MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chrisfosterelli | 2026-01-24 16:34:52+00:00
> Contractor estimates are just as prone to schedule slippage and cost overruns as anything estimated by software engineers

I completely agree. That's why I chose that example: They're also awful at it, especially these days in North America in particular. But any contractor that tried to put in a bid claiming "it'll be done when it's done and cost what it costs" would not be considered professionally competent enough to award a multi-million dollar budget.
by joshribakoff | 2026-01-24 16:35:12+00:00
This is just sub agents, built into Claude. You don’t need 300,000 line tmux abstractions written in go. You just tell Claude to do work in parallel with background sub agents. It helps to have a file for handing off the prompt, tracking progress, and reporting back. I also recommend constraining agents to their own worktrees. I am writing down the pattern here https://workforest.space while nearly everyone is building orchestrators i also noticed claude is already the best orchestrator for claude.
by somenameforme | 2026-01-24 16:35:31+00:00
In theory I agree with you, in practice I do not. This is one of those terms where the precise meaning is being, or has already been, lost. For instance in the overwhelming majority of rhetoric around the lines of this article, populism is framed as being in an adversarial relationship with liberal democracy. Yet that is, from a precise interpretation of 'liberal democracy' this quite nonsensical.

The entire system of democracy, of any flavor, is fundamentally populist. But populism trends towards values that are not what one would consider left-wing by US standards. And so far as I can tell, that is the only real basis for the claim of its supposed adversarial relationship with liberal democracy. It is framing "liberal" as being left-wing and US-centric left wing, and not simply of liberty.
by antiframe | 2026-01-24 16:35:45+00:00
No, encryption keys should never be uploaded to someone else's computer unencrypted. The OOBE should give users a choice between no FDE or FDE with a warning that they should not forget their password or FDE and Microsoft has their key and will be able to recover their disk and would be compelled to share the key with law enforcement. By giving the user the three options with consequences you empower the user to address their threat model how they see fit. There is no good default choice here. The trade offs are too varied.
by EurasPvP | 2026-01-24 16:35:46+00:00
Hey guys, what do you think of this?

I was just scrolling through some dev blogs and found a breakdown that honestly blew my mind. It explains exactly why gaming feels so trash lately.
The post basically argues that we aren't players anymore, just cash cows. It says that giants like EA and Ubisoft have mathematically removed actual skill from the equation to push loot boxes and those endless cosmetics.
What caught my eye was a mention of a project called Euras. Apparently, they are building a PvP arena on Solana that physically removes RNG from the code.
by PxldLtd | 2026-01-24 16:35:56+00:00
Sounds like you don't have a good process for handling scope changes. I should know, the place I'm at now it's lacklustre and it makes the job a lot harder.

Usually management backs off if they have a good understanding of the impact a change will make. I can only give a good estimate of impact if I have a solid grip on the current scope of work and deadlines. I've found management to be super reasonable when they actually understand the cost of a feature change.

When there's clear communication and management decides a change is important to the product then great, we have a clear timeline of scope drift and we can review if our team's ever pulled up on delays.
by CharlesW | 2026-01-24 16:36:07+00:00
If your Management thinks it's acceptable to increase velocity by shipping crappy code, I'm surprised they never thought to do this before AI.

From what I've seen, companies using AI well are shipping better code because of all the artifacts (supporting context like Architectural Design Records, project-specific skills and agents, etc.) and tests needed to support that. I understand that many are not using AI well.
by catlifeonmars | 2026-01-24 16:36:26+00:00
> When you train a dog, you have to give a reward very soon after the desired behavior, otherwise the dog won't associate the reward with the behavior. Likewise, a manager is not going to associate a slight towards an employee with an increase in absenteeism or lower productivity that happens days and weeks later.

Note that GP is comparing the _managers_ motivation to a dog’s motivation, not the worker. It’s about a delayed feedback loop to the manager, who won’t connect the punishment (lower productivity) with the bad behavior (slighting the employee).
by dpforesi | 2026-01-24 16:36:50+00:00
This isn't a "statistics" problem exactly, but rather a data science problem, but... Personality tests are usually framed as psychological instruments, but the core problem is statistical. They assume responses are noisy observations of a stable latent variable, when in practice they’re samples from a context-dependent decision process. Respondents condition on incentives, infer what’s being rewarded, and optimize accordingly, so the data-generating process shifts with each setting. From a statistical perspective this breaks identifiability: multiple latent personalities can produce the same observed responses, and the same personality can produce different responses under different incentive structures. Because those incentives are unobserved or only weakly observed, the model is fundamentally misspecified. More samples don’t converge on truth; they converge on a biased estimate of a strategic equilibrium rather than the latent trait itself.

On paper, I'm a real collaborator, because that is what I think the test should reveal about me. In reality, I just don't wanna deal with collaboration and I'd rather work alone. Can this be measured? Probably not, but it does present an odd paradox for data scientists to solve.
by theptip | 2026-01-24 16:37:18+00:00
Nah, they were always chasing flash. I enjoyed using their products circa 2015-2020, but man they really leaned into the Pareto Principle. Every feature had rough edges, and they didn’t invest much in polish.

It’s a tough trade-off for a small team competing with a behemoth, and I guess their success indicates that they played their hand correctly. If you are going for the enterprise segment then checking off the feature requirements can be more important than making each feature perfect.
by analog31 | 2026-01-24 16:37:22+00:00
>>>> In a functioning org, there are lot of professionals depending on correct estimation to do their job.

A side effect is, no there aren't. Allow me to explain that catty remark.

The experienced pro's have figured out how to arrange their affairs so that delivery of software doesn't matter, i.e., is someone else's problem. The software either arrives or it doesn't.

For instance, my job is in technology development for "hardware" that depends on elaborate support software. I make sure that the hardware I'm working on has an API that I can code against to run the tests that I need. My department has gone all-in on vibe coding.

Customers aren't waiting because the mantra of all users is: "Never change anything," and they can demand continued support of the old software. New hardware with old software counts as "revenue" so the managers are happy.
by Dachande663 | 2026-01-24 16:37:32+00:00
I want to like Mux. We use Mux. But everything feels half done.

- No 2FA support, at all. Support says it's not on their roadmap. Not acceptable in 2026.

- Editing subtitles requires a series of API calls, meaning I had to make a mini editor for our staff to change a word.

- Same with editing anything really. Playback restrictions, glossaries etc. There's no UI for doing it in-app. I understand that the majority of traffic is via the API, but having nothing in-app feels like an omission rather than a choice.

- Every video has multiple keys; uploads, assets, playbacks. And it's a pain moving from one to another.

Overall we use them, but I wouldn't choose to use them again.
by fogzen | 2026-01-24 16:38:44+00:00
The thing that I got wrong about estimates was thinking it was about estimating. Actually, someone already has a time constraint. There’s already a deadline. Always. Your manager, VP, customer, whoever already has a time budget. Find out what it is and work backwards.

When someone comes at you for an estimate, you need to be asking for the time budget or expected schedule — not estimating.

I failed to understand this for most of my career. Someone would ask me for an estimate, and I would provide one. But without knowing the expected schedule, the estimate is always either too high or too low.

Scope is always flexible. The feature or commitment is just a name and a date in people’s heads. Nobody but engineers actually care about requirements. Adjust scope to fit the date, everyone is happy. Adjust the date to fit the scope and people will think you’re either late or fooling them.
by pvtmert | 2026-01-24 16:39:50+00:00
> It’s the normal procedure to buy things from Europe since Brexit 2020. It’s actually quite shocking that Royal Mail still hasn’t updated their tracking system to be able to give a status “waiting on import fees to be paid online”. They had 6 years!

Just click "reconnect" and re-join to the EU (and Schengen area)

I am saying this because I have some friends living in UK, but I do not have the Visa for UK. Although I am on a work/residence-permit in EU, it is just extra hassle to get the visa. I am instead waiting for my years to finish to apply for citizenship...
by hnlmorg | 2026-01-24 16:39:59+00:00
> It's not the cost of protecting one transaction from another transaction

I know it’s not and never suggested it was.

I was making the point that writes contain more overhead than reads (which should be obvious) so people should bear that in mind when reading this blog post.

Edit: is it “bear” or “bare”? I’m never sure with that phrase haha
by deaux | 2026-01-24 16:40:13+00:00
Most of it is entirely unreasonable and being posted by Americans with vested interests who would never dream of posting the same comment if it was about the US reducing their dependency on Chinese tech - think Huawei, Tencent, Alibaba, Bytedance. Imagine a post on that topic - there have been many when it was higher on the agenda - and droves of Europeans commenting "Gee, how strange that the US wants to do this".

It's the exact same, and it doesn't take much wisdom to understand.
by pipo234 | 2026-01-24 16:40:21+00:00
> I think the problem is that people:

> * see the hype;

> * try to replicate the hype;

> * it fails miserably;

> * they throw everything away;

I'm sure doing two years of vibecoding is is a considerably more sincere attempt than "trying to replicate the hype and failing at it".
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-01-24 16:40:31+00:00
Good point, they were all super easy births. They had high bilirubin levels, but I looked up that I could put blue light on them, and it cures it. So I brought a LED light strip and placed my kid next to a window.

We also had sleep shifts. Giving each of us 3 hours of solid sleep was like 2 REM cycles. Only needed to do ~2 per night and we were mostly normal.
by LeFantome | 2026-01-24 16:40:33+00:00
As somebody that was around at the time, this is not at all a stretch.

First, Linux was created FOR the 386. Linus Torvalds had one and wanted to unlock its power.

As you say, Windows 3.0 is certainly no stretch.

That leaves only Windows 95. The minimum spec at launch was a 386 with 4 MB of RAM. Realistically, you needed 8 MB to do anything.

Here is an article from 1993 saying that manufactures are beginning to drop the 386 from their product lines. That is, this is when people stopped being able to buy 386 machines brand new.

https://books.google.com/books/about/InfoWorld.html?id=2zsEA...

The 486 was the dominant chip in 1993 but there were still a lot of 386 machines being sold to that point when.

When Windows 95 shipped, people would certainly have been trying to run it on those machines.

When Windows 95 was released, people famously lined up to buy it like they were getting tickets to a rock concert. It was not just sold with new hardware. Back then, it was normal for people to pay money to buy a new operating system to run on hardware they already owned.

Of course Windows 95 certainly helped sell Pentiums. Pentium would have dominated new sales but a typical PC in service in 1995 would have been a 486 and there were still plenty of 386 machines in use.
by metalman | 2026-01-24 16:40:39+00:00
As a small business owner who often has to deal with that worst possible ratio 1:1 for management/employee, I can promise you that emoloyees are premptivly looking for reasons to get there digs in, and often show up enacting vengence? in the form of vandalism from day 1.
As I have never taken shit from an employer, I walk out and get another job imediatly, I have no sympathy for passive agressives whatsoever and despise the world
we have built that can absorb the damage and still net a profit, which of course does not work for small business, so I am becoming very up front with prospective hires, and forceing a conversation about personal expectations and needs, which is very challenging as they have been trained to say whatever is needed to get hired, NOW!, and worry about anything else later.
by catlifeonmars | 2026-01-24 16:41:25+00:00
The relationship between owners and workers has always been extractive. The adversarial relationship is built in. That doesn’t mean that you can’t have a good relationship with your employer, but there is always a conflict of interest, so to speak.

I’ve had great relationships with my bosses, but they’re always under pressure to extract more work from the workers. In turn, their bosses are also pressured to do the same.

So yes, it’s not the default and you and I have both been lucky.
by B1FIDO | 2026-01-24 16:42:17+00:00
The Wikimedia Foundation is a full-fledged cloud services provider. They host applications and developers on their cloud platform. These developers have been working with AI and scripted solutions for a long, long time. ClueBot is the premier example of an AI- (ML)- powered solution to combat vandalism.

So Wikipedia is not merely a "cloud app with cloud storage" but it is a first-class cloud-based platform: the English project is merely the largest and best-known, but there are hundreds, hundreds of other projects hosted on WMF's cloud services. And the developers and the bot operators who run in the backend are hardly detectable by the end-users or even the everyday editors, but they are also the backbone of WMF services, and they are supported by WMF admins and developers, to run their applications that support editors and wiki admins in their duties.
by geist67 | 2026-01-24 16:42:41+00:00
You’ve all been very silly with the idea of intellectual properties, copyright specifically.

Every generation throughout time has had the right to recreate the legacy of human thought through the filter of their own times.

“Cultural appropriation” and other knock off terms are objectively a part of every creative and functional cycle.

Give credit where credit is due, yet once let into the world a thought becomes a part of such wilds.
by lifetimerubyist | 2026-01-24 16:42:42+00:00
Great tips and you’re right.

We just flip into an app-side maintenance mode before we run the backup so we know there’s no writes, scp the file and then flip it back. We only do nightlies so it’s not a problem. The shell script is super simple and we’ve only needed to do nightly backups so far so we run it in a cron at midnight when no one is working. Ezpz. Literally took us an hour to implement and been chugging along without issues for nearly 2 years now without fail.

If we ever need more than that I’d probably just setup litestream replication.
by svara | 2026-01-24 16:42:54+00:00
I'm a fan of AI coding tools but the trend of adding ever more autonomy to agents confuses me.

The rate at which a person running these tools can review and comprehend the output properly is basically reached with just a single thread with a human in the loop.

Which implies that this is not intended to be used in a setting where people will be reading the code.

Does that... Actually work for anyone? My experience so far with AI tools would have me believe that it's a terrible idea.
by pdpi | 2026-01-24 16:43:38+00:00
I don't have my own kids, but my experience with people with kids is that they're often desperate for social interaction, they feel limited in their ability to go out of the house, and they really don't want the extra work from having guests over.

So I try to act accordingly — help cook and tidy up the kitchen afterwards, help bathe the kids and/or put them to bed where appropriate, or just sit on the couch fiddling with my mobile when not interfering is the best course of action. Just slot into their routine and provide an extra pair of hands. For people you're comfortable with, socialising happens around these things just fine.
by muzani | 2026-01-24 16:43:57+00:00
It's not a junior developer. It's not a senior. You are not managing it. It's an agent. A machine. A tool. Like a vacuum cleaner. A car. An IDE.

I treat it like a non-deterministic script. It does stuff. If the stuff does not result in the expected outcome, fix the script.

You have to observe it. If you were a developer and decided to write code that you never run because you're worried that you're micromanaging your code, that's negligent.

You manage it the same way you manage those little SWAT units in Door Kickers - there's a plan, let them follow the plan, then the plan goes to hell in 4 seconds, so you interrupt and fix it on the spot. Some people get a kick out of building ultimate foolproof blind plans. Yes, this is impressive. But the goal of the game is to win the levels.

Unlike a junior developer, it does not grow. I treat it unlike the way I would treat a human. It may be self-learning and stuff, but that's not the plan. The plan is to throw it out 6 months later, when Grok Supersonic comes along and forces completely new strategies.
by B1FIDO | 2026-01-24 16:44:19+00:00
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by j45 | 2026-01-24 16:44:52+00:00
This make little to no sense.

This is being reported on because it seems newsworthy and a departure from the norm.

Apple also categorically says they refuse such requests.

It's a private device. With private data. Device and data owned by the owner.

Using sleight of hand and words to coax a password into a shared cloud and beyond just seems to indicate the cloud is someone else's computer, and you are putting the keys to your world and your data insecurely in someone else's computer.

Should windows users assume their computer is now a hostile and hacked device, or one that can be easily hacked and backdoored without their knowledge to their data?
by pas | 2026-01-24 16:44:56+00:00
Responsibility is a very complex topic. Sometimes it seems straightforward. People training child soldiers are more responsible than the child soldiers, right? The USA financing, training, and arming this or that group seems to be also responsible if those groups do bad things. (Hence all the protests in the US against the way the IDF wages war in Gaza.)

People voting for or against gun control also have some responsibility. (Australia's National Firearms Agreement comes to mind.) Similarly people who (continued to vote, or) voted in the EU to use cheap Russian gas even after 2014, and even after 2022 share again certainly share some responsibility. Maybe even more than the conscripts coerced to be on the front.

I think structural effects dominate in many cases. (IMHO local crime surges are perfect evidence for this, and even though the FBI crime data is slow and not detailed enough, the city-level data is good enough to see things like a homicide spike after a "viral police misconduct incidents" -- https://www.nber.org/papers/w27324 and this is even before George Floyd -- and https://johnkroman.substack.com/p/explaining-the-covid-viole... which shows how much of an effect policing has on homicides.)

Tool availability is an important factor, and in the US it's a drastically huge effect, because the other factors that could counteract it are also mostly missing.

We can simply apply the Swiss cheese model for every shooting and see that many things had to go wrong. Of course focusing only on guns while neglecting the others would lead to increase in knife-deaths.
by dfajgljsldkjag | 2026-01-24 16:44:59+00:00
Recently I've seen coworkers frequently turn what should be a <10 line bugfix into a 500+ line refactor across multiple files. I suspect it's due to AI.

There's a time and place for refactoring, but just fixing an isolated bug isn't it. But I've seen that often AI can't help itself from making changes you didn't ask for.
by otterley | 2026-01-24 16:45:31+00:00
IAAL but this is not legal advice. Consult an attorney licensed in your jurisdiction for advice.

In general, agents "stand in the shoes" of the principal for all actions the principal delegated to them (i.e., "scope of agency"). So if Amy works for Global Corp and has the authority to sign legal documents on their behalf, the company is bound. Similarly, if I delegate power of attorney to someone to sign documents on my behalf, I'm bound to whatever those agreements are.

The law doesn't distinguish between mechanical and personal agents. If you give an agent the power to do something on your behalf, and it does something on your behalf under your guidance, you're on the hook for whatever it does. It's as though you did it yourself.
by kreetx | 2026-01-24 16:45:40+00:00
Perhaps for you. As a European, the shake-up came with the war in Ukraine. That this actually could happen, and could happen in other countries here, too.

Though, in the US, there seems to be some focus on what the country wants and does. The following I say more as a joke, but I wouldn't mind being bought by the US all that much (or "invade" as you say). In a way, US is the biggest ally anyway, after being incorporated it's unlikely that Russia would try anything.

Regarding Greenland, it has been Denmark's colony, who has kept the natives in check there. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to go through these injustices and choose a different parent country?
by at1as | 2026-01-24 16:45:46+00:00
I'm a very casual and very occasional gamer, so I can't deeply about this topic. But, is gaming in a dire state?

Platform exclusives seem to be rare (outside of Nintendo). I have an xbox (which I'm told is the wrong console), but I can play nearly everything a PS5 can. Most major titles seem to be very cross platform (PC, Xbox, PS5, and sometimes Nintendo). If anything, they stagger release dates, not access.

Steam's market share has held relatively steady at 75%. And in fairness, it does not seem like Epic is trying at all to improve their product, so I'm not sure they're deserving of more right now. GoG continues to have ts cult following (I had never heard of it until recently, but now see references to it frequently).

And it seems to be easier to game on Linux (and even Mac) than in the past few years.

I have no way of verifying this, but Perplexity states that ~5% of Steam games are exclusives. Have they exerted monopolistic pressure on the market in other ways?
by bawolff | 2026-01-24 16:45:55+00:00
> Ok, `io_uring` (like NVMe but for IO commands from application to kernel)

Are there benchmarks comparing turso with io_uring to sqlite (with other config the same)?

io_uring has the potential to be faster but its not garunteed. It might be the same, it might be slower, depending on how you use it. People bragging about the technology instead of the result of using the technology is a bit of a red flag.