MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by majormajor | 2026-01-04 20:36:32+00:00
There are very good less-cynical reasons. I've also seen companies with the opposite problem, where the engineers constantly shoot down real, important feedback brought by customer support in order to preserve the superiority of engineering over support.

If you have ten engineers and even just 100 customers, you have a very high number of conversational edges. Good luck keeping things consistent and doing any sort of long-term planning if engineers are turning the output of those conversations directly into features. "Engineers talking to customers but not making any changes" would be more stable, but is still a very expensive/chaotic way to gather customer feedback.

Additionally, very few of those single engineers have a full knowledge of the roadmap and/or the ability to unilaterally decide direction based on some of the customer feedback or questions. "Will this get fixed in the next two weeks?" "Will you build X?" etc. You don't want your customers getting a bunch of inconsistent broken promises or wrong information.

The best-managed orgs I've seen have pretty heavy engineering and user experience in their product and support orgs. You need people in those roles with knowledge of both how it's built AND how it should be used, but you can't continually cram all that knowledge into every single engineer.

A startup should start with the builders talking directly to the customers. But at a some point, if successful, you're going to have too many people to talk to and need to add some intermediaries to prevent all your engineering time going to random interrupts, and centralization of planning responsibilities to ensure someone's figuring out what's actually the most important feedback, and that people are going to work on it.
by moregrist | 2026-01-04 20:36:34+00:00
This doesn’t seem right to me. Carpentry still seems like a pretty solid line of work with a lot of jobs. I know at least one guy who moved from EE work to contracting because he could make a lot more money that way.

Given, a lot of it is framing houses and remodeling. And there are fewer jobs in hardwood furniture these days. But a lot of that is because US furniture manufacturing was moved to China 20 years ago, not because of power tools.

If anything, the advent of power tools in the 40s/50s made single family homes more affordable and increased construction demand.
by javawizard | 2026-01-04 20:37:05+00:00
Xoogler here.

When you get to a company that's that big, the roles are much more finely specialized.

I forget the title now, but we had someone who interfaced with our team and did the whole "talk to customers" thing. Her feedback was then incorporated into our day-to-day roadmap through a complex series of people that ended with our team's product manager.

So people at Google do indeed do this, they just aren't engineers, usually aren't product managers, frequently are several layers removed from engineers, and as a consequence usually have all the problems GP described.
by cmxch | 2026-01-04 20:37:17+00:00
AI model makers win, luddites lose.

Never mind that the more people try to corrupt a model, the more likely that future models will catch these corruption attempts as security and trust/safety issues to fix and work around.

The next Nightshade will eventually be viewed as malware to a model and then worked around, reconstructing around the attempt to break a model.
by ipdashc | 2026-01-04 20:37:23+00:00
Yeah that seriously whiplashed me too, I'm genuinely confused. Google Meets has always worked completely fine for me, good performance, works well on mobile, Firefox, etc. Nothing special but it works. Probably my favorite of all the meeting apps.

Teams meanwhile is absolutely my least favorite, takes forever to load, won't work in Firefox, nags me to download the app, confusing UI. I don't think I've ever heard anyone say they like teams.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2026-01-04 20:38:00+00:00
> Initially this seems like a case of a communication breakdown alongside a technical disagreement. However, the real unacceptable behavior comes with System76’s response to Richard’s post. They start by sharing part of the correspondence between both parties. I believe the communication breakdown occurs in this section, where Richard explains why their current methods will not work for the LVFS. Then they go further and imply that the LVFS is handing away private data:

> [...]

> Later on the LVFS team put in work to support the use case of System76 so that vendors could use the LVFS without any sort of reporting. Soon after System76 began using the LVFS and fwupd without any fanfare or retraction of their prior statements.

So... System76 correctly point out that LVFS defaults to pulling from a central service in a way that sends more information than is necessary to that service, and later LVFS supports not sending that data, and then System76 starts using it. There's nothing for them to retract; they made a correct claim, it got fixed, and then they moved forward.

Also as a fairly minor point:

> Their existing misinformation has already caused ripples within the community, getting many people stirred up and making claims like GTK4 being only for GNOME, or GNOME wanting to be the “only” desktop on Linux because of the approach to themes we have.

I assure you, it's not just the theme debacle that makes people treat GNOME as wanting to be the only desktop. My personal favorite will probably always be https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685#no1 but it's not like it's an isolated incident.
by lmorchard | 2026-01-04 20:38:03+00:00
What you consider fun isn't universal. Some folks don't want to just tinker for half an hour, some folks enjoy getting a particular result that meets specific goals. Some folks don't find the mechanics of putting lines of code together as fun as what the code does when it runs. That might sound like paid work to you, but it can be gratifying for not-you.
by astura | 2026-01-04 20:38:31+00:00
>Trying to sit still for 30 min without any stimulation at all (no talking, watching, reading) sounds like torture to me.

Those of us over 40 have already had plenty of this in our lives, it used to be so common. Waiting for appointments, waiting for the bus, etc. before smartphones. My first job had two hours between lunch and dinner service. I only had about 15 minutes of work during that time, so it was hour plus of almost entirely idle time every shift.
by bri3d | 2026-01-04 20:38:56+00:00
I don’t think these devices represent a demand in the same way at all. Secure boot firmware is another “demand” here that’s not really a demand.

All of these things, generally speaking, run unified, trusted applications, so there is no need for dynamic address space protection mechanisms or “OS level” safety. These systems can easily ban dynamic allocation, statically precompute all input sizes, and given enough effort, can mostly be statically proven given the constrained input and output space.

Or, to make this thesis more concise: I believe that OS and architecture level memory safety (object model addressing, CHERI, pointer tagging, etc.) is only necessary when the application space is not constrained. Once the application space is fully constrained you are better off fixing the application (SPARK is actually a great example in this direction).

Mobile phones are the demand and where we see the research and development happening. They’re walled off enough to be able to throw away some backwards compatibility and cross-compatibility, but still demand the ability to run multiple applications which are not statically analyzed and are untrusted by default. And indeed, this is where we see object store style / address space unflattening mitigations like pointer tagging come into play.
by wdr1 | 2026-01-04 20:40:24+00:00
> I wonder why Google UX always sucked so much

It depends on how you define "suck."

When Google first launched it's homepage, its emptiness (just a logo & search box) was a stark contrast to the portal pages popular, which were loaded with content.

Some thought the Google homepage "sucked" whereas other liked it. (I was in the latter.)

Likewise, the interface for Gmail. Or the interface for Google Maps. Or the interface for Chrome.
Ask HN: How to fight doomscrolling habits with RSS?
by LukasWeber | 2026-01-04 20:40:36+00:00
I know many HN users love RSS, but I never used it. However, I'm annoyed by myself for doomscrolling too much (mosly those fucked up YouTube Shorts and News Landing Pages) and thought that I want to limit the content I consume to self-selected stuff. Does anyone have good resources for an absolute RSS noob where to start? How did you start? are there different approaches to RSS? what is good RSS software?
by GabrielTFS | 2026-01-04 20:40:41+00:00
Moving away from Program Files would cost far more than it's worth - it'd cause lots of issue for a massive amount of users and be of very little value for others, when the only practical issue with the Steam folder being in Program Files right now is people going "oh I didn't expect that directory to be writable I guess" which is not something worth spending a bunch of time orchestrating a massive transition on.
by sefrost | 2026-01-04 20:41:12+00:00
Unsure why this comment appears to be downvoted!

I have followed him for a long time and learned a lot too. I always wonder the same thing about the “tech influencers” and I’d love to know more about how they structure their days.

I find it difficult recently to sit down and complete a meaningful piece of work without being distracted by notifications and questions. In the last year this has been exacerbated by the wait time on LLMs completing.

I would love to know how top performers organise their time.
by SapporoChris | 2026-01-04 20:41:31+00:00
I do not understand the attraction or rather the glorification of going to a Cafe alone.

"It was pure delight. Every element. Or rather, the non-existence of any element. No phone. No headphones. No tablet. No laptop."
I believe I can do this anywhere.

They talk about interactions with people in the cafe but it is primarily avoiding interactions.
by fn-mote | 2026-01-04 20:42:12+00:00
I hate to say it, but even the existence of this tool is a danger sign.

I say this as someone who uses Hugo and is regularly burned (singed) by breaking changes.

Pinning your version is great until you trip across a bug (usually rendering, in my case) and need to upgrade to get rid of it. There goes a few hours. I won’t even mention the horror of needing a test suite to make sure the rendering of your old pages hasn’t changed significantly. (I ended up with large portions of text in a code block, never tracked the root cause down… probably something to do with too much indentation inside a bulleted list. It didn’t render that way several years before, though.)
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-04 20:42:22+00:00
One could probably use matrix (perhaps might need account creation?) or session or simplex (their accounts are sort of like addresses, easy to make compartively to matrix)

I have built dead simple bots on both session/simplex trying both of them out and session was the more ergonomic one to build on but simplex is more decentralized considering session's more crypto related and wants to ask you for money for node whereas simplex doesn't

Although on the other hand, simplex wants to do client side verification on their official client and their bot creation was really painful to start with so but I do feel like its more decentralized but not sure, Both have consequences but honestly I just really end up shilling signal in the end for most people's usual use cases which is communication but its super great to know that there are alternatives.

Matrix is really cool as well. especially cinny's ui (https://cinny.in)
by majormajor | 2026-01-04 20:42:31+00:00
If you have M customer complaints, and each one risks a differently-sized N customers... you better try to triage that vs just playing whack-a-mole with whatever comes to a random engineer first. I've never seen engineers plow through a bunch of 0-or-1-customers-would-actually-churn-over-this papercuts because it was easy and it feels good - the customer mentioned it! i fixed it! - while ignoring larger showstoppers that are major customer acquisition and retention barriers.

Nothing is knowable in only the same way that plans are useless but planning is essential.
by hinkley | 2026-01-04 20:42:32+00:00
16 bit programming kinda sucked. I caught the tail end of it but my first project was using Win32s so I just had to cherry-pick what I wanted to work on to avoid having to learn it at all. I was fortunate that a Hype Train with a particularly long track was about to leave the station and it was 32 bit. But everyone I worked with or around would wax poetic about what a pain in the ass 16 bit was.

Meanwhile though, the PC memory model really did sort of want memory to be divided into at least a couple of classes and we had to jump through a lot of hoops to deal with that era. Even if I wasn't coding in 16 bit I was still consuming 16 bit games with boot disks.
by lelanthran | 2026-01-04 20:42:36+00:00
> I felt in love with the process to be honest. I complained my wife yesterday: "my only problem now is that I don't have enough time and money to pay all the servers", because it opened to me the opportunities to develop and deploy a lot of new ideas.

What opportunities? You aren't going to make any money with anything you vibe coded because, even the people you are targeting don't vibe code it, the minute you have even a risk of gaining traction someone else is going to vibe code it anyway.

And even if that didn't happen you're just reducing the signal/noise ratio; good luck getting your genuinely good product out there when the masses are spammed by vibe-coded alternatives.

When every individual can produce their own software, why do you think that the stuff produced by you is worth paying for?
by AngryData | 2026-01-04 20:42:47+00:00
I don't doubt that the show ending mirrors the book's intended ending, however a huge part of it is how you get to that ending, which they rushed and fumbled horribly in the show. Like Bran becoming King could work, but not when he basically shows up out of nowhere and nobody knows anything that happened to him or what he is capable of, he basically disappeared for years and when he came back he said a few nonsense things but wasn't involved in much of the politicing that could make him a viable candidate for King. Or Dany going full Mad King, after they spend seasons showing her trying to not be a crazy ruler but then suddenly snapping, instead of going through a series of harder and harder choices that turn out worse each time and drive her to more relatable desperation and violence.

At minimum they needed a full extra season and a full final season, if not more. But without GRRM handholding them throughout the entire plot they completely lost the path.
by imperio59 | 2026-01-04 20:42:55+00:00
The sad thing is it doesn't have to be this way.

I worked on an internal tools team for a few years and we empowered engineers to fix user issues and do user support on internal support groups directly.

We also had PMs who helped drive long term vision and strategy who were also actively engaging directly with users.

We had a "User Research" team whose job it was to compile surveys and get broader trends, do user studies that went deep into specific areas (engineers were always invited to attend live and ask users more questions or watch raw recordings, or they could just consume the end reports).

Everyone was a team working together towards the same goal of making these tools the best for our internal audience.

It wasn't perfect and it always broke down when people wanted to become gatekeepers or this or that, or were vying for control or power over our teams or product. Thankfully our leadership over the long term tended to weed those folks out and get rid of them one way or another, so we've had a decent core group of mid-level and senior eng who have stuck around as a result for a good 3 years (a long time to keep a core group engaged and retained working on the same thing), which is great for having good institutional knowledge about how everything works...
by tombert | 2026-01-04 20:43:12+00:00
I dunno; AI has been somewhat of an unblocker for me so I actually complete projects now, so in a way it's ∞ times more productive.

Throughout my life, I would start projects and work on it for a bit until it stops being fun, get blocked on something, get confused by some arcane bash error or cryptic dmesg or journalctl error, and give up because I'm not being paid for it.

With ChatGPT it's much easier for me to power through the annoying bullshit associated with any large project, and as a result I've been able to get a lot more projects past the finish line.

Am I learning as much as I would if I powered through it directly? No, definitely not, but I am almost certainly learning more than I would be if I had just abandoned the project like I would have historically.
by sedatk | 2026-01-04 20:43:32+00:00
The book looks great actually, and I agree with the first sentiment about S.H.I.T, but the author incorrectly assumes that tests are used as a reliability indicator. Maybe some do use it for that, but most teams don't. Tests are regression detectors. Tests are there to prevent you from causing unintended behavior change while changing other parts of code. Tests never tell you if your code or even if your spec is reliable. They just tell you that code adheres to the given spec.

I also dislike TDD but for a different reason: it incorrectly assumes that spec comes before code. Writing code is a design act too. I talk about that in Street Coder.
by dijit | 2026-01-04 20:43:40+00:00
Sometimes.

Sometimes it's just bullshit.

Learn the lingo, the language, the proper way of posturing and the correct way to shirk responsibility and that's what matters in certain orgs.

I sound really bitter, but I'm not, I'm actually quite good at the game and I've proven that, I just don't really like the game because it doesn't translate into being able to take pride in what I've done. It's all about serving egos. Your own and others.

Every french multinational I've worked for is entirely built on this.
by ar_turnbull | 2026-01-04 20:44:50+00:00
Location: Calgary, Canada

Remote: yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Figma, Miro, Jira, Linear, Claude Code

Resume: Available on request

Email: ar.turnbull@gmail.com

—-

I’m a Product Leader with UX superpowers, seeking leadership roles with growth-stage companies — typically Head of Product or Director-level, but open to the right scope and mandate or fractional roles.

I help teams navigate the rollercoaster of uncertainty to untangle complexity, make sound product bets, and build things that matter — especially in 0→1, platform, and ecosystem contexts.

I’m comfortable working closely with engineering, operating in difficult stakeholder environments, and owning product strategy through delivery.

Recent work includes leading complex platform replatforms and AI-enabled product experiments.

—-

Website, Portfolio, and Writing:

https://www.andrew-turnbull.com
by kenferry | 2026-01-04 20:45:12+00:00
I agree with you re: abstraction - one of the author's only points where I didn't totally agree.

But also worth noting that whenever you make an abstraction you run the risk that it's NOT going to turn out increase clarity and precision, either due to human limitation or due to changes in the problem. The author's caution is warranted because in practice this happens really a lot. I would rather work with code that has insufficient abstraction than inappropriate abstraction.
by 2ap | 2026-01-04 20:45:32+00:00
Part of my job, is that I design protocols to help young children lie in MRI scanners for a living. We have all sorts of techniques to help with this.

However, for each new scanning protocol, I like to have had it myself - so I know what the children go through. And, at times lying inside a MRI scanner, detached from the world, with only the noise of the scanner (very reduced with our new noise cancelling headphones), is almost meditative, and a welcome escape from the constant connection and pressures of being immediately available at work. Sounds like the writer achieves something similar in the coffee shop.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2026-01-04 20:45:43+00:00
> Gershwin is a desktop environment based on GNUstep welcoming to switchers.

Might be just me, but that feels like an odd description. Assuming I'm understanding the intent correctly, perhaps something like

> Gershwin is a desktop environment based on GNUstep but made more intuitive for users coming from other desktops

might be easier to understand?
by kiwijamo | 2026-01-04 20:45:54+00:00
I've used Meet a few times for video calls and I was amazed at how poorly it worked given the amount of resources Google has at their disposal. I've never had a good video call on Meets. I've had a few Meet calls where over time the resolution and bitrate would be reduced to such a low point I couldn't even see the other person at all (just a large blocky mess). Whereas Teams (for all its flaws) normally has no major issues with the video quality. Teams isn't without its flaws and I do occassionally fall back to ZOom for larger group video calls but at the end of the day Teams video calling sort of just works fine. Not great but not terrible either. YMMV of course.
by apparent | 2026-01-04 20:45:54+00:00
> Merriam-Webster and Oxford both have a definition for majority meaning most, and that's the more common definition that is used in everyday speech.

I don't have a subscription to Oxford's dictionary, but MW's lead definition mentions being more than half [1]. The fact that there is some other definition that doesn't specifically mention this is not probative of your claim that this is the more important definition. And your unsubstantiated claim that this is the more common usage is belied by the fact that your preferred definition is not the lead definition.

1: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/majority
by jason_oster | 2026-01-04 20:46:06+00:00
Your conclusion is spot on. Fuzz generators excel at fuzzy tasks.

"Convert the comments in this DOCX file into a markdown table" was an example task that came up with a colleague of mine yesterday. And with that table as a baseline, they wrote a tool to automate the task. It's a perfect example of a tool that isn't fun to write and it isn't a fun problem to solve, but it has an important business function (in the domain of contract negotiation).

I am under the impression that the people you are arguing with see themselves as artisans who meticulously control every bit of minutiae for the good of the business. When a manager does that, it's pessimistically called micromanagement. But when a programmer does that, it's craftsmanship worthy of great praise.
by pshirshov | 2026-01-04 20:46:16+00:00
Yes, I know all that. Except it doesn't work. At all.

Ten years ago there were cursor clipping issues, cursor coordinates issues and crashes and I've been home-baking patches for that.

Also it was impossible for one X session to span across two GPUs. Dunno if that was improved.

Now it's bit better, but for sure your amdgpu will entertain you with little nice crashes when you run something heavy on a scaled display.

I'm not even talking about VRR, HDR and all that stuff.
by seanwilson | 2026-01-04 20:46:35+00:00
You don't pre-render the search pages. You generate some search index files on the build step (something like a map of keywords to matching post URLs), and then client side JavaScript requests the search index files it needs on demand and generates the search results on the page. For a modest blog, I think the compressed index can be a few 100K. A single large image can be bigger than that.

Nothing is perfect, but the above is really simple to host, is low maintenance, and easy to secure.