skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sometimes you're writing code because you want to see what happens. Richard P. Gabriel wrote a wonderful, moving essay about this recently, "I Throw Itching Powder at Tulips": https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/Tulips.pdf

> Software engineering is not what I do when I program. I am
programming. I write software as part of doing science. I use
software as a machine or instrument to explore how the mind
/ brain might work. Not when the mind’s thinking—that’s
old AI. I mean when people are creating.

I find that it's pretty common when I'm, say, tweaking gameplay in a game, that I have no trouble making the code behave the way I expect, but impossible to predict ahead of time how I will feel about different possible behaviors. I have to try them on to see how I feel in them. Adding tests to that feedback loop doesn't help; it just slows it down, dramatically slowing down the process of learning and exploration.

On the other hand, when I am writing code to meet someone else's needs rather than as a form of self-expression or exploration, I usually want the code to behave in a specific way, at least in certain situations, and to keep behaving that way as I make other changes to it in the future, unless I change my mind. In those cases I think it's very rare for automated tests to slow me down instead of speeding me up.

In languages with expressive static type systems like OCaml, the crossover happens a little later, because the static type system already constrains the program's behavior a lot. But automated tests still become very valuable very soon when I want a specific behavior.

I've also, unfortunately, worked on projects where the test suite we had was worse than nothing. Invariably it wasn't because we were throwing itching powder at tulips so that the optimal test suite would be empty; it was because we'd done a bad job writing the tests.
A manta I've been repeating at my institution: There's no number of Good Boy Points that will save you if the administration decides to come for you.
I totally understand writing tests on professional projects and on projects that I am working with others, but for my side projects, I could never. I don't feel like I have lost anything by not writing tests in my side projects.

My issue with tests in my side projects is that it kills my flow. I need to actively iterate on the code that matters and feel out the results. At what point should I be writing tests?

I can only think of a point where I am certain this is where I am going to stay at and then I write some sanity regression tests.
Isn't that how funding works? We give you money, you meet demands. How is that an attack?
That was a bit weird for the US system though. There is the obvious element that topical cable news political reporting is nearly wall-to-wall misinformation and it is often hard to tell if it was the politicians or the news operations that were most responsible. They've already hit an equilibrium where everyone appears to be doing their best to be wilfully stupid to obscure whether they are lying or just that dumb.

For the legal system to single out the Dominion Voting thing as an issue was ... acceptable but probably a misfire. Of all the craziness, hysterics targeting voting machines was the issue most likely to accidentally be a net good for the US system.
Sold investors on new app, but spent the money on cars, Malibu mansion and yacht
https://archive.ph/7Jd8z
I have spotty test coverage, but always configure a high level smoke test on every end point. Prevents silly mistakes that might otherwise slip through and trivial to implement. Can supplement for the more complex interactions, but gives a big safety blanket that there has not been a regression which breaks everything.
Neither convincing them nor compelling them through law would work. I’m surprised the author can’t see that as an ad person himself. The incentives are too strong; if you outlaw them, they’ll just be circumnavigated in more nefarious ways.
Many people do keep jumping spiders as pets.
Ah, fair enough! Thanks
This article must've been written in Spring 2022. Tech hiring is now like 2008 or post-dotcom.

The question is whether it will return to what it once was.

The big tech companies are monopolies, no longer afraid that they have to employ "all the engineers" to prevent competition. ZIRP isn't there to give rise to startups, or to give the tech companies unlimited leeway in development.

If interest rates drop or big tech is broken up, we might see a sharp rise in salaries. But now there's also more competition from overseas, both in terms of great talent and competition from large international players.

edit: the article was from 2016, and can confirm. I was making bank then and getting free at-work massages, boba, and towel service.
Agree - unit tests are best for pure functions and the like. If you are having to do a ton of mocking and injection in order to unit test something, it's probably a sign black box testing might be higher value
Firefox Android supports uBlock Origin just fine (I didn't see a single ad or modal in this article). There is no need for obscure forks, and Iceraven is "Definitely not brought to you by Mozilla!", as the first sentence on the page says.
WebGL LLM visualiser experiment
Good spot.

From the page it suggests in 2021 the opportunity for private investment. I’d infer that there’s a few turf wars, and legal things to be resolved.

I’d hope that many people would be painfully aware of how essential this is to enable battery power to produce a return on investment.

Considering the governments passion for transparency there doesn’t seem to be much on this, and I only realised this since grid battery charging and power is missing from the daily stats.

I’m curious to find out if the grid controlling software is written in COBOL and running on a BBC model B in a back room somewhere.
One of my favourite books. Read it three times.
how do you know that you did:

- thought about clear interfaces?

- created clean separation of concerns?

- built proper startup and shutdown sequences?

:)
Malibu Man Found Guilty of Defrauding Investors Out of Over $20 Million via False Claims about Celebrity App’s Business Performance - https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/malibu-man-found-guilty...
> If you live in a conservative state, what are the chances that they say advocacy for Planned Parenthood is advertising and say that advocacy for pro-life is freedom of religion?

A nonsensical argument. You might as well ask how "Oh yeah, you want to ban murder? Well how would you like it if conservative states say that abortion is murder, and killing negroes isn't? Clearly outlawing murder is unworkable."

Great job pointing out that laws can be misinterpreted by motivated judges, I guess we should get rid of all the laws then to make sure that doesn't happen.
Is Dart still a thing? Genuinely interested.
Here's the link for model on openrouter:
https://openrouter.ai/meta-llama/llama-4-maverick
This is a great idea! Exactly what I was also thinking and started working on a side-project. Currently the project can create summaries like this [1].

Since HN Homepage stories change throughtout the day, I thought it is better to create the Newsletter based on https://news.ycombinator.com/front

So, you are getting the news a day late, but it will capture the top stories for that day. The newsletter will have high-level summary for each post and a link to get the details for that story from a static site.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43597782
Refactor simplicity, regression reduction, reduced time to “next launch” because manual validation period is shorter.

Increased customer trust because fewer regressions get missed.
Wasn't expecting to see the Co-op.
There are many smaller billboards visible when you use Street View in Google maps. Sao Paulo may have fewer billboards, and no large billboards, but it still has billboards.
manual testing doesn't scale at all. the more functionality and code you have, the more people you have to hire to run tests. since those people aren't being spun up and down by an orchestrator, you need more resources to cover their coffee breaks. you also don't get testing at night or on the weekends unless you have a global presence. manual testing also limits your reach, if every time you add a new test you have to add another body to run it, you're not going to be running as many tests as you could (if those people were employed writing tests instead of running them)

worse, manual testing is considerably less repeatable than automated testing. was this result worse than it was before, or did someone just forget to set that environment variable or run it on the correct node type.

if your developers are running manual tests before every commit, that's potentially a huge waste of resources. and if you're hiring people specifically to do manual testing that's.. kind of inhuman? unless you're really hiring people that can't do anything else, in which case you'll need to hire an appropriate number of overseers.

automated testing gives you so much more leverage for less cost than manual, I struggle to think of a situation where that might be preferable.
My understanding is that our success was largely down to the Marshal Plan. The claim that it's due to legal quirks sounds dubious.
Columns work if you can see all of the column - screens are wide and short, books/mags are thin and deep.

A physical book has a ratio of exactly the opposite of your laptop. Amazon realised this quite quickly and you will note that their readers have a book shape.

Look at this web site (HN) which is used by some of the most vociferous nerds ever (including you and me) and tell me I am talking bollocks! Note the styles, layout, colours in use.

How far removed from white on black text, 1/3 screen width and teenager bedroom looks are we away from?
I think you articulated the vagueness very well.

One other example I was thinking was product placement. Are these characters eating pizza? Or is it Pizza Hut®™ pizza?
High-level discussions to phase out petrol and diesel vehicles (in India)
How can that benchmark be useful unless real people are actually eating some lettuce covered in milkshake?

Wait, ARE people eating that? Have I been out of the game too long?
[content creators] want ads and they're going to be consuming underground ads from their ad dealers. Examples: AudioGO, PodcastOne, Acast.
I would add to the list politicians, sports people, business people.

But they all seem to be sitting on the sidelines waiting for a payoff. Time to put the future ahead of a little bit of wealth.
This idea immediately reminded me of “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” by James Tiptree

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_Who_Was_Plugged_In
> If nobody advertised, every solution would be equally discoverable via search and word-of-mouth.

This is unbelievably untrue. Consider clothing brands, large and older labels have an immense advantage over newcomers. Newcomer word of mouth will never come close to some brand that has a store in every mall across the US.

With (say) Instagram ads alone, tiny labels can spend and target very effectively to create a niche, and begin word of mouth.

Gap and Lululemon would love it if all advertising was shut off today. It would basically guarantee their position forever because of the real estate and present day distribution Schelling point.
There's also the funeral care: https://www.coop.co.uk/funeralcare.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene

https://www.demoscene.info/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRkZcTg1JWU
I think testing as a cost and manual QA has another cost. Depending on the cost over time (maintenance or manual QA) and the upfront cost, as well as the risk of refactors, which needs tests, there are moments where one option is better than the other.
It changes, so it is worth considering.
So I joined this company as a lead of a team of 4 developers. I found a medium size Java codebase with not a single test. Instead of unit tests, we had a list of scenarios, and at the end of each sprint a QA guy would manually go through each scenario and verify the software.

One of my first moves was to ask the developers to write tests for their code. I got terrible pushback, specifically from one of them that said the dreaded "we don't have time to write tests".

This went back and forth a few times until it got escalated to the lead of the whole project, who sided with the developer: writing tests takes too much time and we don't have enough.

Two days. It took me two days of my own time to go through a completely unfamiliar codebase and get a reasonable code coverage with unit tests.

The benefits were immense and immediate. For starters, we caught a bunch of regressions before a new release that might have taken days of manual testing by QA. We were also able to ship faster and with more confidence.

As OP say, if you don't have time to test, you certainly don't have time not to test.
Spiders are scary enough even without jumping.
Keyboard is essential; my time was dominated not by the time it took me to solve but the time it took me to click around with my mouse.
$deploy looks cool, I ll take it for a spin!
Ha, opened the comments to say exactly this. Truly infuriating.
What is up with car door handles these days?
Unexpected Keyboard [1] has a similar concept: you can tap keys to enter letters or swipe to the corners to input special characters. It also has all of the usual modifier keys so it's really nice to use together with Temux.

[1] https://github.com/Julow/Unexpected-Keyboard
In a 25 year career, I've never really managed to significantly negotiate compensation upwards, either at the job offer phase or for raises once I'm in. It's always a "take it or leave it" offer and yea, I've chosen to leave it a few times.

Recruiter: "Here's your offer for $X compensation."

You: "I was actually looking for something paying $X+Y."

Recruiter: "Well our offer is $X."

You: "This data shows that comparable jobs with the work I'm taking on are paying $X+Y."

Recruiter: "Our offer is $X. Do you want the job or not?"

You: "Well, I'm not willing to join for less than $X+(Y/2)."

Recruiter: "OK, well, bye. We have 35 other candidates lined up to talk to. Good luck."

Not sure how it's different when you have multiple offers. The company offering a lower comp will just say "Well, their offer is higher. Have fun at Company B. Thanks for interviewing!" Reading stories of these Captains Of Industry just asking for more and getting it, or getting companies into a bidding war over them is... kind of wild. It's like we're living in different universes.
Tests are a superpower with hardware development. It can be difficult to find the best boundaries to mock, but once you do it's amazing how much easier it is to develop! I find that tests are a great way to get the software into states that are hard to recreate in real life, such as faults as well
If you’re a startup handling customer data, how can you skip out on tests? How can you be confident that your code doesn’t expose customer data in an exciting way and in a that demolishes trust in your product without testing to make sure and adding continuous tests to make sure a mistake like that doesn’t make it live?
Whether I commit murder is objective. Speech is always subjective.

Even if abortion is murder is objective based on the state laws. We see right now how government controlling speech that it doesn’t like is harmful.

Again I’m amazed that people want to give the government more power unnecessarily seeing the current abuses of power and how it is used to punish people the government doesn’t like.

We should limit the power of the government to only punishing things that infringe on our rights and our person.
Show HN: The first golf course maintenance app on Replit
I decided to democratize this hole replacement instructional app so even small rural courses can have great greens like the top courses.
The rugpulls shall continue until morale improves
As a hiring manager, this might help negotiate pay up if I already wanted to hire you, but if I was on the fence, knowing someone I'm not thrilled with has an offer does basically nothing for me.
> I do have Holywood's ... output to act as a proxy and it seems that US companies do love to shout it from the hill tops at vast expense and fuck up the scenery with those bill board thingies.

This reminded me of learning the Hollywood sign was literally an advertisement (shouted from the hill top) that turned into a cultural landmark

On to the point for the topic, parts of Asia (mid/large cities) are overwhelming with their advertisements which I don't think the US or EU/UK can compare either
Kinda seems like an article like this should have some pictures of this button?
Yep, I've read a lot of negotiation books and that's the one that explains all the other ones.

Everything else (including this article) is a specific case of the models described in that book.
It seems like it would be extremely difficult to identify that breakdown.

Not because it's difficult to identify emissions generated in order to produce those goods subsequently exported (it would be arduous to do so, but not infeasible), but because absent that particular manufacturing effort for those specific exports, what would that nation state instead be doing with those resources / what emissions would they be generating in the pursuit of domestic consumption needed to replace the income from those exports.
Five Nurses who work on the same floor at hospital have brain tumors
One person's desire for ignorance should not force that on everyone.

Don't want an add supported service? Don't use it. Don't want ads on TV? Don't watch it. Don't want ads on others property? Let them control the look of your property.

Lots of people like ads because it's how they discover movies, restaurants, better financial help, better doctors, new hobbies, and a world they'd not have found otherwise.
I agree I also lived through that time and you saw stuff like jQuery be supercede by marionette and backbone js maybe ember when it came out. But those were all kind of flavors of the same thing, ultimately speaking. With these new models coming out it seems like every time there's a new model it unlocks a gigantic New branch of application type
Not a hoarder per-se but I bought a 24GB card on the secondary market. My privacy is valuable. I'm okay being a half-step or full-step behind in LLM or image diffusion if it means my data never leaves my machine.
DOGE's Plan to Rewrite Social Security's Code in Months
> It's impossible. How do you even define advertising? If you define it conservatively, then advertising will skirt through the loopholes. If you define it liberally, then you have an unfair, authoritarian system that will definitely be selectively enforced against political enemies.

I've been on the advertising, is an evil parasite around useful transactions bandwagon for a while and thought this was really hard to define properly.

So far my best take is around that what's good is being discoverable instead of something that you run into. This allows people to do what they want, without the evil side of unconsciously or in-competitively driving them to your business/deals.
I dont think they replace each other, they are complementary - they do overlap though, which is why people think you can trade them off - a test is not creative, a human is not an automaton.
You would have to be incredibly underwhelming to not receive multiple offers simultaneously.
Location: Outside NYC

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Maybe, depends where

Technologies: PHP, Laravel, Vue, React, SQL, Python, CSS

Email: hacknews.0eeaz@simplelogin.com (privacy email, will reply from real email)

Previously founded and sold a SaaS company (70+ FTEs), worked in high growth tech teams.

What I can bring to the table: Leadership, strategy, operations where I can help build the product (actually writing code). My previous experience could also help with investor relations.
I bought a used 2023 Nissan Leaf for $15K. It had 18K miles on it, 150 miles of range on a full charge, and still 5 years on the battery warranty, and 2 years on the bumper to bumper warranty. I did admittedly find a good deal, but this is not unobtainium

A friend wanted one of those licensed electric golf carts to drive around town, it cost more than my car.

With off-peak charging, (and the cost of gasoline in San Diego) I expect the car to pay for itself in fuel savings in ~5 years.

How many years will it take an inexpensive gasoline car to pay for itself?
Good catch.

My New Year's promise this year was to be more demonstrably accurate than last year and I seem to have screwed it up already.

Bugger.
I've found the llama 3 served by meta.ai to be quite weak for coding prompts, it gets confused by more complex tasks. Maybe its a smaller model? I agree it's weaker than others of its generation.
In the US advertising is considered a business expense. So we equate it with investing in infrastructure or research, both of which reasonably would be subtracted from your revenue to determine your tax burden.

It's very dumb.
in [2016]
Here is my negotiation tactic:
“I see on levels.fyi that people of my level make X dollars, I want the top of that range”

And magically I got 25% more TC. Only works for big enough companies with salary datapoints online.

It is kind of crazy how there is a bifurcation of TC between those who bothered to negotiate and those who didn’t. Being on the inside I know there are ranges for positions and if you push you can pretty much always get to the max for your range, obviously the recruiters will not give you a max TC offer right away.
Sometimes that happens, because the difficulty is not in getting it to do what you want, but figuring out what you want. That's the main theme of my top-level comment; I'm interested to hear what you think. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43597869
To 98% of readers.

Your software is not that important and you don't get paid for testing.
I saw Peter Navarro saying US car plants were only running at 65% capacity and by tariffing foreign cars, the US plants could crank up and produce more. Not sure how true that is but that's the kind of thing that could be positive.
Grift and theft, plain and simple. I don't know why people keep looking for rationality from Trump and his lackies. Their worldview ends with themselves, their power, their wealth.
Me too. It was utterly bizarre. Spent 6 month looking for a job, with I don’t know how many failed interviews, then I got one offer for a 6 month contract, and suddenly the next two companies I interviewed with were falling over themselves to give me a permanent one.

I just do not see how that works. There’s no logical reason for it.
Yes exactly. If you're writing a library, unit tests are likely a great investment. Your "customers" are using the things you are testing.

If you're writing an API, your customers are calling the endpoints. Very important they behave properly on happy path and fail appropriately when they should (permissions / security especially)

(I also ensure tests in the service/dao layer to protect developers from footguns and/or more "unexpected" behavior, but I'd argue the API layer is generally more important)

If you're writing a react app, playwright is very important (and using it properly / acting like a real user) as your customers are interacting with it via a browser.

Though the larger the codebase/ when you start having reusable components, the better tested they are, the less will go wrong in the future as an unfamiliar developer will inevitably hold it wrong.