MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pinnochio | 2026-01-24 14:40:19+00:00
Again, the comparison was between a dog and a manager. There's zero insinuation that a manager is like an owner and an employee like a dog. It does feel like you're looking for a pretext to feel slighted here.

That aside, I completely agree with you that managers should engage in empathy and introspection. I still think it's helpful, even for those that do, to have some empirical confirmation of how strongly employees can be affected by what might seem a simple oversight to an otherwise empathetic and introspective manager. But unfortunately, callous people tend to be chosen for management, and this research is also potentially helpful in aligning their own self-interest with their employees.
by woliveirajr | 2026-01-24 14:41:05+00:00
Well, that actually happens a lot, with many causes.

For example: manager is perfectionist (at some level), it takes more time to delegate than doing it yourself, there's some attitude from the subordinate to undermine the manager, there's lot of work in a specific season and manager prefer to do it himself than risking his job due to a bad work form a subordinate

In an ideal world, of course the manager would replace the subordinate. But in real life, sometimes you can't find someone in the adequate time and is better to have him doing 75% of the work instead of 0%...
by herewulf | 2026-01-24 14:41:05+00:00
It's great to have new images to start from. Definitely gives a new leg up for new installs. For installations you already have, release numbers don't really mean a lot.

I want to mention a few resources for anyone diving into Guix to write your own packages and services. It took me a while to come across Toys[1] which is a great search tool for any packages you might be missing or examples of how to write packages/services. YMMV on the quality of 3rd party things that turn up.

Speaking of 3rd party things, there are a lot of great blog articles floating around for doing interesting things with Guix that the official documentation does not discuss. A lot of this stuff should go into the Guix Cookbook[2] but volunteers spending a lot of time writing documentation (and then getting the appropriate review) is always going to be a struggle. Just beware of a few CLI argument changes in regards to older articles.

Also, worth mentioning is the move to Codeberg has been great for network performance for end users pulling updates. Sadly Savannah is down a lot or is just slow.

[1]: https://toys.whereis.social

[2]: https://guix.gnu.org/cookbook/
by codethief | 2026-01-24 14:41:40+00:00
> To me it has become a bit of a meme that you always end up in this old-issue flow: I want to do X -> Try it -> Run into an issue -> Search for solution -> Find an official bugreport that is 3-8y old.

That's been my experience as well and, in fact, it was totally a meme at my former client! See also my comment in another recent thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46296816
by digiown | 2026-01-24 14:42:16+00:00
I'd like to mention that the cat5e cable present in your walls is rated to 2.5Gbps, and would often still work at 5 or 10Gbps over shorter runs in a home. 2.5gb equipment is very cheap nowadays. I got a couple of no-name switches under $40 each and they all work perfectly. Wired networks will always have better consistency and latency characteristics, too, if that matters to you.
by wbkang | 2026-01-24 14:42:21+00:00
This resonated with me a lot, thank you. It more or less matches what I have experienced, and it’s good to see someone write this down in a fairly balanced point of view.

My favourite parts:

> My job is to figure out the set of software approaches that match that estimate. […]

> Many engineers find this approach distasteful. […]

> If you refuse to estimate, you’re forcing someone less technical to estimate for you.

Even after many years, I still find it distasteful sometimes but I have to remind myself what everyone gets paid for at the end of the day.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-24 14:42:25+00:00
> you have the right to do that work without kowtowing to the authority of other people who did the work before you ("just fork it").

> The important point lost in many of these anti-fork posts is that forks usually aren't hostile, and "just fork it" isn't usually a dismissal of people's input

In my experience, forking a semi-active project can often be viewed as hostile by the maintainers. Some of those maintainers may turn it into a holy war where they try to throw their weight around to push back on the fork. I’ve seen claims of “trying to stealing our project” to mobilizing users of their Discord to warn people to avoid the fork across Reddit and other social media.

It doesn’t always go that way, as you experienced with the project you forked. The situation you described is about as non-threatening as it gets, though, because you forked for a single client and you don’t want to become a maintainer of a new project.
by RickJWagner | 2026-01-24 14:43:27+00:00
When I started in the early 90s, a wise old programmer gave me two pieces of advice about estimation.

1. When you consider planning, testing, documentation, etc. it takes 4 hours to change a single line of code.

2. To make good estimates, study the problem carefully, allow for every possibility, and make the estimate in great detail. Then take that number and multiply by 2. Then double that number.
by cromka | 2026-01-24 14:43:40+00:00
Sure, but these are all mere statements. You don't know if they fully back that until there's a public standoff with law enforcement/administration and there weren't any in recent years. Yet at the same time it's hard to believe there were no attempts from that government to decrypt some devices they needed. So the fact we hear nothing about it is also an information to me. Sure, this is all speculation, but all things considered...

Besides, they fully comply with Chinese requirements, so...

PS. Others report Filevault keys are also being backed to iCloud since September and they didn't tell anyone: https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/09/filevault-on-macos-tahoe-...
by _blk | 2026-01-24 14:44:16+00:00
A Proton model makes this very simple: full cooperation and handover and virtually nothing to be extracted from the data. Size is somewhat of a metadata, ip connection points and maybe date of first use and when data changes occurred...
I'm all for law enforcement, but that job has to be old-school Proof of Work bound and not using blanket data collection and automated speeding ticket mailer.

But I guess it's not done more because the free data can't be analyzed and sold.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-24 14:44:51+00:00
> Yes exactly. I've forked many a library to meet my own needs. Usually temporary,

This isn’t really what the article is about. Doing a temporary fork for your own needs is equivalent to maintaining some personal patches.

The article is talking about running a forked project as an active fork that other people are using. That comes with the social overhead and community complications.
by jraph | 2026-01-24 14:45:38+00:00
> You will never find a HTML6 or higher

You might be right, but we don't know yet. Microsoft said that for Windows 10.

You might also be right that the current Living Standard specification doesn't really call it HTML5, but you'll find many people writing HTML for a living say HTML5 to refer to it, and telling them that HTML5 doesn't exist doesn't really help and is a bit wrong too if you have a descriptive approach to languages.
by ghostinit | 2026-01-24 14:45:44+00:00
This is the part that gets me. When it works, it's just someone doing basic execution. When it doesn't, you're paying $120k for someone to send calendar invites and forget retros.

That contrast you described, pharma-sales-rep energy vs the guy people yell at mid-meeting got me thinking about the actual ROI. I've been tracking salary data and trying to see if SM presence correlates with delivery metrics (deployment frequency, lead time, that kind of thing). Looked at around 40 teams. Couldn't find any meaningful difference.

Wrote up the whole thing here: https://agilelie.com/blog/scrum-master-salary-data-2026-wort...

Would love to know if I'm missing something in the analysis.

One thing I keep wondering: that good SM you had, would she have been just as effective as a tech lead who spends 10% of her time on facilitation? Or does the dedicated role actually matter when you find the right person?
by Verdex | 2026-01-24 14:46:02+00:00
I gave up on osx 5 years ago. I gave up on Linux 3 years ago.

Today, 2 out of 3 of my machines are KDE fedora. The last one is TBD because my kids are using it.

I didn't have a choice for machine 1 because it wasn't eligible for windows 11 and windows 10 security updates were EOL. Machine 2 quickly followed.

At the time, there had been disappointing windows news every few months. Since there have continued to be disappointing windows news every few months.

I expect more disappointing windows news to follow.
by dist-epoch | 2026-01-24 14:46:54+00:00
Everybody should have access to your hard drive, not just the FBI, so please do not encrypt your hard-drive.

If you encrypt your drive and upload the key to Microsoft, you are engaging in anti-competitive behavior since you give them access to your data, but not also to the local thief.

Just don't encrypt your drive if you cant be bothered to secure your key. Encryption-neutrality.
by cornholio | 2026-01-24 14:47:04+00:00
It's dismissive because most of the requests open source developers get need to be dismissed.

"Where can I send some cash for your hard work" or "here is a very well thought out patch to a long standing bug, with minimal impact" are much rarer than "Here's my very complex edge use case that I need to support ASAP, I think it's quite shameful you don't support this already must not take you more than 5 minutes, come on people do it already my clients are waiting and I'm stuck waiting for your lazy asses".
by mattacular | 2026-01-24 14:47:05+00:00
Estimation is an art, not a science. It's always going to be a judgement call by the engineers tasked with giving them to management. Taking all of the factors from this article and beyond can and should go into making that judgement call.

I always tell my teams just skip the middlemen and think of estimates as time from the jump. It's just easier that way. As soon as an estimate leaves an engineer's mouth, it is eagerly translated into time by everyone else at the business. That is all anyone else cares about. Better said - that is all anyone else can understand. We humans all have a shared and unambiguous frame of reference for what 1 hour is, or what 1 day is. That isn't true of any other unit of software estimation. It doesn't matter that what one engineer can accomplish in 1 hour or 1 day is different from the next. The same is true no matter what you're measuring in. You can still use buffers with time. If you insist on not thinking of your labor in terms of hours spent, you can map time ranges to eg. points along the Fibonacci sequence. That is still a useful way to estimate because it is certainly true as software complexity goes up, the time spent on it will be growing non-linearly.
by martinald | 2026-01-24 14:47:12+00:00
It's not true either. Openreach offer a 1.6gbit/sec product now, which ISPs can resell.

I don't understand why he says it's the most expensive places to get internet. You can get 900mbit (really 1gig pre overheads) for ~£30/month on openreach infrastructure which is not the cheapest in the world but it certainly isn't the most expensive.

And if you're covered by an altnet (who build their own infrastructure instead of reselling openreach) like cityfibre, community fibre or netomnia you'll get far faster speeds for even less money.

A lot of these providers do rent the poles and ducts off openreach, but then lay their own fibre over it
by cube2222 | 2026-01-24 14:47:13+00:00
I think the main problem in estimating projects is unknown unknowns.

I find that the best approach to solving that is taking a “tracer-bullet” approach. You make an initial end-to-end PoC that explores all the tricky bits of your project.

Making estimates then becomes quite a bit more tractable (though still has its limits and uncertainty, of course). Conversations about where to cut scope will also be easier.
by VorpalWay | 2026-01-24 14:47:28+00:00
> But you are very wrong about embedded systems development and AI. I do a huge amount of microcontroller programming and AI is a massive productivity multiplier and the LLMs are extremely good at it.

Probably true if you use an SDK there are lots of examples for. I have worked with embassy in Rust and AIs were not good, not with a company internal SDK in C++ at work. They will frequently hallucinate non-existing methods or get the parameters wrong. And for larger systems (e.g. targeting embedded Linux) they can't keep enough context in their head to work with large (millions of lines) existing proprietary code bases. They make mistakes and you end up with unmaintainable soup. Humans can learn on the job, AIs can't yet do that.
by netsharc | 2026-01-24 14:47:50+00:00
> Validation is ignored, and most modern sites are built with little concern for structure or longevity.

I remember going online with a modem in the 90s. There was a new ISP in town, but their homepage took forever to load. I viewed the source, and whatever page generator they were rendered the page as HTML tables (this was fine back then), and added repetitive style tags to every table cell instead of using CSS (although I wonder if this was before CSS) or not doing so for empty cells, and that their homepage was so bloated and slow to load on dial-up.

I wonder how it is nowadays. But I suppose in the age that accomodates apps like Teams and Slack, who cares?
by Macha | 2026-01-24 14:48:10+00:00
It does, and I've even had Gitlab as the primary repo for some time. But if your projects pick up any steam, github mirrors are going to pop up whether you run them or not - I've had people mirror my projects onto github because it means less questions for them when they want to package them for their organisation or minor packaging system than pulling source from "not-Github". Of course, the license allows them to do that, and they're upfront why they're doing it, but if there's going to be a github mirror anyway, may as well have it official.

Also if we're being honest, despite Gitlab being the #2 platform, you're going to get less contributions than on Github as people just aren't going to want to sign into a second service. Now most of my public projects are like "I made this, I put it here to show off, and use it if you like" so if people _don't_ use it, it's no big deal for me, but if you're in it for revenue or clout or just like seeing usage numbers going up, it's clearly not the optimal choice.
by simonw | 2026-01-24 14:48:16+00:00
The blog post had just a couple of paragraphs about the browser project, all of them accurate: https://cursor.com/blog/scaling-agents#running-for-weeks

> To test this system, we pointed it at an ambitious goal: building a web browser from scratch. The agents ran for close to a week, writing over 1 million lines of code across 1,000 files. You can explore the source code on GitHub.

> Despite the codebase size, new agents can still understand it and make meaningful progress. Hundreds of workers run concurrently, pushing to the same branch with minimal conflicts.

The commits that knocked the project into shape so other people could build the code were handled by agents as well.

I really don't think there's a notable scandal here.
by Noaidi | 2026-01-24 14:48:25+00:00
Yes, I know this sounds conspiratorial, but I think the whole Liquid Ass thing was a rush to put some other software in Apple products to appease the Trump admin.

For example, it is new in Tahoe that they store your filevault encryption key in your icloud keychain without telling you.

https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/09/filevault-on-macos-tahoe-...
by B1FIDO | 2026-01-24 14:48:51+00:00
Well, for a consumer notebook or mobile device, the threat model typically envisions a thief grabbing it from a coffeehouse or hotel room. So your key needs to be safeguarded from the opportunist who possesses your hardware illegally.

Linux can be fairly well-secured against state-level threat actors, but honestly, if your adversary is your own nation-state, then no amount of security is going to protect you!

For Microsoft and the other consumer-OS vendors, it is typically a bad user-experience for any user, particularly a paying subscriber, to lose access to their account and their cloud apps. There are many ways to try and cajole the naïve user into storing their recovery key somewhere safe, but the best way is to just do it for them.

A recovery key stored in the user's own cloud account is going to be secure from the typical threats that consumers will face. I, for one, am thankful that there is peace of mind both from the on-device encryption, as well as the straightforward disaster recovery methods.
by ch_123 | 2026-01-24 14:49:41+00:00
> What "modern software support" do I lack here?

There is a growing list of software that which has discontinued support for Windows 10 on the latest versions (or the Server versions thereof). I'm not sure if your example of running a ~16 year old version of SQL Server on Server 2016 demonstrates.

To my original post - if you only need to run an old version of a software package, then an old version of Windows is fine. Just because something is old, it doesn't mean that it is not useful.
by jraph | 2026-01-24 14:49:46+00:00
> Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict (or Transitional) is requirements of XHTML club

Where do you see this?

I see that they do use XHTML 1.0 Strict but I don't see this requirement written.

Brad, we need your clarification here, it's critical, we need you to tell us which one of us is wrong! :-)
by strogonoff | 2026-01-24 14:49:51+00:00
As someone who has gotten into the idea of semantic Web long after XHTML was all the rage[0], I somewhat resent that semantic Web and XML are so often lumped together[1]. After all, XML is just one serialisation mechanism for linked data.

[0] I don’t dislike XHTML. The snob in me loves the idea. Sure, had XHTML been The Standard it would have been so much more difficult to publish my first website at the age of 14 that I’m not sure I would have gotten into building for Web at all, but is it necessarily a good thing if our field is based on technology so forgiving to malformed input that a middle school pupil can pass for an engineer? and while I do omit closing tags when allowed by the spec, are the savings worth remembering these complicated rules for when they can be omitted, and is it worth maintaining all this branching that allows parsers to handle invalid markup, when barely any HTML is hand-written these days?

[1] Usually it is to the detriment of the former: the latter tends to be ill-regarded by today’s average Web developer used to JSON (even as they hail various schema-related additions on top of JSON that essentially try to make it do things XML can, but worse).
by GuB-42 | 2026-01-24 14:49:52+00:00
Turns out that I rarely need to know sizes or indices of a UTF8 string in anything other than bytes.

If I write a parser for instance, usually, what to know is "what is the sequence of byte between this sequence of bytes and that sequence of bytes". That there are flag emojis or whatever in there don't matter, and the way UTF8 works ensures that a character representation doesn't partially overlap with a another.

What the byte sequences mean only really matters if you are writing an editor, so that you know how many bytes to remove when you press backspace for instance.

Truncation as to prevent buffer overflow seems to be a case where it would matter but not really. An overflow is an error and should be treated as such. Truncation is a safety mechanism, for when having your string truncated is a lesser evil. At that point, having half a flag emoji doesn't really matter.
by Juliate | 2026-01-24 14:49:55+00:00
There is at least one obvious company in the list where the founder does not advertise the slightest discernment in his public discourse (about the tech, about the business and about the impact on society).

We do not have to be charitable with people that have such financial and industrial (hence political) power over our lives, and that do not display obvious and verifiable signs of charity upon the human kind either.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-24 14:50:27+00:00
Read the parent comment first then mine, if you haven't, and it should make sense. Otherwise; "Them" here is referring to "AI companies wanting to market their products". The screenshot shows one such attempt of a company wanting to pay someone on HN to talk and share their product in return of compensation for that. Proof that "They" aren't just "fighting for our attention" in the commonly understood way, they're also literally paying money to talk about them.
by direwolf20 | 2026-01-24 14:50:51+00:00
That's basically the design of PHP with different syntax. <?for($i=0;$i<1;$i++){?> <html></html> <?}?>

Nobody uses PHP this way any more though — people treat it like Python or Node and write the entire codebase inside a big <? block

JSP is similar with different syntax again — nobody uses JSP either

I think ASP too but I never used that
by andai | 2026-01-24 14:50:59+00:00
Can a non-human entity accept an agreement? I know there are things like mountains and rivers which have been granted legal personhood. But obviously they have humans who act on their behalf.

The general question of the personhood of artificial intelligence aside, perhaps the personhood could be granted as an extension of yourself, like power of attorney? (Or we could change the law so it works that way.)

It all sounds a bit weird but I think we're going to have to make up our minds on the subject very soon. (Or perhaps the folks over at Davos have already done us the favour of making up theirs ;)
by fredflint | 2026-01-24 14:51:23+00:00
A good leader believes in the team and the team’s mission.

Celebrating birthdays and milestones are a possible side effect of this, but these celebrations can’t take place of the power of that belief.

If you consistently smile, you can force yourself to be happier, and if you force yourself to celebrate others, that’s still a good thing. But, your team will know if you don’t believe.

You’re better off being Gary Oldman in Slow Horses (only secretly believing in the mission and with a team that all care) than just being in it for the paycheck.

I’m not saying to quit if you can’t believe, but don’t expect top productivity.
by cedws | 2026-01-24 14:51:25+00:00
It's most software. Cryptography is user-unfriendly. The mechanisms used to make it user friendly sacrifice security.

There's a saying that goes "not your keys not your crypto" but this really extends to everything. If you don't control the keys something else does behind the scenes. A six digit PIN you use to unlock your phone or messaging app doesn't have enough entropy to be secure, even to derive a key-encryption-key.

If you pass a KDF with a hardness of ~5 seconds a four digit PIN to derive a key, then you can brute force the whole 10,000 possible PINs in ~13 hours. After ~6.5 hours you would have a 50% chance of guessing correctly. Six digit PIN would take significantly longer, but most software uses a hardness nowhere near 5 seconds.
by jeduardo | 2026-01-24 14:51:42+00:00
We used to run Gitlab Premium for around 300 users running hundreds of jobs over some monorepos. Gitlab suggested a small architecture using Omnibus, and while it helped a bit, it didn't perform as well under load as we expected it to.

Eventually, there was no virtual scaling that could help. This, for me, is the biggest problem with Gitlab hosting: as soon as you hit a scale where a single machine with Omnibus doesn't cut it, the jump in complexity, cost, and engineering hours is significant.