MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How much emphasis to put on unit testing and when?
by theturtlemoves | 2026-01-27 06:56:46+00:00
I'm wondering if a shift has occurred. When I started as a junior software engineer, over a decade ago, I learned about unit testing, integration testing, system testing. The whole codebase we worked on was thoroughly unit tested, and had layers of integration tests and system tests as well. I've worked for other employers since and in some cases any kind of automated testing was completely absent. Still, the message I got when reading and keeping up with best practices was: unit test ALL the things!

I've personally found that when the architecture of the system is not mature yet, unit tests can get in the way. Terribly so. Integration tests or system tests to assert behavior seem the starting point in this and other scenario's, including when there are no tests at all yet.

I've recently read a statement about letting go of a strict "unit test everything" mindset and go for integration tests instead. I'm thinking it probably depends, as with everything, on the type of system you're working on, the maturity of the system, the engineers' experience with automated testing, etc.

I'd be interested to learn when each type of testing helps you and when it gets in the way (and what it gets in the way of).
by b33j0r | 2026-01-27 06:58:32+00:00
I think of it more like moving from sole developer to a small team lead. Which I have experienced in my career a few times.

I still write my code in all the places I care about, but I don’t get stuck on “looking up how to enable websockets when creating the listener before I even pass anything to hyper.”

I do not care to spend hours or days to know that API detail from personal pain, because it is hyper-specific, in both senses of hyper-specific.

(For posterity, it’s `with_upgrades`… thanks chatgpt circa 12 months ago!)
by JasonADrury | 2026-01-27 06:58:46+00:00
I assume you can read Spanish, I don't think the link to the court order leaves any room for interpretation.

LIGA NACIONAL DE FÚTBOL PROFESIONAL y TELEFÓNICA AUDIOVISUAL DIGITAL S.L.U filed the lawsuit against Vodafone España S.A.U, Vodafone ONO S.A.U, MASORANGE Orange Espagne S.A.U, DIGI SPAIN TELECOM S.L.U, TELEFÓNICA ESPAÑA S.A.U and TELEFÓNICA MÓVILES ESPAÑA S.A.U.

> A judge could ask every ISP to do so, but they don't

You are getting this wrong. The judge isn't acting on their on initiative here, but because La Liga (together with Movistar+) sued the biggest ISPs in Spain.

They didn't bother suing the smaller ISPs, probably because co-ordinating the blocking with them isn't worth the hassle.

>3. Not true, please don't FUD. In Spain is extremely rare to be killed by the police, even resisting, unless you threat them with a gun for example. And there are more cases with guns or knifes that are peacefully defused, than "executions on the spot". I don't know what are your intentions lying like that, but they don't look good.

You're failing to understand that this is the implicit threat that accompanies most court orders anywhere.

1) If you refuse to comply, you will be locked in a small room for an indefinite period

2) If you continue to actively resist, increasing amounts of force will be used to force your compliance.

3) If you still continue to resist, you will be summarily executed.
by mikkupikku | 2026-01-27 06:59:17+00:00
Doctors are the primary and most numerous beneficiary of the American status quo. And have you seen the houses they live in? In 99% of America, doctors live in the nicest biggest houses there are in town. What's more, doctors are politically and socially untouchable. Even saying what I've said will probably have people itching to respond that doctors earned their huge salaries, that medical bankruptcies are completely unrelated, that doctors actually have little political power, that some doctoring organization has released some feel-good vague statements about fixing the system (but nonetheless not actually financially backed the candidates that might fix it), etc. How doctors are actually the victims and it's all the insurance companies, even though doctors have way more political and social sway than insurance corps. How doctors are the victims of the executive leadership of hospitals, even though those executives are usually MDs as well..

How can the problem be fixed if we don't even talk about it?
by 7e | 2026-01-27 06:59:30+00:00
It's obvious. The harder you make it to down or hijack a plane, the fewer downed planes you will see. It didn't have to be perfect to prevent and deter. Some security is better than no security. If you had no security at all you would see planes go down all the time.

And it wouldn't surprise me if some of the detection technology were classified.

It would not be "great" if governments were more open about their detection capabilities; that would cause more terrorism attempts and is one of the stupidest things one could do here.
by breppp | 2026-01-27 06:59:41+00:00
most of airport security rests on the notion of going over a series of long tests will elicit unusual (fear, stress) responses from malicious actors and these can then be flagged for even thorougher checks which will then eventually lead to discovery, banning or removal of luggage

so it's not the test accuracy by itself but rather then the fact that these tests are happening at all
by ssl-3 | 2026-01-27 06:59:43+00:00
The grunts working for TSA on the floor at airports aren't desperately clinging for the notion that they're doing something important, or working towards some lofty, noble, and/or altruistic goal.

It's just a job.

They're principally motivated to do this job by the promise of a steady paycheck and decent benefits -- the same motivation that most other people with steady paychecks and decent benefits also have.
by dakshgupta | 2026-01-27 07:00:15+00:00
The signal-to-noise ratio problem is unexpectedly difficult.

We wrote about our approach to it some time ago here - https://www.greptile.com/blog/make-llms-shut-up

Much has changed on our approach since then, so we'll probably write a a new blog post.

The tl;dr of what makes it hard is
- different people have different ideas of what a nitpick is
- it's not a spectrum, the differences are qualitative
- LLMs are reluctant to risk downplaying the severity of an issue and therefore are unable to usefully filter out nits.
- theory: they are paid by the token and so they say more stuff
by jmaker | 2026-01-27 07:00:51+00:00
Same here with a Pixel 10 Pro. Having seen issues that others have been struggling with, I’m shocked at the poor quality controls. It’s not only hardware, the software breaks every now and then. Looks like every patch introduces some bugs or bricks some Pixels. According to Gemini, it’s all known and has been discussed for a long time. I checked Pixel bug reports, some of them closed with wont-implement states, while users still struggling.

This was the first time in two decades that my smartphone broke, and it could only be replaced.

In the end, to me it’s really too much maintenance with Pixels and Android devices in general. Really don’t get it why people prefer Android. It’s like desktop Linux. Not there yet.
by tripledry | 2026-01-27 07:00:57+00:00
I don't think that's a good comparison though. We shouldn't compare AI/Software to handcrafting one item, you should compare to handcrafting the machine that crafts the items.

If I knit a hat, I can sell it once, but if I make a game, I can run or sell it repeatedly.

However, I still agree with the outcome - if AI becomes even better and is economically viable - number of people handcrafting software will reduce drastically.
by echelon | 2026-01-27 07:01:10+00:00
That perfectly surmised my experience. I've been "too early" far too frequently.

Before ElevenLabs, I built an AI TTS website that got 6.5 million monthly users at peak [1]. PewDiePie and various musicians were using it. It didn't have zero shot or fine tuning, so it got wiped out pretty easily when ElevenLabs arrived.

Before Image-to-Video models got good and popular, I built a ridiculous 3D nonlinear video editor [2] for crazy people that might want to use mocap gear and timelines to control AI animation. You couldn't control the starting frame, which sucked, but you could control the precise animation minus hallucination artifacts. Luma Labs Dream Machine came out just a few weeks after our launch and utterly wiped the floor with our entire approach.

I was late to build an aggregator, but I'm a filmmaker and I'm stubborn and passionate. I'm now trying to undercut the website aggregators with an open source (non-OSI fair source) desktop "bring your own keys" system [3]. Hopefully I'm "just in time" for these systems to become desktop, with spatially controllable blocking, and with "world model" integration (nobody else has that yet).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29688048

[2] https://vimeo.com/966897398/6dd268409c

[3] https://github.com/storytold/artcraft
by mattnewport | 2026-01-27 07:02:32+00:00
The disconnect is weird isn't it? The latest coding models can churn out a lot of mediocre code that more or less works if the task is sufficiently well specified, but it's not particularly good code, they have no real taste, no instinct for elegance or simplification, weak high level design. It's useful, but not anywhere near superhuman. It's also my impression that improvements in raw intelligence, far from increasing exponentially, are plateauing. The advances that people are excited about come from agentic patterns and tool use, but it's not much higher levels of intelligence, just slightly better intelligence run in a loop with feedback. Again that's useful but it's nowhere in the realms of "greater than Nobel winning across all domains".

Outside of coding, the top models still fall flat on their face when faced with relatively simple knowledge work. I got completely bogus info on a fairly simple tax question just a few days ago for example, and anyone using AI regularly with any discernment runs into simple failures like this all the time. It's still useful but the idea that we're on some trajectory to exceeding top human performance across all domains seems completely unrealistic when I look at my experience of how things have actually been progressing.
by BrenBarn | 2026-01-27 07:02:34+00:00
I seriously doubt that most people are happy with the tradeoffs of safety vs. convenience provided by the TSA. The general idea of x-ray, metal detectors, sure, that's all good. But the stuff with taking off your shoes, small containers of liquid, etc., no. I think if we reverted to a simpler system with fewer oddly specific requirements layered on top, most people would not feel significantly less safe, but would feel less inconvenienced.
by rvz | 2026-01-27 07:03:28+00:00
It ultimately depends.

Only if the startup idea you are raising for is worth it, which now matters more than ever as execution is going to zero.

If that doesn't bother you and you need the cash now, then in summary:

For: Access to bookface network (secret network for YC founders and mentors).

Against: Depends on the terms, maybe not good if you mess up the cap table allocation.

If you don't mind the risk for a small amount of equity then you might as well do it before AGI arrives.
by umanwizard | 2026-01-27 07:03:39+00:00
Alcohol is flammable around 40%. French cooks aren’t using overproof brandy to do flambé.

Gunpowder doused in alcohol is, very famously for people interested in the history of rum, flammable if the alcohol is around 57.1% or higher, but straight alcohol/water without gunpowder is flammable at a lower strength than that.
by johnsmith1840 | 2026-01-27 07:03:41+00:00
EU aligning heavily with China is a fantasy.

You really think EU is going to ally with China over japan, south korea, philipines, and Australia?

You really think Russia's current number 1 ally is all of a sudden going to be best friends with EU?

China and North korea are ACTIVELY supporting a war in Europe! China has openly threatened Australia. There are literal north korean troops shooting Europeans right now. Who is north korea's number 1 supporter?
by reeredfdfdf | 2026-01-27 07:04:25+00:00
Yeah. The "security theater" absolutely does play its part in stopping attacks. Without it, airplanes would be an extremely easy target for any nutjob to commit mass murder in. They wouldn't even necessarily need a bomb, anything that can cause a big enough fire mid-flight could be potentially catastrophic. Over past few decades many airliners have crashed because out of control fire in the cabin / cargo hold. I really don't want it to be easy for any random person to cause such fire.
by nake89 | 2026-01-27 07:04:53+00:00
Me, my wife and my mom are all using the second SE. My mom is the only one who has updated to the newest iOS. I didn't want to because I heard rumors it was slow. But I tried my mom's phone and it seems as snappy as my phone (more or less, not the fastest phone to begin with, but not slow either). So I'm going to update too.
by sooheon | 2026-01-27 07:04:57+00:00
Using power to tilt the playing field is the logical outcome of all political systems, not just capitalism.

> capture the market, and become the sole dominant force in that market and use your position to then pull up the ladder behind you and cement your position

This is worth discussing in detail. Becoming dominant by providing a better thing, or investing more capital, is not tilting the playing field, it's winning the game. Getting government protected monopolies, special tax write-offs, subsidies, exclusive grants is. Uber and Facebook are not anticompetitive just because they are dominant, they are anticompetitive to the extent that they specifically use their dominance to influence politics.
by decimalenough | 2026-01-27 07:05:01+00:00
Actually, there is plenty of telling, and the largest (only?) massacre outside Beijing was in Chengdu, with 8 to 400 people killed depending on who you believe:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chengdu_protests_of_1989

There was plenty of rounding up student leaders and executions afterwards, but I don't think even the wildest anti-communists would claim a death toll in the thousands for this.
by littlestymaar | 2026-01-27 07:05:01+00:00
> It's not really a lubricant, but in a pinch it can temporarily function as one.

That's wrong. WD-40 is a literally a lubricant mixed with a solvent that makes it very fluid so it can enter small interstices, the solvent then evaporates quickly, leaving the lubricant in place.

There's not a lot of lubricant in there compared to a pure lubricant, because the solvent takes a significant share of the volume, but it's still a lubricant once the solvent dries up.
by godelski | 2026-01-27 07:05:58+00:00
There's a quote I love from Feynman

> The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.

I have no doubt he'd be repeating it loudly now, given we live in a time where we developed machines that are optimized to fool ourselves.

It's probably also worth reading Feynman's Cargo Cult Science: https://sites.cs.ucsb.edu/~ravenben/cargocult.html
by surgical_fire | 2026-01-27 07:06:38+00:00
> I just didn't want to deal with each country.

Yes, the EU is not a country. Each country has their own government, with regulations of their own.

I am in favor of some sort lf EU federalization for this reason, there's a lot of redundancy.

On the other hand, you could just choose a country to operate, which is a normal thing to do. There are things I could find, for example, in France that I cannot find in the country where I live
by Barrin92 | 2026-01-27 07:06:57+00:00
the one that's worse is the first one though, because it's significantly more sophisticated in its manipulation. A society in which censorship is so pervasive that it has been baked into the commercial or moral infrastructure is significantly more asinine than a government that literally just makes a list of things that you can't read, because at least I can look at the list and know what's off limits.

There's a hilarious moment with Noam Chomsky where an interviewer asks him. "Do you think I'm a US propagandist, that I don't believe what I say?" And Chomsky replies "no I think you believe what you claim to believe, it's just that if you didn't you wouldn't sit here to ask me the question". That is far more sinister than any ban could ever be because the censorship has already become implicit without even an order.
by canucker2016 | 2026-01-27 07:07:04+00:00
After the battery problems that the Pixel 4a, 6a, and 7a have had, I'll stick to the regular Pixel phones (well - who knows far this sideloading clampdown will go).

I know people have had battery problems with non-a Pixel phones, but the number of 'a' phones with battery problems caused Google to publicly respond.
by jeffreygoesto | 2026-01-27 07:07:22+00:00
Our graphs are hierarchical, can contain cycles, too and have a bunch of directed subgraphs. We reach 500 nodes with 20k ports and 10k edges and "getting the graph" is still possible but takes a bit of practice. Cycle breaking is okish for us, because there is a strong asymmetry between many "forward" and much less "backwards" edges that makes the heuristics succeed often.
by woodpanel | 2026-01-27 07:07:26+00:00
I like that the pictures are taken by government employees instead of the graffiti writers themselves nor by fans of graffiti.

Because of that the pictured artworks look much less nice, and the images can capture what 99% of the artworks actually provide to their surroundings: dismay, disregard, and a constant reminder that urban anonymity is a moloch that you can enjoy watching from a coffee shop’s window, while it pisses in a baby stroller.
by mikkupikku | 2026-01-27 07:09:48+00:00
I think those commenters were just on cruise control, applying a pattern of thought with which they are well accustomed, to a scenario which is even more clear cut than usual crime. If it were instead teenagers stealing cars to joyride, we'd get the same cohort pleading for leniency because it was social circumstance that made them do it. It's not just hungry people stealing bread, there's an automatic reflex to defend any criminal as being a victim of society and this only becomes as bizarre as you experienced when the criminals involved are in particularly privileged and trusted positions.
by jraby3 | 2026-01-27 07:10:21+00:00
I don't think anyone really believes civilian deaths shouldn't be condemned. I think the main source of argument is who gets the blame. Hamas could've returned the hostages at any time, but they got rewarded by foreign money (and immensely successful anti Israel propaganda campaign by Qatar, Russia and China) to keep going.

The only real way to peace for gazans is to have a non Islamist government take over (like from the UAE) and re educate the population to not start training their children for intifada at the age of 3 or 4 and instead use some of the billions they've received in aid to build infrastructure and education.
by jarbus | 2026-01-27 07:10:43+00:00
This is why I like buying in a physical store. I also think the only solution to this practice is really just to avoid buying as much as possible. I never get food delivery and only get uber to go to and from the mechanic. Ditto for the medical system, I got charged $400 for a strep throat test. I’ll just stay home until I feel better
by TheCapeGreek | 2026-01-27 07:11:41+00:00
My 2c: there is a divide, unacknowledged, between developers that care about "code correctness" (or any other quality/science/whatever adjective you like) and those who care about the whole system they are creating.

I care about making stuff. "Making stuff" means stuff that I can use. I care about code quality yes, but not to an obsessive degree of "I hate my framework's ORM because of <obscure reason nobody cares about>". So, vibe coding is great, because I know enough to guide the agent away from issues or describe how I want the code to look or be changed.

This gets me to my desired effect of "making stuff" much faster, which is why I like it.
by jraby3 | 2026-01-27 07:11:54+00:00
It's not just press. The actions of the world are to let Iran continue doing what it wants to its people and not interfere.

The reason isn't that no one disagrees, it's that Qatar, Russia and China don't think the issue is divisive and have not launched a multi billion dollar propaganda campaign about it. And the actual press couldn't care less if Israel isn't involved.
by anon7000 | 2026-01-27 07:12:31+00:00
A worthwhile book to read on this topic is Outlive by Peter Attia (MD). The core premise is that American healthcare focuses far too much on treating problems after they’re extremely severe. It is would be cheaper and healthier to invest more into conservative & preventative care, trying to prevent or minimize problems early in life before they become incredibly dangerous and expensive/difficult/impossible to treat.

I have a close friend who works in conservative care, and it’s astonishing what they see. For example, someone went to a number of specialists and doctors about a throat condition where they really struggled swallowing. They even had to swallow a radioactive pill to do some kind of imaging. Unnecessary exposure, and an expensive process to go through, and ultimately went exactly nowhere.

Meanwhile, it was a simple musculoskeletal issue which my friend was able to resolve in a single visit with absolutely no risk to the patient.

Medical schools need to stop producing MDs who reach for pills as the first line of defense without trying to root cause issues. Do you really need addictive pain killers, or maybe some PT, exercise, massage, etc. to help resolve your pain.
by chillacy | 2026-01-27 07:12:45+00:00
Hmm, I once transited in Heathrow in a return flight from europe to the US and had to go through Heathrow security for whatever reason, where they subjected me to liquids rules way stricter than either my source or destination did.

E.g. 1 day use contact lenses and prescription creams all having to fit in a tiny plastic bag. So I'm happy for this change.
by dingaling | 2026-01-27 07:14:24+00:00
> It's about making people feel safe.

I don't think that's a common perception of airport security. Few people take reassurance from it, most consider it a burden and hindrance that could stop them getting their flight if they don't perform the correct steps as instructed.

The lifting of this restriction is an example, the overwhelming response is "oh thank goodness, now I don't have to pay for overpriced water" and not "is this safe?"
by mrandish | 2026-01-27 07:15:50+00:00
It's worth deep diving into how analog composite broadcast television works, because you quickly realize just how insanely ambitious it was for 1930s engineers to have not only conceived, but perfected and shipped at consumer scale using only 1930s technologies.

Being old enough to have learned video engineering at the end of the analog days, it's kind of fun helping young engineers today wrap their brains around completely alien concepts, like "the image is never pixels" then "it's never digital" and "never quantized." Those who've been raised in a digital world learn to understand things from a fundamentally digital frame of reference. Even analog signals are often reasoned about as if their quantized form was their "true nature".

Interestingly, I suspect the converse would be equally true trying to explain digital television to a 1930s video engineer. They'd probably struggle similarly, always mentally remapping digital images to their "true" analog nature. The fundamental nature of their world was analog. Nothing was quantized. Even the idea "quanta" might be at the root of physics was newfangled, suspect and, even if true, of no practical use in engineering systems.