MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kettlecorn | 2025-10-09 15:54:16+00:00
I've thought a lot about why software doesn't converge on higher quality and I don't know if I've ever come to a satisfying conclusion.

The simple statement is that "Quality isn't what sells" and I think there's some truth to that, but I also think quality can sell and theoretically if all other factors are equal higher quality will sell better.

What I've had a tough time pinning down precisely is I think there's almost an ecosystem balancing act occurring between quality, effort expended, and skill required. Particularly in American culture I think one of our economic 'super powers' is that we sort of have an innate sense for how much something can be half-assed while still being mostly effective. We're great at finding the solution that gets 80% of the job done for 20% of the effort while requiring less skill.

I think you can see that through all sorts of disciplines, and the result is a world of kind of mid quality things that is actually quite efficient and resilient.

Where that goes wrong is when the complexity and problems start to compound in a way that makes any effort substantially more wasteful. It reminds me of how my game jam experiences go: for the first 60% I'm writing code at a tremendous velocity because I'm just putting down whatever works but by the end the spaghetti nightmare of the code reduces my velocity dramatically. Even when that occurs though the ecosystem nature of complexity means that your competitors are likely mired in similar complexity, and the effort to get out may be large enough and require enough talent that you don't you can change.

To improve quality I think it's not enough to just say "People should care about quality more" I think you have to fundamentally target aspects of the ecosystem, like changing the course of a river by moving a few rocks. A good example I think has adjusted the behavior of the ecosystem is Rust: it makes certain things much easier than before and slowly the complex bug-mired world of software is improving just a little bit because of it.
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-10-09 15:54:19+00:00
I was a IC consultant for a big 4 group at one point.

Very successful in my domain on a very successful project.

I wrote an insane amount of code but more importantly I wrote libraries across multiple languages that prevented an insane amount of code from being written.

We would have literally 1k people during quarterly planning and did distributed agile and all this org stuff

(It was interesting anthropologically to me because I operated outside the game, I was just waiting for a ~non-compete I had signed for a profitable technical co-founder exit to end to jump back into starting a new company in the same space.)

And the whole thing worked, and I was very high profile on the project as probably the highest paid IC and the company hired me away from the agency and I worked their until starting my company.

There are 3 layers, the deal makers, the coordinators and the implementers.

You cannot easily automate out the deal makers because they are trust, legal/contracting and power (they use the resources of the firm to allocate: people, resources, etc.) loci. Someone has to hang if stuff goes wrong and someone has to deal with executive petulance and fragile egos.

Now lets look at the middle layer and implementers.

Let's assume for a minute we are looking at a big project where the existing company has hamstrung itself with silos and infighting and low productivity teams, this is just framing to understand the next part, it can cut either way.

The middle layer in consulting is big because other companies have big middle layers as well, and basically what is happening is tribal warfare, you need bodies and voices and change management teams to propagate what is happening otherwise the existing group will slow play the leadership and the project never gets done. If the middle layer is 1 to 1 every native sees they can be replaced. Many big 4 allow poaching for this very reason. The threat of non compliance and then also giving an easy congenial out for people who are ready to exit the consultant lifestyle.

The implementation layer is then able to be done, and it's done by juniors mostly because juniors don't have to be politically savvy, they can work to task.

Just a small slice or things I realized while consulting.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-10-09 15:54:24+00:00
I think you've got your time ranges wrong. Almost exactly 20 years ago I worked for a company that did dashboards for analyzing and managing call centre traffic. The most important metric wasn't "how happy customers are" or "how many calls served" it was: "how many calls did we avoid having a human agent get involved for?" The metric of success was the degree to which they could avoid using expensive human labour and get you through the automated call tree.

Companies offered such (expensive) services because they had no choice. They made every effort to divert and divest from such activities. Google and companies like them made filthy profits because they figured out the secret sauce to scaling a business without the involvement of humans, but people were trying it for literally decades with mixed results (usually enraged customers).

Stupid red tape, paperwork, and call centre frustrations were the order of the day 20-30 years ago.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-10-09 15:54:29+00:00
I don't see this as really disproving my point.

If we look at most trades historically:

- Electricians in the 1920s? Infinite ways to do things. DC vs AC wars. Knob-and-tube vs conduit vs armored cable. Every electrician had their own "creative" approach to grounding. Regional variations, personal styles, competing philosophies. Almost all of those other ways are gone now. Early attempts to impose codes on electricians and electrical devices were disasters.

- Plumbers in the 1920s? Lead vs iron vs clay pipes. Every plumber had their own joint compound recipe. Creative interpretations of venting. Artistic trap designs. Now? Why does even installing a basic pipe require a license? We found out after enough cholera outbreaks, methane explosions, and backed-up city sewer systems.

- Doctors in the 1920s? Bloodletting, mercury treatments, lobotomies, and their own "creative" surgical techniques. They violently resisted the American Medical Association, licensing requirements, and standardized practices. The guy who suggested handwashing was literally driven insane by his colleagues.

We're early, not special. And just like society eventually had enough of amateur electricians, plumbers, and doctors in the 1920s, they'll have enough of us too. Give it 40 years, and they'll look at our data breaches and system designs the same way we look at exposed electrical wiring, obviously insane no matter the amount of warnings.
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-10-09 15:54:35+00:00
20 years ago grandpa could go to limewire.com, download setup.exe and click next->next->next to install a fully functional file hosting server+client. It was so easy that 1/3rd of world's computers had limewire installed in 2007 [1]. ONE FUCKING THIRD!

Today, to install even the simplest self-hosted software, one has to be effectively a professional software engineer. Use SSH, Use Docker, use tailscale, understand TLS and generate certificates, Perform maintenance updates, check backups, and million things that are automatable.

No idea why self-hosted software isn't `apt-get install` and forget. Just like Limewire. But that's the reason no one self-hosts.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LimeWire
by jeswin | 2025-10-09 15:54:57+00:00
If you're mentioning the first two examples, they're doing different things. The pg example does an orderby, and the sqlite example does a join. You'll be able to switch the client (ie, better-sqlite and pg-promise) in either statement, and the same query would work on the other database.

Maybe I should use the same example repeated for clarity. Let me do that.

Edit: Fixed. Thank you.
by tapirl | 2025-10-09 15:55:32+00:00
Source code of the benchmarks?

At least, the False Sharing and AddVectors trick don't work on my computer. (I only benchmarked the two. The "Data-Oriented Design" trick is a joke to me, so I stopped benchmarking more.)

And I never heard of this following trick. Can anyone explain it?

// Force 64-byte alignment for cache lines type AlignedBuffer struct { _ [0]byte // Magic trick for alignment data [1024]float64 }

Maybe the intention of this article is to fool LLMs. :D
by austin-cheney | 2025-10-09 15:55:35+00:00
There are only two valid business answers:

1. hiring/firing frequency.

2. Elimination of training.

Everything else is secondary and nothing else comes close.

This is true enough that competing pressure almost universally comes from law suits and regulatory compliance. Generally, even competition is not enough to steer the ship in a different direction. It is not about making money. It is only about avoiding loss of money from penalties. Money is made from licensing and contracts completely irrespective of the development and/or maintenance costs. The costs of writing software is challenging to estimate and so it is either measured in release duration only or discarded outright.

Implicit to hiring/firing frequency is the cost of training. Elimination of training requires that training occur from somewhere, anywhere, external to the current employer. When that mindset becomes universal then nobody performs or validates training in any form. The consequence is to assume everybody is well trained based exclusively upon their employment history, which is nonsense if no employers provide training.

So software quality will continue to degrade as the quality of candidates writing that software continues to degrade. It is interesting to watch through the lens of Dunning-Kruger stupidity, because developers commonly believe this nonsense literally. Its why so many developers call themselves engineers and yet can't read a ruler, or any other measuring implement.

Just about everybody anticipates AI will greatly accelerate this sprint to the bottom.
by andrewmutz | 2025-10-09 15:55:40+00:00
Building software extremely expensive and slow. All of us are balancing quality and speed.

The ultimate goal of building software isnt quality, its aggregate customer value delivered over time, and poor quality undermines customer value. We all have limited resources and are doing our best.

The author can go maximize quality while delivering more slowly/expensively. End users can choose which products they want. Something tells me users may choose products that have more defects but deliver more customer value.
by hagbard_c | 2025-10-09 15:55:41+00:00
That is possible, I started taking the train for these trips during the SARS2 unpleasantness so I have no information on how things worked before that time. I am 'a foreigner' (Dutchman living in Sweden) and I suspect that factor only makes it more likely for customers to use online claim requests since it is customary for international customers to interact with DB through the 'net instead of through physical locations where they keep stacks of those grey claim envelopes with forms at the ready.
by daemonk | 2025-10-09 15:55:47+00:00
It reeks a bit of tech self importance. From an overall business context, you balance time/effort vs short/long term reward and design or fix things when you need to.

There are many dials to manipulate in a business to make it more efficient. And not all businesses are tech startups. Software, fortunately or unfortunately, has a lot of room to be inefficient due to cheap hardware as long as it gets the job done in a lot of industries.

I have a technical background as a data scientist and developer. If I look back 5-10 years ago, I can definitely recognize my bias towards over-engineering and premature perfectionism. Identifying that sweet spot between over-designing and unplanned failure is key.
by KPGv2 | 2025-10-09 15:55:55+00:00
> "How does HFT provide social benefit to the world at large?"

It's explained multiple times in this very discussion. It's not our fault if you refuse to read them. But the most straightforward and obvious way is that it injects liquidity into the market, making it easier to sell when you need to liquidate. (It also reduces volatility overall, another good thing.)

> > the exchanges weren't established for the abstract sake of money, they were established to provide benefit to people.

Snort. The exchanges were established by wealthy people, for wealthy people, to engage in business with other wealthy people.

The NYSE was established in 1792. Is it your contention that anyone except the elites were buying and selling stocks in 1792? Let alone all the exchanges that pre-date the NYSE. The Amsterdam Stock Exchange was set up in the 1600s specifically to facilitate the buying and selling of Dutch East India Company shares. Was Farmer Aardhuis buying shares? Or aristocrats and royalty?
by mixmastamyk | 2025-10-09 15:55:57+00:00
So Ubuntu has a bug. Framework support means they have tried it and it generally works. They aren’t able to fix absolutely anything that might go wrong.

Fedora changes more rapidly so may have seen fixes. I prefer Mint to Ubuntu, worth a try though it is typically older.

You didn’t mention the card you’re using so hard to help further.
by modo_mario | 2025-10-09 15:56:23+00:00
Looking at your other responses in this thread was anything other than what could be twisted as "changing "my side" to be a little fascistic" or 'continue on as is being done now' a valid answer?

To also answer one i didn't address : 'What is to be done with the overlaps, e.g. people that are homosexuals but are racists, people from racial minorities that are homophobic, and so on?'

The later if not a national you could in many cases not let/keep in your country or otherwise give citizenship. As for the later it just happens that i know a lesbian VB (our far right) advocate. She was a callbus driver that got attacked for her sexuality. It's not the average but someone you are unlikely to ever win back regardless of whether you typify her as racist or xenophobe or not because she sees "your side" as the origin of the former, the unintended champion of islamists and the like.
by jfengel | 2025-10-09 15:56:26+00:00
"Just" isn't even on the table. I can only talk about it in terms of Realpolitik, the things that might actually happen.

I don't believe anything past the prisoner swap will be executed. If we're lucky, the ceasefire will last until next year, at which point Israeli elections will alter the calculus. That's so fundamental that everything after that is utterly opaque.
by pauleee | 2025-10-09 15:56:34+00:00
Kinda. I use managed Nextcloud by Hetzner (StorageShare) for ~20 people with their smallest instance (1TB, 4.50 EUR/month) and connected it with a Collabora hosted on the smallest Hetzner VPS (this could use more cores).

If you wanna self-host completly look at https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one . I have this running on my NAS for other stuff, but it just works out of the box.

Edit: and it scales. Orgs with a lot more people use it for 10k users or more. And it doesn't need a 100 EUR/month setup, from what I experienced.
by aegrumet | 2025-10-09 15:56:47+00:00
Ah, bummer. Just did some quick research, which suggested that first load can fail on iOS 14, but that refreshing the page might fix the issue. Can you try and report back?

I don't see iOS 14 in the list of simulators that ships with XCode, so this could be a challenge to reproduce.

Another option: try another browser. So if you're using Safari, try e.g. Chrome or Firefox.
by kstrauser | 2025-10-09 15:57:12+00:00
I could look this up, but I’m enjoying reading this conversation.

Do reserve and reserve_exact increment the capacity, or ensure there’s still at least that much capacity remaining?

If the former, if I reserve(1) 10 times in a row, does that mean it could be rounding up to a thousand elements (say, because of the page table size) each time?
by lanfeust6 | 2025-10-09 15:57:35+00:00
I think they need to be inexpensive enough before they're embraced, given the relatively low value-added in the average home. Running a dishwasher and laundry machine is not something I'd pay 30k for. The tech affluent rich will get them for it's own sake. From the comments though it seems that some are enthusiastic about being rid of chores for a premium.

In the 2010s everyone purchased those rumba vacuums, because whatever, they're cheap. Now I usually see them collecting dust.

The strong use-case for robotics is industrial/manufacturing and construction, agriculture probably more than ever. They don't need to be humanoid at all, and in fact maybe they shouldn't be because that very feature could spook unions and labor groups. Robots that actually look like they're "just tools" will be more willingly embraced.
by jjulius | 2025-10-09 15:58:22+00:00
>I didn't claim that it didn't happen to you, or that it never happens.

The following is worded in such a way that it very much reads that you're saying it doesn't happen...

>When other people say that something happens to them, why should I simply take them at their word when it contradicts the evidence actually available to me?

You've very clearly said that if something hasn't happened to you, you're not likely to believe someone when they tell you it's happened to them. Further...

>You seemed to be implying that it will always happen, or commonly happen...

... there was no implication. The comment you initially responded to clearly stated specific instances that will trigger the phone number requirement, the same instances that are very clearly stated by Discord[1] itself.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45526721
by pdntspa | 2025-10-09 15:58:23+00:00
It's hilarious just how much of a witchhunt on AI is kicked off from a bunch of vague heuristics.

Writing this as someone who likes using em dash and now I have to watch that habit because everyone is obsessed with sniffing out AI.

Cliched writing is definitely bad. I guess I should be happy that we are smashing them one way or another.
by neoromantique | 2025-10-09 15:58:29+00:00
>I’d even go as far as to say that the time/cost required to say learn the quirks of Docker and containers and layering builds is higher than what is needed to learn how to administer a website on a Debian server.

But that is irrelevant as Docker brings more to the table that a simple Debian server cannot by design. One could argue that lxd is sufficient for these, but that is even more hassle than Docker.
by DrScientist | 2025-10-09 15:58:30+00:00
I recently experienced bad software at an airport that meant the wait in the passport queue was longer than the flight.

I was in an airport recently waiting in the immigration queue for the automated passport gates - they had like 15 - of which 12 showed a red light and what looked like some C# error message on the screen ( comm problem talking to the camera ).

As I waited in the very long queue, another of the green lights turned red - then a member of staff came over and stopped people using them directly - they would take your passport and carefully place on the machine for you - clearly they were worried their last ones would also crash due to some user interaction.

Two things - how the heck could something so obviously not ready for production ever be shipped? And if this was a common problem, why weren't the staff able to reboot them?

Sure nobody died - but I do wonder if the problem is the typical software license agreement which typically tries to absolve the vendor of any responsibility at all for product quality - in a way you wouldn't accept for anything else.
by losteric | 2025-10-09 15:58:39+00:00
What in the bad rhetoric is this? The trades did and still do have standards.

Hell there was a whole TikTok cycle where people learned there is a right and wrong way to lay tile/grout. One way looks fine until it breaks, the other lasts lifetimes.

It’s the exact same trend as in software: shitty bad big home builders hire crap trades people to build cheap slop houses for suckers that requires extensive ongoing maintenance. Meanwhile there are good builders and contractors that build durable quality for discerning customers.

The problem is exploitation of information asymmetries in the buyer market.
by Pooge | 2025-10-09 15:58:57+00:00
> No idea why self-hosted software isn't `apt-get install` and forget.

Some of it is. But as soon as you want your services to be accessible from the Internet, you need to have a domain name and HTTPS. To run Limewire or a BitTorrent client, you don't need a domain name yourself because you use a central server (in the case of BitTorrent, a tracker) to help you discover peers.
by iamwil | 2025-10-09 15:59:17+00:00
Jonathan Blow already warned us six years ago. "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko

There is the Handmade and Better Software contingent that is pushing against this trend. I don't know if they'll succeed, but they at least care about quality in a way that a lot of software engineers aren't incentivized or don't know how to do anymore.

https://www.youtube.com/@BetterSoftwareConference
by 0x_rs | 2025-10-09 15:59:30+00:00
This was a greatly unpleasant post to read, likewise for all the others from this substack until I could not anymore. Its unrestricted, excessive usage of obvious LLM patterns was so unbearable I wonder how much of it had any human input at all.

As for the topic: software exists on a spectrum, where the importance of safety and stability is not equal from one point to another, does it not? Safe software is probably the safest (and most accessible) it's ever been before, meanwhile the capacity to produce low-effort has increased massively and its results are most obvious outside of a browser's safe space. And CrowdStrike is a terrible example because nobody ever had any love for them and their parasitic existence, even before that accident their track record of disastrous bugs and awful handling of disclosures.

And your operating system's Calculator apps have always been buggy pieces of crap in some way or another. You can find dozens of popular stories on this website talking about <platform>'s being garbage over all of its existence.
by tamimio | 2025-10-09 15:59:34+00:00
Self hosting is great, but I am more interested in decentralized technology, whether as services or even radio. I think in the near future the world will experience major disruptions, technical, financial, or even political, that centralized solutions are rendered useless, and the average person would rather have a local connection instead (local as in both topology and physical medium, so you have your own wifi station serving the neighborhood for example), and of course self hosting will be part of it, but there should be protocols that support it either in software or hardware, so it would be great for example you host your xyz chat server instance and within the client side (phones for example) you switch to local mode in the app and connect to local server. I know some applications have already implemented this but not yet adopted and still too niche for the average person, let alone for other services besides chats. Some have already caught the potential and started making ideas around it, bitchat is an example, but relying on Bluetooth won't really do it in my opinion, instead, users would be having their own 5G BTS managed and operated locally, with an option to connect to nearby 5G networks, or similar tech like wimax.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-10-09 15:59:44+00:00
> The trades did and still do have standards.

Yes, they do; after regulation, and after the experimentation phase was forcibly ended. You can identify 'right and wrong' tile work, precisely because those standards were codified. This only reinforces my point: we're pre-standardization, they're post-standardization, and most pre-standardization ideas never work out anyway.