MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by seneca | 2025-11-29 00:19:42+00:00
> Somehow we were better at using remote tools while literally in the same office than some teams are at using them now while fully remote.

This is sort of the point. Remote tools work great when you have spent a lot of time building relationships and rapport with the people involved. That's hard to do in professional settings, and extremely hard to do in remote professional settings.

Letting teams that know each other well work remotely works great. Building teams remotely is very hard.

I'm a diehard for remote work, but we have to be realistic abouts limitations.
by tomhow | 2025-11-29 00:19:59+00:00
Please just flag the comments and email us (hn@ycombinator.com ) when you see them so we can kill the accounts. Spam is not a new thing. AI-generated spam is growing but it's just a new variant of a thing that's been around forever on the web. A lot of these bots are people experimenting and seeing what they can get past the moderators and the community. Let's not give them oxygen. Flag, email if you like, and move on.

Edit: A user has emailed us with a list of these accounts (with that Firstname-Lastname username format), and all of them had already been detected and killed.
by willio58 | 2025-11-29 00:20:15+00:00
Key fob-based has worked great for me in a variety of living configurations (apartments, single homes) in the past 7 years with my 2017 civic. It can connect surprisingly far distances, and it doesn’t need a direct line of site or anything. Just good old RF.

I get what you’re saying about app-based. My civic has that too and it’s for a cost. I’ve just never needed it since we have the free for life RF version.

At $110/yr for cell-based remote start via Honda link, I’ve saved $770 over the years. Over the life of the car for me I could be looking at doubling those savings. That’s the power of avoiding needless subscriptions.
by anonymous908213 | 2025-11-29 00:20:27+00:00
Awfully nice, isn't it? You get all the privileges of being a remote worker, while "confessing" that remote work sucks to upper management who read your blog, giving them justification to deny other people the same opportunity you have. If you genuinely believe remote work sucks, you should own up to it, sell your property, and move to a city rather than reaping the benefits of it to the extent of your entire life being dependent on it while talking about how bad it is. The fact that you haven't done that indicates to me that you actually quite enjoy the benefits more than you suffer the drawbacks, but aren't acknowledging it, instead choosing to denigrate remote work for having any drawbacks at all.
by AndrewStephens | 2025-11-29 00:22:18+00:00
If there is one thing I have learned in my years in the internet it’s that there is no minimum reward below which people won’t bother to be dicks.

Farming karma on HN to boost stories seems the most likeliest reason for this - an enterprise which would maybe net 3 figures in advertising dollars. But also it could just be someone wasting everyone’s time for fun - who knows?
by notepad0x90 | 2025-11-29 00:22:34+00:00
they block VPNs too, if yours is working it's just a matter of time until they get to it. Avoid using imgur entirely. What I find insidious is that unlike reddit and some other sites, they won't tell you it's blocked, they'll give you this:

{"data":{"error":"Imgur is temporarily over capacity. Please try again later."},"success":false,"status":403}
by jinfeng79 | 2025-11-29 00:24:54+00:00
Hey HN, creator here.

Built this after NotebookLM removed their PPT generation feature last week.

Key points: - Free, no login required - BYOK (bring your own Google AI Studio key) for unlimited use - Smart template selection based on content - Built in a week using Claude Code

Tech stack: Gemini API for generation, React frontend.

Examples: https://imgur.com/a/zjZ7oOa

Feedback welcome!
by AlotOfReading | 2025-11-29 00:25:00+00:00
Of course it's not the same, that's the point. I personally prefer the async, chat based mediums I've used since I was a child. Some of my coworkers have disabilities that make conversational typing difficult and prefer video calls as a result.

Consider the effort to accommodate those preferences though. Accommodating a video call preference is easy. Same for chat. Accommodating a preference for face-to-face requires spending an hour (2x average US commute) traveling to meet you. That's quite a significant ask of the other person.
by britch | 2025-11-29 00:25:35+00:00
I think we're both arguing for balance here

When I started programming I wanted everything I wrote to be museum-ready. I was slow as shit and waaay too precious about code. As I've matured I realize that's not a good way to work.

I think my lowest acceptable quality bar is still pretty high (and I'm fortunate to work somewhere that is valued). But as time has gone on I've tried to emphasize speed and knowing when something is "good enough"

I feel that it's an important skillset for the profession, but often craft-oriented engineers dismiss it at "business people not understanding"

As always this depends a bit on where you work and your projects
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-11-29 00:25:37+00:00
I've been at big companies for 12 out of the last 20 years, never a FAANG, just "average" big companies. The rest of the time I've spent at startups and medium-sized companies, and sometimes a startup-in-a-big-company.

I have met maybe 5 good engineers in my whole career. The size of the company did not matter. The reason is, the only thing that exists in our world today that can make you a good tech engineer, is yourself.

When you hear the word "engineer", you might imagine a professional who has done studies, passed exams, has certificates, maybe even apprenticed. They know a specific body of knowledge (which is maintained by some organization), they're held liable for their work. They are masters of their domain and they don't step outside of it.

But not if they're in tech! Then an 'engineer' can be a high school graduate or a PhD. Both can make the same amount of money, and have the same lack of real-world experience and job skills. They will both regularly apply technology they've never been trained on, never learning more than the least possible information to get a proof of concept working (and then that immediately becomes a production service). There's often no record of the decisions they made, no formal design process, no architectural review, no standards listed, no testing required, no risk analysis performed, no security/safety/reliability checklist performed. And they often are dealing directly with PII, with absolutely no thought to how to manage it. And they often have far more access than they should have, leak critical credentials everywhere, don't manage the software supply chain properly, don't even pin versions or even test rollbacks, etc. I have seen all of this at every single company I've worked for.

In any other 'engineering' profession, this would be illegal. Hell, it's sometimes illegal just to change a breaker in a subpanel in your home without pulling a permit, because doing it wrong has consequences. Think of all the times your personal financial records, health records, sensitive data, social security numbers, etc, have been leaked, just in the last year or two. 9 times out of 10 those happened because nobody cared enough to prevent it. But these things shouldn't be optional. There should be some kind of mandatory thing in place to force people to ensure this doesn't happen. And some kind of mandatory minimum requirements about what people know, what they're allowed to work with, and how. None of that applies in tech, yet we still call it engineering.
by d3Xt3r | 2025-11-29 00:25:42+00:00
You're talking about business workflows, and that makes sense. But this article is about universities, they have far less Microsoft-specific document editing workflows, compared to established enterprises. At least, that was my experience when I was a part-time teacher at a university - LibreOffice did the job just fine for me. And although other professors used MS Office, none of them did anything fancy (they didn't have any custom VBAs/macros, no disgusting database-like Excel spreadsheets etc) - I can see these people easily switching to the oss options we have today.

Of course, every university and every person is different, but it's not an impossibility unlike businesses.
by alfalfasprout | 2025-11-29 00:25:48+00:00
Interesting. Coming from big tech, it's actually pretty spot-on of an article. I think most folks at big tech have experienced this stuff too.

> Why is it necessary for big tech companies to act this way? Why does bad code bother engineers so much? Are they actually misguided for feeling like bad code is a catastrophe, or is it really the fault of the broader economic sphere we all inhabit? Is it actually maturity to reconcile ourselves to drift powerlessly as faceless and titanic forces sculpt our reality? So many possible questions.

These are all great questions. I have some thoughts, of course. But I'm not sure it's fair to describe OP as a burnt-out nihilist. The premise of the post is pretty reasonable actually.
by Kerrick | 2025-11-29 00:25:53+00:00
I am indeed learning, working to close those gaps.

For automated testing, I'm in the middle of reading Developer Testing by Alexander Tarlinder, with xUnit Test Patterns by Gerard Meszaros coming close behind. I'm also working through Test-Driven Development: By Example with my wife as we have time.

For SQL, I read Grokking Relational Database Design by Qiang Hao last winter, and I started SQL Queries for Mere Mortals by John Viescas this week. Sadly, my flub with "left inner join" was not a joke.

For OOP, I've been on a whirlwind tour: OOA&D With Applications by Booch et al., Object Thinking by David West, POODR and 99 Bottles of OOP by Sandi Metz, Domain-Driven Design by Eric Evans, IDDD and DDDD by Vaughn Vernon, Design Patterns in Ruby by Russ Olsen, Clean Architecture by Robert C. Martin, and Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns by Kent Beck. Still on the docket are Design Patterns by the Gang of Four, PoEAA by Martin Fowler, Smalltalk, Objects, and Design by Chamond Liu, and Object Design by Rebecca Wirfs-Brock.

> confessing that you don't know something and gleefully stopping there is not much better [...] we shouldn't let shamelessness about what we don't know limit us either

I promise you, this was not gleeful and this was not shameless. Shame and fear affected me for months on these issues. And I'm not stopping there... From the end of the article: "I’m going to continue to work on skill building, but now I feel free to write about it. If [...] you’d like to help me fill [my knowledge gaps], [...]"

> if you want to write a blog about a topic, then part of the requirements here is that you do hold yourself to a high standard

A high standard of writing, maybe. But plenty of great stories come from those who are striving for a high standard, not just those already in the upper echelon. It's what makes this place different from academic journals.
by RealityVoid | 2025-11-29 00:25:56+00:00
It's not _only_ that, it's also the fact that the failure mitigation was not catching it, so even if they "fix" the random spikes issue, they still need to consider the "what if" issue if the thing _still_ happens. My money is that they will mitigate this:

"There was a limitation in the algorithm used by the A330/A340 flight control primary computers for processing angle of attack (AOA) data. This limitation meant that, in a very specific situation, multiple AOA spikes from only one of the three air data inertial reference units could result in a nose-down elevator command. [Significant safety issue]"

It's the only one marked "Significant safety issue" so my money is on that.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-11-29 00:26:22+00:00
It's unclear which meaning of "betrays" you intend. If you think it's counterproductive to be so direct and emphatic, let me rephrase it: I am against all but a small amount of immigration of very high-quality people, whereas liberals are in favor of practically unlimited immigration. If you think I "betrayed" my intent by expressing this clearly, it was no secret or mystery to begin with.
by twothreeone | 2025-11-29 00:29:08+00:00
The thing is shipping sloppy code is orders of magnitudes easier, because that's the default result. Any sufficiently determined hack-job can do it. On the other hand, steering a team of 5-10 engineers to deliver quality on (or before!) a deadline requires excessive amounts of coordination and skill. Now, is this trade-off "worth" the effort? I guess that's a matter of opinion, though I would argue in the long term quality wins out by a large margin.
by Aeolun | 2025-11-29 00:29:21+00:00
Changing requirements is fine. Changing requirements when it was eminently avoidable is very, very bad.

If I asked you 6 months ago if you might ever consider something other than credit card payments, urged you to seriously consider this and you say no, you shouldn’t come to me now and say that bank transfers (bank transfers!) are absolutely indispensible.
by Tade0 | 2025-11-29 00:29:44+00:00
Getting to know the neighbours is what helped me in getting out, so perhaps it could help you as well.

Among those with whom I established any contact there's a:

-Doctor in training

-Teacher

-Small business owner doing house renovations

-Telecom company sales representative

-Taxi driver

There's hardly any overlap between them in terms of what they do for a living and it's like that naturally in every place that's not close to some kind of large business like a factory.
by sfpotter | 2025-11-29 00:29:46+00:00
I don't disagree that it's an accurate portrayal of reality. And of course, as I made clear in my post, I don't know if they're actually a burnt out nihilist.

My issue with the article is maybe more that the perspective and framing seem to want to lock out idealism from the conversation and encourage people to become ruthless, hard-nosed pragmatists in order to survive in this environment. Is that actually good, effective, or desirable? Again, lots of questions.
by hibikir | 2025-11-29 00:29:53+00:00
It's interesting that you talk that there's a lot of good management, followed by a list of things I'd call bad management: Forget about good vs bad code, of course that's unimportant. But insufficient maintenance that causes lower velocity on the next set of changes matters. Good engineering will tell you when the issue isn't just about code that is ugly, but code that slows changes down so much you'd be better off improving it.

If you set incentives that say that being sloppy and leaving landmines for the next group of people is the way to get promoted, guess what? the management is bad. Often because they are also looking at their own self interest, and expect to leave the consequences to whoever comes after them. This isn't new to big tech: You'll find this all described in books about corporate dysfunction written in the 90s.

It's all traditional principal agent problems, which just get worse and worse as you add layers of management, as the principal has agents upon agents underneath, all using the misaligned incentives. One either wants t avoid getting fired while doing the minimum, or sacrifice the health of what is around them for a good enough promotion packet/review. And since there's no reasonable way for individual objectives to align well with long term objectives, people leave landmines. When there's enough landmines everywhere, you are always better off in greenfield development. And at that point, doing any maintenance, or being stuck in a project that isn't getting fed a bunch of capital to grow it is career suicide. All about bad incentives, set by bad management.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-29 00:29:56+00:00
I’m all for freedom of association.

I’m also all for being able to call out when a community is being excessively political while also trying to claim to be a no-politics zone.

I was a big fan of Lobsters in the early days, but it became apparent that even for apolitical topics you had to walk a very fine line with your comments and avoid anything that might be misinterpreted as wrongspeak.

The site has a long history of finding obscure reasons to ban people. The moderation log is public, but if you try to read the comments that caused the ban they’re all [Removed by moderator] in a very non-public way. The moderators then respond with their own interpretation of events after the account is no longer able to dispute it. It’s another example of double speak where the moderation actions are supposedly public but you’re also not allowed to see the comments that led to the ban.

> What really offends me is the consumer entitlement that people have that make them think that they should be allowed to participate in any community however they see fit.

No entitlement here. My Lobsters account is in good standing since the start. However I believe we’re all entitled to explain our opinions about the moderators, even if it offends you that other people have opinions that disagree with your own.

Anyway, this entire comment thread where you derisively deliver “fun fact” snark and declare other people’s opinions “ridiculous” while ignoring the argument they’re trying to make is ironically a prime example of why Lobste.rs feels so exhausting. If you feel like you’re on the right side of the culture war you feel empowered to be snarky, dismissive, and rude because you think the rules of civil discourse only apply to people on the other side of the dividing lines.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-11-29 00:30:12+00:00
You're so pugnacious in your replies that I'm not sure it's worth replying to you, but I'll do so anyway. My guess is if you respond you'll sneer at me again but let's see.

If the site said "The rules are: pushcx's homies get gas and haters get ass" then I'd have no expectations of fairness or clear guidelines. But that's not the site. It has a set of guidelines. It has flagging capabilities along with categories you can use to indicate why the content you flag is flag worthy. It has a mod log where moderator actions are performed publicly. This gives the impression to many users that the site cares about a semblance of fairness and tries to separate rules from mere passions. The reason why I find Lobsters so annoying is because of that disconnect. The site gives this impression of rules, guidelines, and moderation philosophy. But in effect it's just the sounding board of the admin and some mods. Obviously as you so caustically try to reiterate they are free to associate like this (and I'm freely speaking about how much I dislike it while freely associating on another site), but that doesn't stop people from disliking it.
by alfalfasprout | 2025-11-29 00:30:18+00:00
> The problem I observe is a fairly universal one: management doesn't care about good code, it cares about results.

The thing is, good code is a form of a good result. You need to solve the underlying problems (which manifest as impact) but if you used code to get there, that code if well designed is extensible, reusable, then you pay low maintenance on it and that same code can be used to solve other problems (ideally).

It's a difficult judgement call to make though. If your org doesn't have the right technical leadership and the performance management structure doesn't reward it then you get what you see.

It's a lesson that's always learned far too late when it becomes slow and costly to deliver something new because you've amassed so much tech debt so it's often cheaper to start from scratch (which is saying something).

I see this all fwiw in big tech myself and with my peers at peer companies.
by netllama | 2025-11-29 00:30:25+00:00
Every time I'm forced to use MacOS again, its worse than the last time. Everything feels like a bolted on afterthought in an OS that forces Apple's opinions on everything. My productivtiy is ruined trying to do things the Apple way, instead of the way that works best for me.

No thanks, I'll stick with Linux, where I can tinker to have the OS work the way that is best for me, instead of what Apple thinks is best for me.
by enahs19 | 2025-11-29 00:30:53+00:00
Everyone misses the forest for the trees. Neural unit and layered topology deep learning applications excel at revealing and leveraging correlations (something people flippantly refer to crudely as "pattern matching") at many scales in a data set. Commercial LLMs are merely deep learning applications purpose built to reveal correlations in the corpus of internet available language. The impressive aspect of LLMs is not that they seem to give such comprehensive answers to queries, but rather what that fact says about human language itself. Human language uses thousands of tokens (degrees of freedom) which in theory could be combined in an infinite number of ways to encode information. Yet LLMs show us that we really only use our tokens in a very limited, highly correlated manner. Taking it a step further, this also demonstrates the limits of deep learning... that an LLM requires a trillion parameters and $100B to characterize the much much lower dimensionality of this data set should be a clear signal that LLMs and likely all deep learning approaches based on data alone are not a viable path to "intelligence". Anyway, I'm just a vallet (yes, FSD fans, this still exists) so what to I know?
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-11-29 00:31:00+00:00
> vs only waking up on an FCM push notification like the regular app

FWIW you can actually do the FOSS version of this now with UnifiedPush support (rolled out in Molly a while back).

It's a massive saver on battery life but it does require that you have a server set up to forward notifications to your unifiedpush distributor.
by innocentoldguy | 2025-11-29 00:31:19+00:00
> I'd love to hear more about this!

He deployed our applications using Kubernetes and refused to implement libcluster. There was something else, too, but I can't recall what it was. It was seven years ago.

> Yeah, this is weird...

I kept telling this developer that you're supposed to test your private functions through your public interfaces, not expose your private functions and hope nobody uses them (which they did), but that fell on deaf ears. He was also a fan of defdeligate and used it EVERYWHERE. Working with that codebase was so annoying.
by simondotau | 2025-11-29 00:31:46+00:00
The company itself doesn't have to be vaporware in order for the product, as described, to be vaporware. And even if it's not true vaporware, there's still no independent evidence of anything. The design could end up being a bust, whether because of unexpected hardware limitations, or an immature software stack, or underwhelming thermals, or sheer economics.
by wyre | 2025-11-29 00:31:59+00:00
>It's a race towards AGI at this point. Not sure if that can be achieved as language != consciousness IMO

However it is arguable that thought is relatable with conscienceness. I’m aware non-linguistic thought exists and is vital to any definition of conscienceness, but LLMs technically dont think in words, they think in tokens, so I could imagine this getting closer.
by jjcm | 2025-11-29 00:32:14+00:00
Because money.

Don't underestimate the financial impact of getting to the frontpage of HN.

I had this story hit the frontpage two years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36296695

From that, I got around 100 subscriptions, which to date has netted me $2,673.85. That's from a platform that was designed to payout most of the subscription cost, where I actively encouraged people not to subscribe, and has since become inactive.

A small investment in bots can very easily be worth the payout, especially for those in LCOL countries.
by alfalfasprout | 2025-11-29 00:32:26+00:00
It's getting much worse with AI now too. People just blindly trust the AI's decisions which even as of Opus 4.5 is generally misguided for nontrivial problems and best-case doesn't even consider the bigger picture given context-window limitations.

So the mountain of syntactically correct functional slop is growing faster than ever before.