MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stego-tech | 2026-01-24 15:58:35+00:00
My lived experience in America is that employers often feel slighted by default by their employees, with rare exception. Otherwise they wouldn’t put so many obstacles in the way of paying livable wages for work performed.

That said, half a century of continued slighting of employees is quickly snowballing against them. While I’d hope these studies lead to positive change in the short-term, I doubt anything will move the needle short of mass collective action.
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-24 15:59:02+00:00
> The FBI agent who initially began working with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to investigate the fatal ICE shooting of Renee Good has resigned from the bureau, two sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

> Soon after the agent opened the civil rights investigation, she was ordered to reclassify it as an investigation into an assault on the officer. The FBI blocked the BCA from participating in the investigation.
by t-3 | 2026-01-24 15:59:18+00:00
Leadership, authority, command, etc. have many forms that don't necessarily match up with what is effective or how people would like to be treated as a subordinate. Assuming that managers know better than to be assholes to their employees (or vice-versa) is a huge and very wrong assumption. Social skills also benefit training and practice like anything else. Many people have never seen or experienced professional and competent management, so they have no example to follow or model to emulate.
by polyglotfacto | 2026-01-24 15:59:51+00:00
I understand this is not meant as production level quality, but as a web engineer I was expecting at least a decent POC with some interesting design ideas; not total spaghetti that even gets the spec wrong(despite the good idea of checking the spec in the repo).

They may have solved a problem related to agent coordination, like you discussed in your interview related to conflicts and allowing edits to merge without always compiling.

But at the end of the day, a novelty like this is only useful in so far as it produces good code. I don't see how coding agents are of any help otherwise.

So the failure of the pattern should be acknowledged, so we can move on and figure out what does work.

I speculate that what does work is actually quite similar to managing an open source project: don't merge if it doesn't pass CI, and get a review from an expert. You also need the project to decide on ways of doing things, so that the AI is relegated to their strength: applying existing patterns.
by arielcostas | 2026-01-24 16:00:19+00:00
End-to-end usually means only the data's owner (aka the customer) holds the keys needed. The term most used across password managers and similar tools is "zero knowledge encryption", where only you know the password to a vault, needed to decrypt it.

There's a "data encryption key", encrypted with a hash derived of your username+master password, and that data encryption key is used locally to decrypt the items of your vault. Even if everything is stored remotely, unless the provider got your raw master password (usually, a hash of that is used as the "password" for authentication), your information is totally safe.

A whole other topic is communications, but we're talking decryption keys here
by 46493168 | 2026-01-24 16:00:51+00:00
Because if you can make it at Amazon, you can make it anywhere. It has a brutal work culture, and if you can survive it long enough to claw your way into the FAANG inner circle, you might, might get breathing room at some point to live your life at another company that isn't as brutal.

If you're someone who comes from the American Hinterlands [0], i.e., not a born-and-bred Coastal Elite, this could be the difference between barely surviving and being able to help your extended family survive. If you can keep off the hedonic treadmill yourself.

[0] https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/H/bo28...
by bikenaga | 2026-01-24 16:01:30+00:00
Original article: "Bilateral Loa-Kea trends of the Hawaiian Islands caused by the bottom-up splitting of plume conduit" - https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adx4095

Abstract: "The Hawaiian-Emperor chain has exhibited two distinct Loa-Kea magmatic groups over the past 8 million years, but their origin remains debated. Using paleographically constrained global mantle convection models, we reproduce the present-day location of the Hawaiian hot spot and the associated spatiotemporal geochemical evolution. The composition of the plume conduit shows conventional concentric zoning prior to the Hawaiian-Emperor Bend and gradually evolves to a north-south bilateral zoning pattern afterward, corresponding to the subparallel Loa-Kea trends. Further analysis suggests that the plume originates from ridges of large low-velocity province (LLVP) induced by the push of slabs. Upwelling at the intersections of ridges is more energetic than at the middle of the ridge, causing bottom-up splitting of plume conduit in the lower mantle that propagates upward, forming bilateral zoning and eventually two independent plumes. This process suggests that bilateral zoning is transient and more common in the Pacific than Africa due to the circum-Pacific subduction."
by shortsunblack | 2026-01-24 16:01:39+00:00
Open source community detests dilettante attempts at rent seeking by building mediocre wrappers over commodity software.

Docker did not invent Linux containers. They did not invent namespaces or chroots.

You'll be hard pressed to name the things they did invent and those things have long ago left Docker to hang dry (OCI imagespec).

OrbStack is built by a single person and it provides an objectively better experience than Docker Desktop, built presumably by dozens of full time engineers.

People detest incompetence and rent seeking. That they do.

The lack of important contributions of Docker can be best summarized by all the alternatives that popped up in no time. With Kubernetes now defaulting to CRI-O, modern container stack has precisely zero Dockerisms.
by Hizonner | 2026-01-24 16:01:40+00:00
... only because you'd have no evidence of it. From a legal point of view, the question is what would come down if the judge were (somehow) convinced that it actually happened that way. Actually if a "perfect" judge were so convinced.

Probably a real judge would want to say something like "Why are all of you bozos in my courtroom wasting public money with some two-bit shrinkwrap bullshit? I was good at surfing. I could have gone pro. I hate my life..."
by stego-tech | 2026-01-24 16:02:00+00:00
> Would the people who need such a reminder actually accept the research, and change their behavior?

No. They will give you formal discipline for raising such concerns regardless of your professionalism in doing so and ultimately lay you off for being a squeaky wheel. Ask me how I know.

> Are they even aware of the effects of their behavior?

This is the better question to be asking, IMO. Many are aware of the effect and either don’t care or find enjoyment from it, while many more have no clue why their star worker has dropped the ball after being denied a raise or promotion three years running. There are a few who know the effects and are sympathetic, but they’re often in the position of facing similar retribution if they stand up for their workers, and so they don’t.

It’s a gruesome shit show, man.
by theptip | 2026-01-24 16:02:55+00:00
> This is, of course, false. As every experienced software engineer knows, it is not possible to accurately estimate software projects.

This is a cop-out. Just because you can’t do it, doesn’t mean it’s impossible :)

There are many types of research and prototyping project that are not strongly estimable, even just to p50.

But plenty can be estimated more accurately. If you are building a feature that’s similar to something you built before, then it’s very possible to give accurate estimates to, say, p80 or p90 granularity.

You just need to recognize that there is always some possibility of uncovering a bug or dependency issue or infra problem that delays you, and this uncertainty compounds over longer time horizon.

The author even gestures in this direction:

> sometimes you can accurately estimate software work, when that work is very well-understood and very small in scope. For instance, if I know it takes half an hour to deploy a service

So really what we should take from this is that the author is capable of estimating hours-long tasks reliably. theptip reports being able to reliably estimate weeks-long tasks. And theptip has worked with rare engineers who can somehow, magically, deliver an Eng-year of effort across multiple team members within 10% of budget.

So rather than claim it’s impossible, perhaps a better claim is that it’s a very hard skill, and pretty rare?

(IMO also it requires quite a lot of time investment, and that’s not always valuable, eg startups usually aren’t willing to implement the heavyweight process/rituals required to be accurate.)
by debazel | 2026-01-24 16:03:26+00:00
The performance loss can be substantial on modern NVMe drives, up to 20 times slower. But I was wrong about the reason for the performance loss, it's not TRIM but how VeraCrypt handles I/O operations. You can see some numbers real numbers in this Github issue: https://github.com/veracrypt/VeraCrypt/issues/136
by chrisfosterelli | 2026-01-24 16:03:50+00:00
I agree. Software engineering is basically the only industry that pretends this is professionally acceptable. Imagine if government staff asked when a bridge would be done or how much it would cost and the lead engineer just said "it's impossible to estimate accurately, so we wont. It's a big project tho".

Estimating in software is very hard, but that's not a good reason to give up on getting better at it
by kldg | 2026-01-24 16:03:52+00:00
not to say this "should" be the solution, but does Proton not offer easy email filtering & automation (e.g. skip inbox, delete)?

I ask because I haven't yet bothered to implement it on a from-scratch email server I stood up a couple weeks ago (just kidding; I wanted to brag about SPF, DKIM, and DMARC test passes from Gmail with both inbound and outbound encryption). I can say from this experimentation and using Google's Postmaster tool, though, that emails being reported as spam by users is *very* serious; Google's threshold is 0.3%; if just 0.3% of users report your email as spam, it's considered a policy violation and your emails are likely to go to spam or have delivery refused outright. idk what Proton's policies are. (edit: by extension, this means enforcing authorization of users is very serious; if someone abuses the service as an open relay, your whole domain is toast)
by CuriouslyC | 2026-01-24 16:04:02+00:00
The pattern I like to advocate for now is to do customer sharding with SQLite. Cloudflare makes this easy with D1, you can tie Durable Objects to a user as an afterthought.

The nice thing about this pattern is that you can create foreign data wrappers for your customer SQLite databases and query them as if they were in postgres, cross customer aggregations are slow but individual customer analytics are quite fast, and this gives you near infinite scalability.
Show HN: Bread Count – Private Net Worth Tracker
by boomzors | 2026-01-24 16:04:04+00:00
Hello, everyone,
I've been trying to keep track of my finances, but I guess I'm too lazy for budgeting apps. At the end of the day, I just want to know if numbers go up or down. To fix this, I've built an app that allows me to add snapshots from my banks and assets to get an overview. I've been using it for months and it's been great, so I've decided to improve its appearance and publish it.

This app has no tracking or in-app purchases. Buy it once and use it on your iPad, iPhone, or Mac. I'm planning some cool features for the future, like Apple Intelligence support.
I hope you like it. Thanks
by micromacrofoot | 2026-01-24 16:04:32+00:00
yes exactly, comma.ai is making a driver assistance product and this is similar to their stance... which is refreshing

they know they won't be able to make a fully autonomous product while navigating liability and all sorts of problems so they're using technology to make drivers more comfortable while still in control

none of this hype about full autonomy, just realistic ideas about how things can be easier for the humans in control
by Aurornis | 2026-01-24 16:04:40+00:00
> 240 grams is twice as heavy as for example an average minidisc player (https://www.minidisc.wiki/equipment/sony/portable/mz-g750) which could often weigh less than 100g.

The parent comment chose an unusually large DAP with a big screen to compare to. It’s not really a fair comparison.

Also the weights of old devices are usually listed without batteries, which could increase the overall weight by 50% or more.

I had a minidisc player a long time ago. It was a quality one, but it wasn’t the lightest or more robust thing to carry around.
by storystarling | 2026-01-24 16:04:53+00:00
Matches my experience trying to stabilize long LangGraph workflows. The regex checks are fine for formatting but miss the semantic drift that happens when you're actually injecting context. The rubric-based approach makes sense, but I'm not sure how a bootstrapped team implements this without the human labeling budget. I've tried using a stronger model to grade the outputs, but the latency overhead is brutal.
by mike_hearn | 2026-01-24 16:05:04+00:00
How so? The Android ecosystem literally became the Kotlin ecosystem it was so successful. The multiplatform stuff came out of organic demand for re-using code at first between JVM backend and browser (Kotlin/JS), and then for re-using code between JVM, JS, Android and sharing the business logic on iOS, and then finally for being able to reuse UI code on iOS too for cases where native Swift UI can't be justified (obscure apps, etc).

Seems to me like Kotlin Multiplatform has been quite successful actually. The weakest part is Kotlin/Native where they could have just used GraalVM Native Image but I talked to the Kotlin team about that at the time and it was more of an opportunistic move than anything else - a compiler team in St Petersburg had been let go by Intel and JB could acquire the whole team cheaply.
by bluGill | 2026-01-24 16:05:30+00:00
> Trim features, push date, bring in extra help, or crunch.

There are problems with all of these. The company knows they can sell X of the product for $Y (often X is a bad guess, but sometimes it has statistical range - I'll ignore this for space reasons but it is important!). X times Y equals gross profit. If the total costs to make the feature are too high the whole shouldn't be done.

If you trim features - the affects either the number you can sell, or the price you can sell for (sometimes both).

If you push the date that also affects things - some will buy from a competitor (if possible - and the later date makes it more likely the competitors releases with that feature).

Bring in extra help means the total costs goes up. And worse if you bring them in too late that will slow down the delivery.

Crunch is easiest - but that burns out your people and so is often a bad answer long term.

This is why COMPANIES NEED ACCURATE ESTIMATES. They are not optional to running a company. That they are impossible does not change the need. We pretend they are possible because you cannot run a company without - and mostly we get by. However they are a fundamental requirement.
by literalAardvark | 2026-01-24 16:06:37+00:00
One thing I really appreciate about cruise control is that my foot can be floating above the brake at all times.

This cuts an entire second off of brake times in motorcycling, where it's just a quick hand move that you MUST do (well, 80% of it, the throttle release part) anyway because if you leave the throttle on you will wipe out, so I'd assume it cuts even more for a move like a large lateral move of a leg in a car.

Only issue is that you need to be careful with that foot to avoid keeping your brake lights on at all times.

Note that this might only apply to driving stick. I'm not sure if left foot on brakes is best practice in automatics.
by heyitsdaad | 2026-01-24 16:06:42+00:00
Compare this with how customer requests end up in products in startups:

Step 1: Customer <-> Sales/Product (i.e., CEO).
Step 2: Product <-> Direct to Engineering (i.e., CTO)

The latency between Step1 and Step2 is 10 minutes. CEO leaves the meeting takes a piss and calls the CTO.

- Simple features take a day:
CTO to actual implementation latency depends on how hands on the CTO is. In good startups CTO is the coder. Most features will make its way into the product in days.

- Complex Features take a few days:
This is a tug of war between CTO - CEO and indirectly the customer. CTO will push back and try to hit a balance with CEO while the CEO works with the customer to find out what is acceptable. Again latency is measured by days.

Big companies cannot do this and will stifle your growth as an engineer. Get out there and challenge yourselves.
by whatreason | 2026-01-24 16:06:45+00:00
This is not correct, encrypted content is in fact encrypted content. For openai to be able to support ZDR there needs to be a way for you to store reasoning content client side without being able to see the actual tokens. The tokens need to stay secret because it often contains reasoning related to safety and instruction following. So openai gives it to you encrypted and keeps the keys for decrypting on their side so it can be re-rendered into tokens when given to the model.

There is also another reason, to prevent some attacks related to injecting things in reasoning blocks. Anthropic has published some studies on this. By using encrypted content, openai and rely on it not being modified. Openai and anthropic have started to validate that you're not removing these messages between requests in certain modes like extended thinking for safety and performance reasons
by alephnerd | 2026-01-24 16:07:15+00:00
> companies paying 80th to 90th percentile or higher. The attitude is that they’re paying employees enough that they need to shut up and put up with anything that comes their way. If you don’t like it, we have a list of qualified applicants who will gladly take your place in a heartbeat and won’t complain as much because those paychecks are larger than what they made at their last company

Well, yes in a way.

Criticism is expected and encouraged, but if it is done so while ignoring the 3 primary goals of a business:

1. Drive revenue growth

2. Expand TAM

3. Land strategic deals (not all customers are equal)

and is provided without a solution, you will be replaced. I don't care if we leave a bug open if it means not being able to release feature X to help land Acme's mid 7 figure TCV deal.

The best Engineers I've worked with learnt how to merge valid engineering concerns with the top-line concerns mentioned above as well as being able to provide solutions. It's also how I was able to go from an IC to management.

If an employee thinks they know better, they can try to become a PM or start a competitor.

The bad experiences mentioned above really took off during COVID, and this is why we are seeing the pendulum swing the opposite direction.

> I think the trend where companies made Staff Eng into a pseudo-management role without reports was a mistake. It gets defended heavily by people who hold that role, but in the real world the Staff Eng people I’ve worked with who don’t really write code but float around and tell people what to do and how to do it become bad for an organization over time.

I partially agree.

I think a Staff Eng role where it is someone who is deeply technical but helps align their team's delivery with other teams is extremely valuable (basically Staff+ as an architect role).

What I feel is the severe title inflation that arose during COVID turned "staff" into the new "senior", with too many people who floated into the role without aptitude.
by xn | 2026-01-24 16:07:40+00:00
Is it going to take more than two hours?

Is it going to take more than two days?

Is it going to take more than two weeks?

Is it going to take more than two months?

Is it going to take more than two years?

If you can answer these questions, you can estimate using a confidence interval.

If the estimate is too wide, break it down into smaller chunks, and re-estimate.

If you can't break it down further, decide whether it's worth spending time to gather information needed to narrow the estimate or break it down. If not, scrap the project.
by xyzzy123 | 2026-01-24 16:08:15+00:00
Sorry, I edited the plumbing refence out of my comment because I saw a sibling post that made a similar point.

I agree there is less uncertainty in plumbing - but not none. My brother runs a plumbing company and they do lose money on jobs sometimes, even with considerable margin. Also when I've needed to get n quotes, the variation was usually considerable.

I think one big situational difference is that my brother is to some extent "on the hook" for quotes (variations / exclusions / assumptions aside) and the consequences are fairly direct.

Whereas as an employee giving an estimate to another department, hey you do your best but there are realistically zero consequences for being wrong. Like maybe there is some reputational cost? But either me or that manager is likely to be gone in a few years, and anyway, it's all the company's money...
by fzeroracer | 2026-01-24 16:08:40+00:00
As an aside, there was another ICE murder in Minneapolis just an hour or so ago [1]. If you thought Renee Good's murder was bad, this is just straight up an execution with no pretense. Once news catches up I'll post the full story.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Minneapolis/comments/1qlpzu8/anothe...
by bluGill | 2026-01-24 16:08:58+00:00
I have 10s of millions of lines of C++. It cost nearly a billion dollars to write it, starting before Rust existed. Rewriting in rust would cost more (inflation more than eats up any productivity gains - if we were to rewrite we would fix architectural mistakes we now know we made so a of this wouldn't be a straight rewrite slightly increasing costs, but safe rust wouldn't even be possible with some things anyway)
by mystraline | 2026-01-24 16:09:17+00:00
So, now we have metrics of what "slighted at work" does to work.

Just like the terrible outcomes of fraud elimination indicate non-zero fraud is preferred, I can see a similar nom-zero dissatisfaction at work the same.

Except now companies can calibrate how much dissatisfaction due to terrible policies can be done in response to lower work quality, and minmax that.

Reading between the lines, the paper is how to manage dissatisfaction in relation to work and cost. In other words, "How bad can we make it for the minimum work product needed?"
by staindk | 2026-01-24 16:09:56+00:00
That sucks. The following is unsolicited stuff you probably already know - feel free to ignore.

I would heavily suggest speaking frankly about this with your manager or even going above their head if needed to ensure someone hears and acknowledges this. With your review in hand and any other additional info that can help back you up.

Ask what you need to focus on to secure a substantial Y raise/promotion and bonus etc. over the next X months and work towards that, keeping management updated as things progress. Probably have specific numbers for X and Y to mention as targets.