MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jph | 2025-12-07 19:58:58+00:00
When teams don't need strong estimates, then Kanban works well.

When teams do need strong estimates, then the best way I know is doing a project management ROPE estimate, which uses multiple perspectives to improve the planning.

https://github.com/SixArm/project-management-rope-estimate

R = Realistic estimate. This is based on work being typical, reasonable, plausible, and usual.

O = Optimistic estimate. This is based on work turning out to be notably easy, or fast, or lucky.

P = Pessimistic estimate. This is based on work turning out to be notably hard, or slow, or unlucky.

E = Equilibristic estimate. This is based on success as 50% likely such as for critical chains and simulations.
by fractalbits | 2025-12-07 19:59:29+00:00
Yes, you can check the code here https://github.com/fractalbits-labs/fractalbits-main/blob/ma.... For each type of requests we have a separate handler for that.

The basic tests are here: https://github.com/fractalbits-labs/fractalbits-main/blob/ma.... We also have fuzz tests internally, which could be open once we feel it is ready.
by coldtea | 2025-12-07 19:59:54+00:00
Yeah, that it was "brutal" is a common misconception.

Beside the fact that duties were shared among extended family members, it was really not that brutal, and that's including "heavier" chores like bringing water from the well and firewood.

Another common misconception is that what they did "back then" is something ancient or medieval. People in the country did pretty much all the same chores with the same tools well into the 20th century. x
by array_key_first | 2025-12-07 20:00:13+00:00
> Why is there no outreach to other minorities in tech, like the Amish, for example? They are certainly more underrepresented than women in the python community.

Well the amish wouldn't want the outreach, because they're amish.

> There are plenty of other outlets more suitable for doing our civic duty.

I kind of hate this mentality, because there's no logic or reasonableness behind it.

There's ALWAYS another place you can do something. Always. Where you draw the line is arbitrary. There's no rulebook anywhere saying we can't do this in tech. That's just your opinion, that you made up. We don't have to do that and, evidently, we don't.
by Nasrudith | 2025-12-07 20:01:30+00:00
No, I'm afraid the original poster was right. The original comment was just plain stupid. For one there isn't a single 'western diet' any more than there is one 'eastern diet'. If you had attributed a single social issues cause to 'eastern society' like conformity to what you think 'the eastern diet' is and does you'd rightfully be called out for racist stereotyping.
by yen223 | 2025-12-07 20:01:34+00:00
The unique thing about estimates in software engineering is that if you do it right, projects should be impossible to estimate!

Tasks that are easiest to estimate are tasks that are predictable, and repetitive. If I ask you how long it'll take to add a new database field, and you've added a new database field 100s of times in the past and each time they take 1 day, your estimate for it is going to be very spot-on.

But in the software world, predictable and repetitive tasks are also the kinds of tasks that are most easily automated, which means the time it takes to perform those tasks should asymptotically approach 0.

But if the predictable tasks take 0 time, how long a project takes will be dominated by the novel, unpredictable parts.

That's why software estimates are very hard to do.
by echelon | 2025-12-07 20:01:38+00:00
Python's type hinting is horrible.

It's not checked, it's not required, and the bolted on syntax is ugly.

Even if the types were checked, they'd still fail at runtime and some code paths wouldn't get exercised.

We need a family of "near-scripting" languages like Go that check everything AOT, but that can be interpreted.
by kspacewalk2 | 2025-12-07 20:01:42+00:00
I mean, what exactly are phrases like "strictly limited in population viability" and "never going to see a massive population" euphemisms for, exactly? High mortality, intense resource competition and survival of the fittest. Not what we normally associate with "exceptionally high standards of life". The higher the standard of life, the more procreation happens, the more demand there is for a constant supply of resources, and then starvation and warfare turns that supposedly noble savage into quite a vicious competitor.
by thecr0w | 2025-12-07 20:02:57+00:00
I think this is a reasonable take. I think for me, I like to investigate limitations like this in order to understand where the boundaries are. Claude isn't impossibly bad at analyzing images. It's just pixel perfect corrections that seem to be a limitation. Maybe for some folks it's enough to just read that but for me, I like to feel like I have some good experiential knowledge about the limitations that I can keep in my brain and apply appropriately in the future.
by cpgxiii | 2025-12-07 20:02:59+00:00
In the case of the Toyota/Denso mess, the code in question had both auto-generated and hand-written elements, including places where the autogenerated code had been modified by hand later. That is the worst place to be, where you no longer have whatever structure and/or guarantees the code gen might provide, but you also don't have the structure and choices that a good SWE team would have to develop that level of complexity by hand.
by coldtea | 2025-12-07 20:03:20+00:00
>Who do you think built the houses?

The men. Again, I'm writing there about what women didn't have to do.

>In most places and times, didn't all men just get conscripted into war frequently?

Yes, and thus what I wrote is that women didn't have to do it.

(My point was: "yes, women did the house tasks, but on the plus side, they didn't have to do those other far more dangerous and hard things").

>Why do you think it didn't consume all waking hours?

I don't think it didn't, I know it didn't. For starters it was shared among larger family units (including several kids). And even when it wasn't, like some people living on their own, it hardly took a few hours each day, and that's including maintaining a fire, cooking, some cleaning, feeding some nearby hens, bringing water, and things like that. Modern people over-dependent on modern conveniences overestimate how hard all those things were, as if it was some horror survival movie.

In these here parts, people in the country did all the same things people did in the 19th century or the 15th century well into the 20th century (with cars and electricity not reaching many places until the late 1950s), all with plenty of time to spare and socialize.
by ravenstine | 2025-12-07 20:03:23+00:00
Re-planning in isolation is not a failure. I think re-planning is a failure when nothing is learned from previous assumptions not being correct, which usually leads to serial re-planning. I've seen this pattern form at practically every company I've worked for, in particular whenever there's a merger or a private equity buy-out. More often than not, this is ironically caused by leadership failing to learn from previous assumptions because they're too busy chasing the shiny new bobble of the week, but the blame still gets diffused across the organization.
by Balgair | 2025-12-07 20:03:36+00:00
Glad to hear the change of heart here and the guts it took to write it up. I know that's not an easy thing to do, and it likely burned some bridges.

The point about it being gambling, and therefore, taking advantage of idiots, yeah that rings true. The mass proliferation of gambling and the true compulsive addiction and ruin of mostly young men, it's hard to look at oneself and state that they caused that pain for other and their loved ones.

The next step is, of course, to do the very hard part: use the money gained for good. The author mentions that they are a hypocrite for only speaking out after making their money. They need not be so. Finding legitimate ways to use the ill gotten gains for good is a bit of what they built their skills in, after all.

I hope to someday see the next post of theirs detailing how many people they helped and how many lives saved, families reunited and made sound again, based on how they used this new wealth for good.

They are very far from the end of their story, but the midpoint, so to speak, has been passed.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-12-07 20:04:04+00:00
I like to challenge myself to TL;DR these things:

* The Deluge: 17th century double invasion of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by Sweden + Russia.

* America has lost faith in Europe. Cold war is over, administration doesn't value European trade.

* American right is racist and no longer cares about democracy.

* Russia plans to invade Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, and Moldova. Alleges that China is helping.

* Europe is facing another "deluge" because it's under attack on two fronts.

* Solutions: reindustrialize, remilitarize, cut pensions, befriend India.

Did I miss anything?
by gavinray | 2025-12-07 20:04:11+00:00
My org had to write a pivotal backend service on the JVM, due to JDBC having the largest number of data source adapters.

The choice was Kotlin. Scala is too "powerful" and can be written in a style that is difficult for others, and Java too verbose.

Kotlin is instantly familiar to modern TypeScript/Swift/Rust etc devs.

The only negative in my mind has been IntelliJ being the only decent IDE, but even this has changed recently with Jetbrains releasing `kotlin-lsp` for VS Code

https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlin-lsp
by chrismorgan | 2025-12-07 20:04:13+00:00
Layout can only expand/overflow to the right and down, not up or left. Although not fundamental, this has been a standard and useful design limitation in almost all software from the start: infinite drawing canvases are the only counterexample that immediately occurs to me. (“Pull to refresh” is almost another exception.)

I’ve seen sites that centred in a way that caused balanced overflow while assuming a wider viewport than I had. The result was a completely unusable site: the middle half was in-viewport (good), the right quarter was accessible by scrolling (poor), but the left quarter could not be accessed at all (abject failure).
by wrs | 2025-12-07 20:04:40+00:00
It’s amazing how people are reading this to say the opposite of what it says. The end of the essay literally tells the reader they can appreciate Lisp if they just take the time to understand it, and they should make the effort. Not “if you don’t already know this, you must be stupid.”

If someone writes code based on an algorithm out of a 1985 textbook, and I tell them that they could make it go 20X faster if they learned more about processor architecture (out-of-order execution, cache coherency, NUMA, etc.) — a new dimension of programming to them — am I making an ad hominem attack?

Once I made somebody’s SQL query 100X faster by explaining what an index was. Fortunately they didn’t think I was attacking their intelligence.
by lenkite | 2025-12-07 20:04:47+00:00
The S400 seems to do a good job of shooting down drones despite what CNN/MSN says. It has defended against several thousand drones in the last year. It also successfully used by India in the latest spat and India is placing more orders after its proven success in Operation Sindoor.

Also, Ukrainian drones vary the gamut from cheap, but modern FPV drones for easy mass production to state-of-art naval drones, rivaling anything produced in the world.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-12-07 20:05:30+00:00
The point I'm making is not that NetBSD is a solution

The point I'm making is that putting the rootfs on a memory filesystem, e.g., tmpfs, mfs, etc. avoids the problem with SD cards^1

This can be done with a variety of operating systems. IMO, the advantange of the RPi hardware is that it is supported by so many different operating systems

When I want to run additional, larger programs that are not in the rootfs I have embedded into the kernel, I either (a) run them from external storage or (b) copy them to the mfs/tmpfs

It depends on how much RAM I have available

1. There are probably other ways to avoid the problem, too
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-12-07 20:05:43+00:00
>It's constraints like "line up the left side of widget A with the right side of widget B" that can be slow. In this case no width is provided for each widget, so the constraint solver has to find one (which likely involves calling into the widgets to size themselves, adjusting the sizes according to some algorithm and then laying out those widgets again with the final size).

this problem somewhat already exists with layout thrashing https://web.dev/articles/avoid-large-complex-layouts-and-lay...

And given how layout thrashing and similar problems work I feel that you can code CSS in a constraint manner at least part of the time.
by amrocha | 2025-12-07 20:06:15+00:00
it’s not “some people”, it’s practically everyone that doesn’t understand how these tools work, and even some people that do.

Lawyers are running their careers by citing hallucinated cases. Researchers are writing papers with hallucinated references. Programmers are taking down production by not verifying AI code.

Humans were made to do things, not to verify things. Verifying something is 10x harder than doing it right. AI in the hands of humans is a foot rocket launcher.
by card_zero | 2025-12-07 20:07:03+00:00
The given definition of vain is "if they don’t lead to something more important (e.g. profit)". I don't directly profit from reading the news, it's true. I'd have to make quite hand-wavy arguments about why it's beneficial. We can also list activities such as friendship, dreams, appreciating beauty, and feeling excited as non-profitable. Then there's having aspirations: what do we gain from that? Without goals, we could save a great deal of time and effort. Striving for profit, then, is a vain and non-profitable activity because of the unnecessariness of everything.
by nwallin | 2025-12-07 20:07:05+00:00
"Anyone, from the most clueless amateur to the best cryptographer, can create an algorithm that he himself can’t break."--Bruce Schneier

There's a corollary here with LLMs, but I'm not pithy enough to phrase it well. Anyone can create something using LLMs that they, themselves, aren't skilled enough to spot the LLMs' hallucinations. Or something.

LLMs are incredibly good at exploiting peoples' confirmation biases. If it "thinks" it knows what you believe/want, it will tell you what you believe/want. There does not exist a way to interface with LLMs that will not ultimately end in the LLM telling you exactly what you want to hear. Using an LLM in your process necessarily results in being told that you're right, even when you're wrong. Using an LLM necessarily results in it reinforcing all of your prior beliefs, regardless of whether those prior beliefs are correct. To an LLM, all hypotheses are true, it's just a matter of hallucinating enough evidence to satisfy the users' skepticism.

I do not believe there exists a way to safely use LLMs in scientific processes. Period. If my belief is true, and ChatGPT has told me it's true, then yes, AI, the tool, is the problem, not the human using the tool.
by swatcoder | 2025-12-07 20:07:35+00:00
Three-point or PERT estimates are in the same vein, but are just an old and established business process concept and not a trademarked "project" from a (defunct?) consultancy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-point_estimation

https://projectmanagementacademy.net/resources/blog/a-three-...

And yeah, they can be useful when you can must put numbers to things and can decompose the work into familiar enough tasks that your estimation points are informed and plausible. Unfortunately, in a field often chasing originality/innovation, with tools that turn over far too often, that can be a near-impossible criteria to meet.
by Amezarak | 2025-12-07 20:07:39+00:00
> Does it tho? Cause in Germany there are no deductibles or co-pay.

By the time we're quibbling about deductibles and co-pay, we're not talking about meaningful differences - and of course, it can vary widely. However, when your employer is the medical system, your insurance is usually pretty good.

> How many hours do your nurses work for the money?

36-40 hours is a typical workweek. Around here, it's 36 hours.

> How man vacation days are included

This is, as well-known, not federally mandated, and can vary widely. Leave is also often lumped into many different categories. A look at my local, poor rural hospital system says they get 200 hours of PTO a year starting out, or five weeks, plus holidays.

> 0.23€/kWh is the current price for electricity in Germany

Maybe something has changed. This was what I looked at, and that's not what my friend is paying right now. It's only twice as high as California, which is not representative of the US as a whole.

https://www.bundesbank.de/resource/blob/862768/b159d13929f17...

> We don't have ACs, because we got well insulated homes and live in a rather cold climate.

Yes, and having an AC would put a stop to the German obsession with opening windows to stop mold from forming. But even though climate control would be very convenient even if most of the time it's not necessary, Germans don't have it because they can't afford it. Because professions like nursing are paid too little.

Why is there such resistance to just paying people more? How on earth does it make more sense to import people to pump up the labor supply, suppressing wages, so that you have to continue to import people, because there's no reason for a German to go into a low-paid field with a bad work environment?
by Nasrudith | 2025-12-07 20:07:47+00:00
Yeah, it is frankly just plain bad epistemology to expect an AI chatbot to have answers on a matter such as this. Like trying to get this week's lotto numbers by seeking a reading in bible passages and verses. There is no way that the information was encoded within in there as it would violate causality. At best you'd have coincidental collisions only.
by gavinray | 2025-12-07 20:08:11+00:00
This article specifically discusses calling external C ABI libraries via the FFM API.

GraalVM is for compiling JVM bytecode to native, architecture-specific binaries.

FFM is like "[DllImport]" in .NET, or "extern" definitions in other languages.

The article shows how to auto-generate JVM bindings from C headers, and then allocate managed memory + interact with externally linked libs via the FFM API passing along said managed memory.
by elteto | 2025-12-07 20:09:08+00:00
Not exactly sure what your experience is, but if you work with in an -fno-exceptions codebase then you know that STL containers are not usable in that regime (with the exception of std::tuple it seems, see freestanding comment below). I would argue that the majority of use cases of the STL is for its containers.

So, what exact parts of the STL do you use in your code base? Most be mostly compile time stuff (types, type trait, etc).
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-07 20:09:41+00:00
Do people use LeetCode all year round? I thought it was something people fresh out of school did because they thought it helped them be better at FANG interviews, but seems I've missed how they seemingly grew in scope.

> I was hesitant to implement this because I obviously people wouldn't trust inputting a cookie into a form, but if this repo gets lots of stars I'll make a chrome extension that gets around this.

Fun how it goes the opposite compared to the real security implications. Sending one exact cookie you can see to one site VS giving an unknown entity access to * permissions on your computer, and the entity can change at any time + update in the background by their own wishes.
by DaveZale | 2025-12-07 20:10:12+00:00
You need to write a book on these topics. You've already got the outline. I'll be first in line for a signed first edition. Seriously. A lot of us old timers who grew up with simpler, more user friendly software that nearly any user could streamline with their own code (even if it was just stacking macros into a small file)- a lot of us miss what was lost. Keep up the good work.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-12-07 20:10:14+00:00
>If you don't make assumptions then when edge cases happen that have not been programmed for then the system will probably crash.

>and weird defaults in your system

I'm not sure that there is any sufficiently complex logical system that will never have weird defaults, perhaps caused by the logic of some other seemingly sensible default. Complexity being the root cause of this overarching phenomenon.
by skybrian | 2025-12-07 20:10:30+00:00
That’s not the kind of evidence I’m basing my opinions on. I’m reading historians who tell us what it’s like because they have looked at the evidence. What there is of it. For ancient times, this is pretty sparse.

For example, read the series on peasants that I linked to an acoup.blog. It’s largely a demographic model because peasants don’t write to us and the elites were not very interested in them. But it’s based on things like child mortality rates and I don’t think there is anyone claiming that there were any societies with modern child mortality rates in ancient times?

Also, exploitation by the elites is part of the model.
by ishandotpage | 2025-12-07 20:10:39+00:00
I agree with you that this question is unanswerable verbatim. It sorta reminds me of how Agile came up the "Definition of Done"

System maintainers / stakeholders themselves need to come up with a "Definition of Working"

Since distributed systems are basically in some state of failure/degradation almost all of the time, it is useless to try to say that "the system is working when there are no errors anywhere".

Some sort of threshold needs to be arrived at where we can say "it's working".

What that threshold looks like is going to vary from project to project.
by WheelsAtLarge | 2025-12-07 20:10:55+00:00
Books are a hard sell. Think about it. You need to get someone to spend their time, lots of time, reading a book they have very little knowledge about. You have to convince them that its worth their time. You do that though promotion and trust. It takes time and hard work. Most authors, by a long shot, don't make money from a book , specifically their first. It takes lots of promotion and time to get started as an author.

The author of The Martian gave away the book for years before it caught on and made money for him and that book is outstanding.

Writing is a career not a one time book. Even then, it's a hard career to make a living at. Many people use books to express their ideas as a way to improve their true career. Think politicians that are running for office. Or people that want to improve their resume.

You need to continue to promote your book and hope it catches on. Think of it as a hobby until you can turn it into a career.

Also, if you tell me it's written by AI, I automatically think it's not something I want to read. I can get any LLM to write stuff to read. I don't need to buy a book. Use AI to help you but use your own style and words to write something people want to read. People are writing books written by AI by the thousands. You need to standout in that crowded market place. Good luck.
by seviu | 2025-12-07 20:12:11+00:00
I am in a project where we have to give estimates in hours and days.

Needless to say we always underestimate. Or overestimate. Best case we use the underestimated task as buffer for the more complex ones.

And it has been years.

Giving estimations based on complexity would at least give a clear picture.

I honestly don’t know what the PO and TL gains with this absurd obscenity.
by Terr_ | 2025-12-07 20:13:02+00:00
It's funny, I was doing some budgeting stuff, and I ran into some corruption of payee-data in my bank's export files.

Good: I already wrote a script to fix the exact same issue.

Bad: It was in a pile of old stuff from 10+ years ago.

Good: It worked anyway.

Bad: The bank still has the same bug.