MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by the_af | 2026-01-24 16:09:58+00:00
I don't know that it's the reality of engineering. (Edit: in fact there are some comments for this post providing counterexamples, an interesting one is the hardware world).

It's what we software engineers like to tell ourselves because it cuts us slack and shifts the blame to others for budget and time overruns. But maybe it's also our fault and we can do better?

And the usual argument of "it's not like physical engineering, software is about always building something new" because that's only true for a minority of projects. Most projects that fail or overrun their limits are pretty vanilla, minor variations of existing stuff. Sometimes just deploying a packaged software with minor tweaks for your company (and you must know this often tends to fail or overrun deadlines, amazingly).

I know another "engineering" area where overruns are unacceptable to me and I don't cut people slack (in the sense it's me who complains): home building/renovation contractors. I know I'm infuriated whenever they pull deadlines out of their asses, and then never meet them for no clear reason. I know I'm upset when they stumble over the slightest setbacks, and they always fail to plan for them (e.g. "we didn't expect this pipe to run through here", even though they've done countless renovations... everything is always a surprise to them). I know I'm infuriated when they adopt the attitude of "it'll be done when it's done" (though usually they simply lie about upfront deadlines/budgets).

Maybe that's how others see us from outside software engineering. We always blame others, we never give realistic deadlines, we always act surprised with setbacks.
by andsoitis | 2026-01-24 16:10:06+00:00
> late birthday recognition.

if someone is going to feel slighted and similar things add up to them working less, they probably are not a great colleague to begin with.

What matters more are: assignment to rewarding work, get paid top dollar, not be bored, get recognition for success, coaching on career growth, given leeway to make mistakes, not overlooked for promotion, etc.

Now, as a people manager, if you're not steering those kinds of things, you are not a great manager and you should be replaced with someone who does those things.
by B1FIDO | 2026-01-24 16:10:34+00:00
Since World War II, the U.S. has mostly been fighting asymmetric warfare against insurgents and guerillas. This has caused a paradigm shift in our armed forces, to be more prepared for these types of conflicts, for street-to-street fighting as in Fallujah, and wary of threats like IEDs and suicide bombers.

Perhaps our pivoting has left them less prepared to fight conventional warfare on open battlefields against symmetric adversaries? I don't know.
by refulgentis | 2026-01-24 16:10:40+00:00
What arrogance?
Is hyperbole a literary device, or genre?
What’s the difference between hyperbole and making stuff up?
When is it okay to say it’s making stuff up, when it could just be hyperbole? How is “you said it works for you but I say doesn’t work for me, trumped!” calling out arrogance?
by jraph | 2026-01-24 16:11:13+00:00
HTML is perfectly able to do what it was designed for: mark up documents.

There still needs to be something like HTML even when you have PHP: PHP is something you run on the server and it still needs to output something to the client in some format, and HTML is adequate for this.

The heck we are doing with HTML is taking it for building client apps. But even then, you now have UI toolkits that mimic this model: QML, whatever XML format Android has to design UIs, etc.
by dmurray | 2026-01-24 16:11:42+00:00
They could start by observing the rate at which birthday cards are delivered on time, and not vary too much from that.

I suppose the impact on productivity isn't known in advance, and it might be that failing to receive a birthday card from a normally diligent manager costs the company more in productivity than it gains from a sloppy manager unexpectedly giving one on time.
by dbshapco | 2026-01-24 16:12:34+00:00
When I was in university I took a lot of courses in management science, which is basically a lot of applied psychology, and learned a lot of stuff like this.

Then I went out into industry and watched as all these principles about managing employees effectively were ignored, or at best received lip service.

It led me to the conclusion that actually effectively managing employees to motivate better performance wasn't a priority. Not in the top ten anyway.

Most corporations and therefore managers operate using resource extraction principles. How do I extract maximum labour from this resource at lowest cost?

The 'R' in HR always bothered me, and others judging by the companies that used nomenclature like 'talent' or 'people'.

However that was whitewash. Underneath the nomenclature resource extraction continued unimpeded.

The irony being that treating people like resources is counterproductive and hurts performance.

Companies extracted the illusion of more resources, more hours, while productivity largely plateaued or decreased.

Somehow corporations expected to hire smart people, smart enough to do an intellectually challenging and technical job, and not have them do the math that the additional pay for performance generally amortized lower than the hourly rate, and that by doing more employees were actually lowering their effective hourly rate -- i.e. discounting labour for the employer.

The wag in me would observe the reason companies were so eager to portray everyone as family is that's the only model where this is marginally acceptable. Family taking advantage of family, like a family farm. Working more hours to get paid less certainly doesn't work as a business model for the employees. They'd be better off with a second salaried job -- and there were apocryphal stories about employees doing actually that, hanging up a coat on the door hook, throwing a newspaper on their desk, then leaving to go to their other job.

This is all observational and anecdotal however, but over a three decade career with a dozen plus companies, some of them Fortune N (where 20 <= N <= 500) in both contractor, IC, senior leadership and C-level roles.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-24 16:12:49+00:00
> Security aficionados pushing non-recoverable traps on people are plain disconnected from reality.

To be fair, if you inadvertently get locked out of your Google account "tough luck, should have used a different provider" and Gmail is a household name so ...

Less snarky, I think that there's absolutely nothing wrong with key escrow (either as a recovery avenue or otherwise) so long as it's opt in and the tradeoffs are made abundantly clear up front. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the route MS went.
by eqvinox | 2026-01-24 16:13:01+00:00
> This isn’t about a strategy for some random tier 2/3 ISP.

That's not a constraint you mentioned in your original post.

> Ok. 5 minutes. The point is clearly there’s route changes happening globally already. It should not be that much extra work to add like 10% more route changes […]

I see you haven't had to deal with the operational reality of devices handling things they weren't quite designed for, and/or have been overdue for replacement, and/or were just designed to the limit to begin with. Good for you. But your solution would affect the entire internet.

If you're serious, you could try posting your suggestion to the NANOG or RIPE mailing lists. At the very least you'll probably learn a whole new set of expletives and curses… but I'd recommend against it.
by at1as | 2026-01-24 16:13:40+00:00
You're conflating several things.

Tech nostalgia is driven, in part, by a lack of excitement about what current companies are offering. It wasn't really present when we were all excited about Apple, etc.

That nostalgia signals there's a market for alternatives, which we've seen some companies serve, and expect others to enter. This will provide us with more choices apart from "Apple" vs. "Google" end-to-end ecosystems.

Tech is also fun because we have some new categories for the first time, perhaps since mobile. VR isn't popular per se, but I consider it mature. Ray Ban Metas are also a new category (consider an emerging AR application — or more of a glorified camera device, for now). A first person point of view for videos is very different than what's captured by a smartphone; I feel like I'm "there" when I watch travel videos I've taken with them, much more than when I watch what's taken with my phone.

The only personal statement I'm making is that tech seems primed to be fun again (though we probably have to anchor our expectations around a local maxima)
by delbronski | 2026-01-24 16:14:04+00:00
How does one go about deployment and backups with a local db? Like let’s say I have a web app hosted on a cloud service like App Engine or Elastic… if I redeploy my web app how do I make sure my current local db does not get get wiped? How are periodic backups handled?

I can think of many hacks to do this, but is there a best practice for this kind of stuff? I’m curious how people do this.
by mionhe | 2026-01-24 16:14:07+00:00
Meta: down votes here prove no such thing. If you are downvoted it's because you read the article that had nothing to do with politics, the comment on a vision of heaven and hell that had nothing to do with politics, and then you made it about something that is very politicized in the US.

Both the article and comment you commented on eschewed a trite political message and tried to say something real and human.
by secretsatan | 2026-01-24 16:14:10+00:00
A very niche one from me as a developer.

Apple frameworks for exif editing do strange thing, and exif is altered even if you never touch it.

In particular for me, the gps location cannot be written at the full accuracy allowed, and overwrites accurate data.

For the location, exif allows 3 rationals, for degrees, minutes and seconds, but apple ignores the seconds.
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-24 16:14:16+00:00
(1) It's a problem if you have 2 or 3 (never mind N where N is large) different web pages that have the same stuff at the top of the bottom. I mean you can have

<?php include("header.php") ?>
... body ...
<?php include("footer.php") ?>

but...

(2) ... in either case it is just as easy to write

<?php
... some "router" that tests $_GET, ... to set $body_file ...
include("header.php");
include($body_file)
include("footer.php");
?>

where you have the option of putting headers on before you include header.php, showing a different header
or footer conditional, etc. This approach is structurally stable and scales with the complexity of your
application no matter what you're doing...

(3) ... for instance say you want to write a page that might return a different format depending on the headers, the router can return JSON if that is called for, or XML if that is called for, or HTML inside the site's global template if that is called for.
by andsoitis | 2026-01-24 16:14:44+00:00
> "Here's the irony," Sir Nick said. In the battle between "the world's great autocracy" and "the world's greatest democracy" - China and America - China is "doing more to democratise the technology they're competing over".
> The Stanford report also suggested China's success in developing open-source models could be partly explained by government support.

Is that really rigorous analysis? Isn't the US government investing a shit ton in enabling a wide range of AI business models? Energy, regulatory, adoption, etc. I don't buy the thesis of the article.
by 46493168 | 2026-01-24 16:15:10+00:00
This kind of work is important because it's an attempt to make computers understand the real world. LLM/GenAI do not understand the real world, and the more we run up against their limitations, the more the people and systems who depend on them will try to make the world more understandable to LLMs/GenAI. This means modifying your behavior so that you are more like a machine. LeCun is trying to make machines more human.
by t-3 | 2026-01-24 16:16:10+00:00
As an American, I would be totally creeped out if a manager even knew my birthday, let alone gave me a card.

When I've seen people feel slighted in the workplace, it's usually due to uneven praise or criticism, or discriminatory stuff like passing over all the black workers with years of experience to promote the one white guy who's been there for 6 months.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-01-24 16:16:15+00:00
> so if a warrant can be issued in that case compelling a locksmith to open it, then by analogy it can be issued against an encrypted device.

But it isn't a warrant, it's a subpoena. Also, the locksmith isn't the one compelled to open it; if the government wants someone to do that they have to pay them.

> Any written constitution is just a snapshot of a social contract at a particular historical time and technological development point, so it cannot serve as the ultimate source of truth regarding individual rights - the contract is renegotiated constantly through political means.

The Fourth Amendment was enacted in 1791. A process to change it exists, implying that the people could change it if they wanted to, but sometimes they get it pretty right to begin with. And then who are these asshats craving access to everyone's "papers and effects" without a warrant?
by io_eric | 2026-01-24 16:17:05+00:00
Possible in theory, but a Vue→Coi transpiler would be complex given the different reactivity models and syntax.

Most practical approach: AI-assisted conversion. Feed an LLM the Coi docs + your Vue code and let it transform components. For migrating existing codebases, that's likely the most efficient path.

For new code, writing Coi directly is simpler :)
by NegativeK | 2026-01-24 16:17:28+00:00
Would a general person in your situation know that it's doing criminal things? If not, then you're not on the hook - the person who wrote the secret code is.

You can't sit back and go "lalalala" to some tool (AI, photo software, whatever) doing illegal things when you know about it. But you also aren't on the hook for someone else's secret actions that are unreasonable for you to know about.

IANAL.
by atq2119 | 2026-01-24 16:17:30+00:00
Having used Claude Code in anger for a while now, I agree that given the state of these agents, we can't stop writing code by hand. They're just not good enough.

But that also doesn't mean they're useless. Giving comparatively tedious background tasks to the agents that I check in on once or twice an hour does feel genuinely useful to me today.

There's a balance to be found that's probably going to shift slowly over time.
by moregrist | 2026-01-24 16:17:45+00:00
Sure, for roofing jobs or other large repairs, that’s true. But for remodeling it’s pretty different.

When I’ve engaged with a contractor for remodeling, I usually have some vague idea like “we should do something about this porch and deck and we’d like it to look nice.”

The contractor then talks to you about _requirements_, _options_, and _costs_. They then charges for architectural plans and the option to proceed with a budget and rough timeline.

Then they discover problems (perhaps “legacy construction”) and the scope creeps a bit.

And often the timeline slips by weeks or months for no discernible reason.

Which sounds exactly like a lot of software projects. But half of your house is torn up so you can’t easily cut scope.
by brookst | 2026-01-24 16:17:52+00:00
Principal engineers! We need architecture! Marketing team, we need ads with celebrities! Product team, we need a roadmap to build on this for the next year! ML experts, get this into the training and RL sets! Finance folks, get me annual forecasts and ROI against WACCC! Ops, we’ll need 24/7 coverage and a guarantee of five nines. Procurement, lock down contracts. Alright everyone… make this button red!
by buildbot | 2026-01-24 16:17:56+00:00
FYI if I get hit by someone and I find out they are using comma, everyone’s is getting a lawsuit.

Is there a hard safety check for an insane steering angle? Full brake or throttle? ECC error? What happens!? That’s what a safety standard checks and certifies for.

Incredibly dangerous, irresponsible, and illegal to be using this around other people. At least Tesla vaguely pretends to work with regulators. The cute download your own firmware so they aren’t shipping an illegal device? Encouraging hands off, inattentive driving? Let’s see how civil court sees that.
by jbgreer | 2026-01-24 16:18:41+00:00
My read on the reception of Steve’s post is that there are largely 2 camps, one of which thinks he’s given them a concrete tool to use, and the other of which thinks he has given them something to think about. I read his experiment as suggesting an agent architecture akin to Erlang supervisor trees, i.e. agents are cattle, not pets, and should be monitored and processed as such, with the obvious caveat that context matters.
by grayhatter | 2026-01-24 16:18:42+00:00
If the author fundamentally misunderstands the social and technical implications around the topic. Then yes, it's good that all the comments are correcting the misunderstandings of the post.

The blog post makes a lot of arguments, that sound like they might be good. Only until you try to apply them to reality, when they fail. So yes, it's a good thing that examples that would encourage the debate to shift from critiques of the faulty arguments, to heated exchanges over internet drama requiring popcorn.
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-01-24 16:19:27+00:00
This is somewhat a variant of the cooperate situation in the prisoners dilemma.

I find it interesting to dress it up in religion, because the optimal situation is to defect, and if everyone knows the game, you get a worse outcome. Religion can cause people to be selfless and you get a better outcome for most people.

I've always thought to teach people religion, but defect yourself. In a modern secular world, teach everyone ascetic stoicism. Myself, follow some sort of Machiavellian/Nietzsche/hedonism.
by felixbecker | 2026-01-24 16:19:34+00:00
Contrary to what most devs belief: Most code is not shipped to hundreds of millions of users and passing the test and actually implementing a feature is worth more that drowning in backlog.

The video is spot on for codebases of products that are critical systems: payment, erp etc -> single source of truth.

Simple Crud apps/ Frontends for ecom that abstracted away the critical functionality to backend APIs (ERP, shop system, payment etc) benefit from vibe slop vs no shipping cadence
by at1as | 2026-01-24 16:19:51+00:00
The internet is a marketplace of ideas.

Engage with or amplify content you agree with. Create content of your own that represents your values or ideas. If you want, try to persuade others where you think they're wrong.

Overall, if you can feel good about what you've put out there, that's enough. You'll field comments like this no matter what it is.
by Intermernet | 2026-01-24 16:19:55+00:00
This is a bit tricky as it couples the user's password with the disk encryption key. If a user changes the password they would then need to change the encryption key, or remember the previous (possibly compromised) password. A better option is to force the user to record a complex hash, but that's never going to be user friendly when it comes to the average computer user.

Basically, we need better education about the issue, but as this is the case with almost every contentious issue in the world right now, I can't imagine this particular issue will bubble to the top of the awareness heap.
by indigodaddy | 2026-01-24 16:20:10+00:00
Hi, so I'm looking for an stt that can happen on a server/cron, that will use a small local model (I have 4 vCPU threadripper CPU only and 20G ram on the server) and be able to transcribe from remote audio URLs (preferably, but I know that local models probably don't have this feature so will have to do something like curl the audio down to memory or /tmp and then transcribe and then remove the file etc).

Have any thoughts?
by exegete | 2026-01-24 16:20:44+00:00
I think the points about code ownership and responsibility are spot on. Management wants you to increase velocity with these agents so inevitably there is pressure to ship crappy code. You then will be responsible for the code, not the AI. It’s the idea of being a reverse centaur.

I also like the comments on how developers should be frequently reading the entire code and not just the diffs. But again there is probably pressure to speed up and then that practice gets sacrificed.
by B1FIDO | 2026-01-24 16:20:48+00:00
I wouldn't call the problem "solved" just because of password managers.

Password managers shift the paradigm and the risk factors. In terms of MFA, a password in your manager is now "something you have" rather than "something you know". The only password I know nowadays is my sign-in password that unlocks the password manager's vault. So the passwords to my bank, my health care, my video games are no longer "in my fingers" or in my head anymore, they're unknown to me!

So vault management becomes the issue rather than password management. If passwords are now "something you have" then it becomes possible to lose them. For example, if my home burns down and I show up in a public library with nothing but the clothes on my back, how do I sign into my online accounts? If the passwords were in my fingers, I could do this. But if they require my smartphone to be operational and charged and having network access, and also require passwords I don't know anymore, I'm really screwed at that library. It'd be nearly impossible for me to sign back in.

So in the days of MFA and password managers, now we need to manage the vaults, whether they're in the cloud or in local storage, and we also need to print out recovery codes on paper and store them securely somewhere physical that we can access them after a catastrophe. This is an increase in complexity.

So I contend that password managers, and their cousins the nearly-ubiquitous passkeys, are the main driving factor in people's forgetting their passwords and forgetting how to sign-in now, without relying on an app to do it for them. And that is a decrease in opsec for consumers.
by saghm | 2026-01-24 16:20:49+00:00
> For instance, many engineering teams estimate work in t-shirt sizes instead of time, because it just feels too obviously silly to the engineers in question to give direct time estimates. Naturally, these t-shirt sizes are immediately translated into hours and days when the estimates make their way up the management chain.

I've worked on multiple teams at completely different companies years apart that had the same weird rules around "story points" for JIRA: Fibbonacci numbers only, but also anything higher than 5 needs to be broken into subtasks. In practice, this just means, 1-5, except not 4. I have never been able to figure out why anyone thought this actually made any practical sense, or whether this apparently is either common enough to have been picked up by both teams or if I managed to somehow encounter two parallel instances of these rules developing organically.
by mlinhares | 2026-01-24 16:21:43+00:00
While I greatly dislike the hype and don't believe most of what people say is real or that whatever they're building is just bullshi, I can definitely see the improvement of productivity, specially when working with agents.

I think the problem is that people:

* see the hype;

* try to replicate the hype;

* it fails miserably;

* they throw everything away;

I'm on call this week on my job, one of the issues was adding a quick validation (verifying the length of a thing was exactly 15). I could have sat and done that but I just spun an agent, told it where it was, told it how to add the change (we always add feature flags to do that), read the code, prompted it to fix a thing and boom, PR is ready. I wrote 3 paragraphs, didn't have to sit and wait for CI or any of the other bullshit to get it done, focused on more important stuff but still got the fix out.

Don't believe the hype but also don't completely discount the tools, they are incredible help and while they will not boost your productivity by 500%, they're amazing.