolves.

> It's also not arbitrary—a good cognitive test will give insight into the ability to perform everyday cognitive tasks.

That's the part I believe I am clearly missing. These tests provide insight into the ability to perform everyday cognitive tasks better than one's history of already performing various tasks? It's not as if someone with a perfect SAT score takes an IQ tests and then is met with the sudden reality that they are mentally disabled nor vice versa.

What do these tests tell us that we already do not know? If I want to find someone with high mathematical abilities, then I would administer a math exam. Reading? Reading exam. Chess? Chess tournament. And so on...
by KaiserPro | 2025-08-30 20:54:20+00:00
Thanks for the insinuation there, it means a lot.

The reason why I said this is because its not part of the advertising team. The advertising team can do all sorts of shit because it makes them money. The rest of the company have more constraints.

The ads pricks are not the ones that have to ask the app store to let them back on, when one of the builds gets tagged as non-compliant.

Now, its not impossible, but unlikely. if it was something to with Ads, I'd be less sure.
by troupo | 2025-08-30 20:54:27+00:00
> Sure, that is a risk. But not all unit tests require mocking or stubbing.

Not all integrations require mocking or stubbing either. Yet somehow your argument against integration tests is that they somehow won't trigger failure scenarios.

> The argument is coming from the other side with the claim that unit tests don't matter.

My argument is that the absolute vast majority of unit tests are redundant and not required.

> The idea of the test pyramid has nothing to do with one type of test being more important than another. It's simply a matter of practicality and utility.

You're sort of implying that all tests are of equal importance, but that is not the case. Unit tests are the worst of all tests, and provide very little value in comparison to most other tests, and especially in comparison to how many unit tests you have to write.

> it's not unheard of for a few E2E and integration tests to cover a large percentage of the code base, e.g. >50% of lines or statements. This doesn't mean that these tests are more valuable.

So, a single E2E tests a scenario that covers >50% of code. This is somehow "not valuable" despite the fact that you'd often need up to a magnitude more unit tests covering the same code paths for that same scenario (and without any guarantees that the units tested actually work correctly with each other).

What you've shown, instead, is that E2E tests are significantly more valuable than unit tests.

However, true, E2E tests are often difficult to set up and run. That's why there's a middle ground: integration tests. You mock/stub out any external calls (file systems, API calls, databases), but you test your entire system using only exposed APIs/interfaces/capabilities.

> These tests also require more boilerplate to setup, external system dependencies, they take more time to run, and so on.

And the only reason for that is this: "people pretend that only unit tests matter, and as a result all other forms of testing are an afterthought." It shouldn't be difficult to test your system/app using it the way your users will use, but it always is. It shouldn't be able to mock/stub external access, but it always is.

That's why instead of writing a single integration test that tests a scenario across multiple units at once (at the same time testing that all units actually work with each other), you end up writing dozens of useless unit tests that test every single unit in isolation, and you often don't even know if they are glued together correctly until you get a weird error at 3 AM.
by Jweb_Guru | 2025-08-30 20:54:30+00:00
I agree that it seems like an extraordinarily difficult problem, but I don't find this particular dismissal convincing. It's much easier to reject something potentially unsafe than it is to generate something safe. That's the basis for all sound type systems and scales to extremely sophisticated types (e.g. it is fairly to define the type representing the Collatz Conjecture, and I think most people would agree that it is perhaps slightly more difficult to find an inhabitant of that type).

In this case, I don't even know if we're in the paradigm of "hard to satisfy types"--a lot of the time you can for example probably use an autobooking feature to get something you'd be okay with as a backup, but since you know it is suboptimal you still want to try to do better if possible. There are also plenty of real world control systems which perform fairly involved calculations, but still perform some basic sanity limits checks on the inputs and outputs to make sure that if the calculations screwed up, things don't fail catastrophically. In such cases the limits are much easier to define than a spec for how the whole thing works.
Ask HN: Any Android Engineers Here?
by gooob | 2025-08-30 20:55:10+00:00
Is there anyone here who works on android at google? What's it like? I'm curious about the new dev verification requirements: https://developer.android.com/developer-verification/guides

Can you give a rundown on how those rules came about? What do the other developers think about the rules and the future of android?

Also, why did you switch away from the alphabetical naming conventions for the android versions?

I'm posting this because I haven't heard anything about this from anyone who actually works on android. Figure this would be a good place to post.
by dmurray | 2025-08-30 20:55:35+00:00
Once an invasion is happening, a majority of the population will be in favour of it.

It was true when Nixon first spoke of a silent majority. It was true when the US elected leader after leader on a platform of prolonging or escalating wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Even WWII wasn't popular in America until you were in it:

https://news.gallup.com/vault/265865/gallup-vault-opinion-st...
by pan69 | 2025-08-30 20:56:21+00:00
Looking at the PR you posted below, your comment seems to be slight misrepresentation:

> taylorotwell commented on Sep 13, 2023 > I personally don't have the knowledge to trust merging this sadly. I would > prefer to either de-document cache tags or recommend their use with Memcached > only. Cache tags and Redis have been a maintenance and complexity nightmare.

https://github.com/laravel/framework/pull/48078#issuecomment...
Show HN: Sometimes GitHub is boring, so I made a CLI tool to fix it
by nathbns | 2025-08-30 20:56:32+00:00
Just wanted to clone a repo from my gh account and visualize it. Pretty easy with gitact. You can check any gh account.

It’s called { gitact }

quickly navigate through a user’s repos instantly grab the right git clone URL

Feedback, stars and PRs are welcome
by tick_tock_tick | 2025-08-30 20:56:44+00:00
Ehh I think that phrasing doesn't really capture reality. It's better to say most of the USA population just doesn't care. Like if we started bombing them tomorrow everyone's going to go about their day maybe make a social media post about it but forget about it by the evening.

It will be like when Obama started bombing Libya or Syria. It's in the news but the average person doesn't care or retain that information.

Now if he tries a full ground invasion.....
by troupo | 2025-08-30 20:56:51+00:00
How do you "design a good system" without testing it? Oh wait:

> It was all tested, repeatedly, over and over, and over the course of about fifteen year

So, you do test how your system actually works, and not just isolated unit tests.

> Again, when you begin knowing that the software has to deliver on such a range of systems, where one customer is two college kids in a basement and one customer is valued in the tens of billions (although doing a lot more, of course, than just what our software let them do), design and good software engineering goes a very long way.

Indeed. And that good engineering would include a simple wisdom "unit tests are useless without integration and E2E tests, otherwise you wouldn't be able to run your software anywhere because units just wouldn't fit together".

And once you have proper integration tests, 99%+ of unit tests become redundant.
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-08-30 20:56:56+00:00
I just can't believe that an OS needs to be forked off for such a workload

iPhones and Macs share a kernel and a large portion of user space and syscalls, right?

If the GPL is a problem just fork some BSD like the PS3 did, and pretend you're maintaining code that you already spent five years on

I know you need low latency for XR + VR + AR - everyone needs low latency for everything. So they could build on whatever has been done for audio and networking and Android touch screens that all want low latency too

I'm speaking foolishly from outside but making "an OS for" something is more commonly marketing speak than a good idea. Like this fucking "OS for cities" and "OS for work" stuff. That's an OS the way a cookie recipe is an OS for a fucking oven. The casual insistence on misunderstanding important things really gets my goats
Ask HN: Claude code subscription vs. API, which is cheaper?
by totisjosema | 2025-08-30 20:56:56+00:00
I’ve been using Claude Code for a couple of weeks now, and on heavy use days the bill can get pretty steep. At what point does it make more sense to switch from paying per API call to a subscription or vice versa? Any of you done the math or can share any report where the tipping point lies? Thanks!
by BryantD | 2025-08-30 20:57:40+00:00
I would not say that Venezuela is currently having orderly rotations of power. Since the 2015 parliamentary elections, we've seen at least one constitutional crisis and the most recent election results are disputed.

I do not particularly think it's a good idea for the US to invade in order to overthrow Maduro, but I don't want to pretend he's more ethical than he appears to be.
by gary_0 | 2025-08-30 20:57:42+00:00
Off the top of my head: Paid hosting/services on top of the protocol, reddit-gold style tipping and gamification, being a transactional middleman (there are a lot of artists selling things, famous people promoting things, and so on), promoted posts and ads (easily blockable, but some users wouldn't bother).

Bluesky is a small team of like ~30 people, if they keep running lean they have at least a chance of a decent profit margin. But none of that will make anyone a multi-billionaire, so never mind.
by bsenftner | 2025-08-30 20:58:36+00:00
Which is why I consider DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) to be an anti-rule until an application is fairly well understood and multiple versions exist. DO repeat yourself, and do not create some smart version of what you think the problem is before you're attempting the 3rd version. Version 1 is how you figure out the problem space, version 2 is how you figure out your solution as a maintainable dynamic thing within a changing tech landscape, and version 3 is when DRY is look at for the first time for that application.
by d0gsg0w00f | 2025-08-30 20:58:50+00:00
I used to have a close Ismaili friend and saw some of the inner workings of the community. They're extremely tight knit due to historical persecution (similar to Judaism). They are very well connected and are always secretly funding schools and factories for communities in need all over the world. The charity and service are never boasted about outside the religious circle to keep eyes off of them. However, they do a fair amount of boasting internally just because they are very proud of their community.

Much respect for Ismailis.
by slt2021 | 2025-08-30 20:58:56+00:00
You are a product of a neo-colonialist system.

In the age of knowledge work, brain drain from poor countries to rich countries is no different than stealing oil or gold resources.

Yes it works well for you, but that's because system is setup in that way.

Global capitalists are sharing a little bit of value with you so you remain content, while raping your country of all future potential by brain draining the nation.

In case the country decides to develop itself, instead of being a colony: they quickly reverse the election results and appoint their colonial administrator as president.

If you don't see the neocolonialism here, how capitalist is raping the future of your nation, I don't know how else to explain it to you
by Izkata | 2025-08-30 20:59:28+00:00
My favorite flakey test where nothing was actually wrong with the code or test: The system used some of the same settings between development and CI, including the memcached server. The test would fail if one of the devs happened to be using their development site within 15 minutes of the next CI run, because the code would retrieve a nonexistent object from the cache and fail with a really strange error.
by troupo | 2025-08-30 21:00:27+00:00
> You can't check because the numbers quickly become astronomical.

But you can with unit tests?

> Can you test the Python parser on all possible Python programs?

A parser is one of the few cases where unit tests work. Very few people write parsers.

See also my sibling reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45078047

> What you do is write more primitive components and either unit test them, prove them to be correct or make them small enough to be correct by inspection. An integration test is just testing that the interfaces do indeed fit together, it won't normally be close to testing all possible code paths internally.

Ah yes. Somehow "behaviour of unit tests is correct" but "just testing interfaces in just a few integration tests". Funny how that becomes a PagerDuty alert at 3 in the morning because "correct behaviour" in one unit wasn't tested together with "correct behaviour" in another unit.

But when you actually write an actual integration test over actual (or simulated) inputs, suddenly 99%+ of your unit tests become redundant because actually using your app/system as intended covers most of the code paths you could possibly use.
by nine_k | 2025-08-30 21:02:33+00:00
Feeling some moderate positive emotion as a result of your work is not incompatible with 9 to 5 work.

The bigger problem is usually the opposite: nagging negative emotions, feeling annoyed, feeling contempt towards some parts of the work that one is bound to do. These emotions are unbecoming, so the psychological defenses hide them, as if there's no feeling at all. This is what "mind-numbing" work often is.
by mitchellh | 2025-08-30 21:02:38+00:00
(Author of the linked blog post).

Look at my other posts and you'll see I'm not like an "influencer content" person. I purposely made this piece shallow to encourage more people to read it and discuss the core idea, rather than get distracted by specific examples or points.

I've blogged long enough on a personal level, done corporate PR long enough at a professional level, to know that the more words there are, the more people get bogged down in the details.

I plan to follow up this post with specific callouts and associating it directly with my work (both positively and negatively). But, for example, if I used Terraform as an example of something in this (hypothetically), people would focus in on arguing the merits of "feeling" Terraform. That's not the point.

The point is to think about what we're shipping.
by 9rx | 2025-08-30 21:03:06+00:00
> and you still want to avoid mocking.

Assuming by mock you mean an alternate implementation (e.g. an in-memory database repository) that relieves dependence on a service that is outside of immediate control, nah. There is no reason to avoid that. That's just an implementation detail and, as before, your tests shouldn't be bothered by implementation details. And since you can run your 'mock' against the same test suite as the 'real thing', you know that it fulfills the same contract as the 'real thing'. Mocks in that sense are also useful outside of testing.

If you mean something more like what is more commonly known as a stub, still no. This is essential for injecting failure states. You don't want to have to actually crash your hard drive to test your code under a hard drive crash condition. Testing failure cases are the most important tests you will write, so you will definitely be using these in all but the simplest programs.
by blintz | 2025-08-30 21:03:20+00:00
> This page measures the concentration of the Fediverse and the Atmosphere according to the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index (HHI), an indicator from economics used to measure competition between firms in an industry. Mathematically, HHI is the sum of the squares of market shares of all servers.

I had not heard of this metric before - it’s neat and simple to understand. If you scaled it down to 0-100 (by dividing by 100), I think it would make the numbers more immediately understandable. I’d even consider inverting it (so 0 = centralized and 100 = decentralized), since the website title implies measuring progress ‘towards’ decentralization.
by troupo | 2025-08-30 21:03:36+00:00
Unit tests test units in isolation.

Integration tests test that your system works. Testing how a system works covers the absolute vast majority of functionality you'd test with unit tests because you will hit the same code paths, and test the same behaviours you'd do with unit tests, and not in isolation.

This is a joke, but it's not: https://i.sstatic.net/yHGn1.gif
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-30 21:04:19+00:00
We don’t need to depose Maduro. We need him, ironically, to stop creating problems outside his borders.

That means to withdraw from the Guyanese border. And to do something about his drug and emigration problems. The former could be achieved from offshore. The latter requires boots on the ground.

All of which is irrelevant because the only reason this is happening is to deflect from Epstein and and the deteriorating economy.