MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Coding assistants are slow. So we multitask
by brunaxLorax | 2026-01-25 00:01:05+00:00
Coding assistants are slow.

Obviously they are extremely fast in comparison to the best human programmers, but they are still too slow to be our one-to-one enhanced pair programmer. Our current solution is multi-instances, toggling between tasks. However, Multitasking is known to be a poor method, with low productivity and causing harm as it increases cognitive load, stress and fatigue levels.

I am sure that this is temporary and we will soon have coding assistants fast enough for deep focus on single tasks. What do you think?
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-01-25 00:01:20+00:00
The man was a Veterans Administration ICU nurse who cared for sick veterans that was helping a woman that ICE pushed to the ground and then used chemical weapons on. There are quite a few doctors giving testimonials to this man's character at the VA.

The right will tell you that an awful/chaotic world is one where a male ICU nurses helps a woman pushed to the ground and sprayed in the face with less lethal weapons by government jackboots wearing masks.

The right will tell you that a sane/reasonable world is one where that man is extra-judicially murdered and the woman taken into government custody.
by Anonyneko | 2026-01-25 00:01:30+00:00
>In the Swedish coastal city of Helsingborg, for example, a one-year project is testing how various public services would function in the scenario of a digital blackout

Russia has been doing these blackout exercises for many years now all across the country, forcing major services to make serious changes to their infrastructure. I assume similar things happen regularly in Iran and China. Europe is incredibly late to the game, and doing random experiments in small towns is not even nearly enough. Weaning off government services is also not enough, physical networks have to be prepared for it, commercial services have to follow, and the general populace has to be incentivized to use them. Otherwise, the damage from a blackout will still be unsustainable. It doesn't sound democratic, but this should be treated as a matter of national security. That is, if self-reliance is an actual goal - waiting for things to possibly blow over is still an option, but this is one of those matters where I believe half-measures are worse than both of the extremes.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-01-25 00:02:49+00:00
> That's why full disk encryption was always a no-go for approximately all computer users, and recommending it to someone not highly versed in technology was borderline malicious.

Do you feel equally strongly about people using drives that can fail? Is selling a computer without redundant drives also borderline malicious?

> In the real world, there is always a recovery path.

To accounts there is. But data gets lost all the time.
by close04 | 2026-01-25 00:03:30+00:00
Despite the downvotes, this is at least partially correct. If unions were ubiquitous in the tech sector, companies would have been a lot more stingy with the hiring during ZIRP or boom eras. Or they would have been more creative with the hiring form - contractors, temporary staff, etc. None of these companies would risk locking in so many employees knowing that they'll be very expensive or impossible to fire.

I don't know about how a union would affect the standard salary being offered. I'd say that it could be higher for those essential enough to be "core staff", those that the company hires permanently knowing they'll be hard to get rid of and who drive the company forward because they're motivated with additional means.

So a union might drive the salaries and employment conditions up for the "core" team, while driving them down for the "temps". I've been through this as a unionized tech worker in both categories, and this is how it played out.
by Spooky23 | 2026-01-25 00:04:02+00:00
Unionism is capitalism. If you are a W2 employee in the United States, you are in a contractual relationship in which you have very limited leverage to negotiate and limited protections.

Humans organize together in many different ways for many different reasons. Your own assertion belies that — if my negotiating my terms of working for someone is crime against humanity, why should the guy controlling the capital have that right?

The dude for whom I work is worth $10-15B. What should he make for the benefit of humanity and efficiency? He negotiated a deal with the board for his comp.
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-25 00:04:17+00:00
It is literally his right under the second amendment to carry a firearm. In fact, this is the position argued by most conservatives. However, he did not fight them at any point, and in fact, he did not even draw his gun.

Analysis of video clearly shows they took his gun away, which he had not drawn previously, then put him on his knees, then executed him:

https://xcancel.com/adamscochran/status/2015119306086900170
by roenxi | 2026-01-25 00:05:05+00:00
> The fact is that there's evidence that unions can correct power imbalances, raise wages, reduce inequality, and even support long-term productivity and social stability

I suppose there was a time when American manufacturing had a big power/equality/productivity and social stability imbalance over Chinese manufacturing and the US unions did play a role in correcting that and promoting Chinese wealth and power. So in principle I agree. I'm just less sure that AWS employees are going to benefit from doing the same thing in software.
by Alasater | 2026-01-25 00:05:39+00:00
Space safety for sure on the cover, although I'm not sure we'll have that cover for future launches because it was less than easy to coordinate with the FCC on where to eject it.

The radio came from a supplier who has been investigating the issue. We had concerns with their NAND and ECC implementation, and we weren’t able to fully root-cause it with them. Going forward, we’ll be building our own radios, which will make it easier to test, iterate, and resolve issues like this internally, or at least be able to trace possible latch ups or destructive failures and implement the right levels of redundancy.
by nobody_r_knows | 2026-01-25 00:05:44+00:00
I'm confused when you say you have a manager, scrum master, archetech, all supposdely sharing the same memory, do each of those "employees" "know" what they are? And if so, based on what are their identities defined? Prompts? Or something more. Or am I just too dumb to understand / swimming against the current here. Either way, it sounds amazing!
by throwup238 | 2026-01-25 00:05:48+00:00
> Is anyone exploring the (imo more practically useful today) space of using agents to put together better changes vs "more commits"?

That’s what I’ve been focused on the last few weeks with my own agent orchestrator. The actual orchestration bit was the easy part but the key is to make it self improving via “workflow reviewer” agents that can create new reviewers specializing in catching a specific set of antipatterns, like swallowing errors. Unfortunately I've found that what decides acceptable code quality is very dependent on project, organization, and even module (tests vs internal utilities vs production services) so prompt instructions like "don't swallow errors or use unwrap" make one part of the code better while another gets worse, creating a conflict for the LLM.

The problem is that model eval was already the hardest part of using LLMs and evaluating agents is even harder if not practically impossible. The toy benchmarks the AI companies have been using are laughably inadequate.

So far the best I’ve got is “reimplement MINPACK from scratch using their test suite” which can take days and has to be manually evaluated.
by neximo64 | 2026-01-25 00:06:09+00:00
This is the basic Maastricht treaty. You cannot make EU law in France without France creating it not as EU law, but as French law. A SE or EU-INC would have to exist within this construct.

The only exception to a legal entity are the EU entities themselves which are supranational.

This is what most people don't understand with the EU, that there is a very specific process to create law and limitations on what it can do. It isn't like the US and the EU isn't a country. I may appreciate you might be European but even within Europe the detail with it is where it matters.
by Gooblebrai | 2026-01-25 00:06:26+00:00
So the PM must have the velocity of the team to be able to estimate timescales for the project, which is what they care about, and this velocity metric is only as good as the estimation of complexity points of a team?

> An experienced senior dev might tend to deliver 30 points per sprint

Seems a bit ironic that complexity doesn't measure time but then we are measuring how much complexity can someone deliver on average on a given time. Isn't complexity directly proportional to uncertainty factors, and therefore inversely proportional to confidence of time to completion?
by cryzinger | 2026-01-25 00:06:40+00:00
It spoke to me as someone who's not jazzed about LLMs but also not convinced by the "it's violating our precious copyright!" arguments against them.

I think there's something in there with the character hierarchy of screenwriter vs novelist vs poet; it seems like the screenwriter in the story writes to make a living, the novelist does it for prestige, and the poet does it largely for the love of the game. The screenwriter is on board with AI until he realizes it'll hurt him more than it'll help him--ironic since he had been excited about being able to use different actors' likenesses!--and the whole time he's looking down at the poet like "Oh, god, if all this takes off I'm going to be as poor and pathetic as that guy." (Which raises interesting questions about the poet's stake in all of this: he doesn't actually have much to lose here, considering how little money or recognition he gets in the first place, but he's helping the other two guys anyway.) The novelist is rallying against the AI, but he's also initially disappointed to find out that his work wasn't important enough to use in its training data... and then later gets a kind of twisted thrill when it does actually quote his own work back at him.
I dunno. I think it's a messy story in the same way that the conversation about AI and the arts is itself messy, which I like. And I always appreciate a story that leaves me with questions to mull over instead of trying to dump a bunch of platitudes in my lap :P
by manuelabeledo | 2026-01-25 00:06:41+00:00
But that’s not true. As I said, it was made available to third parties in 2024.

Again, it’s disingenuous to claim that Apple is a monopoly, while ignoring the fact that two companies have dominated the entire card network market for decades. Also, there’s no such thing as a “monopoly” on payments in their own platform. If that were true, anyone could sue American Express, the payment network, for not offering Visa cards. Completely absurd.
by bsder | 2026-01-25 00:06:58+00:00
The types on the variables. Python recently adopted "gradual typing", but it isn't enforced by default. Consequently, you may have to actually execute a Python program to determine what an unlabeled variable type is.

A lot of people write Python code and then run "AI" on it to fill in the variable types. This, of course, is error prone and shitty. And the AI will miss strange usages like the one I flagged.

Although I am sorry for phrasing it as "variable typing". I can see how you might read that as "typing that varies" instead.
by Spivak | 2026-01-25 00:07:09+00:00
Genuinely, what's the sell of Microsoft 365? I get MS Word, Excel whatever lock in but what is their cloud actually adding that can't be substituted?

Email, chat, video calling, and file storage? All products that have plenty of competitors. We went with 365 only because it was dirt cheap.

I would think weening off Windows and the AD "Entra" stack would be a lot harder than commodity office software but at least they can self host that.
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-25 00:07:18+00:00
Here’s a post analyzing each part of the video and showing the evidence:

https://xcancel.com/adamscochran/status/2015119306086900170

They had him pinned on the ground, then someone takes a gun away from him, and AFTER THAT they put him on his knees and executed him.

Additionally, there are many other videos of the agents, taking phones away from the nearby witnesses who recorded all of this.

But the most disturbing thing is that the claims made by DHS, Trump, and Noem about what happened were completely made up. They are simply inventing a story and getting it out there as quickly as possible to refute any other competing story. It does not matter to them that this is a lie. The idea is to muddy the waters.
by WalterBright | 2026-01-25 00:07:24+00:00
> 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

Amazon doesn't owe anybody a job. Likewise, if you buy groceries from Safeway, you can switch to buying from Walmart anytime.

> It’s not like Amazon can’t afford it.

I'm sure there are a lot of things people don't buy even though they can afford it.
by jabwd | 2026-01-25 00:07:53+00:00
I don't know, you might be underestimating how much damage the orange in charge is really doing to the interests of the US. Change is slow, and the subtle things set in motion are always perceived too late. A simple example would be a small county in germany saving 5+ million a year thanks to moving away from microsoft. Add that to the budget of the many (largely european) opensource projects out there , and you can see things can shift, slowly, but rapidly once noticed.
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-25 00:09:00+00:00
But this person did not even have a gun in his hand. He had a gun on him, concealed. In fact, the video shows another ICE agent walking up to him and digging it out and taking it away. The execution happened after all of that.

The most likely situation is that he actually voluntarily told them that he has a firearm because he is a lawful gun owner with a concealed carry permit. Most gun owners know that this is the best way to interact with law-enforcement, for example, when you get pulled over. But we will not know because these agents do not wear body cams on purpose.
by klodolph | 2026-01-25 00:09:21+00:00
I’ll say that the parent comment is correct and explain why I think it’s correct.

Amazon has demonstrated a preference for “unregretted attrition” (URA). URA is the name for what happens when engineers exit the company and Amazon is happy that they do. The exit can either be due to a PIP failure (performance improvement plan) or just unhappiness with the company. If you believe URA works well, then URA is how Amazon gets rid of low-performing employees. If you are like me, then you believe that URA is mostly explained by the following factors:

- Failure of Amazon to successfully develop engineers. A good company will turn engineers into better engineers, and Amazon gets rid of them instead, which is inefficient. The attrition is only unregretted because Amazon was not competent enough to develop these engineers into better engineers.

- Consequences of poor culture, causing good engineers to mentally check out and eventually leave. The attrition is only unregretted because the good engineers will care less and therefore look like bad performers, when they’re good performers in a bad environment.

- A way for Amazon to avoid paying out stock grants at the 2-year mark (which is when you get most of your stock grants at Amazon). The attrition is only unregretted because somebody at Amazon cares more about the short-term bottom line.

- A way for managers to exercise control over employees they don’t like. The attrition is only unregretted because Amazon’s decisions about employee performance are based on bad data provided by managers.

I won’t share stories here but the targets are around 5% per year, maybe a little higher.
by ninkendo | 2026-01-25 00:09:51+00:00
I just want to thank you for taking the time to reply so thoughtfully to someone who is so intent on letting it all go to shit just so they can think themselves enlightened by predicting it.

I have the same response to people who ask me why I don’t leave the country since things are going so bad: fuck that, this is my home. I will always love this country. It is never beyond saving. We have been through worse (the civil war at the very most obvious, but there are plenty of other low points.) We can get through this. We can make it better, we can learn to love our neighbor again, we can learn to trust each other again. We can learn to avoid these tendencies towards hatred. We can’t give up.
by kibwen | 2026-01-25 00:10:10+00:00
> saying this is all trivial

The comment above isn't saying that closures are trivial. Once you understand the borrow checker, you understand that it's a miracle that closures in Rust can possibly work at all, given Rust's other dueling goals of being a GC-less language with guaranteed memory safety despite letting closures close over arbitrary references. Rust is in uncharted territory here, drawing the map as it goes.
by darth_avocado | 2026-01-25 00:10:35+00:00
> Amazon has about 350,000 corporate employees and a total workforce of approximately 1.56 million.

Is it mentioned anywhere that the roles eliminated are all going to be software engineers, because that’s what all the threads so far are interpreting this as. This feels more like preparing for a recession without saying it out loud. People aren’t buying as much anymore and with focus on cost savings across tech, can easily understand AWS not covering for lower retail revenue anymore.
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2026-01-25 00:10:44+00:00
The biggest beef I currently have with microservice architectures is that they are more annoying to work with when working with LLM's. Ultimately that is probably the biggest limiting factor for microservices in 2026, the tooling for multi repo setups is there (i've been using RepoPrompt for this with really good effect), but fundamentally LLM's in their default state without a purpose designed too like this suck at microservices compared to a monorepo.

You could also turn around and say that it's a good context boundary for the LLM, which is true, but then you're back at the same problem microservices have always had: they push the integration work onto another team so that developers can make it Not Their Problem. Which is, honestly, just a restatement of the exact thing you just said framed in a different way.

I think your statement can also be used against event driven architecture - having this massive event bus that controls all the levers of your distributed system always sounds great in theory, but in practice you end up with almost the exact same problem as what you just described, because the tooling for offering those integration guarantees is just not nearly as robust as a centralized database.
by vineyardmike | 2026-01-25 00:13:04+00:00
Publishing a paper (in 2025) about formal verification is miles different than implementing it company wide. Anyone who has talked to an Amazonian SWE knows they’re not building their systems like this.

The Amazon way is to quickly grind something out, and build on as many layers of AWS abstractions as possible. They’re famous for the hustle and grind not the stellar engineering acumen of formal verification.
by Alasater | 2026-01-25 00:13:20+00:00
To be certain, if you're in the trenches of this anomaly investigation you'll get the full root cause and corrective action presentation, but that's not what this post is for.

You're correct on 1, we ended up hitting an edge case in their spec that they hadn't adequately tested to and the upper level management and engineering leadership were swift to accept the fault and implement fixes with us going forward.

From a SE perspective, as a "COTS" product, we had spec'd correctly to them, they accepted our requirements and then executed each unit's acceptance test plan (aka lower level than first unit quals or life tests where this should have been caught) on the ground without anything amiss. We ran through our nominal and off nominal cases at the higher level of assembly, but not for a duration that caught this on the ground. It wasn't until we were at extended operation on orbit the issues began.

Sadly like you state, space isn't like on the ground, you can't buy spares or replace things that fault, even for a true high volume COTS product that might slip through the acceptance testing.
by xyzsparetimexyz | 2026-01-25 00:13:33+00:00
The FOMO nonsense is really uncalled for. If everything is going to be vibecoded in the future then either theres going to be a million code-unfucking jobs or no jobs at all.

Attitudes like that, where you believe that the richeous AI pushers will be saved from the coming rapture meanwhile everyone else will be out on the streets, really make people hate the AI crowd
by weitendorf | 2026-01-25 00:14:24+00:00
I believe that microservices (but under a different model than K8s et al expose) are posed to make a huge comeback soon due to agentic development. My company has been investing significantly in this direction for a while, because agents need better APIs/abstractions for execution and interaction with cloud environments.

Once Claude Code came out something new clicked with me regarding how agent coordination will actually end up working in practice. Unless you want to spend a time of time trying to prompt them into understanding separation of concerns (Claude Code specifically seems to often ignore these instructions/have conflicting default instructions), if you want to scale out agent-driven development you need to enforce separation of concerns at the repo-level.

It's basically the same problem as it was 5-10 years ago, if you have a bunch of logic that interacts with each other across "team"/knowledge/responsibility/feature boundaries, interacting with your dependencies over an API, developing in separate repos, and building + rolling out the logic separately helps enforce separation of concerns and integration around well-specified interfaces.

In an ideal world, Claude Code would not just turn every repo into a ball of mud, at least if you asked it nicely and gave it clear guidelines to follow to prevent that. That was always true with monoliths and trying to coordinate/train less experienced developers to not do the same thing when, and it turns out we didn't live in an ideal world back then so we used microservices to prevent that more structurally! History sure does rhyme.
by chr15m | 2026-01-25 00:15:10+00:00
I have run my own mail server for years and I rarely see spam. I'm running a classic Bayesian filter as outlined in the legendary PG post "A Plan For Spam" and it works very well. I don't really get all the fuss about this issue. When I do see a piece of unclassified spam I simply classify it and continue. For me this is a far better tradeoff than having all my most private mail on some bigcorp server where any nerd can rifle through it.
Show HN: C From Scratch – Learn safety-critical C with prove-first methodology
by william1872 | 2026-01-25 00:17:07+00:00
Seven modules teaching C the way safety-critical systems are actually built: MATH → STRUCT → CODE → TEST.

Each module answers one question: Does it exist? (Pulse), Is it normal? (Baseline), Is it regular? (Timing), Is it trending? (Drift), Which sensor to trust? (Consensus), How to handle overflow? (Pressure), What do we do about it? (Mode).

Every module is closed (no dependencies), total (handles all inputs), deterministic, and O(1). 83 tests passing.

Built this after 30 years in UNIX systems. Wanted something that teaches the rigour behind certified systems without requiring a decade of on-the-job learning first.

MIT licensed. Feedback welcome.