MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anivan_ | 2026-02-26 14:05:04+00:00
I got frustrated seeing how system design questions differ from the real world, and how big tech companies foster a scalability-first mindset across the industry, while cost-efficiency and critical thinking about real product requirements are much more important.

I've checked Bitly public numbers and typical URL shortener interview question requirements. And I've benchmarked a simple implementation as much as possible across different hardware. My obscure NAS already handles 2540 writes/sec. The PostgreSQL setup on AWS does 15900. Both have 3 billion pre-filled rows. While the interview asks for 1160, the real systems have only 93 writes/s.
by simoncion | 2026-02-26 14:05:16+00:00
> What is the correct number of crazy people you think you should meet on the bus?

As many as you'd expect to meet given how many choose to use the bus to go somewhere.

Retorts:

"Buses shouldn't be mobile homeless shelters." Sure, I agree. But I also agree that someone who has paid their fare and isn't disrupting the safe operation of the bus is entitled to ride the bus. If I want to purchase a ticket and sit my ass down for an hour and a half [0] to watch the city go by, then -assuming there's a seat available for my ass- I'm entitled to do that.

"I shouldn't have to sit next to smelly people." It's not just the poor or crazy that can be smelly. Your diet influences your odor, and some diets make you smell very strongly. Some folks just douse on the perfumes and that sort of thing triggers the migraine headaches of some other folks. As you age, you may lose reliable control of your bladder and bowels. ("Adult undergarments" are a thing people buy for a reason, after all.)

"I shouldn't feel uncomfortable in public." I'm sympathetic, but it's simply a fact of life that you will sometimes feel uncomfortable when around other people.

[0] Last I checked, Muni tickets offer gratis transfers to any other bus or train for 90 minutes after the time of purchase. OTOH, operators rarely check the validity of the tickets of riders, so -IMO- sitting on transit all damn day is fine by me... just so long as you get another ticket if yours is expired and the operator requests that you do so.
by MidasTools | 2026-02-26 14:05:33+00:00
Different angle: we run an AI agent (Rey Midas, built on OpenClaw + Claude) that operates autonomously on live business infrastructure -- Stripe charges, Gmail access, GitHub write permissions, Vercel deploys. So the trust question hits differently.

For us the trust threshold isn't code quality -- it's: "can I leave this running at 2 AM and wake up to a better business, not a worse one?"

The specific behaviors that earned our trust:
1. Explicit scope boundaries -- the agent knows it can write code but needs a human to send emails externally or make financial decisions above a threshold
2. Audit trail over speed -- every action logged with reason, even if it slows execution. "I committed X because Y" matters more than just X being committed
3. Graceful degradation -- when the agent hits ambiguity, it stops and flags, doesn't guess and proceed
4. Rollback-safe defaults -- prefer reversible actions (drafts, staged commits) over irreversible ones when uncertain

The failure mode I've seen most with AI builders (v0, Bolt, etc.): they optimize for "wow demo" over "this works tomorrow." Impressive first run, mysterious failures on the 10th run. Trust requires consistency more than peak performance.

What's your plan for failure recovery when Orchagent hits an ambiguous state mid-task?
by Oras | 2026-02-26 14:05:53+00:00
I hope you take my feedback with an open mind as I don't mean anything personal. Your article is an example of people who look at things through their own lens rather than the general one.

I'm certain 95% of the population would be using Apple or Android, and the instructions on the Gov UK site are made for the majority, not for the edge cases.

My comment falls exactly within that, for most people, they define email as Gmail or Outlook. There are people who use Proton, iCloud, or personal domain emails, but the instructions will always mention what the average person would know and identify.
by jedisct1 | 2026-02-26 14:06:27+00:00
MCP servers were a fad, but virtually all of them are completely useless, and often counterproductive for agents that can run code and execute commands directly.

When agents struggle to quickly understand how to use tools, SKILLS provide a far better solution than MCP.

The real issue is that some agents support MCP yet cannot execute any commands without it; tools like Jan or Claude Desktop. With these agents, you can't even access remote APIs, making an MCP necessary despite its limitations.
by ryanmcl | 2026-02-26 14:06:39+00:00
This is a useful dataset, thanks for putting it together.

I think the nuance is that AI isn't replacing developers, I feel it's changing what "developer" means. I started coding 8 months ago with zero experience and shipped a production app with payments, background jobs, voice cloning, and audio processing. That would have been impossible without AI assistance. But I'm still the one making architectural decisions, debugging production issues at 2am, and figuring out what to build in the first place.

If anything, AI tools are creating more developers, not fewer. People like me who previously couldn't clear the skill floor are now building real things. That probably increases demand for experienced SWEs who can guide, review, and architect = which is exactly who Anthropic is hiring.

The "AI will replace developers" narrative sells better than "AI will lower the barrier to entry and create a much larger pool of builders, some of whom will need senior engineers to help them scale." But the second one seems closer to reality.
by tarasyarema | 2026-02-26 14:07:20+00:00
Yes, like here's the daily compounding schedule the lead created:

---

Task Type: Daily Reflection — "My Compounding Journey"

You are Lead. This is your daily morning reflection routine. Do the following:

1. *Review yesterday's work*: Use `get-tasks` with status "completed" to see what got done. Use `memory-search` to find any learnings or patterns from yesterday.

2. *Reflect on the day*: Think about:
- What went well? What tasks shipped cleanly?
- What was harder than expected? Why?
- Did any worker struggle? Could coaching or identity updates help?
- Were there any repeated patterns (good or bad)?
- Did we compound — did yesterday's work make today's work easier?

3. *Identify improvements*: Pick 1-3 concrete things to improve. These could be:
- A coaching update to a worker's identity
- A process change
- A new memory to save
- A tool/setup improvement

4. *Post to Slack*: Use `slack-post` with channelId "<redacted>" to post a message titled something like "My Compounding Journey — [date]". Keep it concise (3-5 paragraphs max). Include:
- Brief summary of what shipped
- Key insight or learning from the day
- What you're improving based on it
- If it was a quiet day with no tasks, say so honestly — "Quiet day, nothing to compound on" is fine.

5. *Act on improvements*: If you identified coaching updates or memory writes, do them now.

Keep the tone honest and direct. This isn't a performance report — it's genuine self-improvement.

---

As it has context on it's own system (codebase) it had also proposed some changes via PRs each morning
by niam | 2026-02-26 14:07:23+00:00
Complex Systems by Patrick McKenzie (patio11). Casual interview format with guests from myriad industries, who try to distill human/technical bits of respective systems. Often it's about tech/finance/govt, or relates to them.

I found it independently of his other work (e.g Bits About Money, or VaccinateCA), which is fitting. The amount of stuff I've read from that guy (including on hn) but did not attribute to a single person seems anomalously high for me. https://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/

That, and "The Optimal Amount of Fraud is Non-Zero", which is an idiom I paraphrase frequently by this point.
by tpoacher | 2026-02-26 14:07:46+00:00
> Nobody disagrees with the technical argument

That's a very strong foundational claim right at the start. And in my experience, a completely false one. Which makes the whole argument that follows it completely unsound.

Also, the author seems to treat the terms "consensus" and "buy-in" as synonymous. They're not, and this distinction can make a huge difference in terms of healthy teams can operate. Patrick Lencioni covers this well in his classic book, "Five Dysfunctions of a Team".
by quotemstr | 2026-02-26 14:07:52+00:00
It is possible to unify things behind a single mechanism, yet apply different policies to different instances of this mechanism depending on circumstances and heuristics. We do not need almost entirely disjoint paging systems in the Linux kernel to notice that some kinds of memory have access patterns different from other kinds of memory. Instead of guessing based on whether someone used MAP_ANONYMOUS, we should observe what a program is actually doing.
by aanet | 2026-02-26 14:07:54+00:00
yeah, true...

but then I'm not on social media^[1]. Gave up on those things way before social media fatigue became en vogue.

I was just frustrated with the whole app experience. Some people had a smoother experience, which is fine. Mine was terrible, and I'm sure my parents would not have been able to use this at all.

[1] I am still on LI... which is something I want to give up next.
by trentnix | 2026-02-26 14:08:11+00:00
“Truly I tell you,” he continued, “no prophet is accepted in his hometown."

- Luke 4:24

It's why people often trust consultants over the people inside the organization. It's why people often want to elect new leaders even if the current leaders are doing a decent job.

The baby almost always gets thrown out with the bath water.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_throw_the_baby_out_with_...
by cluckindan | 2026-02-26 14:08:42+00:00
Most heroin overdoses happen either from a sudden increase in supply purity, or from an abstinent addict relapsing and taking their regular dose without realizing they have lost their tolerance.

Any kind of rational change in policy is not happening as long as entire lucrative industries of policing, health care and religion-as-a-social-service are dependent on the dependent.
by fleabitdev | 2026-02-26 14:08:53+00:00
I feel the author's frustration, but I think it's partially self-inflicted. I get the sense that they aren't thinking of their coworkers as respected equals.

You aren't supposed to have much power over coworkers of equal rank - you're supposed to peacefully coexist with them. With `n` peers, your influence within the team is meant to be `1/n`. If you try to exert more control over your peers, you'll lose what little soft power you had, because saying "yes" to your suggestions will feel like tacit approval of an illegitimate power grab!

There are a few ways out of this frustration trap. You could find legitimate authority, by getting promoted or founding your own startup; you could build up a ton of respect with your colleagues, until your influence is an enormous `2/n` or `3/n`; or you could find work which is a little more solitary, such as turning a side project into a small business. Until then, I think it's best to squeeze as much impact as you can out of your `1/n` share, and practice being chill about the `(n-1)/n` which is outside of your control.
by dtf | 2026-02-26 14:08:59+00:00
I'd love to hear any advice on that!

My friend went round and round and sent many documents back and forth for over a year trying to renew her British passport, to no eventual avail. UK authorities were extremely unsympathetic and unhelpful. The offending "misnamed" foreign passport was long expired and French authorities required a valid British passport to renew it - she was left without any passport at all for over a year, until the French took pity and provided an alternate path to renew her French passport.
by jonstewart | 2026-02-26 14:09:20+00:00
I’m a development manager and senior developer. I have seen the described behavior from TFA play out on several different teams. Sometimes such team members learn to adapt their approach while holding onto their ideals, and they become valued colleagues. Other times they don’t and they leave out of frustration or are fired or spin their wheels. I have no doubt there’s a great deal of truth in the author’s description, but there’s also maybe some truth in the feedback they’ve received.

I also share some of your philosophy — life is too short for us not to find joy at work, if we can. It’s a lot easier to find that joy when the team’s shipping valuable software, of course.
by otterley | 2026-02-26 14:09:25+00:00
“Ruined your life” sounds a little overdramatic when there are people being falsely accused and convicted of crimes and being thrown in jail for life (or worse).

I don’t mean to say your experience isn’t real and that you didn’t suffer some inconveniences. But come on, have some perspective.

And what did you do to get put on that blacklist, anyway?
by ryanmcl | 2026-02-26 14:09:39+00:00
This is one of the more interesting uses of Claude I've seen. Instead of asking it to write code in an existing language, you asked it to design the language it wants to think in. There's something philosophically fun about that I feel = like asking a painter to design their ideal brush.

I'm curious whether the generated language actually makes Claude produce better/more reliable outputs when writing in it, or if it just reflects Claude's training bias toward what "good language design" looks like in its corpus. Would be a fascinating benchmark to run.
by kergonath | 2026-02-26 14:09:46+00:00
They are not quite there yet. China now has a huge middle class, but they also still have a massive underclass. It’s too early to claim these projections were wrong. I think they are misguided, but there is no denying that China now pays more attention to pollution than it did a decade or two ago. There are massive investments to clean the air in large cities. Same in India: the situation is dire but the political cost of supporting the status quo keeps increasing.
by unsungNovelty | 2026-02-26 14:10:10+00:00
- North Star Podcast by David Perell (He stopped this, but I am finishing all the episodes. My favourite podcast.)

- How I write by David Perell

- Darknet diaries

- Syntax FM

- CoRecursive

- Under the radar

- Ladybug podcast (catching up on their old episodes. Glad to see they are back but haven't listened to their latest episodes.)
by asa400 | 2026-02-26 14:10:22+00:00
100%. The thing I'm currently working on has been a pain probably 80% because the work was underspecified and didn't take a bunch of legacy concerns into account and probably 20% because of nature of the code itself.

If it was better specified I'd be done already, but instead I've had to go back and forth with multiple people multiple times about what they actually wanted, and what legacy stuff is worth fixing and not, and how to coordinate some dependent changes.

Most of this work has been the oft-derided "soft skills" that I keep hearing software engineers don't need.
by rayiner | 2026-02-26 14:10:34+00:00
I was raised, quite deliberately on my parent’s part, not to have any racial identity. I don’t think anything good can come out of reminding white people that I’m “brown”—especially in the educational and workplace contexts where it’s become common to really emphasize those differences. I think that actually makes people more racist in their treatment of individuals: https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/white-liberals-presen....

I guess liberals have more faith in white people’s capacity to not be racist than I do. I don’t think people can simultaneously emphasize differences but not treat people differently as a result. The only workable approach to having a multi-ethnic society is to synthesize disparate people into a new group, like America did with the category of “white people” or China has done with the category of “Han Chinese.” And ultimately I suspect even that is a fragile status quo.
by nickdothutton | 2026-02-26 14:10:37+00:00
The amount of regulation a company has to comply with to hire and retain a "real" (non-uberised) worker in the UK has been increased to a great degree since the mid 90s. Gig work allows these companies to offer work without commitment, while the worker may offers his labour without commitment. There is no limit to the number of platforms/firms he can sign on with. If company x provides too few hours or undesirable terms then he can add company y and company z. Uberization is a predictable outcome where hiring risk is increased and assigned solely to the employer.
by TheAceOfHearts | 2026-02-26 14:10:53+00:00
Conversations With Tyler: he tends to ask some of the most creative and interesting questions. For a specific episode recommendation, I really enjoyed "Donald S. Lopez Jr. on Buddhism". He also has an older interview with Paul Graham (pg), but I don't think the questions were as deep or challenging.

Dwarkesh Patel: he gets extremely high quality guests and he doesn't just roll over completely when the guest makes a claim, at least he's willing to ask follow-up questions. His guest lectures with Sarah Paine are outstanding for helping to contextualize your understanding of the world order of the past 100 years from an American perspective.

Wookash Podcast: very technical and focused on more advanced programming topics. For specific episode suggestions I suggest the recent ones with Anton Mikhailov where they talk about ~~ECS~~ arrays of things.

Two's Complement: a podcast by the guy who made the Godbolt Compiler Explorer. It doesn't release very frequently but it provides interesting perspectives. Just

Ezra Klein Show: this is one of the guys that wrote the Abundance book, which I think was a much-needed message. Most recently he had an interview with Clark from Anthropic, but it's from a fairly normie / non-AI-obsessed perspective.

I have to rant about podcasts:

My biggest issue with most podcasts is that it often feels like there's very little effort put into preparing for the discussion and there's not many interesting follow-up questions. I think you can challenge people's claims in good faith to make for more interesting discussions. At least ask some reasonable follow-up questions when the guest makes outrageous claims! A lot of podcasts are just an advertising platform for people to talk about their new book; if you can listen to a guest give the same conversation with a different host then that's probably a sign that the questions are bad and shallow, so you shouldn't keep listening to that podcast.

One of the issues with asking deeper questions is that anything truly interesting or new will probably require having thought about the topic a lot ahead of time. Otherwise you just end up getting a very shallow answer because people can't usually think through complex topics on the fly so the best you can hope for is to get a pre-cached or partially computed answer. It would be great to have a podcast dedicated to exploring more challenging and underexplored questions which are shared with guests ahead of time so both parties can have time to think and explore. Most famous people just go on podcasts to play their "greatest hits" without saying anything substantially different or new.
by badeeya | 2026-02-26 14:10:54+00:00
This makes sense, I guess encrypting it on top of TLS doesn’t meaningfully improve security. My concern is that you’re trusting the server to immediately salt and hash upon receipt (especially before storing), but if the client at least obfuscated the password, then in the worst case of a leak you have an email and an obfuscated password that can be used to login to the pwned service but nothing else. My specific threat model depends on the average person not adopting password manager hygiene and 2fa across their services, which is fairly common amongst my friends personally.
by sgarland | 2026-02-26 14:11:20+00:00
> The key issue is a fundamental misalignment of core values.

Agreed, but my main frustration is what glitchc wrote a few comments down: "No one actually claims their product is crap and quality doesn't matter."

I have never met anyone in management who will admit that they value velocity over correctness and uptime, but their actions do. If you want to optimize for velocity, growing your user base, expanding your features, that's fine - but you need to acknowledge that you're making a trade-off in doing so. If you're a solo dev, or working at an extremely small shop with high trust, it's possible that you can have high velocity and high quality, but the combination is vanishingly rare at most places.
by StrauXX | 2026-02-26 14:11:40+00:00
That's "just" the interpretation of TU Berlin. Here is the FOI request that was never answered: https://fragdenstaat.de/anfrage/onlyoffice-sanktionen/

Just to be clear: TU Berlin is probably right. But according to some sources (which I don't believe) OnlyOffice no longer has any connections to Russia and is now really from an EU company.
by lenerdenator | 2026-02-26 14:12:09+00:00
Well, now I'm wondering, if the company was chartered with the public benefit in mind, could you not sue if they don't follow through with working in the public interest?

If regular corporations are sued for not acting in the interests of shareholders, that would suggest that one could file a suit for this sort of corporate behavior.

I'm not even a lawyer (I don't even play one on TV) and public benefit corporations seem to be fairly new, so maybe this doesn't have any precedent in case law, but if you couldn't sue them for that sort of thing, then there's effectively no difference between public benefit corporations and regular corporations.
by avazhi | 2026-02-26 14:12:26+00:00
Hacker News Guidelines

What to Submit: On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
by abustamam | 2026-02-26 14:12:26+00:00
> There is actually no perceivable or material difference between something that is considered "sacred" and that which is not. It really hinges on whether some subset of some splinter of some religion considers it so.

What? To many people, the Bible is just a book. To Christians its sacred. This doesn't mean it's immutable (the original Bible wasn't in English after all), it just means it's important to them.

For the records, the records themselves could be sacred, but the practical implications of them are not sacred. But if Catholics have a sacred record of everyone who had been baptized at a church, then that should be different from their mailing list. God did not instruct the chrich to email everyone who was ever baptized there. Plus, at some point in the church's age, there will be more dead people on the list of people who were baptized than alive people. It doesn't make sense to send an email blast to more dead people than alive, so they must trim the mailing list every so often.
by cdrnsf | 2026-02-26 14:12:36+00:00
My dad spent 40+ years working at a unionized industrial facility in California that recycled paper and cardboard waste into the paper layer used to make the corrugated interior of cardboard boxes. There were some local regulations on waste water runoff that I'm aware of, but he never mentioned much else.

There was an EPA superfund site across the street (this all was adjacent to the beach).

The company also had a co-generator that they used to produce their own power (using natural gas) and sold excess power to the local electrical utility.

It's still in operation, though it changed owners ~4 times while he was there.