Hacker News with Generative AI: Software Engineering

9.5% of software engineers are ghosts (twitter.com)
Meta Uses LLMs to Improve Incident Response (tryparity.com)
In June, Meta released an article titled Leveraging AI for efficient incident response on their engineering blog. In this article, engineers outline how they leveraged large language models to improve Meta's incident response capabilities. The headline metric from this report: Meta was able to use LLMs to successfully root cause incidents with 42% accuracy in their web monorepo. This means that nearly half the time, the mean time to resolution (MTTR) can potentially be reduced from hours to seconds.
Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday (arthur-johnston.com)
Normally when developers/SWEs/SRE/IT are oncall for a project, the oncall is from Monday of one week to Monday of the following week. This is sub-optimal. Instead it should be Tuesday to Tuesday. This is a 0 cost improvement to everyone’s quality of life and improves schedule accuracy.
Ask HN: What are some of the best take-home coding tasks you've gotten? (ycombinator.com)
As an applicant, I've personally had a mixed experience with take-homes. We're designing the technical interviews right now, and I thought I'd ask for some stories on exciting take-home tasks. We're looking for something that resembles the actual job, so we'll allow any tool (including AI and debuggers).
Story-time: C++, bounds checking, performance, and compilers (chandlerc.blog)
Recently, several of my colleagues at Google shared the story of how we are retrofitting spatial safety onto our monolithic C++ codebase: https://security.googleblog.com/2024/11/retrofitting-spatial-safety-to-hundreds.html
Removing global state from LLD, the LLVM linker (maskray.me)
LLD, the LLVM linker, is a mature and fast linker supporting multiple binary formats (ELF, Mach-O, PE/COFF, WebAssembly). Designed as a standalone program, the code base relies heavily on global state, making it less than ideal for library integration.
How linear types control the future and prevent bugs [video] (youtube.com)
Please stop the coding challenges (bearblog.dev)
Let’s talk about tech interviews – specifically, the ones that go overboard with unrealistic coding assignments. If you’re a developer who’s been asked to debug legacy PHP or build a mini-app from scratch in just a few hours, you know what I’m talking about. It’s becoming a trend, and it’s not helping anyone.
The barriers to AI engineering are crumbling fast (helix.ml)
A couple of weeks ago, I gave a talk at Hannah Foxwell’s amazing AI for the Rest of Us conference about something that's been brewing in my mind after years of working in DevOps, MLOps, and now GenAI: the barriers to AI engineering are crumbling fast. The tools have gotten good enough that if you can handle an IDE and push some YAML to git, you're already qualified.
Ask HN: Do indie devs enjoy programming less than software engineers do? (ycombinator.com)
Ask HN: Do indie devs enjoy programming less than software engineers do?
Ask HN: I don't want higher salary, I need more freetime (ycombinator.com)
As a software Engineer with the same need, what career paths did you take to achieve this goal?
Reddit on Overcoming Internet Addiction (reddit.com)
I’m a software engineer with an internet addiction that I’ve struggled with for about 18 years. I’ve likely spent half of my waking adult life sitting unproductively in front of a screen, which is a catastrophe I’d like to help other people avoid.
FBDetect: Catching Tiny Performance Regressions at Hyperscale [pdf] (tangchq74.github.io)
I Will Always Be Angry About Software Engineering (mataroa.blog)
Why do I bother getting angry about software?
Ask HN: Do you feel burnout from being less hands on as you become more senior? (ycombinator.com)
I work in a 50-60 person SaaS company and I'm taking on a head of engineering role. At this level, my whole day is spent writing out plans and proposals, responding to communications, checking on projects, connecting resources, etc. On rare occasions, if I have time, I might actually build something small.
Ousterhout's Dichotomy (wikipedia.org)
What Is a Staff Engineer? (nishtahir.com)
"I've worked with a couple of Staff Engineers on different teams in the past and I've seen them do different things, but I've not been able to pin down exactly what they do."
We built a self-healing system to survive a concurrency bug at Netflix (pushtoprod.substack.com)
Our CPUs were dying, the bug was temporarily un-fixable, and we had no viable path forward. Here's how we managed to survive.
Factorio with Michal Kovařík (softwareengineeringdaily.com)
Factorio is a construction and management simulation game focused on resource-gathering with real-time strategy and survival elements.
Launch Code Health Guardian: The Old-New Role of Human Programmers in the AI Era (codehealthguardian.com)
I am thrilled to announce the launch of my new book, Code Health Guardian, which was designed to prepare software engineers for the upcoming changes in their duties.
Please take our programming assessment with an LLM (creatingvalue.substack.com)
I’m Trey, the Head of Engineering at Clipboard Health, and I want you to use an LLM to apply to our Software Engineering roles.
How to become a more effective engineer (pragmaticengineer.com)
Hi – this is Gergely with the monthly, free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer. In every issue, I cover challenges at Big Tech and startups through the lens of engineering managers and senior engineers. To get weekly emails like this in your inbox, subscribe here:
My Wild Experience Interviewing with Real Engineers (mataroa.blog)
I had my first interview with a serious tech company - the kind that isn't Google but actually has some name recognition amongst people deeply into the tech space. It starts normal and promising, and then fucking derails in spectacular fashion. Strap yourselves in, this is a long one.
A 94x speed improvement demonstrated using handwritten assembly (twitter.com)
Stop saying "just" (2019) (sgringwe.com)
Do you work in Software Engineering, and have you seen messages or sentences like these before?
Next Generation Out of Band Garbage Collection (railsatscale.com)
In 2023, I wrote about how we’ve tuned Ruby’s garbage collector for Shopify’s monolith, including how we implemented out-of-band garbage collection to reduce the impact of major collection on latency.
Static Basic Block Versioning (dagstuhl.de)
Basic Block Versioning (BBV) is a compilation technique for optimizing program execution.
Zero Downtime Django Deployments with Multistep Database Changes – Johnny Metz (johnnymetz.com)
Preventing downtime during deployments is crucial for maintaining service availability and ensuring a positive user experience. Blue-green deployments have emerged as a popular strategy to achieve this goal. However, they introduce challenges, especially when dealing with database changes. This article delves into what blue-green deployments are, why database changes can be tricky in this context, and how to navigate common change scenarios effectively in Django.
The Senior Shortcut (medium.com)
Many have predicted the death of the “junior engineer” thanks to AI; after all, if AI can do all of the simple tasks, we don’t need to hire people who are only capable of handling those tasks anymore.
The performance of hashing for similar function detection (edmcman.github.io)