MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vee-kay | 2026-01-17 23:12:12+00:00
DevOps was (and is) merely an excuse for companies to replace Developers with cheaper Ops resources, and yet expecting better services and better products from them.

My personal experience says that the best way is that Ops team shouldn not be repurposed as Developers, rather put the experienced Developers into Production Support (incident management, that's intense Ops, working in shifts and weekends, etc.). And rotate them whenever needed. Over a period of time, you'll invariably see less defects and issues percolating down
from the Devs, and then after both sides are stable and working well together with less friction and open tickets, then some more tech savvy Ops members can be rotated into Development teams as rookie devs to help reduce costs a bit (as there'll invariably be some natural attrition among the Devs and Ops, so this gives an alternative career path to the Ops team (who are usually less paid, and more stressed), and pushes the Devs not to become complacent). Such an approach is doable and productive.
by andrewflnr | 2026-01-17 23:12:43+00:00
I read it as saying that even if you solved the incentive misalignments, you would still have very similar annoying symptoms to what people complain about today. So you have to be careful in looking at any particular annoyance to disentangle which aspects of it are inherent complexity to a large company and which are BS. But I already believed that, so I may be steelmanning the article too much.
by kshri24 | 2026-01-17 23:12:57+00:00
Explained here [1]. We live in a pseudorandom World. So everything is deterministic if you have the same set of input parameters. That includes trees as well.

I am not talking about controllable/uncontrollable variables. That has no bearing on whether a process is deterministic in theory or not. If you can theoretically control all variables (even if you practically cannot), you have a deterministic process as you can reproduce the entire path: from input to output. LLMs are currently a black box. You have no access to the billions of parameters within the model, making it non-deterministic. The day we have tools where we can control all the billions of parameters within the model, then we can retrace the exact path taken, thereby making it deterministic.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46663052
by abujazar | 2026-01-17 23:13:04+00:00
Sure, I've managed both clusters and single node deployments in production until 2025 when I changed jobs. Elastic definitely does have its strengths, but they're increasingly enterprise-oriented and appear not to care a lot about open source deployments. At one point Elastic itself had a severe regression in an irreverible patch update (!?) which took weeks to fix, forcing us to recover from backup and recreate the index. The documentation is or has been ambigious and self-contradicting on a lot of points. The Debian Elastic Enterprise Search package upgrade script was incomplete, so there's a significant manual process for updating the index even for patch updates. The interfaces between the different components of the ELK stack are incoherent and there's literally a thousand ways to configure them. Default setups have changed a lot over the years, leading to incoherent documentation. You really need to be an expert at Elastic in order to run it well – or pay handsomely for the service. It's simply too complicated and costly for what it is, compared to more recent alternatives.
by Quothling | 2026-01-17 23:13:10+00:00
It's probably also because a lot of people sit in rooms which are poorly lit. Part of it is probably because it's really hard to establish proper lighting with modern LEDs. This is anecdotal, but our lamps haven't really changed in the way they are designed, We now have six lamps where we had three before, and there is still "less" light in our living room because LED's create and emit light differently.

I usually work with darkmode at home, and light mode in the office because our office is basically the surface of the sun.
by roenxi | 2026-01-17 23:13:15+00:00
There was presumably a lot of money and status on the line, so I'm sure had he realised what was coming he'd have been happy to learn enough logical notation to express !(It's OK To Be White) && !(It's !OK To Be White). If anyone figured out what positive statement he had to say he'd probably have said that too. The man was notable for his philosophical rejection of shame.
by 827a | 2026-01-17 23:13:47+00:00
There is no secondary reserve currency the world can look to. The world is becoming increasingly hostile and unstable, and no one is in this position, or seems fit to serve this position, in the next twenty years. Its also the case that the US still has a goal of maintaining low inflation, and I think its likely we would pursue austerity on benefits before we would intentionally succumb to higher levels of inflation (as we already have).

Or, you grow the pie. Look to history to learn how empires of the past grew their pies.
by RicoElectrico | 2026-01-17 23:14:00+00:00
Now, here are two interesting bits:

1) They seem to change sender e-mails frequently

2) There's this "thing" in the HTML source. Maybe it's to trip up the filter and cause a fail-safe?

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by hattmall | 2026-01-17 23:14:19+00:00
> I don’t know of any restaurants that previously had delivery of their own and switched.

>Only a small percent of restaurants delivered in the first place outside of the ones like pizza that still do.

Where I live about half of the non-chain restaurants offered delivery service. In addition to places like Domino's. Now, it's only Domino's and Jimmy Johns that have delivery of their own. I've talked to multiple owners / managers that complained how DoorDash and maybe Uber eats literally listed phone numbers under their name and paid for top ad spots and middle manned call in orders using their own drivers. So much so to the point that staffing for drivers wasn't feasible.
by GiorgioG | 2026-01-17 23:15:31+00:00
In my experience DevOps has little interest in doing actual DevOps - they just want to run ops. They want to advise (or tell us we’re holding it wrong) but not actually get their hands dirty. On the flip side, devs don’t want to spend a ton of time learning k8s or how to manage servers, cloud services, etc.

DevOps is a mess of our own making - embracing K8s created complexity for little gain for nearly all companies.
by card_zero | 2026-01-17 23:15:38+00:00
Meh. I used to think that in about 1996. Sea levels weren't rising, environmentalists were (and some continue to be) alarmist media-whoring ideologues whose ideal solution is for us all to make ourselves very small and just live less. But these days I'm persuaded global warming is happening. I'm not sure why I was persuaded but I guess mainly because it got hotter.
by koolba | 2026-01-17 23:15:48+00:00
> The problem with "let the parents decide" is that if all other kids in the neighborhood have phones and are on social media then unless you want your kid to grow up with no friends you don't have a choice but to let your kid also use social media.

This is why you find a circle of friends and like mind neighbors who raise their kids in a manner that makes you comfortable. It’s never 1:1, but it doesn’t have to be you against the entire world either. (Though it can certainly feel like that at times)
by austin-cheney | 2026-01-17 23:15:58+00:00
My take on college:

* Don’t stop at just a bachelors degree. Get a masters.

* Don’t bother with a computer science degree. A person that is smart enough can teach themselves to write code. Instead focus on an educational subject of greater learning.

* Be choosy with your school focusing on quality of education in your subject area and not the prestige of name unless you have money to burn and are just there to buy future friends.

Yes, college was absolutely worth it, but then I went to a very inexpensive school.
by iLoveOncall | 2026-01-17 23:16:57+00:00
This is obviously the case, and I don't understand why anybody falls even a second for "it's for the children".

They don't give a flying fuck about the children, they want to have total control over the citizens because all westerns countries are more or less slowly slipping towards authoritarianism.

Dictatorships in 21st century first world country will be impossible to topple, once the government can reliably link your ID to your online activity, you'll be arrested before you even know you'll commit an anti-governmental act.
by alexjplant | 2026-01-17 23:17:04+00:00
> being an enterprise dev in a tier 2 city.

Tangential to the question, but this is me and one of my top three regrets in life is not having been a founding engineer. For people without generational wealth or a safety net it takes a particular combination of executive function and youthful ignorance of the opportunity cost (a steady paycheck and obvious career trajectory) to be a founder. As soon as I grew enough of the former the latter evaporated as I realized how close I'd come to financial ruin and how I didn't want to ever again.

OP, if you're even thinking about it, you should just do it before wisdom sets in and you know better. Or maybe I'm romanticizing the startup experience too much - anybody with actual expertise care to comment?
by jleyank | 2026-01-17 23:17:13+00:00
If, however, you consider the academic model, the senior people DO have expertise and experience to solve the problems. In ST, the stale/old knowledge of the bosses probably leads them to asking the computer the correct question. If it's an engineering (ie, known) solution, that might be sufficient. Otherwise, they work with the computer which knows more than the aggregate department I guess.
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-01-17 23:17:22+00:00
I have a few 1099 MBA advisors that I call Chief of Staff. I check my questions against what they think. When you get 3 MBAs with engineering, finance, or CS degrees agreeing independently, it bumps up confidence.

I think this is a case where this helps considerably. Its essentially the 'consulting' thing for small businesses.
by qball | 2026-01-17 23:17:53+00:00
No.

The reason Light Mode has been getting lighter is simple: because the default computer in 2025 is now a laptop or phone, whereas in 2009 it was a desktop.

Laptops and phones have easy and relatively coarse brightness adjustment settings for their screens. Desktops didn't, and still don't.

So it makes sense that you'd just make whites as bright as possible- if the user doesn't like that, they can just turn the brightness down. Otherwise you're just kind of leaving the monitor's available/potential contrast on the table.

Note that Dark Modes skyrocketed in popularity after the default computer changed from being a desktop to a laptop- but that's because laptop and phone screens couldn't (and still can't) get dim enough at night (for dark colors are still bright due to inherent backlight bleed-through).

The next change to this trend will occur, specifically to Dark Mode, 1-2 years after the average machine a software designer is issued for work has an OLED screen- because OLED screens actually can get that dim, the current color balance will likely be inappropriate.
by vee-kay | 2026-01-17 23:18:37+00:00
Millions of years of evolution has resulted in the human brain being the best way to store information.

I doubt we humans will be able to do better (faster, more capacity, more analytical, more intuitive, more logical) storage (at an individual level, not at mass scale, since that's kinda achieved already by the behemoths like Google, etc.) in a few thousand years of civilization.

Quantum computing may be the game changer though.

I read somewhere that the entirety of humanity's information, including all knowledge and data of past (of every human ever) and current, if stored via quantum computing - that quanta of quantum information will just be the size of a football.
by fumi2026 | 2026-01-17 23:18:49+00:00
I’d gladly pay $100 for a compiler if it meant my life's work wasn't strip-mined for $0 by the companies providing the 'free' tools.
A free pen is no consolation for the theft of the novel written with it. You're mistaking a reduction in overhead for a gift of sovereignty. Enjoy the free birdseed; I'd rather own the sky.
by beej71 | 2026-01-17 23:19:49+00:00
Only my own two eyes and my own learning experience. The fact is students will use LLMs no matter what you say. So any blanket "it's bad/good" results are not actionable.

But if you told me every student got access to a 1-on-1 tutor, I'd say that was a win (and there are studies to back that up). And that's one thing LLMs can do.

Of course, just asking your tutor to do the work for you is incredibly harmful. And that's something LLMs can do, as well.

Would you like to have someone 24-7 who can give you a code review? Now you can. Hell yeah, that's beneficial.

How about when you're stuck on a coding problem for 30 minutes and you want a hint? You already did a bunch of hard work and it's time to get unstuck.

LLMs can be great. They can also be horrible. The last thing I wrote in Rust I could have learned nothing by using LLMs. It would have take me a lot less time to get the program written! But that's not what I did. I painstakingly used it to explore all the avenues I did not understand and I gained a huge amount of knowledge writing my little 350 line program.
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-01-17 23:19:50+00:00
If you want me to ruin this for you, look up Bertrand's Paradox and The Problem Of Priors.

I recently had to deal with this, ugh, I just pick a prior or two and see what the outcome looks like. I'm not sure we can calculate probability of success, but rather use probability to find losing ideas that should never be done.
by aabajian | 2026-01-17 23:20:08+00:00
AI is making us face the reality of non-physical goods and services. If a product exists solely as data (writing, music, code, drawings, movies, etc.) then the value is in the idea and its distribution, and less on its production.

I'll give some examples:

Novel algorithms: PageRank, BitTorrent, Like buttons, disappearing pictures, etc.

Artistic styles: Cubism, impressionism, Wes Anderson, etc.

The above algorithms are (relatively) straightforward to implement and could be implemented by Claude Code in a matter of hours if not minutes. But, you'd still need a means to distribute them.

Similarly, you can have AI generate an image in any of the above styles (or a combination thereof), but the image won't have intrinsic value unless you can finds a means of (profitable) distribution.

Put another way, there's limited value in being able to master physical tasks (playing piano, typing fast), but fundamental skills that lead to creative innovation will remain important...along with being able to package/market/distribute the AI-implementation of your ideas.
by sandworm101 | 2026-01-17 23:20:37+00:00
There is a Dilbert takeaway i use at work today: the only thing an employee really wants is more money for the same work/pain, or less work/pain for the same money. I dont do trinkets and titles. My people get as much time off as i can provide, and i will sign most anything that means they get paid a little more.
by ravenstine | 2026-01-17 23:20:53+00:00
I recently was convinced by colleagues to try Cursor at work for project planning. At first I was excited for something even better than Copilot Chat, but then I quickly realized it's just a shitty VS Code fork with maybe a few improvements that are by no means a moat for that company. Worse yet, it makes lots of bizarre mistakes, deletes lines for no good reason, and sometimes even deletes the entire project plan. The scroll on the chat history gets laggy very quickly, and I've found the whole program to be glitchy as hell.

The hype around Cursor is unreal. My suspicion is this company is little more than a parasite with no qualms about getting you to waste your tokens. It's one thing when a product is new, but Cursor has been around since 2023 I guess? The quality of their software is unacceptable.
by bmitch3020 | 2026-01-17 23:22:13+00:00
DevOps only failed in that so many don't know what it is.

DevOps isn't a tool, but there are lots of tools that make it easier to implement.

DevOps isn't how management can eliminate half the org and have one person do two roles, specialization is still valuable.

DevOps isn't an organization structure, though the wrong org structure can make it fail.

DevOps is collaboration. It's getting two distinct roles to better interoperate. The dev team that wants to push features fast. And the ops team that wants stability and uptime.

From the management side, if you aren't focused on building teams that work well together, eliminating conflicts, rewarding the team collectively for features and uptime, and giving them the resources to deliver, that's not a DevOps failure, that's a management failure.
by al_borland | 2026-01-17 23:22:39+00:00
Your team might be an anomaly. I get the sense that dark mode people are a vocal minority. I see people share their screen constantly at work and I can probably count on one hand the number of people I’ve seen with dark mode. Actually, I can only recall 2, and one of them was an intern from 10+ years ago.

If the majority was using dark mode, I’d imagine we’d see operating systems show dark mode as their default screenshots and ship as the default. We don’t see that.

When I’ve tried dark mode I had a big issue when the contrast. Everything became harder to discern, which I found more difficult for my eyes.
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-01-17 23:22:43+00:00
While I am quite laissez-faire and not sure how much I care about this particular issue, I have seen this mentality on teaching. "Its the parents fault the kids can't read in college."

No... They spent 13 years in government school, that is not the parents fault if they can't read. If we assume its the parents job to educate their kids, there will be some 1-5% of kids that fall through the cracks, damning millions of kids to failure.

For policy that we care about, it is not good enough to have parents decide.
by tadfisher | 2026-01-17 23:22:54+00:00
I hate this paradigm because it pits me against my tools as if we're adversaries. The tools are prone to rewrite or even delete the tests, so we have to write other tools to sandbox agents from each other and check each others' work, and I just don't see a way to get deterministically good results over just building shit myself. It comes down to needing high trust in my tools to feel confident in what we're shipping.
by heyjamesknight | 2026-01-17 23:24:07+00:00
No, I have the feeling that “feeling safe” is “unhealthy” because these online communities children get access to are full of predators who wish them harm.

The online communities in question do more damage than good. They encourage isolation and spread social contagion.

We should do more as a society, absolutely! But these places are not “stop gaps” because they’re NOT helping.
by ninkendo | 2026-01-17 23:24:32+00:00
Yeah, or something even smarter than that.

If you are willing to go language-specific, the tooling can be incredibly rich if you go through the effort. I’ve written some rust compiler drivers for domain-specific use cases, and you can hook into phases of the compiler where you have amazingly detailed context about every symbol in the code. All manner of type metadata, locations where values are dropped, everything is annotated with spans of source locations too. It seems like a worthy effort to index all of it and make it available behind a standard query interface the LLM can use. You can even write code this way, I think rustfmt hooks into the same pipeline to produce formatted code.

I’ve always wished there were richer tools available to do what my IDE already does, but without needing to use the UI. Make it a standard API or even just CLI, and free it from the dependency on my IDE. It’d be very worth looking into I think.
by suspended_state | 2026-01-17 23:25:03+00:00
So you were criticizing the C language syntax, without considering the context which it was designed in.

Just to give this context a little bit more substance, Pascal was designed to work on a mainframe which could address up to 4MB of RAM, with a typical setup of around 1MB (it's actually not the real amounts: the CDC-6600 the values are 128Kwords, but it had 60 bits word). These machine were beasts designed for scientific computation.

The first C compiler was implemented on a PDP-11, which could handle up to 64KB of RAM, and had 16bits words.

I assume that these constraints had a heavy influence on how each language was designed and implemented.

Note that I wasn't aware of all these details before writing this comment, I had to check.

See: http://pascal.hansotten.com/niklaus-wirth/zurich-pascal-comp...

Regarding the C compiler, it is likely that the first version was written in assembly language, which was later "translated" to C.

An early version of the compiler can be found there: https://github.com/theunafraid/first_c_compiler and does look like assembly hand converted to (early) C.
by johnea | 2026-01-17 23:25:14+00:00
I agree, HN is the only place I make comments on the WWW.

The only gripe I have is that a certain segment of the community feels compelled to flag comments on topics that don't align with their personal vision of what HN should be.

If there's a topic I'm not interested in, I just ignore it. I don't feel compelled to block other people from having a discussion they are interested in.
by antonymoose | 2026-01-17 23:25:32+00:00
That’s an incredibly low rate for the breadth and depth of work here. I, a homeowner, can do all of this work with no permitting involved and no certification. Were I to hire out to a GC he’s going to sub out to a plumber and electrician at a minimum. Probably also a drywall+paint crew. Maybe they’ll handle trim and flooring? Who knows!

My in-laws, a cost conscious couple, recently had a bathroom remodel. Nothing fancy or Gucci about it. Materials could not have been any more than 10k and reasonably closer to 5k - it was 45k total for the entire job.

I can’t give you an exact man-hours count but it was less than 40 hours of real-time but with 2 or 3 man crews. Let’s ballpark and say 100 man hours.

So you want to gut and finish a basement? That’s far worse than 10k more in my state of South Carolina.