Hm, there must be businesses like this, but I presume there are many who experience huge returns on current spend - and even 5x costs would be fine, but currently AI prices (given fixed 'intelligence') are dropping like a stone. I can't imagine that the same level of intelligence is going to be more expensive in 12 months.

It's just normal that there's a huge variation of how businesses and individuals adapt to new circumstances, this has been the case forever.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50162230

Points: 14

# Comments: 14

The opposite. Reviewing PRs is now about just reviewing the tests, as the code is very likely to be fine if tests are relevant and they're passing.

The main enabler of agentic coding is heavy end-to-end/characterisation testing.

We can ask AI to do very large-scale refactors, for example, because if tests pass, it's 99% that everything is fine.

No, a fan response curve is kinda-sorta a P controller. It does not take into account 1) how quickly the temperature is rising or dropping (D) 2) the time passed since the system has drifted from the target temp (I).

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48271933

Points: 32

# Comments: 3

Very strange -- it seems to be conflating end-to-end encryption with encryption-in-transit.

Yes, I agree. We do this too. Findings are followed by a post-mortem-like process: - fix the problem - produce an automated test - evaluate why the feature wasn't autotested properly

The testing pyramid is a par excellance SWE kool-aid. Someone wrote a logically-sounding blogpost about it many years ago and then people started regurgitating it without any empirical evidence behind it.

Many of us have realised that you need a "testing hourglass", not a "testing pyramid". Unit tests are universally considered useful, there's not much debate about it (also they're cheap). Integration tests are expensive and, in most cases, have very limited use. UI and API tests are extremely useful because they are testing whether the system behaves as we expect it to behave.

E.g. for a specific system of ours we have ~30k unit tests and ~10k UI/API tests. UI and API tests are effectively the living, valid documentation of how the system behaves. Those tests are what prevent the system becoming 'legacy'. UI and API tests are what enable large-scale refactors without breaking stuff.

Isolated QA should not exist because anything a QA engineer can do manually can be automated.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47063005

Points: 470

# Comments: 251

We're an SMB (100 employees or so), slowly growing in terms of headcount, I'm the CTO. Historically I've been handling most aspect of (tech) hiring (for various reasons). However, partly due to the current market situation if you advertise a new role then you get literally thousands of CVs in a few days.

I'd need someone who could act as a temporary internal recruiter who handles the initial stages of the hiring pipeline - I know there are services for that but my feeling is that finding the reliable service / agency / etc. will take almost as much time as doing the stuff myself. Of course after we've found a good agency it'll save us time and effort in the future, but we're just so busy now.

So my question is: what's the cheapest hack for pre-filtering candidates?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46524580

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

I believe that syncophancy and guardrails will be major differentiators between LLM services, and the ones with less of those will always have a fan base.

So he changed Microsoft fundamentally - a very difficult thing for such a large company.

I don’t see Pichai changing Google so fundamentally. I admire Cook though.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45832473

Points: 3

# Comments: 0