MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by InfiniteQwert | 2026-01-05 15:43:08+00:00
They don't notice, but they can _feel_ it. My aging mother, god bless, doesn't give a crap about design.. but she updated her iPhone and asked me what I thought about it because she hates it. And it wasn't nitpicking design choices - she just said 'it's so hard for me to do anything now and know where anything is'
by sanderjd | 2026-01-05 15:43:25+00:00
It does matter though. I also find it off-putting, but in the same way as lots of other stuff that I don't like about the reality of human society. The trick (I think) is to strike a balance between being open-eyed and realistic about unpleasant truths like "career advancement matters" without losing yourself to cynicism and self-interested gamesmanship.

I read this article as striking this balance pretty well. (Though it's certainly reasonable to quibble with it.) The one I struggled with was the one about not doing glue work just out of helpfulness, to conscientiously make it legible work instead of a personality. I hate this! This is totally my personality. I like being helpful and I like doing this kind of work and I really don't want to think or care about how it is reading to upper management.

But I also think he's pretty spot on about this. It's a very rare personality that can remain content in being the glue holding things together somewhere deep in the leaf nodes of a big organization, while seeing everyone around you graduate to bigger and better things because their work was more legible than yours. Very few people manage this without becoming bitter.

So I read Osmani's advice on this more as avoiding a common pitfall of resentment more so than as cynical careerism.

(Another unpleasant truth about "glue work people" like me, is that we aren't actually holding everything together, and the rest of the team can easily pick up the slack once it is documented and legible. This is exactly what Osmani suggests, instead of "helpfully" responding to all the DMs or requests for help about things, document what you would do in response to the common questions, and set up a rotation of people in charge of responding to them. This is a real bummer to me, because again, I really enjoy spending my time being the go-to helpful person on a team, but this is the much better approach for the organization, and ultimately for everyone including me.)
by ycdeebs | 2026-01-05 15:43:49+00:00
You can’t outwork a bad diet.

Exercise all you want, but for most people, if you eat garbage food in large quantities, you will be overweight.

I am exactly the same, btw. Most of my family was overweight when I was growing up. I was a fat kid, all the way through high school. Since then, I have been exercising consistently for 40+ years. Lifting weights, bicycling, walking every day, etc. But I still need to not just eat everything I want or I will gain weight. I try to avoid junk food, fast food, eating out, MOST days. Personally, I do one “cheat day” per week (see Tim Ferris’ Slow Carb diet for roughly the idea, although I’m not militant about the foods he says are ok, etc.).

I’m around 20% bodyfat at 5’10” in my early 60s, so I could use to drop 5-10 pounds of fat. What boggles my mind is that everyone says I’m crazy to think I need to lose ANY weight. I’ve got clearly visible fat around my middle and other areas, even if I’m not “technically obese”. I don’t look great in most clothes. But compared to the typical person (my age or not), people think I’m in great shape.

I wouldn’t say what I do is incredibly hard. But it’s also not just “do whatever you want all the time”.
by pingananth | 2026-01-05 15:44:04+00:00
That 'MBA case study' feeling is exactly what I was aiming for—moving away from passive video consumption to active decision-making.

You hit the nail on the head regarding coaching. I actually view this tool not as a replacement for coaching, but as the 'Lab Work' that happens between sessions.

If a new manager can play the 'Firing' scenario 5 times at home and fail safely, they come to their coaching session with specific, high-quality questions rather than generic anxieties. It allows the human coach to focus on the nuance rather than the basics.

Thanks for the feedback!
by naasking | 2026-01-05 15:44:33+00:00
> It's not the fault of CSS that most developers don't learn to use it correctly. That's like blaming the bicycle when learning to ride one.

It's not like blaming the bicycle, that's the whole point of my analogy to programming languages. Like I said, learning a new programming language in a few weeks of regular use is a common experience. This also happens with bikes, because you can try a few things, lose balance, make a few intuitive adjustments, and iterate easily.

This just doesn't work with CSS. There are so many pitfalls, corner cases and reasoning is non-compositional and highly contextual. That's the complete opposite of learning to ride a bike or learning a new programming language.

You literally do need to read like, a formal specification of CSS to really understand it, and even then you'll regularly get tripped up. People just learn to stick to a small subset of CSS for which they've managed to build a predictable model for, which is why we got toolkits like Bootstrap.

Edit: this also explains why things like Tailwind are popular: it adds a certain amount of predictability and composition to CSS. Using CSS was way worse in the past when browser compatibility was worse, but it's still not a great experience.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-05 15:44:42+00:00
Indeed. If you destroy housing costs [1], medical costs with single payer [2], and energy costs with renewables [3], that gets you to Abundance everyone so desperately opines about. But too much of the country is driven by the inefficiency (rent seeking, broadly speaking), that is the US system and the economy. That is all the country builds anymore. We collectively know what the foundational problems are, there is simply no political will to course correct. Increased supply will disempower the extraction system. AI replaces jobs people need to survive, but does not fix anything I've enumerated; in some cases, it even makes the problem worse (algorithmic price fixing [RealPage] and price discrimination [Instacart], for example).

I would like to imagine a world with enough housing for every human, affordable, accessible medical care for all, and cheap clean energy deployed at scale. When is AI going to deliver that?

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

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43119657 (housing cost citations)

[2] Health Care Costs and Affordability - https://www.kff.org/health-costs/health-policy-101-health-ca... - October 8th, 2025

[3] U.S. electricity prices continue steady increase - https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65284 - May 14th, 2025
by bluGill | 2026-01-05 15:45:00+00:00
Humans have a bad history of getting things right without the guardrails. We know how to do it, but there often is one code path we didn't think about correctly - we may get it right 99.99% of the time, but that leaves a lot of mistakes in the code.

I want guard rails to ensure that I got everything right, not just 99.99% of the cases right.
by threethirtytwo | 2026-01-05 15:45:01+00:00
There’s a huge downside to manufacturing and that is pollution.

IMO, I’d rather china be the economic super power and the US leeching off that technological progress and manufacturing the same way say Scandinavia or most of Europe currently does.

Those Europeans get 2 months off while china and the US duke it out and they get all the technological benefited with no downsides. It’s genius.
by malvim | 2026-01-05 15:45:34+00:00
That is a fundamental distinction, yes. But the notion that exporting brings wealth to a country is… kinda not really the case anymore.

If that wealth is ending up in very few people’s hands, and if said people are wealthy enough that they keep their money offshore (which is the case a lot of the time), what is the big difference in making something you can export?
Am I making a mistake building an email client for devs?
by eibrahim | 2026-01-05 15:45:50+00:00
I have been cranking out apps for the past few years and loving it. Then one morning a week or 2 ago I got a little ambitious and decided to build a desktop email client because outlook was so-so and superhuman was ridiculously expensive.

Is this a big mistake? Am I wasting my time ?

So far I have Microsoft and Google working and I can do the normal email interaction read, reply, archive etc. I also got local AI working and training on your emails (all local).

Let me know your thoughts.

PS: my target audience is developers not the general public
by sanskritical | 2026-01-05 15:45:54+00:00
I think relay discovery by clients has improved by leaps and bounds and will continue to do so. Previously you had to give some complicated "follow me at such and such relay" thing. These days you can just tell people your npub and things seem to "just work". I don't know what's going on under the hood, I can only say that clients figuring out which relays have content seems to have improved drastically.
by qudat | 2026-01-05 15:45:54+00:00
This is the part that I like the most, which is why I created https://pico.sh

Further, when building ssh "apps" you can build out tooling for client clis that already exist (e.g. rsync, sftp, scp, sshfs). This provides ergonomics because now users aren't required to install extra tools to deploy static sites, for example.

The entire experience is pretty seamless since all developers use SSH anyway.
by systems | 2026-01-05 15:45:59+00:00
I cant read the article (paywall) , but does it talk about any side effects , I am just worried we are celebrating a drug, that might have serious side effects

I am sure at some point a drug will be perfected, but the promotion of this drugs goes way beyond spreading the awareness that excess weight is a health risk, it feels political, and used as an excuse to attack leftist ideas

balance is everything, your body, your choice, move, eat healthy .. and only use proven drugs, and preferably use drugs as a last resort

So last word talk to your doctor about ozempic, if you are considering using it
by adonese | 2026-01-05 15:46:15+00:00
Sublime is quite good. I have always been using sublime for quick edits, dumping notes etc. But lately I came to appreciate it more as a lightweight IDE. I use go (lsp and some plugins) and ST (sqltools) in addition to package manager and project manager. I like how fast it is, how well polished the editor is. And generally all plug-ins i use work nicely. Also claude helped a lot (eg writing some shortcuts for specific scenarios that I tend to use a lot).

Not to say anything against Zed though. But sublime with one session of claude can help you build your very own customized ide.
by wang_li | 2026-01-05 15:46:16+00:00
> to produce something to justify someone’s career,

This is the curse of being a UI designer for a long lived product. Once a thing has been created and future work consists of 99% code and 1% UI, your UI designer job has evaporated. And so we see that everything changes every major release of an operating system, so the UI people can justify their pay checks.
by DrScientist | 2026-01-05 15:46:20+00:00
> Try to convince me this isn’t the case.

:-)

Where is the AI going to get the information required to do the job?

How is the AI going to notice that Bob looks a bit burnt out, or understand which projects to work on/prioritise?

Who is going to set the AI managers objectives? Are they simple or are they multi-factorial and sometimes conflicting? Does the objective function stay static over time? If not how is it updated?

How are you going to download all the historic experience of the manager to the AI or are they just going to learn on the job.

What happens when your manager AI starts talking to another teams manager AI? Will you just re-invent office politics but in AI form? Will you learn how to game your AI manager as you understand and potentially control all it's inputs?
by bborud | 2026-01-05 15:46:25+00:00
Microsoft trying to push copilot on me is just the kind of thing that would drive me to investigate alternatives. This is the same kind of annoying as all those cookie pop-ups which more and more often lead me to think "fuck it, I'm not actually that interested in this content" and close the browser.

I wish Microsoft would make software that just respects that I do not want to use copilot rather than enshittifying VSCode.
by hopelite | 2026-01-05 15:46:41+00:00
It’s an extremely uncomfortable conflict and contradiction between corporate organization, finance “capitalism”, engineering, and creatives; in addition to individual vs group dynamics.

Corporate structure is driven by exploiting and using value for and by a de facto nobility (the c-suite).

Finance “capitalism” seeks to extract value, be it short or long term.

Engineers are motivated by building and creating value.

Creatives are driven by changes for changing’s sake to remain or get a seat at the table.

The uncomfortable reality is that these are inherently conflicting interests that are pulling and pushing each other, but mostly top down.

It’s essentially the “colonialist” exploitative model of existence using creators to leverage rather than extract natural resources, a system that is increasingly not suitable for the modern, technological, commoditized world. AI is a good example of that; it arguably diminishes the value to n degrees of both engineers and creatives, while also leaving the “nobility” and their neo-aristocratic corporate system out in the open exposed as revealing it not only as having no clothes on, but utterly abusive, useless, and downright evil. And no, that’s across the whole political spectrum, not just the opposite of your silly system approved political sport team.
by afavour | 2026-01-05 15:46:49+00:00
I'm not aware of that many times where I've had a choice. I could get a nice, expensive dress shirt made in the US but for general clothing it's extremely difficult to buy domestic.

Frankly, a lot of the corporations are still to blame because they're the ones actively concentrating wealth at the top. If I had more disposable income I'd buy more made in the US products but my budget simply doesn't allow it.
by Timon3 | 2026-01-05 15:46:52+00:00
That doesn't help with Pylance and similar extensions. Microsoft implemented checks to verify the extension is running in VS Code, you have to manually patch them out of the bundled extension code (e.g. like this[0], though that probably doesn't work for the current versions anymore).

[0]: https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/discussions/1641#discus...
by 1980phipsi | 2026-01-05 15:47:12+00:00
>> A few billionaires might have additional vacation homes, but they are not going to consume a million homes, much less 10 million.

> Sumner is somehow unfamiliar with the concept of a landlord or vacant property investment.

I'm sure he is not unfamiliar with either...

Not sure what landlords have to do with anything since washing machines are often included as part of a rental (or the apartment doesn't have a washing machine, but what does that have to do with landlords?).

And vacant property investment is a small fraction of total property ownership in the US. It's more common that people have a vacation home and rent it out part of the year.

>> progressive consumption taxes

> When someone proposes one, let me know.

They have been proposed...many times. In fact, the US's system has elements of a progressive consumption tax already since people can put retirement savings in IRAs/401ks. What would make it a more complete progressive consumption tax would be to either raise the limits on contributions to these retirement accounts (and remove income limits), and also introduce accounts like these that are meant as more universal savings vehicles. This is preferred (in my view at least) to just cutting dividend and capital gains rates to 0% since that would benefit existing rich people.
by lanthissa | 2026-01-05 15:47:25+00:00
the us is 16% of global manufacturing by value with 4% of the population, i dont know how this fact isn't brought up more.

on a population weighted basis the us manufactures more by value than china.

A bunch of people salivating for a world where the us was 52% of world gdp, not because it was great, but because the rest of the world was ash.
by pingananth | 2026-01-05 15:47:26+00:00
'Estimation is work' is a maxim I wish more organizations understood!

You really highlighted the core tension here: The theory of management (WIP limits, focus) is logical and easy to understand. But the practice—actually looking at your boss in the eye and saying 'No, we won't even estimate that right now'—is pure emotional friction.

That specific 'hard part' you mentioned—resisting the pull of authority—is exactly the muscle I'm trying to help people build without burning bridges.
It’s the difference between knowing the rule and having the stomach to enforce it in a balanced way.
by 15155 | 2026-01-05 15:47:43+00:00
> They pay into social security when they have a job just like anyone else.

Really? None are paid under the table? Who pays their ER bills when they break their arm while performing illegal farm labor, for instance?

> If it's weak social safety
net then why would the immigrants choose this country for financial benefit? You're contradicting yourself right in the next bullet point.

Because it's better than from wherever they came? These goals aren't incompatible. Jobs are reason enough, free shit is icing on the cake.

> They came here for the American Dream,

Breaking the law in the process, and pissing on everyone who bothered to obtain it legally.

> It's what happened when your ancestors came to this country.

My ancestors weren't given free shit upon arrival - you can have a welfare system or open borders, not both.
by cryptica | 2026-01-05 15:47:51+00:00
It's so weird how everyone nowadays is using Postgres. It's not like end users can see your database.

It's disturbing how everyone is gravitating towards the same tools. This started happening since React and kept getting worse. Software development sucks nowadays.

All technical decisions about which tools to use are made by people who don't have to use the tools. There is no nuance anymore. There's a blanket solution for every problem and there isn't much to choose from. Meanwhile, software is less reliable than it's ever been.

It's like a bad dream. Everything is bad and getting worse.
by shagie | 2026-01-05 15:47:53+00:00
> You get points for suggesting edits ...

Up to 2000 points. When you get to 2000 points, your edits are no longer suggestions and you don't get any additional points for it.

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/268479/why-dont-you...

---

This is a common misperception about moderation on Stack Overflow. You'll often see people claim that people get rep for doing moderation tasks. And some people do pursue badges... though the gold review badge (1000 reviews) has only been awarded 47 times on Stack Overflow ( https://meta.stackoverflow.com/help/badges/81/steward ) ... and silver (250 reviews) 65 times ( https://meta.stackoverflow.com/help/badges/78/reviewer). ... so I would find it difficult to accept that badges are things that motivate people.

If anything, a story of new people doing community moderation could be told in https://meta.stackoverflow.com/help/badges/80/custodian (it has been several months since a person has done a review for the first time).
by rossjudson | 2026-01-05 15:48:05+00:00
Google "intel sgx memory encryption engine". Intel's designers were fully aware of replay attacks, and early versions of SGX supported a hardware-based memory encryption engine with Merkle tree support.

Remember that everything in security (and computation) is a tradeoff. The MEE turned out to be a performance bottleneck, and support got dropped.

There are legitimate choices to be made here between threat models, and the resulting implications on the designs.

There's not much new under the sun when it comes to security/cryptography/whatever (tm), and I recommend approaching the choices designers make with an open mind.
by strken | 2026-01-05 15:48:05+00:00
The word "consume" is important. Billionaires might own a million average family homes, but that's not the same thing as actually using the home. A normal family will eventually lease the house and use it, unless it's left vacant.

I'm not sure vacant property investment holds up in a world with radically higher numbers of houses getting built. The billionaires either stop investing and let house prices drop, or they keep investing until they run out of money, at which point they have no choice but to stop. This only holds up for houses themselves and not for land, but hey, you can solve that with a land tax.
by IMTDb | 2026-01-05 15:48:07+00:00
Off base.

The only way to get "perfect rating" is to go to your junior dev and bring another interruption (maybe the dev was 90% done !). So now he has been interrupted twice by two different manager and you have contradicted your own boss in front of an employee. You just broke a cardinal rule of middle management: it's ok to tell your boss he is wrong, but not in front of someone else.
Additionally, you also need to tell him to f** off with is request to get the numbers (without even trying to understand if the request was legitimate or not !), so that your precious sprint is saved. I don't see how he gets what he wants in your ideal handling. AT best you seem to tell him you will "look into it" in two weeks.

Much better solution is to help you junior dev solve the problem so the interruption goes away as fast as possible and he can go back to contributing to the sprint. If the VP requires these numbers and went as far as back channeling you there is probably a quite good reason for that. Maybe the last time he needed something you told him it was not possible because the sprint thingy is unmovable ?
Once you have the result, you can go give those to the VP yourself, highlight the work of the junior dev, and use this "I am giving you the very important data you asked for" as a foot in the door to show that you had to pull the dev from the other feature, that these interruption also have cost and that you are more than happy to take care of them. He gets what he wants, the difficult conversation of "you did not do what you are supposed to do" happens behind closed doors, and you have a much better of getting results if he sees you as an ally to get his important stuff rather than a hinderance.
by AltruisticGapHN | 2026-01-05 15:48:32+00:00
I'm trying to catch up with AI but it's difficult because most articles I find are kinda vague and there is a lack of clear examples.

It's always about prompting or how AI "is great" yadi yada but hardly any step by step examples.

I can easily ask gemini CLI to produce code for example. But how to work with AI in an existing codebase isn't obvious at all.

It seems also that for any serious use you need a paid subscription? It seems like the free models just can't handle large codebases.
by threetonesun | 2026-01-05 15:48:35+00:00
A lot of Windows 8 I liked, but Windows perpetually suffers from needing to support older versions of Windowing systems, or some corporate usecase from the early 90s that carries too much money to ever say no to implementing.

Windows 11 is, I think, worse than MacOS these days, half for still dragging the past along with it, and half for introducing a second start menu just for ads.
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-05 15:48:44+00:00
Pretty cool but when you are dragging a country to the planet the country is behind the planet which means I don't expect the drop to work. It should go in front and probably the planet should give some indication that the drag should work.

First time I looked at it I didn't find the country selector because that requires scrolling down.

It's not clear how to remove a country, though I do like it that I can change planets and see the same country. I'd consider turning the planet selector into a dropdown (maybe even on the planet window) which would let the country selector ride up and be more obvious.