MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by daxfohl | 2025-11-28 21:36:32+00:00
IME a dedicated testing / QA agent sounds nice but doesn't work, for same reasons as AI / human interaction. The more you try to diverge from the original dev agent's approach, the less and less chance there is that the dev agent will get to where you want it to be. Far more frequently it'll get stuck in a loop between two options that are both not what you want.

So adding a QA agent, while it sounds logical, just ends up being even more of this. Rather than converging on a solution, they just get all out of whack. Until that is solved, far better just to have your dev agent be smart about doing its own QA.

The only way I could see the QA agent idea working now is if it had the power to roll back the entire change, reset the dev agent, update the task with some hints of things not to overlook, and trigger the dev process from scratch. But that seems pretty inefficient, and IDK if it would work any better.
by Herring | 2025-11-28 21:38:10+00:00
> Big companies know that treating engineers as fungible and moving them around destroys their ability to develop long-term expertise in a single codebase. That’s a deliberate tradeoff. They’re giving up some amount of expertise and software quality in order to gain the ability to rapidly deploy skilled engineers onto whatever the problem-of-the-month is.

And also to "keep the balance of power tilted away from engineers and towards tech company leadership." The author touched on that and forgot about it. You don't want key projects depending on a group of engineers that might get hit by a bus or unionize or demonstrate against Israel or something. Network effects and moats and the occasional lobbying/collusion mean the quality of your product is less important.
by mkl | 2025-11-28 21:38:31+00:00
What is the advantage of a screwdriver over something like a saw?

Atuin Desktop and Marimo have quite different purposes and not much in common. Atuin Desktop is a runbook system for devops, to store, document, and run sequences of templated terminal commands (and some other things). Marimo is a reactive Python notebook development system for programming, data science, etc., which can't run terminal commands.
by GeekyBear | 2025-11-28 21:39:11+00:00
At most, TSMC will let Nvidia pay up front to build an additional Fab dedicated fully or partially to their use.

The way Apple already does:

> The investment includes “a multibillion-dollar commitment from Apple to produce advanced silicon in TSMC’s Fab 21 facility in Arizona,” according to Apple’s February announcement. The plan is to double Apple’s Advanced Manufacturing Fund from $5 billion to $10 billion, with TSMC Arizona a primary beneficiary.

https://www.aztechcouncil.org/tucson-chipmaker-tsmc-arizona-...

They aren't going to throw away a long term partner for short term gains.
by lloydatkinson | 2025-11-28 21:39:15+00:00
I find these drive-by-attacks on CQRS to be particularly frustrating. Some people know CQRS or CQS are fairly straightforward ideas that can be nice to use and give you some benefits. Some people believe CQRS is some kind of elitist architecture authoritarianism bogeyman in the same category as the microservice pushback.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-11-28 21:40:21+00:00
Ya, you have to shape your code base, not just that but get your AI to document your code base and come with some sort of pipeline to have different AI check things.

It’s fine to be skeptical, and I definitely hope I’m wrong, but it really is looking bad for SWEs who don’t start adopting at this point. It’s a bad bet in my opinion, at least have your F-u money built up in 5 if you aren’t going full in on it.
by project2501a | 2025-11-28 21:40:45+00:00
simplify gssapi, for one. single authentication and authorization: submit on slurm? ask kerberos + ldap. can i upload to this service? as kerberos + ldap. Policies applied on this computer? ask kerberos + ldap

i may be naive a bit, i'll accept that, but I really like how AD works (which is essentially kerberos + ldap)
by mannanj | 2025-11-28 21:41:06+00:00
Fun fact: telling the guy saying it's gaslighting that it's not, with your reframe of reality words like "fun fact" are gaslighting.

I've found gaslight-positive people who go on "vibes" are indeed still gaslighters. Abuse is abuse. You can justify it with "vibe check" and "they don't want you around" all you want - does my not wanting you around and treating you poorly make it any less undignified and abusive?
by ElectricalUnion | 2025-11-28 21:41:46+00:00
Portals are used to integrate applications to the host if they're being run inside a sandboxed environment.

They are hooks that latch on the common GUI application library calls for things such as "open file dialogs" such that exeptions to the sandbox are implicitly added as-you-go.

They cannot prevent for example direct filesystem access if the application has permission to open() stuff, like if they're not running in a sandbox, or if said sandbox have a "can see and modify entire filesystem" exception (very common on your average flatpak app, btw).
by derefr | 2025-11-28 21:42:29+00:00
All of the things you listed are ops topics. But sockets are a programming concept.

I would expect a person with 10+ years of Unix sysadmin experience — but who has never programmed directly against any OS APIs, “merely” scripting together invocations of userland CLI tools — to have exactly this kind of lopsided knowledge.

(And that pattern is more common than you might think; if you remember installing early SuSE or Slackware on a random beige box, it probably applies to you!)
by nradov | 2025-11-28 21:42:44+00:00
Another way to win is through exclusive access to high quality training data. Training data quality and quantity represent an upper bound on LLM performance. That's why the frontier model developers are investing some of their "war chests" in purchasing exclusive rights to data locked up behind corporate firewalls, and even hiring human subject matter experts in order to create custom proprietary training data in certain strategic domains.
by arianvanp | 2025-11-28 21:42:59+00:00
I studied at Utrecht University and all the programming classes in the Bachelor were C#, Visual Studio, XNA, DirectX. Windows. Database class i had to learn in Proprietary Microsoft tools too. All Microsoft stuff. Sure nobody would complain if you did stuff on Linux but all the support by TAs and teachers was on Microsoft platforms only.. The Master was much better but the Bachelor basically was grooming people to become Microsoft consultants.

If the rot starts at the core of your education curriculum there is no saving your dependence on Microsoft.

I always found this choice puzzling to teach people proprietary technologies in a public institution. This was before DotNet core and VSCode was a thing and Microsoft hadnt whitewashed themselves to look like an open source friendly brand yet.
by stuxnet79 | 2025-11-28 21:43:16+00:00
Maybe I have it wrong but the very essence of "engineering" is managing the constraints of (1) providing an acceptable solution to a problem (2) within some fixed parameters of time and cost.

The code may look "bad" in a vacuum but if it yielded a successful outcome then the engineer was able to achieve his/her goal for the business.

The stories shared in this article are exactly what you'd expect from big tech. These are some of the most successful firms in the history of capitalism. As an engineer you are just grist in the mill. If you want to reliably produce "good" code then IMO become an artist. And no ... working at a research facility or non-profit wont save you.
by avadodin | 2025-11-28 21:43:54+00:00
There are some very smart people on that site that only contribute there(although some are old slashdotters from back in the day) so it is a shame.

I get the impression by watching the community that interacting with them is basically impossible as a normal person.

Someone gets an invite, has productive technical discussions, eventually says something that doesn't align exactly with their religion(and we're talking really obscure stuff here) and he gets swiftly and permanently banned possibly bringing the person who invited him down with him as well.
by sudonanohome | 2025-11-28 21:44:45+00:00
I do most of the maintenance of cars in our garage, and I would never accept double AC repair, suspension and radiator replacement to be "normal" around 120k.

The thing is, modern jeeps are a joke even compared to this "reliable" example.

There was a post recently about over-the-air update bricking Jeeps WHILE DRIVING ON THE FUCKING HIGHWAY. And no one cares. People keep buying this trash and defend double AC repairs. ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
by raphman | 2025-11-28 21:44:49+00:00
The Whisperfish [1] project (a Signal messenger for Sailfish OS) maintains an independent Signal client library written in Rust [2]. It works quite well - unless Signal decides to change their protocols or kick non-standard clients.

[1] https://gitlab.com/whisperfish/whisperfish

[2] https://github.com/whisperfish/presage
by nullpxl | 2025-11-28 21:45:28+00:00
Like I mentioned in the text, I haven't looked into Wi-Fi yet. The picture/video -> transfer through the app is correct, and why an alternative method for detecting actual recording is necessary, but I'd expect to see that most events like battery status updates would be over directed BLE, since the initial boot + battery status is broadcast. And likely BTC for streaming audio. I'm unfamiliar with Wi-Fi Direct specifically, are you familiar with the process of scanning for active Wi-Fi Direct services?
by iamnothere | 2025-11-28 21:45:33+00:00
This is overstating the case. In the US you can buy such devices (usually from Aliexpress but Amazon has devices capable of some jamming/deauth). They are illegal to use for intentional jamming of other people’s equipment. However, unless you go around jamming important safety equipment or making local hams angry then nothing will happen. The FCC has its hands full and can’t even seem to address persistent issues on the ham bands until they get really bad.
by pessimizer | 2025-11-28 21:45:55+00:00
The executive can't bypass the courts with an executive order, unless you've seen something I haven't. The reason Congress doesn't do anything is because it ceased to be a functioning body sometime around the AUMF. Congresspeople realized that doing anything other than what the donors paid for is fraught with risk. Better to watch things being done and complain about it. The UK went the same way, concentrating all power in the current government with even backbenchers being absolutely powerless.

I guess the only thing saving the EU from the same fate is its powerlessness and indecisiveness. The people who run it are certainly insane in the same way as the leaders of the UK and the US. You're both crippled from your lack of federalization and protected by it.

edit: In the US, our real problem is that our executive (including the intelligence agencies) can do whatever it wants without an executive order or a coherent legal rationale, they will simply never be prosecuted. The next executive will proclaim that the illegal acts under the last one will never be tolerated again, pardon everybody who did it, and make those acts legal from now on.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-11-28 21:45:57+00:00
Great read, but he undersells the weight of von Neumann's EDVAC report. If you haven't read that (which I imagine you have), it's crazy how prescient some of the lesser-known ideas are. He seemed to assume that we'd end up with some kind of neural architecture, and it's easy to imagine him being surprised that it took us this long to get serious about the idea.

Apropos of that, I couldn't resist telling Gemini 3 to run with your story prompt from the earlier thread: https://gemini.google.com/share/ac122aba6f7f. Thanks for the inspiration, apologies for following it. :-P

(Also thanks for posting the material you wrote back in the 1980s on the SCP initiative. I had heard of it as an SDI connection or component, but that was all. Reading through it now.)
by jeltz | 2025-11-28 21:46:08+00:00
Yeah, I in my experience this is the root of most bad code. People rushing. And it is not even necessarily faster to rush, since often working slow and methodical wins the race. I don't get why we as managers and engineers have just accepted rushing and taking shortcuts as the default. Especially at the big tech companies this constant rush makes zero sense, they have tons of engineers they use very inefficiently.
by netbsdusers | 2025-11-28 21:46:43+00:00
I find it interesting that this fulfills some of Dennis Ritchie's goals for what became the STREAMS framework for byte-oriented I/O:

> I decided, with regret, that each processing module could not act as an independent process with its own call record. The numbers seemed against it: on large systems it is necessary to allow for as many as 1000 queues, and I saw no good way to run this many processes without consuming inordinate amounts of storage. As a result, stream server procedures are not allowed to block awaiting data, but instead must return after saving necessary status information explicitly. The contortions required in the code are seldom serious in practice, but the beauty of the scheme would increase if servers could be written as a simple read-write loop in the true coroutine style.

The power of that framework was exactly that it didn't need independent processes. It avoided considerable overhead that way. The cost was that you had to write coroutines by hand, and at a certain point that becomes very difficult to code. With a language that facilitates stackless coroutines, you can get much of the strengths of an architecture like STREAMS while not having to write contorted code.
by nuancebydefault | 2025-11-28 21:46:45+00:00
25 years ago internet was as good as everywhere at work and schools in the civilized world and was starting to ramp up in homes. CDs or DVDs were indeed still used for large sets of software and documentation, like stacks of MSDN discs. We even had distibuted source code version control, though it was often only synchronized accross the ocean (e.g. using SERI) overnight.

Personally i like the fact that there are interruptions at work. Working is often a social business and activities like rubber ducking, whiteboarding or live code explanation with living people works wonders for me. It should happen even more.

The people who were coding 8 hours a day, very often were writing yet another framework that they personally came up with to solve a problem, but without duscussing its requirements. More often than not they were making the wrong thing, making too clever things or over engineering.
by huijzer | 2025-11-28 21:47:08+00:00
I've seen this scientific fact go around for a while now, but to me it just doesn't pass the smell test. Intuitively, it makes no sense at all. Forests are large areas that literally live on processing CO2. That's the main process that is required for growth to occur. So you have all these trees that process CO2 and you are telling me that humans have managed to negate all these processes? I suspect they messed up the math or are it is simply grifting by some NGO that got paid to say something about CO2 so we can invest more in some renewable energy business.
by ruralfam | 2025-11-28 21:47:29+00:00
We were not in the service bay. Our Maverick was outside. The Service Guy said they had to download the update to their servers. From there it was a quick trip to the service bay for the updates. That is the reason I had asked in the first place. I could see the Mav outside. Not blaming the SG. I am sure it as not the Dealership, but someone at Ford Corporate??? Not so sure.

Also: I made sure we were the first appointment, arriving at 7:45am for my 8am reservation. Soon another guy was behind me. One thing I have learned it to always schedule "the first time in the AM" if you do not need immediate service.

Edit: In retrospect, they had turned on the OTA system in the Mav. So maybe when the SG said it was downloading, I thought "to a server" but maybe it was directly to the Mav. As I noted, was not a big issue. Still not using the OTA features.
by O1111OOO | 2025-11-28 21:48:03+00:00
This was the first time I ever tried creating AI generated music. Easier than I thought. This could be fun. I do not like that the only way to sign-in (create an account) is with gmail. How odd.

I degoogled. I'll only be using the free option. Even if I hadn't degoogled, I wouldn't have opted to tie an account to google this way.
by austin-cheney | 2025-11-28 21:48:48+00:00
The short tenure is a symptom of a larger problem. The deeper problem is that very little is expected of big company software employees. Conversely those same employees tend to expect a lot in return. You can call that entitlement, poor expectation management, first world problems, and all kinds of other names.

I have not worked for a FAANG, so maybe things are different there, but I don't suspect so. People are people no matter where you put them.

Increasing compensation is not the solution. It can be a factor in a larger solution, but just increasing compensation increases employee entitlement which makes this problem worse, not better.

The best solution I have seen is risk/reward. Put people in charge of their assigned effort with real adult danger of liabilities. Likewise, award them for their successes. This is called ownership, and it works because it modifies people's behavior. The rewards and liabilities do not have to be tied to compensation. Actually, associating these rewards/liabilities to social credibility within the team/organization appears more effective because it reinforces the targeted behaviors.

I have seen this missing in all of my software career until my current employment. Conversely people in the military are pushed into this liability/reward scenario from the very beginning and its very effective. It has always been striking to see the difference in my dual career progression.
by willvarfar | 2025-11-28 21:49:05+00:00
I have had both frustration and joy working with AI. Just some anecdata:

I have found it is far better at understanding - and, with prodding, determining the root causes of bugs - big sprawling codebases than it is at writing anything in even simple code bases.

Recently I asked an AI to compare and contrast two implementations of the same API written in different languages to find differences, and it found some very subtle things and impressed me. It got a lot wrong, but that was because one of the implementations had lots of comments that it took at face value. I then wrote a rough spec of what the API should do and it compared the implementations to the API and found more problems. Was a learning experience for me writing specs too.

I repeated the exercise of comparing two implementations to track down a nasty one-line bug in a objc -> swift port. I wasn't familiar with the codebase, or even remember much about those languages, so it was a big boon and I didn't have to track down people who owned code until I was fairly sure that the bug had been found.

Also recently I asked an AI to compare two sets of parquet files and it did sensible things like downloading just bits of them and inspecting metadata and ended up recommending that I change some of the settings when authoring one of the sets of parquet files to dramatically improve compression. It needed esc and prodding at the halfway point but still it got there. Was great to watch.

And finally I've asked an AI a detailed question about database internals and vectorising predicates and it got talking about 'filter masks' and then, in the middle of the explanation, inserted an image to illustrate. Of 'filter masks' in the PPE sense. Hilariously wrong!
by t0mas88 | 2025-11-28 21:50:40+00:00
This is highly unusual, so there may be something more to it than only speculation about radiation. The emergency AD says:

> Before next flight after the effective date of this AD, replace or modify each affected ELAC with a serviceable ELAC in accordance with the instructions of the AOT. > > A ferry flight (up to 3 Flight Cycles, non-ETOPS, no passengers) is permitted to position the aeroplane to a location where the replacement or modification can be accomplished.

That's a very limiting AD. The "before the next flight" part is unusual, ADs often have a limit to the next inspection or X flight hours or similar, not immediately.
by ericmcer | 2025-11-28 21:51:41+00:00
That feels like part of why some juniors are so confident while more senior engineers are plagued with self-doubt.

Juniors know how much they have learned whereas a 10+ year senior (like the author) forget most people don't know all this stuff intuitively.

I still will say stuff like "yeah it's just a string" forgetting everyone else thinks a "string" is a bit of thread/cord.
by malkia | 2025-11-28 21:52:04+00:00
I'll need to read more about this ("Dasein") as I was not aware of it. Yesterday our "adoptive" family had a very nice Thanksgiving, and we were considered youngesters (close to our 50s) among our hosts & guests and this came multiple times when we were discussing AI among many other things - "The joy of work", the "human touch", etc. I usually don't fall for these "nice feel" talks, but now that you mentioned this it hit me. What would I do if something like AI completely replace me (if ever).

Thank you, and sorry my thoughts are all over...
by pixelpoet | 2025-11-28 21:52:06+00:00
> Without it, typing on a smartphone would be exceedingly difficult.

I've never understood this argument, and never use autocorrect. The phone has a screen and a delete key, fukkin' use them!

Anyone blaming autocorrect for their errors is just lying to themselves about simply being uninterested in reading what they write. Everyone makes typos, there's no need to be a victim and blame autocorrect for human error, pretending as if they actually do know the difference between there and they're and their when they obviously don't.

The worst part is how everyone gets so insulted when people don't buy their obvious lie. Come on dude, it's all over "you're" writing and it's insulting to me that you think I can't tell the difference between a simple mistake and your not knowing better.

/rant, at no one in particular, but also pretty much 9/10ths of native English speakers on the internet.
by buu700 | 2025-11-28 21:52:42+00:00
To be fair, it's likely that the author's former friend would have a hard time disagreeing with this if presented in exactly the way that you have.

I suspect that what such a person finds offensive isn't OOP's behavior (i.e. receiving a hair treatment without incident), but rather the thought in and of itself. Since they know that they can't credibly assault a person's character purely on the basis of an involuntary or intrusive thought, they have to settle for calling out some behavior as a stand-in for the thought. In an alternate timeline where OOP had apologized (which would really just be extremely socially awkward, not outwardly harmful), I'd bet on the former friend making the exact opposite stink and chastising OOP for failing to keep it to herself.

Another layer that wouldn't be surprising in this instance would be subconscious homophobia. The friend thinks she's upset at OOP for "victimizing" two poor strangers without their knowledge, but in reality she's disturbed by the sudden realization that she herself may have been or may one day become the unknowing object of such thoughts. Since she can't say as much without implying that she's categorically uncomfortable being around queer women, she reached for any excuse to turn it around on OOP and make herself feel like the good guy.
by nradov | 2025-11-28 21:53:06+00:00
Why should a user care whether the entity they're interacting with meets some arbitrary political definition of "AI"? Does it matter whether an article that I'm reading was written by AI or by a monkey randomly banging on a keyboard? Regulations seem totally pointless, just another excuse to shovel taxpayer money to a bunch of bureaucrats with fancy degrees who are incapable of finding real jobs.