MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by qazxcvbnmlp | 2026-01-24 23:21:27+00:00
Humans decide what to remember based on their emotions. The LLM’s don’t have emotions. Our definition of good and bad comes from our morals and emotions.

In the context of software development; requirements are based on what we wanna do (which is based on emotion), the methods we choose to implement it are also based mostly on our predictions about what will work and not work well.

Most of our affinity for good software development hygiene comes from emotional experiences of the negative feelings felt from the extra work of bad development hygiene.

I think this explains a lot of varied success with coding agents. You don’t talk to them like you talk to an engineer because with an engineer, you know that they have a sense of what is good and bad. Coding agents won’t tell you what is good and bad. They have some limited heuristics, but they don’t understand nuance at all unless you prompt them on it.

Even if they could have unlimited context, window and memory, they would still need to be able to which part of that memories is important. I.e. if the human gave them conflicting instructions, how do they resolve that?.

I eventually think we’ll get to a state where a lot of the mechanics of coding and development can be incorporated into coding agents, but the what and why we build will still come from a human. I.e. will be able to do from 0 to 100% by itself a full stack web application, including deployment with all the security compliance and logins and whatever else, but it still won’t know what is important to emphasize in that website. Should the images be bigger here or the text? Questions like that.
by hsbauauvhabzb | 2026-01-24 23:22:03+00:00
That’s because your government aligns itself with businesses, not consumers.

> If a company is legally obligated to offer a feature to people in other parts of the world, they should be forced to offer it at back home in the US as well

This is a pretty typical self -entitled attitude that Americans have. You chose your government, not the rest of the world.
by nikkwong | 2026-01-24 23:23:04+00:00
I understand why HN doesn't want to devolve into a political forum—but at it's spirit, HN is supposed to cover topics that "...are of interest to those working in the tech community". The upvotes on a thread like this demonstrates that these are topics that are indeed of interest—so I wish that there was more of an appetite to allow these discussions to play out. Maybe having a limit on the number of posts per day or per week that could make it to the frontpage could give everyone a bit more of what they want.

Personally, the political threads on HN are the ones in which I learn the most by and large. There simply isn't another community on the web that elicits such thought provoking discussion around these types of issues—reddit doesn't even come close. I hope the policy will change in the future; especially during these tumultuous times, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
by cmiles74 | 2026-01-24 23:23:30+00:00
Isn’t that the job? I’m not even sure what “understand AI” even means, from where I sit, it maybe means “add AI to everything” and that doesn’t seem that complicated.

I’m not here to defend the people in Amazon corporate, I’m just not convinced it’s okay for a big rich corporation to hire all these people and then fire them on a whim. It’s not like Amazon can’t afford it.
by jumploops | 2026-01-24 23:23:41+00:00
That’s what I used to think, before chatting with the OAI team.

The docs are a bit misleading/opaque, but essentially reasoning persists for multiple sequential assistant turns, but is discarded upon the next user turn[0].

The diagram on that page makes it pretty clear, as does the section on caching.

[0]https://cookbook.openai.com/examples/responses_api/reasoning...
by spwa4 | 2026-01-24 23:23:42+00:00
> all the low hanging fruit has been picked, they need a fundamentally different employee base

As anyone in software development can tell you, this does not compute. You cannot do things this way, and any experienced software engineer can tell you it doesn't work.

Besides, it's not how Amazon worked at all. Amazon is famous for having systematically verified ("mathematically proved") how it's core systems operated. Whereas, for example Google only did that in redesigns when the systems had already collapsed once or twice due to scale, not from early on. And even that is superior to how Microsoft or Oracle did it: they bought Google employees and had them design an iteration of what Google is running (yes, is running, not was running. Google redesigned it's core systems ... and then mostly didn't migrate. Borg was never replaced with Omega and the main large system that they migrated to is Spanner. Kubernetes isn't Borg. Kubernetes grew out of Borg's successor. Except Google never migrated away from Borg)

https://cacm.acm.org/practice/systems-correctness-practices-...

I'm sure Amazon had entire departments, much larger than core engineering, just like every other company, where it looked like everything was operationally focused. That doesn't mean core engineering doesn't exist, or does nothing.
by rvz | 2026-01-24 23:23:53+00:00
Exactly. This is why it makes absolutely zero sense to join Amazon right now as they are the worst ones to join [0] (Unless you specialize in robotics or actual AI and not controlling 'Agents')

They are aiming to layoff 30k employees this year. They are one bad earnings away from a surprise mass layoff unfortunately.

The other big tech companies are at lesser risk.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46741246
by crazygringo | 2026-01-24 23:24:23+00:00
Let me be clear -- nobody finds planning poker or story estimation fun. The same way nobody finds writing tests or documentation fun. So of course it'll be a breath of fresh air if it's not part of your job.

But the fact remains that in most environments, it's extremely useful for medium-term planning and especially in surfacing high-risk features that can send people down the wrong path for a long time. And it's meant to benefit stakeholders -- the people paying the developers' salaries -- not individual developers. It's about de-risking.

And if you really have the kind of team you seem to describe where everybody only works on their specific type of task and can't even estimate anybody else's work, then that's a danger situation when they leave or get sick or whatever and nobody else can step in and everyone's blocked because the only person who can do X is gone. Usually, you should be actively getting other developers to work on these features (usually the easier/smaller ones) and involving them in the estimation.
by rurp | 2026-01-24 23:24:38+00:00
That ship has sailed so long ago it's beyond the horizon at this point. Of course the right is going to defend this. We know exactly how this will play out. They will respond just like they have to every other assault and murder committed by ICE in the past year.

The top people in govt all the way down will completely lie about the victim and situation, despite plenty of video evidence that shows them as liars. Absolutely nothing will happen to these scumbag murderers, and another murder just like this will happen again soon.

Many people will be horrified but conservatives will continue cheering this on. This is the country we live in now.
by MrJohz | 2026-01-24 23:24:40+00:00
Of course HTML is a programming language. It's one of the languages I use every day to program with. I'm not sure what the definition of a programming language would be beyond that.

Do you mean "Turing-complete" language? Or maybe "procedural programming language"? I agree HTML isn't either of those, but those aren't the be-all and end-all of programming now, are they?
by crote | 2026-01-24 23:24:57+00:00
> what legal powers does the city/state have to expel ICE agents?

What makes you believe ICE is going to follow a judge's orders? They are already routinely violating it when it comes to deporting people.

Or, if you want to be even more pessimistic: what makes you believe the current Supreme Court is going to rule based on law, instead of based on political affiliation?

The USA's balance of power is horribly broken. To give just one simple example related to the previous: having the Supreme Court be nominated by the President and confirmed by a simple majority in the Senate? That's just asking for trouble. It'd be far better to have judges nominated by a politically-independent organisation (like the currently-sitting judges, or a national bar association) and confirmed by a two-thirds majority in the House/Senate (preventing anyone controversial, so you get boring, professional, and by-the-book judges - like they are supposed to be).
by oorza | 2026-01-24 23:25:21+00:00
> I think there's still a very high chance that someone willing to refine their AI-co-generated output 8-10+ hours a day, for days on end, will have much more success than someone who puts in 1 or 2 hours a day on it and largely takes the one of the first things from one of the first prompt attempts.

That's the truth right now, but that's merely a limitation of the technology. Particularly if you imagine arbitrarily wide context windows such that the LLM can usefully begin to infer your specific preferences and implications over time.

> The most successful people I know are in a category you leave out: the people who will put in long hours out of being super-intrinsically-motived but are ALSO naturally gifted creatively/intelligently in some domain.

Those are the people I mention at the end, those that clear the bar into being uniquely special. From what I hear from my friends that have been teaching for about twenty years now, you're lucky if you get more than one or two of those every ten years.
by tialaramex | 2026-01-24 23:25:32+00:00
Sure, they will have been bundles of 4 pairs and I suppose we could say that is a matter of luck, it will have been installed from the outset in anticipation of networking - there's a period in the late 1980s when everybody is iterating on what will soon become 10baseT and the people in that building would have known all about it - but there's no reason back then to know 4 pairs will be an auspicious choice rather than 3 or 6.

So yes, those cables though they weren't Cat 5e because it didn't exist when they were manufactured, also were not basic phone cables, and I believe when the building was formally opened it had "ground breaking" 10Mbit Ethernet to every laboratory.
by bogeholm | 2026-01-24 23:25:35+00:00
> For the first one, you CANNOT use what you just described, since it doesn't represent time, so you cannot give dates in any form.

Exactly - that’s the point.

Story points assigned to a SINGLE task is not for estimating time spent on that task.

Story points can - given prior data - give you an estimate of time spent on a GROUP of future tasks
by majormajor | 2026-01-24 23:27:02+00:00
Lots of companies can make decent apps. And IMO the Prime Video TV/Mobile and Amazon mobile apps are "decent" from a "they do what they're trying to do" standpoint and don't fail all the time.

But they don't really think about things from a "consumer who wants to watch something tonight" vs "shopper who we want to get money from" perspective. So the Prime Video app has been painful to navigate and use. Things like concepts of how people want to interact with TV shows - one top level entry with seasons in it, vs top-level entries per season, which took them forever to change - reflect quick and dirty shoveling of concepts over from how they'd sell box sets or such vs thinking about it from a user-first POV. Or how search will return a match for just about anything because they will happily sell it to you vs having as a default "show any free results first because I'm not looking to spend more right now."

That's a product/vision failure (or just mismatch with what you and I want) not an engineering/engineering culture thing.
by 1718627440 | 2026-01-24 23:27:25+00:00
> Microsoft is legally entitled to refuse a request from law enforcement, and subject to criminal penalties if it refuses a valid legal order.

This is a problem, because Microsoft operates in a lot of jurisdictions, but one of them always wants to be the exception and claims that it has jurisdiction over all the others. Not that I personally am of the opinion, that it is wise for the other jurisdiction to trust Microsoft, but if MS wants to secure operating in the other jurisdiction it needs to separate itself from that outsider.
by vel0city | 2026-01-24 23:27:28+00:00
> Wireless POS card terminals are incredibly cheap, why people need to hand their cards to someone?

Lots of restaurants and bars have been slow to adopt new systems. While many have moved towards waiters having portable machines and can process the payments table-side, probably half the restaurants and bars I go to expect the waiter/bartender to handle the card.

Few banks/merchants actually require a PIN for transactions most of the time. I couldn't even tell you what the PIN is on most of my credit cards, its never come up on a lot of them even with $1,000+ purchases.
by kukkeliskuu | 2026-01-24 23:28:39+00:00
The biggest beef I have with microservice architectures is lack of transactions across service boundaries. We say that such systems-of-systems are "eventually consistent", but they are actually never guaranteed to be in a consistent state -- i.e. they are always inconsistent. That pushes the responsibility for consistency to the system that needs to use the data -- making implementing those either extremely complex -- or more typically -- you introduce rare distributed timing issues that are difficult to find in testing. The benefits of microservices are offset by losing the ability to use the database to make your systems robust.
by lukev | 2026-01-24 23:28:56+00:00
Firstly, the idea that "1/3" of people went to truthsocial is laughable.

Readers are free to create accounts on whichever platforms they choose, in order to follow you. And publishes are free to choose which platforms they endorse.

Notably, of the three mentioned, ATProto is by far the most open and extensible protocol, and less subject to the whims of an addled billionaire.
by mjr00 | 2026-01-24 23:29:16+00:00
There's some stuff that, culturally, I don't think Amazon will ever do well. Amazon Games should be shuttered entirely. Their latest game was a really embarrassing flop; "King of Meat", which they expected to have 100,000 daily concurrent players, reached a max of 320 concurrents during a free weekend[0]. Have you heard of a single Amazon Prime Original Movie[1]? Likely only one -- 2025's War of the Worlds, which became a meme because it is legitimately one of the worst movies of all time.

Amazon is built on a culture of doing the most boring, data-driven, predictable thing possible and executing well. Which is awesome when you're dealing with databases and the logistics of delivering packages. But it's effectively the opposite of games, movies and other creative media where you have to trust a single person or small group of people with a vision. Otherwise you get what Amazon gives, which is unappetizing slop.

If I were Jassy I'd cut off these product lines entirely. It's just not a good fit for how Amazon operates.

[0] https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/king-of-meat-studio-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Amazon_Prime_Video_ori...
by JumpinJack_Cash | 2026-01-24 23:29:38+00:00
It's the playbook already seen in Argentina, the Middle East and many other countries. But especially Argentina.

The military always has in the back of their mind the idea that they are above people, and this goes from the most deviant and incompetent soldier who still has a 6pack and fighting abilities and thinks all the guys in his small town are wussies all the way up to the highest ranked general who begrudgingly has to meet Senators and Representatives but still think they are nothing but wussies.

A common thread is that they think that society doesn't reward them with enough power for their valuable skills and instead it gives such power to undeserving people and their undeserving skills, for example a mayor who is able to cry on command to empathize with the population when some tragedy happens or the same mayor who got elected by being able to identify people's worries and lie that they'll fix them just to get power.

And if even the smallest doubt begins to enter the mind of the population , the doubt that yes maybe it could be better if the military ran things, the cold execution, the lack of emotion would bring us efficiency....it's already over.... the military dictatorship in effect already in place as there is no way to stop it after the seed of the doubt begins to emerge in the collective minds of the population.

If a malignant actor can convince the military that he can deliver the status in society that they really deserve they'll be willing to kill for that man. And if that malignant actor can also plant a small seed in the collective minds of the population....well get ready to kneel before your new dictator America
by Lammy | 2026-01-24 23:30:13+00:00
> It seems like 5%/year is sort of industry norm.

That's because the people running these companies learned the hard way not to write their collusion down, so now they just all totally coincidentally act in the same way that ends up driving wages down and keeping workers afraid and in line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
by publicdebates | 2026-01-24 23:30:31+00:00
> macro language is surprising for the newcomer, but you get used to it

This was one of the biggest paradigm shifts for me in mastering C. Once I learned to stop treating the preprocessor as a hacky afterthought, and realized that it's actually a first-class citizen in C and has been since its conception, I realized how beautiful and useful it really is when used the way the designers intended. You can do anything with it, literally anything, from reflection to JSON and YAML de/serialization to ad hoc generics. It's so harmonious, if unsightly, like the fat lady with far too much makeup singing the final opus.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-24 23:31:35+00:00
Partly because it's a good construct. Most people's writing is garbage compared to what LLMs output by default.

But the other part of it is, each conversation you have, and each piece of AI output you read online, is written by LLM instance that has no memory of prior conversations, so it doesn't know that, from human perspective, it used this construct 20 times in the last hour. Human writers avoid repeating the same phrases in quick succession, even across different writings (e.g. I might not reuse some phrase in email to person A, because I just used it in email to unrelated person B, and it feels like bad style).

Perhaps that's why reading LLM output feels like reading high school essays. Those essays all look alike because they're all written independently and each is a self-contained piece where the author tries to show off their mastery of language. After reading 20 of them in a row, one too gets tired of seeing the same few constructs being used in nearly every one of them.
by shoo | 2026-01-24 23:31:40+00:00
Your story reminded me of Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner's book "How Big Things Get Done". It's a pop science book communicating the research of Flyvbjerg & collaborators who collected data of actual schedule & budget outcomes for many large projects, along with recording the estimated schedule and budgets from the time the go/nogo decision was made to invest in the projects.

For accurate schedule and budget estimates, Flyvbjerg strongly recommends figuring out which broader class of projects your project belongs to, then going and looking at accurate historical data with actual schedule and budget outcomes for projects in that class, and using historical averages as your estimates.

There's a great table in an appendix at the back of the book, offering statistics for each category of project, ranking them by mean cost overrun.

The absolute worst category of project, for mean cost overruns, is nuclear storage, with a mean cost overrun of 238%.

IT projects are the 5th worst category of project, with a mean cost overrun of 73%, behind nuclear storage, olympic games, nuclear power and hydroelectric dams.

The table also has statistics on "what percentage of projects has a cost overrun of 50% or greater" and "of those projects with a cost overrun of 50% or greater, what is their mean cost overrun". For nuclear storage projects, 48% of them have a cost overrun of 50% or greater, and of those, the mean cost overrun is 427% (!).

For IT projects, 18% of them have a cost overrun of 50% or greater, and of those, the mean cost overrun is 447% (!!).

Some of the chapters in the book discuss some of the structural or political pressures that set projects up to fail --- e.g. in some fields its an open secret that estimates are always wildly optimistic, as if the estimates were actually realistic, no one would ever agree to fund a project.
by vidarh | 2026-01-24 23:32:07+00:00
I don't know about something this comple, but right this moment I have something similar running in Claude Code in another window, and it is very helpful even with a much simpler setup:

If you have these agents do everything at the "top level" they lose track. The moment you introduce sub-agents, you can have the top level run in a tight loop of "tell agent X to do the next task; tell agent Y to review the work; repeat" or similar (add as many agents as makes sense), and it will take a long time to fill up the context. The agents get fresh context, and you get to manage explicitly what information is allowed to flow between them. It also tends to mean it is a lot easier to introduce quality gates - eg. your testing agent and your code review agent etc. will not decide they can skip testing because they "know" they implemented things correctly, because there is no memory of that in their context.

Sometimes too much knowledge is a bad thing.