Hacker News: fsociety

New comment by fsociety in "Designing a Passively Safe API"

fsociety — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 18:31:40 +0000

Yes but one subtle point. Exactly once processing is not possible in these frameworks, they assume execution is idempotent which means at least once.

Now, any system I’ve seen designed around exactly once is complete garbage.

New comment by fsociety in "Ask HN: Loneliness at 19, how to cope?"

fsociety — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 19:12:04 +0000

This might help https://youtu.be/6KGYCU_INVI?si=1Ds8Rez8vNbZAyV5, it has more to do with your perception, expectations, and the story you tell yourself rather than an actual state of “loneliness”.

You are going through a normal phase of growth, and need to be able to sit with discomfort and question it. You will likely find yourself cherishing these moments when you are older.

New comment by fsociety in "Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI"

fsociety — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 16:16:03 +0000

The real answer is the unsatisfying but true “my shit doesn’t stink but yours sure does”

New comment by fsociety in "Advice for new principal tech ICs (i.e., notes to myself)"

fsociety — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 09:41:30 +0000

Sounds like you have some beef to pick, not sure why you feel the need to discredit this person you don’t even know.

New comment by fsociety in "H-1B Visa Changes Approved by White House"

fsociety — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 11:10:09 +0000

It’s pretty easy to change jobs on an H-1B if you are high skill. I love hearing folks, who aren’t on an H-1B, tell me things like this. Or that I’m paid less when I’m paid more.

I know these abuses happen, no system is perfect. But I feel the bias in the US against H-1Bs from random citizens not from employers. And the government today has quite strong bias against immigrants.

New comment by fsociety in "Writing a good design document"

fsociety — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 11:58:31 +0000

This is my problem with design documents. If your stakeholders already have enough trust that they ask you to go build it without writing a doc, then what value does writing a design doc have.

Many will answer that it helps them think. But why do we need a formal process to think? Thinking is a valuable skill that should be practiced all the time.

New comment by fsociety in "The hospital where staff treat fear of death as well as physical pain"

fsociety — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 05:53:33 +0000

Mortality is not meant to be cured. Quality of life on the other hand..

New comment by fsociety in "The Insanity of Being a Software Engineer"

fsociety — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 15:37:04 +0000

Upvotes for you. I have also worked a ton of odd jobs out of necessity. Many doing things that would frankly disgust most people, or people would say is a worker’s right violation, or is a safety violation. I enjoyed these jobs more despite the conditions.

Financially it is great, no doubt about that. Take away the money and it’s a terrible job - despite loving programming, design, and engineering. And I mean, I love design, programming, ambiguity, and the constant learning required.

My largest source of sanity in this career is to spend extra time at work doing the things that I love in my position. Ironically, I get high performance ratings because of this - but have to fight to spend my time on it.

Modern tech companies and culture suck, even the best ones that I praise. I can’t even blame anyone at this point because it is hard and I have not started a company that tries to be better. I'm not even sure I would do better, to be honest.

New comment by fsociety in "Meta puts stop on promotion of tell-all book by former employee"

fsociety — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 14:14:53 +0000

I worked at Facebook and the amount of ex-FBers, especially OGs, speaking out against them on LinkedIn is staggering. I’ve debated doing a livestream of reading this book from start to finish, perhaps even in one sitting, because of what is happening here.

New comment by fsociety in "Elon Musk, Video Game King? Well, Maybe Not"

fsociety — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 16:47:50 +0000

The effect on society and the human psyche when political discussions are stripped away from forums is chilling. Internet forums and IRC channels, in their peak, welcomed discussions like these. If you didn’t like it then you don’t click on the clearly political topics. This is hurt even more by forums being turned into feeds that pander into a single category and into businesses where profit, and agreeableness, must come at all cost.

New comment by fsociety in "Moving on from React, a year later"

fsociety — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 15:24:41 +0000

I was hoping for stronger rationale than this. This is not a React-specific problem.

New comment by fsociety in "Hitting OKRs vs. Doing Your Job"

fsociety — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 13:43:02 +0000

I did not do any OKRs on an infrastructure team. Qualitative results were just as valued, and we had the quantitative knobs to dial when needed thanks to excellent internal tooling and service maturity.

I found it to be the ironic part of working at one of the most data-driven companies. We didn’t do OKRs in my org despite using data to drive decisions. I much prefer this to OKR hell.

New comment by fsociety in "NixOS is a good server OS, except when it isn't"

fsociety — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 14:07:35 +0000

Some people don't want to hear this, but it is 100% true.

New comment by fsociety in "Bento: Jupyter Notebooks at Meta"

fsociety — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 02:51:01 +0000

Or you know, go chat with the tool maintainers because they want people using them for impact.

New comment by fsociety in "The art of programming and why I won't use LLM"

fsociety — Sun, 25 Aug 2024 18:25:35 +0000

It is a judgemental piece because the writer is putting a value judgement on people who use LLMs to code and those who don't. Its right after the piece you quoted.

> please don’t take this as a judgemental piece to anyone that i am alluring to. it’s fine to not find programming enjoyable. it’s fine to just want things to work. i am just disappointed at how the ones who care appear to be an ever dying breed.

I'm not saying the author shouldn't write that, write whatever you want. But you should own what you write.

New comment by fsociety in "The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown"

fsociety — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 14:25:14 +0000

Let’s not pretend it’s just PMs. I’ve worked with PMs who fought against shipping fast but ultimately an engineering manager or engineer comes in and forces a fast ship.

New comment by fsociety in "The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown"

fsociety — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 14:13:35 +0000

With the right analysis I can show how your outage increased your business value.

New comment by fsociety in "Waymo to begin testing on San Francisco freeways this week"

fsociety — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 17:44:35 +0000

I would bet more in a company who figured out the last 20% in a specific city than a company stuck on the first 80% generally.

New comment by fsociety in "Moxie Marlinspike: Agile is killing software innovation"

fsociety — Sat, 10 Aug 2024 14:20:51 +0000

This, short-term decisions win money in the short-term but businesses are always talking about retention and retention is most durable with a good product.

New comment by fsociety in "Microsoft technical breakdown of CrowdStrike incident"

fsociety — Sun, 28 Jul 2024 23:38:05 +0000

Mac and Linux run EDRs in userspace without an issue. No one here has an excuse or no choice.