Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

7/24/2026 at 8:01:58 PM

So in case you're worried about watching a 35 minute video and wishing you hadn't, here is what I think is an interesting observation that the speaker starts coming around to at around the 7 minute mark.

Why does software suck? Management often has other priorities, and isn't interested in doing the hard work required to increase the reliability and reduce the technical debt in software. Engineers who care about such things, often engage in acts of "benevolent noncompliance". Common workarounds are "asking for forgiveness instead of permission", secrecy, and misdirection. Alternately you can confront management and fight for doing what you think is right. These sorts of things can be risky. You can be fired, you can be reprimanded if caught, you can be retaliated against or lose political advantage. In the past, software engineers had a lot more agency than they do now, because nowadays the supply/demand ratio no longer favors software engineers, and as a result we have weaker negotiation power. Now we're more afraid of being fired and not being able to find a job, and managers aren't afraid of us quitting and not being able to replace us.

I haven't yet finished the whole thing, but there are sections around dark patterns and other forms of user-hostile software. I'll probably finish it.

by spudlyo

7/24/2026 at 8:50:03 PM

I don't think this is really entirely true. Everyone who isn't a FAANG or Frontier Lab seem to be absolutely starving for good talent. It's far more often that I hear "we interviewed someone we thought looked good and they couldn't even write a for loop, where are all the good engineers".

I think you have far more leverage than you think in most places still.

by ianbutler

7/24/2026 at 11:40:57 PM

> * Everyone who isn't a FAANG or Frontier Lab seem to be absolutely starving for good talent.*

I think this is largely a pay gap problem. There’s a bit of prestige involved (why work for random corp’s dev dept when you could work at FAANG) but a huge part is that most those random corps are paying way less. The best talent generally goes where the money is.

by dpark

7/25/2026 at 2:23:44 AM

Maybe it’s not this way anymore, but VC backed companies played as good or better than FAANGs 10 years ago but it was a mixed bag of talent. I ended up at a place where the engineers hard largely come from a non-FAANG, but storied engineering culture that was different but had many analogous solutions to common problems.

The biggest problem with VC startups is their geographic concentration, but sometimes remote is available.

by jonhohle

7/25/2026 at 3:22:26 AM

Sounds like we could fix this if we did a better job of holding FAANG accountable for the sorry state of technology. So many needless social problems have been introduced by technology and it happened on their watch. That prestige... we could poison it.

Maybe working at FAANG should be something to be embarrassed of.

by __MatrixMan__

7/25/2026 at 5:50:49 AM

The prestige is the total comp not the company. Nobody gives a fuck you worked for Facebook or Google but they do care you made 700K doing it.

by voidfunc

7/25/2026 at 3:43:30 PM

Oh I can guarantee you there are many places where people give many fucks. Maybe you don’t because you have never reached a place where coming out of those companies is considered a fast track to whatever.

by throw1234567891

7/25/2026 at 10:34:01 AM

It's not just pay gap. A lot of FAANGs treat employees as very disposable and fire people with an email, but at least provide learning opportunities, growth, have budget for projects... other companies can be much worse.

by goodpoint

7/25/2026 at 7:48:28 AM

Yeah, maybe - but you know what one of the perks of not working for FAANG is?

Not working for FAANG.

Some people prefer having a spine over selling their integrity. There’s heaps of opportunity for doing interesting work in a less toxic environment in places other than Silicon Valley, if you accept a little less pay.

by 9dev

7/25/2026 at 2:22:24 PM

[dead]

by catlover76

7/25/2026 at 4:22:14 AM

I think a much better metric is the results of the compensation, not the peak dollars earned for some narrow window of time. The differences in the cost of living and local economic inflation can become that significant in the long run.

I'm not sure I would call an appetite for risk a "talent", or even a natural consequence of talent.

If we look at the average case, there are plenty of millennials now turning 40 who have higher net worth and a better work-life balance precisely because they never worked for a FAANG. Can't argue with the results of sticking around somewhere and climbing the ladder the traditional way versus enduring all the job hopping, glass ceilings, and layoffs.

by sublinear

7/25/2026 at 5:30:53 AM

I'm skeptical that this is true with respect to net worth, given that I have worked at both FAANG and non-FAANG companies and I know what I got paid at one vs the other.

by JuniperMesos

7/25/2026 at 10:29:56 AM

What factor(s) would cause you to go to a non-FAANG, having experienced both?

Pay means a lot; pay doesn’t mean everything.

by sokoloff

7/24/2026 at 9:12:01 PM

I don't think I have ever encountered anyone who could not write a for loop that got a job as a programmer.

I encounter plenty that used a for loop when something else would have been advisable.

by bryanrasmussen

7/25/2026 at 4:20:02 AM

I hired a data engineer who was unable write a for loop in their primary language (python).

The task was to write a simple sum of a list, but they had to convert the list to a pandas dataframe and then call some series of arcane functions. I originally thought this was just a preference but when I asked them for the simpler version while standing over their shoulder they were unable to do it.

They had ~8 years of claimed experience at the time and were from a country notorious for faked credentials. Turned out to be an ok hire overall (friendly, hardworking) but definitely lacking 80%+ of their supposed competencies.

by throwawaythekey

7/25/2026 at 5:10:04 AM

Data engineering started off as just another discipline in software engineering, but then the BI people got jealous and anyone who used sql started calling themselves DE. The term is fatally cheapened.

by CalRobert

7/25/2026 at 6:14:10 AM

You hired someone for a programming role who could not write a FOR loop? Oh dear.

by andsoitis

7/24/2026 at 11:30:19 PM

I think he was being a little hyperbolic, but the core concern (that programmers look competent right up until you have them write a FizzBuzz) is very real.

(Source: I've helped hire lots of programmers.)

by hungryhobbit

7/25/2026 at 4:15:41 AM

Fizzbuzz is interesting because it relies on either the candidate remembering the modulo operator, or the interviewer allowing them to write a modulo function. I can understand why a candidate could forget how to find the remainder from an integer division.

The bigger issue is not having seen fizzbuzz before, really.

by strken

7/25/2026 at 1:18:22 PM

I've always wondered how people who write code could possibly be unaware of the modulo operator. In the 8-bit and 16-bit CPU era, or even just when working with data types of that width, one has to be aware of wraparound / overflow if the value gets too large and that's what modulo is. Is it just developers who came of age in the 64-bit CPU era that have this gap?

by ThrowawayR2

7/26/2026 at 3:42:33 PM

>I've always wondered how people who write code could possibly be unaware of the modulo operator.

Worked for 25+ years in regular business software - banking , insurance etc. I never recollect using the modulo operator.

by dennis_jeeves2

7/26/2026 at 7:42:42 PM

When one's primary handling of numbers comes down to either linear (single-dimensional) lists or money, then you won't use modulo very much.

But any time you're walking over a discrete multidimensional list packed into a linear list, or walking over any discrete periodic signal (one very common example would be walking a linear array of screen pixels, walking over pcm samples in an audio waveform, literally 100% of GPU programming and 90+% of SIMD programming) you will want to be able to translate between "how far from the start am I" and "how far into the current cycle am I", and modulo handles that.

Similarly for almost anything involving time calculations (and for the same reason: because they are periodic). Modulo is literally described as "clock arithmetic" after all.

Here you can find Tempestt Bledsoe singing about it, lol https://youtu.be/fqtzqcJ6agE?t=570s

So you are absolutely correct that there do exist avenues in programming which can dodge this particular raindrop, I hope you aren't opposed to the idea that they are at least few and far between? ;)

by HappMacDonald

7/25/2026 at 12:06:08 PM

Fizzbuzz is not the least bit interesting on a technical level. It's interesting because even though it's trivial to "cheat" (you can just learn/memorize Fizzbuzz specifically), it still works because people so incompetent they can't even write something as trivial as Fizzbuzz are unlikely to have heard of it.

Fizzbuzz is used to confirm an already present suspicion of complete incompetence, not to assess skill (ability to pass is not a meaningful signal).

by mike_hock

7/26/2026 at 8:13:22 AM

I said "interesting" but I really meant "bad". You might as well test someone on whether they remember bitwise operators.

I feel that you did not address the specifics of what I wrote. It's a silly test because it's meant to cover the bare basics but it still relies on knowing/remembering the modulo operator, which junior hires might reasonably not have seen. If everyone didn't already know about fizzbuzz it would be even more stupid.

by strken

7/25/2026 at 10:33:12 AM

I’ve personally experienced devs who could not sum a collection of ints, “in any language of your choice”.

I’m not talking about devs who got hung up on integer overflow issues (or even off-by-one errors), but rather “just couldn’t get started at all”. I have no idea what they did before or what they expected to do if they got the job, but I doubt it would turn out well.

by sokoloff

7/25/2026 at 2:10:19 PM

Yep, I've seen that too. I start with "sum an array of ints" due to the known problems using fizzbuzz, and there are software engineer candidates who can't or won't do it. Nobody believes you until they see a candidate like this themselves.

My pet theory: A lot of companies are very, VERY big, and a clever person who doesn't know how to do their job but can identify a weak manager, can simply get lost in them. Hiding away getting the paycheck, but doing nothing except convincing their manager they're doing things. I've definitely met a few people in my career that I believe were doing exactly that.

by ryandrake

7/26/2026 at 8:17:06 AM

Yeah, I've seen that too, even in pre-LLM times.

I don't have a good explanation for how candidates with zero ability to write code can make it through a hiring funnel to sit in front of you. Maybe they don't know what they don't know.

by strken

7/25/2026 at 11:31:50 AM

No, fizzbuzz trips people who already have a job because they make two for loops, make too few IFs, or generally don’t have a logic mindset and get out of the interview saying “This is not something that’s asked for in the job!”

by eastbound

7/25/2026 at 1:05:39 AM

Sadly I have run into people like that. To this day I am convinced they paid someone to stand in for the interviews.

by foobarian

7/25/2026 at 1:41:39 AM

I'm probably the person ya'll are hating on. Writing code and writing code under pressure while you have a full blown anxiety attack are not the same thing. I'm lucky if I can accurately tell you what I had for breakfast once that triggers..

by thejazzman

7/25/2026 at 2:40:58 AM

If you program daily, but were nervous during an interview, I would have been able to tell and always tried to get candidates comfortable before getting into any programming - talking about something they liked or were passionate about, reframing my questions in terms of something we talked about or was on their resume.

I found most of the people who couldn’t program were not the nervous ones, but were smooth talkers who probably didn’t write much code. Maybe they did at one point, maybe they never did, it was hard to know, but I couldn’t get even logical steps to solve straight forward problems out of them. Those were the worst interviews, not because the candidate wasn’t a fit for the role, but because then I had to panic to try to keep the experience positive, constructive, and collaborative. When I expected to fill 20-40 minutes talking through a problem with someone who can’t solve problems, let alone produce anything remotely looking like code, I always found that painful.

The questions I asked could be solved by non-programmers (my wife, who was an elementary teacher and even my kindergarten son could come up with reasonable solutions, but of course not code). That was probably the biggest issue I ran into with nervous people - they didn’t think about the problem first, they’d try writing code before really thinking through. That was usually easy to correct and I didn’t fault anyone who could handle correction and guidance.

by jonhohle

7/25/2026 at 12:47:40 PM

I don't know, at least in Europe it's impossible to get a job right now unless you're well connected

companies seem really eager to just decline applicants before they even get interviewed

by r_lee

7/25/2026 at 4:10:04 PM

Oof, so it's not just me.

by throw-the-towel

7/25/2026 at 12:58:37 AM

We really need to let go of the notion, that FAANG necessarily has especially skilled engineers. Their products indicate, that this is not the case. Look at what kind of shitshows Google search and YouTube are for example. Or how FB is only bots now. Do these things still rake in money? Yes. But that's rather due to history and entrenchment, than sheer quality of these platforms/tools. Something all of FAANG have failed at is content moderation. Their quality actually sucks.

Also I would like to add, that companies in general are quite clueless about how to hire good engineers and set up hiring processes, which reward talkers and liars, rather than good engineers. Someone not able to write a loop will be found out, but that doesn't mean they won't hire other types of mediocre engineers, instead of good ones, that they gave a pass. Don't forget, that often not even any engineer is involved in taking a look at someone's application or its contents. Often it is HR going off of checklists, which leads to them ending up with the people, who have fake CVs ticking all the boxes.

I wish companies were able to distinguish better, because then your point would stand, that talented engineers had far more leverage. Lately though, I have lost my faith in that.

by zelphirkalt

7/25/2026 at 2:48:11 AM

> which reward talkers and liars, rather than good engineers

Part of that is also about who management and HR are socially comfortable with and candidates that may have connections with people in the company. It's often not a level playing field because of cronyism, nepotism, and many other -isms.

That's also why a good engineer, confident in their skills and value, needs to read the room or figure out what's going on. If the situation is not to their liking, then jump to another company or start their own business, whenever the chance presents itself.

by baranul

7/25/2026 at 10:24:22 AM

Unfortunately their hiring practices are bonkers.

Of course knowing how many golf balls fit into a plane will help when it comes to fix that nasty bug on a Vulkan driver.

Or having to solve a data structures and algorithms question as if just left university, completely disregarding the 30 years in between.

Naturally we all do cool algorithm problem solving before getting into bed, and can't wait for the next Advent of Code.

Then they complain they can't hire anyone, go figure.

by pjmlp

7/24/2026 at 9:16:00 PM

> I think you have far more leverage than you think in most places still.

In some sense this is true, but in my view it's not whether a person theoretically has leverage or opportunity, but whether it's feasible to practice or to explore it. If enough people believe that programmers shouldn't have leverage, and in-practice if there's only negative repercussions from trying, then it's not meaningful. Broadly, in any profession, it seems like it comes down to a whole lot of luck whether you have real, practicable leverage. Barring some exceptions for somehow intentionally positioning oneself to be solely responsible for an uncommonly important system in an uncommonly lucrative business, but that seems to me to also be dependent on a lot of luck.

Overall, it seems that if you really have leverage, you effectively can't economically be replaced, and everyone knows it, but otherwise you'll be on the chopping block for not doing exactly what your narcissistic boss wants on a moment to moment basis.

by brailsafe

7/25/2026 at 3:27:17 PM

>It's far more often that I hear "we interviewed someone we thought looked good and they couldn't even write a for loop, where are all the good engineers".

Absolutely insane claim to make coming from the other side of the process. You get FAANG-style Leetcode Hard assessments, day-long takehomes with no pay and complete nonsense rejections even for very run-of-the-mill companies. The kind of feedback you're usually getting is so unfounded it can't even be considered in the category of wrong or right. But that's not a problem, since most of the time you're just getting ghosted. And all of that is assuming you're landing interviews, which in an optimistic scenario is going to take you weeks, sometimes over a month.

Anybody who claims they "can't find engineers" either has a broken hiring pipeline or enormously big self-esteem - based on my conversations with founders and people responsible for hiring, it's usually both.

by vovavili

7/25/2026 at 1:51:02 AM

> I don't think this is really entirely true. Everyone who isn't a FAANG or Frontier Lab seem to be absolutely starving for good talent

I don't think the management at most companies could identify good talent if it poked them in the eye. Good talent wants to have agency and freedom to act, the average manager wants to breathe down your neck at all moments

by bluefirebrand

7/25/2026 at 12:29:45 PM

I'm inclined to agree with this. If management can't personally code, and they don't know how the big companies acquire talent, the company ends up in a deadspin of not paying enough, not adequately examining coding skills during interview and probationary periods, and having mediocre seniors who have been around long enough to understand the eccentricities of the stack but still aren't actually any good controlling the hiring and training pipeline and selecting the new architecture.

by quacked

7/25/2026 at 3:49:26 PM

A few years ago I was tasked with doing the technical interview for an operations team in the Chicago area. The job was mostly restarting services on windows and Linux. Running variously automated processes. Rebooting stuff. Be a resource on outage calls. Everything was documented, it was pretty entry level.

I interviewed over 100 people. The number of people who didn’t even know how to search with Google was mind boggling. Some wouldn’t even make an attempt. The people who knew their stuff laughed at the end of the interview and said, “is that it?” But even the most basic questions, that some found laughable, knocked out 80% of applicants. Many people who claimed to know Linux, interviewing for a server support role, had never touched the CLI.

It was rough. By the end of the hiring window, they were just making offers to anyone, so they didn’t lose the positions. I wasn’t happy about that.

by al_borland

7/24/2026 at 8:37:39 PM

> In the past, software engineers had a lot more agency than they do now, because nowadays the supply/demand ratio no longer favors software engineers, and as a result we have weaker negotiation power. Now we're more afraid of being fired and not being able to find a job, and managers aren't afraid of us quitting and not being able to replace us.

This sounds like a job for unions. It would have been advantageous to have formed and joined them before so much power was lost, but it's easy to be shortsighted when you're happy and comfortable with where you are and ignore that the situation could easily change, if not for you then for the next generation. Companies are happy to leverage every advantage they have against workers. Unions can be a powerful tool for workers, one that could help solve a lot of problems current and future, and it's sitting there just waiting to be used.

by autoexec

7/25/2026 at 3:47:19 PM

I am 100% sure that I make more than the average person in my role and level (tbh more money than I even thought I'd make in my life).

Why should I support a union? If the company couldn't fire me they wouldn't pay me so much. If a union advocates for everyone else, it's gonna be harder for me to get paid so much.

I don't really mind the constant layoffs; I think that those are horrific for morale and lead to disengaged engineers and the bare minimum of work being done, but that's true with or without the union. I certainly look at the lack of opportunities for career growth and the constant threat of layoffs as a good reason to take it easy.

What I think the union would be AMAZING at is the same thing unions are always amazing at in this country: stopping anyone from being fired and ending merit based promotions.

by SR2Z

7/25/2026 at 7:03:35 PM

> I am 100% sure that I make more than the average person in my role and level..Why should I support a union?

Even if that is true today, it may not be tomorrow. The corporation you work for is not your friend. They aren't looking out for your best interests. They are worried only about themselves. You should do the same and unions give you more power in negotiations with your employer and more protections against them as well.

> If the company couldn't fire me they wouldn't pay me so much.

That's a lie. First, because unions don't make it impossible to fire employees, but also because the ability to fire you for arbitrary (or even illegal) reasons does not force companies to pay you more. Removing that ability won't force them to pay you less.

> the same thing unions are always amazing at in this country: stopping anyone from being fired and ending merit based promotions.

Employers spend billions every singe year trying to con workers into thinking that unions are evil and wow, you really fell for their bullshit. Those are some commonly repeated lies, but they don't stand up to scrutiny. They're just supposed to trick people who don't bother questioning what they're told.

At most, all a union does is force a company to actually document the disciplinary problems and give an employee an opportunity to correct their behavior before they fire them. This makes it more difficult for companies to fire employees for reasons that have nothing to do with their performance and for any reasons that the company isn't comfortable documenting (often because those reasons would be embarrassing or illegal).

There's nothing preventing merit based promotions either. How promotions are handled will be determined in part by the contract between the company and the union and it's the workers who decide what the union asks for in their contract. If you want a contract with the employer that allows for merit based promotions you can have one. There are zero rules against that, but you should expect the union will require the terms to be well defined. Employers like to say they want "merit based promotions" when what they actually want is total control over promotions for whatever arbitrary reasons they decide to call "merit based".

A union contract probably should require that an employer is able to justify the reasons for their merit based promotions using objective measures of productivity/performance that apply equally to all employees. That means the people who work the hardest and do the best work will be promoted even when the boss would rather promote their favored nepo baby, or when the boss would rather not promote someone who actually earned it. Even then, that'd all be according to the contract. If your union doesn't care about fair merit based promotion and wants the boss to be able to deny or award them to anyone at any time without justification that's fine too.

Unions are organizations made up of people. There are good ones and bad ones. Workers get from them what they put into them. There are plenty of horror stories that get heavily promoted to scare you. Some of them are even true stories. Ultimately though, employees have the power to change or replace their union to make sure their needs are being met. You may still think that unions aren't for you, and that's okay. It's still probably worth looking into them a little though because you've been being lied to by people who want to keep you ignorant and misinformed on the subject. Those people are afraid of what unions are capable of and that isn't because they're worried about your career and want to protect you. Once you understand what unions actually are, and aren't, you can make up your own mind.

by autoexec

7/25/2026 at 8:17:24 PM

> That's a lie. First, because unions don't make it impossible to fire employees, but also because the ability to fire you for arbitrary (or even illegal) reasons does not force companies to pay you more. Removing that ability won't force them to pay you less.

Why do Europeans get paid so much less than Americans for the same jobs? Like it or not, at-will employment makes it much easier to justify hiring a new employee because they can just be let go if things don't work out. I'm not even talking about the employee not working out, forcing companies into continuing employment can be disastrous if the market shifts (e.g. what's happening at VW right now).

A requirement to provide x months of notice with y% chance of success is a quantifiable risk with a dollar price tag. It is definitely brought up when companies decide to expand in places where labor law is different, and it scales directly with how much the employee is being paid.

> There's nothing preventing merit based promotions either.

So why do most of our unions have time-in-grade promotions? Merit-based promo is quite rare in unionized jobs in the US. There are obvious incentives that push unions away from merit-based promo, and you're being intentionally obtuse if you refuse to see them.

> Even if that is true today, it may not be tomorrow. The corporation you work for is not your friend. They aren't looking out for your best interests. They are worried only about themselves. You should do the same and unions give you more power in negotiations with your employer and more protections against them as well.

You're right, that might not always be true. Every time that's happened I've just changed jobs for a raise and sometimes also a promotion.

That's my defense against shitty companies: I can just leave. If people were MORE WILLING TO LEAVE when things got bad, companies would get away with much less and make more efforts to retain employees.

I get the argument when we're talking about working-class people who might have a lot of difficulty finding a new job, but IN SOFTWARE? Demand for qualified engineers is insane! I haven't bothered to apply to a job since college, I've just set LinkedIn to "open to work" and replied to a few recruiters. FFS, even when I've been voluntarily unemployed, just holding onto my stock was enough to see my net worth INCREASE.

> It's still probably worth looking into them a little though because you've been being lied to by people who want to keep you ignorant and misinformed on the subject. Those people are afraid of what unions are capable of and that isn't because they're worried about your career and want to protect you.

I don't understand why pro-union folks always assume that skeptics think their boss is their dad. Rest assured, I am very cynical about my job and corporate politics.

Look man, I'm fully aware of what unions are and what they do. They're a great deal for some union members! They're also why American ports are the least efficient in the developed world, they're a big part of why RICO exists, and I'm already doing an in-demand well-compensated job. My peers and I are all going to be able to retire at 40, barring a major war or other disaster. If I get laid off, I get 90 days of COBRA and then Medi-Cal, and odds are I won't even need the Medi-Cal.

What exactly is a union going to get me that I can't get myself?

by SR2Z

7/25/2026 at 3:22:12 PM

"You can be fired, you can be reprimanded if caught, you can be retaliated against or lose political advantage."

You could also silently burn out. Especially if fighting this as your own personal sisyphean uphill battle.

I think especially people driven by passion and curiosity are at risk of this. And I mean, that's pretty much what the "hacker mindset" of many people on here amounts to. There's also a reason why people with a lot of passion are often taken advantage of, e.g. game development industry.

by sureglymop

7/25/2026 at 10:54:27 AM

In defence of management, there is definitely a pattern of engineers (or employees in general, really) spending inordinate amounts on time doing something that they find personally gratifying but adds no real value to the product/business.

I've been guilty of this myself.

by AussieWog93

7/25/2026 at 11:42:42 AM

It's really easy to miss the value in Pointless Rewrite 5 of Core Module 4, but the grad who rewrites it will at least understand it afterwards and can fix the bugs they introduced and add new features to it easier. But the hard pill to swallow is they spent $200K of the engineering budget making the code worse.

The way to understand the value is to see the engineer as an asset. Engineers aren't interchangeable and no codebase can truly be documented and CI'd to the point where expertise doesn't matter.

by veltas

7/25/2026 at 11:38:57 AM

The pendulum has swung way too much to the other side. Now, people have to fight for just doing a reasonably basic job testing the code while the manager breathes down their neck with impatience fueled by unrealistic expectations of LLM magic (and this is even for those managers who are technically aware enough of LLM challenges so I can only attribute that to wilful ignorance).

The expectation of the code not blowing up in production still stands though. There is no arguing with this unreasonableness.

It basically sucks.

by noisy_boy

7/25/2026 at 7:42:28 AM

> Engineers who care about such things, often engage in acts of "benevolent noncompliance". Common workarounds are "asking for forgiveness instead of permission", secrecy, and misdirection.

Without the support of a unified vision, these good intentions could pave the path to hell by the way.

by chanux

7/24/2026 at 8:14:17 PM

This hits so hard. I used to admire Senior developers who would do this. Now, I find myself in a place where there is no one to do this, and I've taken up to playing this role. It is the hardest job, but I cannot do any thing else as my team is committed to just non-stop slop thanks to management directives. I realize all the time I spent admiring, and now I have become.

by conqrr

7/24/2026 at 8:32:25 PM

If the engineers were right the bill will come due on that tech debt eventually. Likely when that happens the company will just spend more than they needed to fixing the issues and no one will be around to say I told you so.

by repeekad

7/25/2026 at 12:22:47 AM

The bill does come due. I've seen it happen over and over. But management fails to connect current problems to past mistakes, especially when they happen over the course of years. Thats setting aside when they insist that the correct decision was made, but have no real evidence that this is the case, other than the fact that "things worked out" even though maybe it would have been better had a different decision was made.

People do get a pass on this -- you can't rigorously examine every decision and counter-factual or you'd never make forward progress. And I don't really have any great ideas on how to bridge this gap. It'd be nice if there were better ways to measure this but there aren't, so it really comes down to who is more convincing, which is often orthogonal to facts and correctness.

by kentm

7/24/2026 at 8:42:12 PM

The problem is that the counterfactual isn't obvious. The company spends more time - and money - than they needed to fixing those issues, but how do they know? And how do they know that it would've amounted to less if they'd done those fixes sooner? Figuring that out, and figuring it out accurately, is often extremely difficult. A serious attempt might cost more than the fixes.

...and often the amount more isn't catastrophically more, so they don't even think about it. The company might be bleeding from paper cuts, it might be terribly unhealthy because of it, but still not unhealthy enough to kill it.

by wk_end

7/25/2026 at 6:55:36 PM

> Likely when that happens the company will just spend more than they needed to fixing the issues and no one will be around to say I told you so.

In my experience, yeah, but how they do it is... not what you'd expect.

Leadership has no clue about the scope of tech debt in their products and if they do decide to fix it, it will be by coming up with a bunch of ridiculously optimistic estimates and then foisting them off onto engineers who are already overworked trying to keep up with tech debt to launch new stuff. This feels awful and generally doesn't lead to anything being properly fixed because it turns fixing tech debt into a "just get it barely good enough and mark it as done."

After the inevitable surge in attrition, more often than not the tech debt is "solved" by throwing out the old codebase and starting from scratch with a new team. This is expensive, but in a lot of cases produces a better product.

by SR2Z

7/25/2026 at 9:26:09 AM

> Why does software suck? Management often has other priorities

This is Hacker News syndrome. What you described is why everything sucks. It's because people at the top are more concerned with making money than doing good things well.

by BrenBarn

7/25/2026 at 5:20:01 PM

Aren't you glad the govt let them import a bunch of cheap labor they can treat like trash to undercut the US economy?

by honkycat

7/25/2026 at 7:54:50 AM

Thank you for this.

(I think HN should consider creating TLDR type of comments for upvoting separately from commentary. @Dan incentivise with different karma credits?)

by ak39

7/24/2026 at 10:15:54 PM

I think such comment are the exact reason why "the speaker" has quit HN. This is literally some AI transcription from the video + "I find this interesting". Why is this even in the top?

by enbugger

7/25/2026 at 3:39:24 AM

> why "the speaker" has quit HN

Quitting HN[1] might have more to do with feeling he and Zig had already harvested the maximum benefit and marketing propaganda usage for elevating itself, including using it to thoroughly smear its C alternative language competitors. Thus, it came time to figuratively give HN the middle finger while on top (selling high before the stock may fall).

Many might not have done a review of the history, as he quit Twitter and Reddit too[2], years ago (2023). Arguably excuses are given to cover for offloading any personal involvement on a particular social media platform, as either they are self sustaining without his presence or no greater benefit is thought to be possible.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47928645 (Tell HN: Site Is Trash Now)

[2]: https://andrewkelley.me/post/goodbye-twitter-reddit.html (So Long, Twitter and Reddit)

by baranul

7/25/2026 at 6:45:34 PM

Do you find it so unbelievable that Andrew is genuinely unhappy with the direction that HN has been taken? You can't deny that there is a real problem with AI generated submissions and comments.

by spacechild1

7/24/2026 at 11:07:20 PM

[dead]

by aaron695

7/24/2026 at 8:51:02 PM

In the same vein, Jonathan Blow's modestly named "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization" talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko

Crazy how time flies, given that talk is seven years old at this point. But could've been given today, with the points being more relevant than ever.

by helloplanets

7/25/2026 at 11:15:47 AM

This concept of knowledge degenerating between generations is relevant for software developmnent of today, since many junior developers have a hard time finding a job and if they do they just prompt the AI until they get a result.

by cambaceres

7/25/2026 at 3:32:46 PM

Can't blame them. What they need is a senior dev as a mentor to pass down tacit knowledge and experience. They might not get that even if they can find a job.

Then they not only stagnate but simply have to prompt to even deliver anything.

by sureglymop

7/24/2026 at 9:04:16 PM

One of my favorite talks.

by christophilus

7/24/2026 at 7:45:46 PM

Generally agreed with most of the points.

Building software that serves you only...and then sharing with others is like serving others. It's good stuff and we need more of it.

I'm not sure how the deconversion of his faith needed to be conflated as related to the main ideas, especially when the next point was about weilding technology for good or evil in the next point as if these aren't pre-existing realities of our world or universe.

by smalltorch

7/25/2026 at 10:47:55 AM

This was a prelude to his argument for needing a set of moral standards.

by scott01

7/24/2026 at 8:41:50 PM

Yeah, I wasn't clear how his (lack of) religion/faith related to the theme. I like personal details shared thoughtfully in conference talks, but he structured the talk as if those details mattered to the overall message.

by TimTheTinker

7/25/2026 at 7:04:39 AM

I think it was trying to find a moral standard that wasn't being set by established places. I think it was showing a level of self-reflection (going through a process of finding your set of principals after leaving an established faith translates very well into questioning the morality of how established software operates).

I did find a few things adventuring into the off topic in the video. Considering all the drama lately and certain opinions that always come out with threads on this person, I was thinking "oh no, people aren't going to like this" while watching, despite broadly agreeing with the substance of the message.

by flumpcakes

7/24/2026 at 9:17:08 PM

I really enjoyed this. This talk contains a powerful message of optimism, possibility, agency and power that resonates strongly with me.

Computers and technology are force multipliers for humanity. As coders, we are lucky to be gifted with such high agency and global reach, all at a fairly affordable price tag.

I love computers.

by spongebobstoes

7/24/2026 at 10:37:46 PM

I loved the talk as well. The recommended music video by Ninajirachi was really cool as well! Have a good day fellow computer enjoyer :)

by austy69

7/24/2026 at 8:42:07 PM

> “I almost fell into this trap (...) I was raised by conservative Christian parents and thereby had so, so much to learn, and unlearn, in order to date comfortable and confidently.

Is this engagement bait? Is this a cultural critique? What is meant to be said here? At any rate, this is the kind of speech which will alienate a lot of people. Look, I'm more on the progressive end of things, I get it, but I think this just feels mean and divisive from the perspective of a conservative OR a Christian, and I find that to be a message made in poor taste... which is difficult because this is such a potentially inspiring and positive talk. I lost the energy to be inspired by the talk due to this style of messaging, but I don't think you should have to. I'm just a bit thrown off, I guess.

by leecommamichael

7/24/2026 at 8:54:01 PM

This not a rare thing to express. There are a lot of people raised under conservative Christian environments who have spent a considerable amount of time recovering from this. It is not surprising that they feel the need to express something of the journey that has dominated much of their early life.

Taylor Tomlinson puts much of this into her comedy. She often asks the audience to call out if they were similarly screwed up by their religious upbringing. The is a loud audience response every time.

While I don't agree with Andrew Kelly's adversarial attitude, I do understand it a little more from the perspective of someone who had to fight his way out of an ideology that will not seek consensus with his values.

by Lerc

7/24/2026 at 10:59:22 PM

"an ideology that will not seek consensus with his values"

This just seems normal and expected.

Kids are raised by their parents. Parents try to impart their wisdom on their kids, often in the form of rules meant to protect them. These rules are necessarily over restrictive due to simplification during various ages. These rules are also out of date with the new generation.

It's always a right of passage for children to find their own values and how they align with ideologies they have experienced or discovered in the world. And kids thinking their parents messed them up is really just an expression of value mismatch.

by giantg2

7/24/2026 at 11:55:28 PM

> Kids are raised by their parents. Parents try to impart their wisdom on their kids, often in the form of rules meant to protect them. These rules are necessarily over restrictive due to simplification during various ages. These rules are also out of date with the new generation.

> It's always a right of passage for children to find their own values and how they align with ideologies they have experienced or discovered in the world. And kids thinking their parents messed them up is really just an expression of value mismatch.

Right, but not everyone has the same reaction to members of the new generation who don't conform to their values. When my brothers and I didn't end up participating in organized religion as adults, even though my parents still are fairly religious, their reaction was basically "oh well" and to never bring it up again, and we all still have great relationships with them. There are people whose react to their kids not wanting to participate in the same organized religion much more aggressively, and if their kids have "lifestyles" that they consider immoral like being gay or trans, you can forget about any chance of a healthy adult familial relationship between them.

You're not wrong that at a high level, the patterns are somewhat similar, but not all of them are the same magnitude. The values themselves will impact how volatile the conflict is because they're self-describing; parents who highly value tolerance will by definition not be as upset at having kids who don't agree with them on everything, whereas parents who instead place a higher value on conformity and adherence to tradition are going to be a lot less happy with kids who don't end up agreeing with them about that.

by saghm

7/25/2026 at 12:06:43 AM

"you can forget about any chance of a healthy adult familial relationship between them."

Such is life. Not everyone has a family to begin with.

by giantg2

7/25/2026 at 2:05:11 AM

You called it "normal and expected". When not everyone has it happen to them, that's not "normal and expected". (It's not necessarily abnormal, but "expected" at the very least is a stretch).

by saghm

7/24/2026 at 11:25:08 PM

"becoming an adult" is a thing people do, this will include no longer agreeing with everything your parents taught you. This is mundane and what you have described.

"my parents are/were abusive" is something a plurality of people (and especially those raised in evangelical churches) experience.

Within that dynamic, the 'value' at issue here is 'Do I, your child, have a right to my own body and choices?'; Too often, the reply to that is 'no, we expect obedience and obeisance to God, your father, and your mother, in that exact order, because that is the one true way'.

This is a form of domination, not well-meaning 'protection'. It does, in fact, 'mess people up', in their intimate relationships most of all.

by lkey

7/25/2026 at 12:10:28 AM

"have a right to my own body and choices?"

Not sure exactly what you mean by own body. However, under the law children generally do not have a right to their own choices and are expected to be controlled by their parents (really look at the stutes around this stuff and you might be surprised). After all, parents are held responsible for their child's actions under the law.

by giantg2

7/25/2026 at 3:02:52 AM

I recommend you spend more time reading about jurisprudence. I’m not sure where you’re based, but in the US, for example, children below even age 13 can make autonomous decisions about their health when it’s determined that they have the capacity, even when the consequences may be life-ending. And, less relevantly, I personally believe this is the most moral option in such situations. If you have a 15% 1-year survival rate, all treatments either come with a small decrease in mortality, a large increase in risk for detrimental side effects, or both, and you can demonstrate to me that you understand the interplay of these factors, I don’t care if you’re 10 or 100, I believe you should have the right to bodily autonomy.

by mdgld

7/25/2026 at 1:05:16 AM

I am not surprised. I'm aware that the US never adopted:

https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/...

You have stated an unfortunate fact while hiding your value judgement. Do you think the laws you reference are correct, or no?

Do you understand the difference between having a responsibility to prevent your child from law-breaking and having absolute control over their life in general?

If you have children, or plan to, do you want to control every action they take to protect yourself from hypothetical legal consequence? Do you think you have the right to do so? Do you think you should be able to control what they think and express as well?

These questions are not hypothetical, as an answer in the affirmative is precisely what creates the type of abuse I described above.

by lkey

7/25/2026 at 1:39:40 AM

The laws are to complicated to go into a full yes or no. But they mostly are. There are some things not covered by law which generally are controlled, such as the clothes, toys, and food bought for the kid.

by giantg2

7/25/2026 at 3:01:03 AM

Why do we allow people to teach a religion that requires someone to be old enough to have informed concent before they can decide to follow it for themselves, when at the same time we disallow sexual activity with those same individuals because they are not old enough to offer informed consent.

by Lerc

7/25/2026 at 2:53:57 AM

Except conservatism, religion, and religious conservatism in particular do not seem to value open-mindedness, discussion and consensus, or a non-judgmental stance.

It’s one thing to try and impart your values onto your children—that seems like what most parents would want to do, although I wouldn’t go so far as saying it’s what they should do. It’s another to say, for example, “you were born with a penis and so if I see you wearing a dress I’ll beat you and send you to a camp where people demean you and question your innermost feelings until you change them or pretend to do so”, instead of having a conversation about gender vs sex vs sexual orientation, gender roles, society, and culture, and “nature vs nurture”.

by mdgld

7/25/2026 at 7:57:29 AM

Which religion?

Christianity is arguanbly the irritating grit that created the pearl of modern science. A strict text that had to be taken literally ... this led to great intellectual progress in order reconcile it all. Bacon, Darwin ... lots of science was done by Christians.

Christianity isn't the only example. Islam and Judaism also have been heavy hitters. As have other cultures but I don't understand enough about them to comment.

by wisty

7/25/2026 at 10:30:21 AM

I'm not sure the cause and effect are accurate here. It's very likely more the other way: that folks curious about the world and how it works did that research in spite of religion which often attempted to suppress new findings that countered church doctrine or beliefs. Or even suppress findings that happened to be different from earlier mental models.

To be fair, other scientists sometimes do this to. However most begrudgingly accept new findings if they hold up to the scientific method.

by JackMorgan

7/25/2026 at 3:18:53 AM

I appreciate the response, and I can relate. Perhaps I'm too sensitive to some rumblings I'm perceiving in the US at the moment. I don't know. I genuinely do not know.

by leecommamichael

7/25/2026 at 7:49:06 AM

The rumblings as in - the push back on the enormous takeover by christian conservatives of the united states, taking away women's rights, voting to teach the bible in schools, and doing their best to mass disenfranchise voters?

Fuck 'em honestly.

by hilariously

7/25/2026 at 3:53:51 PM

There has got to be a way to be strong against a cause without being strong against the people who represent it. I believe this devolves to violence otherwise.

by leecommamichael

7/25/2026 at 7:58:05 AM

If I talked about how I needed to recover from being raised in a progressive environment, it would not be so well received in well-respected tech circles.

There's an assymetry here no one wants to acknowledge.

by LAC-Tech

7/25/2026 at 10:36:59 AM

I don't know anyone who had to "recover" from being raised by "progressive" parents. Is this actually a thing? What would there be to recover from exactly?

by spacechild1

7/26/2026 at 3:32:24 AM

See? I can't even mention it without scare quotes and downvotes :)

by LAC-Tech

7/26/2026 at 10:34:01 AM

These are just regular quotation marks. Sorry if they scared you.

by spacechild1

7/26/2026 at 8:09:39 AM

"Recover from my dad beating me" vs "recover from my dad not beating me".

Yes, really makes you think.

by AlexeyBelov

7/26/2026 at 9:40:26 AM

lmao. fish, water, etc.

by LAC-Tech

7/24/2026 at 8:52:35 PM

I have so far only completed about 14 minutes of the talk, but I would imagine it to be some sort of relatable analogy which foreshadows what the thesis of the talk is about. The "Christian Parents" are the authority figure and following their rules, lessons, and expectations for dating is a lot like doing only the software engineering tasks that management prioritizes for you. You end up unsatisfied with your life to the point where you become jaded about software (software development is like "dating" in this analogy) instead of learning the skills necessary to wield influence over what you get to work on. I'll watch the rest to see if I'm right.

edit: it's wasn't just about developing software but also using software. You don't have to accept the bad situation you're in (or the bad software you've been given or told to use). Finally, I'll say that while the speaker's comment about conservative christian upbringing isn't a universal one, it is a widely shared one. If you take offense by it maybe take a moment to pause and consider that maybe the way you were exposed to it was probably more balanced than what many others experience, or in the worst case that maybe your negative reaction to it is a sort of defense mechanism that you've learned to shield yourself from confronting the reality that your own conservative christian upbringing was not so good after all?.

by jlhawn

7/24/2026 at 8:47:33 PM

This viewpoint is preposterous to me in the first place.

I am Christian. Everything in the world seems to be falling apart these days and my faith is one of the few real-feeling things!

by joshcsimmons

7/24/2026 at 9:37:52 PM

From my perspective, I do not perceive the world as "falling apart" and I wonder how much of your perception of the state of things (as if there was a universally defined "perfection" to strive towards instead of humans creating these concepts) falling apart is derived from your faith, which has a vested interest in presenting itself as a real-feeling thing in order to promulgate its existence. As a meme, it appears to be persistent in the environment for roughly 2k years, so clearly there's some fitness to its host species. And contrast its feelings of apocalyptic end times to Buddhism, where things are more cyclical rather than ending soon, and I wonder how your feelings would be affected were you to have been raised in that environment instead.

by r2_pilot

7/25/2026 at 1:08:00 AM

I feel like religion is the original corporation. You even have weekly 1-on-1s with your manager!

by foobarian

7/25/2026 at 3:36:46 AM

I don't often laugh on HN, but when I do, it's a big LOL.

by raspasov

7/24/2026 at 9:35:27 PM

While I can't speak to the universality or novelty of the world falling apart, I feel the same way.

Some people aren't yet in a place to understand this perspective. Others have been hurt by Christians who failed to live their faith or were otherwise misguided in their actions or teachings. Some slander the faith based on ignorance or misunderstanding.

We're called to forgive our enemies and respond with patience, humility, and compassion. I've found that doing this without losing sight of God's commandments is a struggle that requires daily prayer and reflection.

Have a good weekend, and peace be with you.

by zoobaloo

7/25/2026 at 3:52:38 AM

A thing you might want to consider is that how "good" a person is is largely independent from their level of religious faith.

It is common for religious people to assume they are linked and that a religious person does good deeds because they are faithful while somebody who does bad deeds has less faith.

Which leads to an assumption by some that atheists are have no morals and priest are exception good.

by slyall

7/25/2026 at 4:51:10 AM

could you please explain your reason for posting this? it doesn't seem related to the preceding comment.

by thin_carapace

7/25/2026 at 5:09:47 AM

I was mainly replying to this sentence:

" Others have been hurt by Christians who failed to live their faith or were otherwise misguided in their actions or teachings. "

by slyall

7/25/2026 at 5:22:32 AM

may i ask a bit more specifically why your comment evaluating the abstract concept of goodness and its relation to faith is related to this sentence? i'm still not seeing the connection.

by thin_carapace

7/25/2026 at 9:41:02 AM

"who failed to live their faith" - ie if they had lived up to their faith would have been good. I'm saying that the practice of "faith" and being "good" are largely unconnected. There are plenty of faithful Christians in prison.

By "good" I mean nice, polite, not murdering people. Generally accepted moral behavior.

by slyall

7/25/2026 at 2:30:50 PM

if someone agrees on what it means to be good, their definition of the term has been subjectively qualified. muslims agree its good to cover their women, you probably dont, both these statements are true. seems to be a central aspect of religion, agreeing on codified morality. im fairly confident that not killing is a moral purported by christianity, therefore it doesnt seem logical to label murderers as christians - based on their murderous behaviour, murderers do not agree with christianity, regardless as to what they verbally state. would you label buddhists as immoral if an individual decided to call himself buddhist post-massacre?

by thin_carapace

7/25/2026 at 1:02:29 PM

> I am Christian. Everything in the world seems to be falling apart these days and my faith is one of the few real-feeling things!

Well, the world is exactly as "God" created it.

Thus, if the world is falling apart, then the God - observably so - has done a real shoddy job.

If you come upon a piece of well written software - you can infer that it's written by a good and competent programmer.

And if the software on the other hand is shitty, then more likely than not - made and created by a shitty programmer.

World as is - is obviously created by either somebody extremely incompetent or downright malevolent as far as UX for living beings is concerned.

by Johanx64

7/25/2026 at 6:28:46 AM

>I am Christian. Everything in the world seems to be falling apart these days

You people have been telling this for the last 2000 years.

by weregiraffe

7/25/2026 at 7:43:51 AM

I don't think it's meant to be mean or divisive, he clearly had trouble dating and he feels his conservative Christian upbringing was partially responsible for that. If you think he's wrongly attributing it to those things, fair enough, but his experience is still valid.

EDIT: just saw your reply to a similar comment below, appreciate your response!

by mindwok

7/25/2026 at 1:32:19 AM

He shouldn't talk about his own experience? Why not? Why is it in poor taste to talk about a difficulty he went through?

by SwellJoe

7/25/2026 at 2:35:59 AM

When you put it that way, I have no issue agreeing wholeheartedly. He’s making an example of incel culture as it appears to him to apply to software culture. After I describe it that way, I think he didn’t have to stoke the religious right in doing so. Something that hadn’t occurred to me until your reply (thank you) was that he might not be aware he’s doing that, and that is where I may be wrong in assessing the “taste” of the messaging. But I will be firm in my initial reason to post: knowingly aggravating each other is a problem in this country. We need compassion and mutual respect. Cooling the temperature of discourse will require a surplus in patience. Maybe even faith. (I am not religious, this is not a dog-whistle.)

I was so pre-occupied with someone being offended by what he was saying that I didn't see the clear positive angles you're showing. I appreciate that.

by leecommamichael

7/25/2026 at 9:48:03 PM

I feel like a lot of folks have bought into the Christian nationalist position that they are always under attack. Someone saying, "I had a hard time in a conservative Christian upbringing and I had to do some work to find a way to be happy and successful at the things I wanted" is, in no way, an attack on anyone or anyone's beliefs, and to frame it as such kinda just shows how wildly successful that particular propaganda tactic has been.

A few extremists are constantly rattling on about the "War on Christmas", the "War on Christians", etc. Meanwhile, Christians hold literally every lever of power in the US, and saying you're not a Christian in public is disqualifying from most public office in the US; not by law, but de facto, based on the prejudices against other religions and the non-religious. If someone raised in a conservative Christian household saying, "that was hard", is "aggravating" to anyone, then I would say the aggravated party is 100% the one in the wrong. I'm not going to pretend along with Christian nationalists that they need protection from any speech that isn't praising their beliefs and actions.

by SwellJoe

7/25/2026 at 3:18:31 AM

I honestly don’t get what you’re saying. From my limited experience Mr. Kelley often adopts a confrontational stance, sometimes to the point of appearing antagonistic, but I listened past the intro and did not interpret what he said as “religion bad” or even “conservatism bad”.

It’s one thing to purposefully provoke people, and it’s another to tiptoe around any personal expression or hot-button issue for fear of offending someone, and that is not limited to one end of the political spectrum. I have been on all sides of this; I was raised by a computer scientist (used to speaking freely/veracity being valued) and a doctor (used to self-censorship/not offending being valued), and have worked in academia, industry, and now medicine, and have experienced conservative as well as liberal approaches to both promulgation and suppression of free expression.

by mdgld

7/24/2026 at 10:11:53 PM

I liked the talk and was about to post a link to it in the $dayjob slack, but this threw me off as well. Still watched it to the end, and I still recommended it to a friend (along with the Youtube channel of the "Software should work" conf), but I'm saddened that the talk paints Christianity as something that is inflicted upon you and that you should strive to get rid of.

It's clear that he had a bad experience, and I'm nobody to tell him what to put on the slides and what to leave out, but my impression is that there are lots of believers out there who do cherish their faith, experience it as a very positive force in their lives, and draw from it the power to make the world a better place around them. Speaking for myself, I'd say faith has been a net positive so far in my life.

by wofo

7/25/2026 at 3:08:42 AM

You’re talking in general about your faith, when this presenter was talking about their specific experience of being raised by conservative Christian parents. I’m not even Christian, and it’s plain to me that there’s massive variation even within one denomination’s congregants, let alone a Baptist vs a Lutheran, for example. It seems like you extrapolated far beyond what he said.

by mdgld

7/25/2026 at 10:39:46 AM

> I’m not even Christian, and it’s plain to me that there’s massive variation even within one denomination’s congregants, let alone a Baptist vs a Lutheran

That's a fair point I agree with. Still, I've met many people who seemingly put all "flavors" of Christian faith in the same negative bucket (implicitly negating the diversity among Christians you call out in your comment). In light of that, my intention was to contribue to the conversation with the very same point you are making, backed by a data point from my own experience: that there are many Christian communities in which faith is practiced in a way that enriches your life, rather than shackling you to a cult.

> It seems like you extrapolated far beyond what he said.

Was it Andrew's intention to talk about Christianity in general? Now you mention it, he might indeed have been focusing only on people "raised by conservative Christian parents".

by wofo

7/25/2026 at 12:44:43 AM

What if we treat all religions as programming languages for humans? Then a degree program for programming humans at the Omniversity would likely put you through several different religions and then through syncretisms of them.

Most people don't want to learn, so they don't choose to live in the Omniversity.

by crawfordcomeaux

7/25/2026 at 6:37:33 AM

It's definitely cultural critique that people who don't agree with his broad political stance will find divisive and mean. I also completely believe that Andrew Kelly is talking sincerely about his own beliefs and experiences, grounded in his own life history - that is, I believe that his own experience is that unlearning some of the conservative Christian values his parents taught him made his own dating life better, at least with respect to the different values he came to have.

I think the lesson here is that you can't divorce a potentially inspiring and positive talk, from the underlying ideological stances that ground that talk, and indeed determine what the speaker thinks count as inspiring and positive. There are a number of points in this talk where I think Kelly's claims that some aspect of computer technology are tempting to blackpill over, are really just that computer technology being useful to people who don't share his political stances. So a listener who doesn't actually share his political stances won't find the argument he is building in those sections of the talk convincing at all.

by JuniperMesos

7/25/2026 at 4:27:08 AM

Its a set up for part 4 (27:45 or so) which talks about irrationally choosing to have faith in humanity. I see it as a sort of "full disclosure" disclaimer. I'd summarize:

> In my past I've dabbled in sorts of faith that I later found to be problematic, but there's also this other faith that I think is good.

by __MatrixMan__

7/25/2026 at 7:29:59 AM

Of course, coming from that background one has to learn to recognize some new concepts to even use online dating - stuff like short-term relationships, folks going for high bodycount, that sort of stuff.

Yet, stating that in an open source talk has the subtext of someone wearing a t-shirt "I know HTML - How To Meet Ladies".

by GalahiSimtam

7/25/2026 at 4:00:00 PM

If you haven’t interacted much with people raised by conservative Christians in the United States, they often have strong feelings about how they were raised.

by natbennett

7/24/2026 at 11:17:37 PM

I don’t think he’s trying to gain your approval, if that’s what you mean.

by burner54828182

7/25/2026 at 3:09:51 AM

After reading some other comments on what I wrote, I guess I'm just surprised if/that he doesn't know this will offend people, and I see a simple way to make his point without doing so.

by leecommamichael

7/25/2026 at 10:53:21 AM

Thanks a lot for the effort you've been putting into your comments! It's not often you come across someone on the internet who wants to have a honest conversation and at the same time has empathy with the real-world people at the other end of the cable. Keep it up!

by wofo

7/25/2026 at 10:42:31 AM

Religious trauma is documented in psychology. People suffer when they are indoctrinated by their parents.

> this just feels mean and divisive from the perspective of a conservative OR a Christian

If they feel offended maybe they should ask themselves some hard questions instead of demanding the speaker to hide his experience.

by goodpoint

7/25/2026 at 3:49:09 PM

What does "indoctrinated by their parents" mean? Everyone learns from their parents and is "indoctrinated" by their values.

If you grow up as an adult and discover that you disagree with their values, it doesn't mean that they "indoctrinated" you.

by swat535

7/26/2026 at 5:42:00 PM

It's a gradual distinction for sure, but I consider it a "I know it when I see it" situation.

Parents try to impart their values, but indoctrination for me begins where they won't allow their children to come to their own, potentially disagreeing opinions. Prohibiting contact to peers with other views, that sort of thing.

You can impart values on children and try to lead by example, but ultimately, they're sovereign individuals, not their parents' property. It's the unwillingness to accept that where I see education and guidance cross the border into indoctrination.

A far better qualifier than my "I know it when I see it", for someone pretty certain they weren't indoctrinated, would probably be a grown-up's reflection on their own upbringing. If they're lucky and become an independent person, they will have a good feeling about whether their upbringing involved unacceptable levels of coercion and isolation.

by Anamon

7/24/2026 at 11:36:10 PM

> Is this engagement bait? Is this a cultural critique? What is meant to be said here? At any rate, this is the kind of speech which will alienate a lot of people. Look, I'm more on the progressive end of things, I get it, but I think this just feels mean and divisive from the perspective of a conservative OR a Christian

Maybe, as a progressive, you should listen to the experience before rejecting it solely because "it is too divisive".

And if you reject personal experience and feelings solely because they are not pro-comservative-christians enougj, maybe there is issue there

by watwut

7/25/2026 at 3:16:45 AM

When you say "listen before rejecting," what would you have me do differently? To call what I'm saying "rejection" seems a bridge too far from what I am intending to say, also. I am making an appeal to civility and compassion in the event that he intended to say what he said knowing that people might feel badly by it.

by leecommamichael

7/25/2026 at 9:12:16 AM

The comment was not "uncivil" and it was not "lacking compassion". Yes people can feel bad when you say them actions of some in their group affected a person negatively. That does not mean it is uncivil to say "a thing conservative person did affected me negatively".

The "you cant talk about something that negatively affected you, because a conservative person might feel bad" is not compassion. Its effect is biasing what people can say in very much one sided way.

by watwut

7/25/2026 at 3:55:38 PM

I don't feel that the way you are paraphrasing me represents what I am trying to say at all, and I feel misunderstood. I do think the phrase "appeal to civility" was fine, but the negation of that phrase doesn't exactly equate to an accusation of being "uncivil," if you know what I mean. I don't disagree with what you're saying in the abstract, and I've had this conversation elsewhere in the thread.

by leecommamichael

7/24/2026 at 10:00:22 PM

[flagged]

by sh34r

7/24/2026 at 11:05:58 PM

He changed what he says his values are when dating women, to make dating woman easier for himself. Why he mentioned it, I don't know. He holds IMHO strange views on internet culture and portrays it as morally superior to not be part of any group mentioned; PUA/any forum/Christianity as a whole. A strange introduction for a software talk.

by philipp-gayret

7/25/2026 at 3:32:51 AM

Idk how that was what you took away from the talk, and I think it says a lot about how you might approach dating, interacting with women, and personal values. He seemingly changed his views/approach to life and dating based on a re-evaluation of his values and experiences, whereas your framing makes me concerned that you believe the only way someone would/could become more attractive is by performing some sort of charade. It’s obvious when this is the case and I am aware of some people becoming frustrated by the experience, thinking that there is a “cheat code” to becoming more interesting/pleasant for others to interact with when it actually requires a radical rewiring of how you view and participate in social interaction; becoming more attractive is really just the side-effect.

Further, his views on PUA in particular might seem strange from the perspective of someone deep inside “internet culture”, and if this is you, from someone raised as a man, who is attracted to women, and who spent many years in the dark corners of the internet, please give broadening your horizons a try. You may just find that the people you think despise you and who you despise have some very good points, and the people who you thought were the only group you had anything in common with are actually quite toxic and full of bad advice.

by mdgld

7/25/2026 at 11:17:37 AM

> makes me concerned that you believe the only way someone would/could become more attractive is by performing some sort of charade.

I am unapologetically my authentic self, I find that works best. If you had broadened your horizons as you say; you'd find the same.

> you may just find that the people you think despise you and who you despise have some very good points, and the people who you thought were the only group you had anything in common with are actually quite toxic and full of bad advice.

There's no need to tell other posters what they think. As for women; I love women, and have always been in long term relationships. Maybe I'm just a lucky guy. I think it's odd though to try and appear superior to these groups as he does. You are right there are toxic people, especially those seeking to earn income and status off of male loneliness. I agree with you fully. Having said that, I stand behind what I said earlier.

by philipp-gayret

7/24/2026 at 10:07:43 PM

The man is running a slide deck in front of his colleagues that is full of crude graphics, memes, and, I guess some anime or something. It’s an unserious talk given by an unserious person for entertainment value. He dons the jester’s hat and signals his alignment with the monied San Francisco tribe to keep his easy job in an air-conditioned environment. If not, he might suffer the awful fate of having to earn his bread hanging drywall or driving a solid waste truck.

by RazorBucksICO

7/25/2026 at 3:54:58 AM

> He dons the jester’s hat

Or maybe it's not an act, and he's just naturally funny :)

> to keep his easy job

He had an easy corporate job. Then he quit and spent half a decade burning his savings to work on his "hobby project", in a belief that one day it would become useful enough that the project would become self-sustainable. Now he can afford air conditioning again. Should we not be congratulating him?

by nvme0n1p1

7/25/2026 at 3:19:31 AM

And what exactly do you do for a living?

by mdgld

7/25/2026 at 1:34:32 AM

WTF are you talking about? He made Zig and is employed by the Zig Foundation, of which he is founder and president. He can't lose his job because he ruffles feathers.

by SwellJoe

7/25/2026 at 1:56:44 AM

So he spends his time working on a hobby project and is completely supported by the charity of others? Do you see where I’m going with this?

by RazorBucksICO

7/25/2026 at 1:59:49 AM

I do not. He spends his time working on a language used by and supported by several startups and a few major corporations, a language that seems heir apparent to C, at least among a lot of developers. The ICO in your name leads me to believe you're a cryptoscammer, so...seems like maybe you're not in a position to be throwing stones regarding how people make a living.

by SwellJoe

7/25/2026 at 2:29:55 AM

The Linux Kernel is also a hobby project completely supported by the charity of others.

by engeljohnb

7/24/2026 at 7:43:41 PM

Does anyone know what the "discord alternative" is that Andrew says he's working on at the end[0] of the video?

[0]: https://youtu.be/zLZwpH5lCD4?si=45knBo2Hsy_6wjEM&t=2092

by keinzirp

7/24/2026 at 7:44:27 PM

https://codeberg.org/awebo-chat/awebo

by some_furry

7/24/2026 at 7:48:42 PM

(reposting my comment from lobsters)

For anybody reading, the project tracks new Zig to get all the new async I/O goodies but was hit by some regressions in Zig's translate-c because it recently became fully independent from LLVM.

Other contributors and I took this as an opportunity to contribute some fixes to translate-c and in my case I also switched for a bit to my other projects, mainly https://zine-ssg.io, which I had neglected for a few months while going all-in on awebo.

I plan to resume development of awebo in a month or two, I just want to leave Zine in a good spot before switching again (I have a bad time paging between different projects too often and prefer doing continuous work for a while before switching back).

by kristoff_it

7/24/2026 at 7:48:27 PM

Thank you!

by keinzirp

7/24/2026 at 9:14:10 PM

I'm much more interested in a realistic bang for your buck discussion about software value for effort and diminishing returns rather than a conversation about whether it's possible to build great software.

Also notable that not up for discussion was any second order effects about user interaction with software; software always must serve its user in the immediate first order. Why? I suppose it's because if you attempt to examine nth order effects the proposition completely falls apart because the world is much more complicated than "software must serve the end user".

Finally, the purpose of software isn't determined by the end user, nor necessarily its author. A user can have their goals, the author(s) theirs, the funding body theirs, and so on. The "purpose" is diffused in this way until what's left is what it does. Saying it _must_ serve the user is a principled stance reflecting a world view, but it's just that. That are other coherent worldviews where software has more than one master. Or no master.

by DangitBobby

7/25/2026 at 10:08:32 AM

In a struggle for a gun the gun serves it's user.

by hahahaa

7/25/2026 at 3:35:42 AM

Yeah, I generally agree with him but there are plenty of fun counterexamples:

1. You go to the DMV to renew your driver's license at a kiosk there. There's a warrant for your arrest. Should the kiosk serve the user directly interacting with it and print out a new license anyway?

2. Grocery store: should a self-checkout serve the user and give them free groceries?

3. ATM: does the user get free money?

by nvme0n1p1

7/25/2026 at 7:10:41 AM

I think you are concentrating on 'free' too much here.

It's not about giving away resources, it's about serving the user.

1. No, a kiosk shouldn't be hooked up to some crime database, it should function exactly as expected in situ.

2. A self-service checkout machine shouldn't 'give away' free stuff, it should however let you pay and leave.

3. An ATM should give the user money from their account - without added charge for the convienance.

I think 2 and 3 are bad examples because they actually already exist in the way that Andrew is saying things should exist. If they didn't (for example, they played a 30 second advert before you could checkout) then people would never have started using them.

Software/SaaS/startups are much more inclined to use dark patterns and attempt to bleed the users dry (either their cash or their attention) - established conveniences like self checkout and ATMs on the whole just do their job - the general public would NOT accept it any other way. It's a shame the general public don't share the same sentiment when it comes to more glamorous technology.

by flumpcakes

7/25/2026 at 2:39:43 AM

This is exactly what I needed, ending my work week for the company, and transitioning to working on my own project over the weekend. Good to know I'm not alone, still dreaming of making things that serve people the way they (the people, not the things) want.

I hope I can get this out soon

by aljgz

7/24/2026 at 10:47:09 PM

I didn't find any of the arguments for optimism compelling, even if I wanted to agree with the talk's message.

Free software is about the worst example, as it has inadvertently built the technology that has, more than any other, concentrated corporate power and debased the profession.

by sporadicism

7/25/2026 at 3:25:20 AM

What does your alternate timeline look like? Because I'm just imagining if Linux never took off, all internet servers would run Windows or a commercial Unix. That sure sounds like concentrated corporate power to me.

by nvme0n1p1

7/25/2026 at 6:24:10 AM

Nah, if it hadn't been for the SCO lawsuit, BSD would have taken Linux's place. The main difference would have been that copyleft licenses probably wouldn't have gotten much traction.

by senderista

7/25/2026 at 3:33:49 AM

Open source did that. Free software would have helped prevent it.

by voakbasda

7/25/2026 at 12:38:00 AM

> Free software is about the worst example, as it has inadvertently built the technology that has, more than any other, concentrated corporate power and debased the profession.

Can you elaborate on this?

by skinfaxi

7/25/2026 at 6:43:39 AM

[0]:

> If you refrain from participating in the software of the commons, the only thing that you're doing is surrendering more of our collective agency to abusive centralized powers.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLZwpH5lCD4&t=1622s

by abetusk

7/25/2026 at 2:47:06 PM

Yes, that is the argument from the video I was referencing.

by sporadicism

7/25/2026 at 9:14:55 AM

Free software hasn't concentrated corporate power, explicit policy to enable monopolies did. Without free software, there would still have been consolidation because that was the express objective.

by spit2wind

7/25/2026 at 4:16:20 AM

I once had an argument with a close friend of mine while earning her PHD in a non-computer engineering field. It was about the semantics of "Computer Engineering" and "Software Engineering", or any variant involving computers. Her argument was that every (virtually, I think?) other engineering discipline requires a certificate after graduation to ensure their competency. Every since then I've also argued for similar industry standard certifications for Computer and Software Engineers. I was a hiring manager for over a decade at a well known MNC, so I can attest that this doesn't, or didn't exist (since the global mass-layoff). I tried to improve interview standards in the past and help establish some forward momentum, but pulling-the-ladder-up and biased-hiring-practices have made this even more elusive.

Edit: I know there are some certifications that may be required by some software engineers, computer engineers, etc. But this is limited to critical/near-failure-proof systems. Which I willing to wager is less than 1% of those employed in these fields.

by adamdb

7/25/2026 at 1:12:21 PM

There was one teacher/dean who was adamant at getting the career out of the "engineering" area at my country's universities and that "Software Engineering" should not exist as a career.

One funny interaction I remember, MariaDB's Monty came to give a talk and he asked "If one wants to help with MariaDB should they be a software engineer or a computer scientist?" Monty's answer was "you just need to know C."

by rererereferred

7/25/2026 at 1:13:53 PM

As an old school Free Software kinda guy, I was a little shocked at the lack of enthusiastic support for "if you do not own the source code, you are not in control". From where does this apathy come?

by Borborygymus

7/24/2026 at 10:41:58 PM

I hope this guy gets an option to inherit the FSF.

But in a way that does not diminish his work on Zig.

by flossly

7/25/2026 at 10:46:49 AM

This is an amazing and inspiring talk. Humanising and empathetic, especially when compared to the vast majority of other related content.

by scott01

7/25/2026 at 12:08:27 AM

After 3 years in a US public company’s IT department between 2013 and 2016, I had been working in private closely help companies with revenue between $100 and $500 million the last few years. Cashflow to invest in good systems and software, but conscious about investments.

I recently took a consulting engagement with another US public (pink sheets) company and remembered how dysfunctional some software development structures/cultures are.

by jwsteigerwalt

7/25/2026 at 7:40:45 AM

Props to Andrew for a refreshing and optimistic message in what is an increasingly uncertain and scary industry to be in. Appreciate you Andrew!

by mindwok

7/24/2026 at 8:34:34 PM

his flagged "goodbye" submission mentioned at the circa 26 minute mark for those who are curious https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47928645

and while i'm not a massive fan of the music (not my kind of electronic) the mentioned Ninajirachi - Infohazard music video really is fucking cool (strobe warning) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2ZdeIKJA8c i definitely feel like my jaded oldtimer critic got called out there.

edit -- jfc, from one of the youtube comments

> From Ninajirachi, in a RollingStone interview about this song: “I love my computer for a million reasons, but it’s also exposed me to some pretty dubious material when I was far too young to see it. Infohazard is about the first time I encountered a snuff film as a kid. It’s kinda like a rite of passage and loss of innocence moment for people who grew up online. If I’d been in high school a hundred years ago, without ever touching a computer, would I even know things like that existed? I can’t ever really forget about it.”

by dijksterhuis

7/24/2026 at 6:15:13 PM

So, today I'm one of the lucky 10,000[1] who finally understands what "black pilled" actually means. (Edit: The video explains what black pilled means)

As a mapper[2], that knowledge now gets subconsciously checked for matches and usefulness against all the other chunks of knowledge I'm fairly certain of.

The first thing that popped out (and there will be more over the next 24+ hours) is that y'all are black pilled about computers and security. You believe, incorrectly, that computers can't be safe AND secure AND easy to use all at the same time. I believe otherwise, and this might help convey that at some future point.

Currently my best hope is that the upcoming release of Genode offers a way forward. Their roadmap[3] features this line when describing the upcoming release

  Sketch of a capability-based desktop environment

Right now, that's where my hope rests, it's been a LONG time coming, but I think Genode might become a widely used OS if they can pull it off. If they can break enough people out of being black pilled, that is.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1053/

[2] https://garden.joehallenbeck.com/container/mappers-and-packe...

[3] https://genode.org/about/road-map

by mikewarot

7/24/2026 at 6:46:01 PM

I expected the link [1] to be to the explaination of what "black pilled" means, but only because I already read and remember xkcd 1053.

by listic

7/24/2026 at 8:34:30 PM

Blue pill: The supplier of the thing you want is friendly and has your best interest in mind. (Suppliers can be corporations, government, the opposite sex,...)

Red pill: The supplier is corrupt and should be treated as such.

Black pill: You can't win against the corrupt supplier.

White pill: You can win/convert the supplier/find a good one in a sea of bad ones/find a complete alternative.

by newsy-combi

7/24/2026 at 8:49:35 PM

"y'all are black pilled about computers and security. You believe, incorrectly, that computers can't be safe AND secure AND easy to use all at the same time"

This is basic fact. Man can make it; man can break it. I've never come across anything in my 44 years of life where this wasn't true.

by lightedman

7/24/2026 at 9:27:33 PM

OK, produce a SHA-2 collision.

by tptacek

7/24/2026 at 9:50:15 PM

Why a collision? Abuse it where it is being used. Infect the chain of certificates that guarantees that the hash you are checking is actually the one you want. Send a million legit documents with bad hashes, so that the forged one looks like another legit one. Infect the library that calculates hashes so that these specific documents have a special hardcoded hash.

by javcasas

7/24/2026 at 9:52:17 PM

Because man made SHA-2, so it must be breakable. I don't dispute that there are systems humans make that are breakable (that would be weird given my career).

by tptacek

7/24/2026 at 9:59:43 PM

Well, if you are that picky, then you will have to wait. MD5 was created in 1991, the first collision was found in 2004.

by javcasas

7/25/2026 at 3:19:09 PM

Okay, so you are saying that there may be a design flaw we just haven't seen yet, based on historical precedent. Which is a very weak argument, because you are just making the case for the possibility that you may be correct, and you are just pointing to a historical precedent.

Can you prove that there is no hash function that is not vulnerable? If anything man-made is vulnerable, then there cannot any invulnerable system. That is what you need to prove to win the argument. And if we can prove that any system is unbreakable, you are wrong.

by tarpitt

7/25/2026 at 5:21:44 PM

One frustration I have with these kinds of analyses on HN is that they're premised on an idea that cryptanalysis progress is unknowable, and that it's just a matter of time before whatever broke the last iteration of a design is going to break the next iteration of a design. As if cryptanalysis is so complex and forbidding that you might as well think of it as a geological-scale weather phenomenon.

If anything, the opposite thing is true. Each of the MD4, MD5, and SHA1 results are essentially exploits of design weaknesses: iteration insufficiency, too much traceable control over state given message words, weak and linear message schedules.

In the history of hash cryptanalysis, we continuously get better at exploiting these kinds of weaknesses, successfully exploiting differential analyses with smaller and smaller windows of opportunity (which is why SHA1 was such a big deal). But in the same way that you can foreclose entirely on a SQLI with parameterized query, or a memory corruption vulnerability with automatic bounds checking, you can also just make the message schedule (not understood in the era of MD4 to be that big a hinge point) strong and nonlinear.

It is very unlikely that the future of CS holds some reliable way to defeat bounds checking, and, for the same reason, you can find cryptographers like JP Aumasson (a coauthor of BLAKE and BLAKE3, with no particular reason to stan the older NSA construction) saying we're unlikely to break SHA2... ever.

by tptacek

7/24/2026 at 10:35:04 PM

You want to pick a date and make a bet?

by tptacek

7/24/2026 at 10:51:54 PM

You are the one discarding every date. I'll take the opposite bet: it will eventually happen, on some date.

by javcasas

7/24/2026 at 10:53:20 PM

I haven't discarded any date. Pick one, and an amount to bet!

by tptacek

7/24/2026 at 11:08:27 PM

> OK, produce a SHA-2 collision.

- Why a collision?

> Because man made SHA-2, so it must be breakable. I don't dispute that there are systems humans make that are breakable (that would be weird given my career).

Thus implying there are man-made systems that are not breakable, and furthermore SHA-2 is one of them.

> I haven't discarded any date.

Going back so quickly?

by javcasas

7/24/2026 at 11:18:51 PM

I'm sorry, you've lost me. I was responding to the claim that any man-made system was breakable. The most obvious example of a man-made system that is unlikely to be breakable in our lifetimes (so, I'll say, "ever") is SHA2. Then someone responded that SHA2 wasn't an interesting target. It doesn't have to be; it just has to be man-made, or concede the narrowing of the original claim.

by tptacek

7/25/2026 at 9:12:43 AM

[flagged]

by BoingBoomTschak

7/25/2026 at 5:28:35 AM

lmao at substituting “ever” for “in our lifetimes”

“That will never happen” and “I think I’ll die before that happens” aren’t interchangeable. Hydrogen will never have two protons, SHA-2 will be broken. “I personally don’t consider a future where I’m not around as existing” is like busting out an Uno reverse card when you lose a hand at poker

by jrflowers

7/25/2026 at 1:48:37 PM

This objection doesn't make sense in the context of the thread.

by tptacek

7/25/2026 at 3:06:46 PM

I wonder when Kalshi will start offering bets where one side doesn’t pay out until the end of the universe.

by akerl_

7/26/2026 at 8:22:22 AM

I don't need to produce a collision, I just circumvent or exploit other parts of the system.

Then again, I did defeat Hermes 2 to recover my hard drive. All it took was a lot of hardware and AI and time and luck and brute force to crack the key.

by lightedman

7/26/2026 at 2:26:09 PM

Then you're breaking other man-made things, not SHA2, but I didn't ask about other man-made things.

by tptacek

7/24/2026 at 10:25:00 PM

> Man can make it; man can break it.

Man can make mathematical proofs that will not be broken. Man is not going to disprove the Pythagorean Theorem. Software is just hifalutin math. There can exist software that, for a given mathematical specification, can be proven correct, and will not be disproven.

by kibwen

7/26/2026 at 12:03:10 AM

"Man is not going to disprove the Pythagorean Theorem"

The pythagroean theorem breaks down in elliptical geometry. This is why it is a theorem and not a law.

by lightedman

7/24/2026 at 10:57:02 PM

The comments here indicate a surprisingly, in my view, mixed reception, for such an unambiguously good talk?

The main thrust is simple:

- Technology is not good or bad, it is an amplifier of human values and our collective ambitions.

- Those of us who are terrified of where technology is going are actually terrified that humans are, on the net, bad, and technology will amplify that, bringing about dystopia.

- Believing this this is self-fulfilling. By embracing such beliefs you surrender your agency, which is what actually brings about dystopia. If you, instead, have a positive vision of humanity, then you are one of the people that drives society forwards rather than backwards.

We are currently at a moment in history where this message bears repeating.

A lot of things feel unstable, and as a result we have an opportunity to redefine the world in good ways and bad ones. Those who choose to redefine it in ways that are intractably bad will often do so from the point of view of a system observer, not a system participant. This is cope, because in reality everyone, whether they choose to accept it or not, is a system participant.

by staticshock

7/25/2026 at 7:32:17 AM

> The comments here indicate a surprisingly, in my view, mixed reception, for such an unambiguously good talk?

It wasn't an unambiguously good talk. Many of the people attacking various portions of the talk are making good points. I actually agree that blackpilling is a self-fulfilling belief and indulging in it weakens your own agency, and it's better to have a positive vision of humanity and to wield your own agency towards that end. But the thing about positive visions of humanity is that different people have different, mutually-incompatible positive visions; and I think a lot of people don't necessarily agree with Andrew Kelly's specific one.

by JuniperMesos

7/25/2026 at 5:19:53 AM

A positive vision of humanity alone doesn't bestow personal agency.

Personal agency alone doesn't solve structural dystopia.

by jdub

7/25/2026 at 4:43:41 AM

I don't really think the main thrust is correct, though, if that's what it really is. Because humans don't have to be bad for tech to bring about a dystopia even under your first premise. They just have to have enough instincts that are even potentially adaptive in times of scarcity that become maladaptive in a high-tech environment for tech to bring about a dystopia. And I don't think that dystopia will be a self-fulfilling prophecy, even if your second premise is correct, because if humans have a sufficient number of instincts to interact with technology to bring about a dystopia, it's very likely to happen whether we believe it or not.

Finally, even the majority can be optimistic about humanity or even everyone, and it could still lead to a tech dystopia because of the additive effects of good intentions sometimes adding to bad (see fossil fuel use for example).

I don't think we have many opportunities to redefine the world. We're already in a state where people just trying to get by is contributing to the destruction.

by vouaobrasil

7/25/2026 at 3:47:47 PM

> - Those of us who are terrified of where technology is going are actually terrified that humans are, on the net, bad, and technology will amplify that, bringing about dystopia.

I think this is true in that people will do what they need to in order to get ahead. If you play a game by the rules against someone who is cheating, then you will lose. The only way to stay competitive and have a chance to win is to also cheat. When people see others who act in an anti-social way (PE destroying companies, enshittification of software, etc.) go unpunished and reap massive rewards...then they too have to be anti-social just to stay on the same level or have a chance of succeeding. It's the descent into a low-trust society and a general race to the bottom.

The hope for me was that humans have learned from history, from all the past mistakes of failed civilizations and collapse of authoritarian regimes to build a modern world that is equitable. But there will always be narcissistic psychopaths who are able to say the right words and sweet talk those they need to in order to gain power and repeat history.

by vinyl7

7/25/2026 at 1:44:16 PM

people like Andrew give me hope - that they're smart people out there with a moral compass.

by dzonga

7/25/2026 at 3:38:31 AM

Wow. I have been really put off by seeing some of the vitriol he’s spewed lately, but this is a shockingly engaging and simultaneously thought-provoking talk. I’m totally going to riff on this in the future, for something completely unconnected to computer science and with credit, of course.

by mdgld

7/25/2026 at 5:29:05 AM

What are some examples of his vitriol? I'm not familiar.

by staticshock

7/25/2026 at 5:13:28 PM

They’re likely referring to his post / thoughts on the bun rust rewrite and specifically those he shared about the lead developer of the bun project and the bun project at large.

I would not characterize what he shared as vitriolic, but from the comments when the post was submitted one would get the impression that is not a majority opinion here.

https://andrewkelley.me/post/my-thoughts-bun-rust-rewrite.ht...

by king_geedorah

7/25/2026 at 5:01:31 AM

Why isn't software better is a complex question and can be a matter of market forces. For example, who remembers a company that sold buggy software and made you a beta tester, then sold the fixes to their customers as updates?

Clearly they had discovered or created an incentive to write "bad software", push testing onto users, and sell the fixes. Bad software or smart business?

Look at Rock stars GTA V Online a money printing machine: still has bugs. Are we to assume they are incapable of fixing them? Or that there is no market for doing so. People play anyway.

The "developers are no good" is a red herring that blames individuals who are doing what they are told to do, or not do.

by newsomix9xl

7/24/2026 at 8:32:03 PM

"Our task as the older generation is to shield the young from those who would exploit their naïveté without infecting them with our own accumulated pain and cynicism." [33:53] stuck with me and is my take away.

by weinzierl

7/24/2026 at 9:44:48 PM

Shield is the wrong word. At some point, the shield must fall, and then the young are no longer young, but are still näive.

There will always be exploiters, don't believe that they will die once we manage to shield the young for enough time for the exploiters to die of old age.

by javcasas

7/25/2026 at 3:36:00 AM

Shield them long enough to teach them how to defend themselves, maybe?

by mdgld

7/24/2026 at 5:16:36 PM

Crazy to see how many people miss 26:15.

by fellowniusmonk

7/24/2026 at 5:35:26 PM

This comment is on a part of the video on Free Software Disillusionment, where people don't want to have their code ingested and used by AI. Andrew's thingy is basically that if you don't participate in open source there won't be high quality code for others/yourself in the future.

People generally don't like the AI using their code for a few reasons, one is replacement, like an AI can just copy your project without attribution. Two is that it feels like you are providing value for a soulless corporate machine without compensation.

If a person uses your code you get maybe happy that it was useful and maybe something cool gets made out it. If an AI uses your work it feels like you just did free labor.

I don't feel like Andrew made any particularly great points, but comments both here and on the youtube link have mentioned really liking that point.

by gregdaniels421

7/24/2026 at 5:54:10 PM

This "theft" is not a new argument, and its always been run by people who have a vested interest in killing open-source or who aren't part of it.

In 2001 I had a guy at Oracle tell me it was a suckers game to write open source code.

I've had M$ heads tell me ruby was a joke that would never amount to much because you couldn't use it in a "real business".

I've had bad phil bros tell me in 2004 that open source was "anti american communism bullshit".

It's ok to be a humanist and not a corporatist.

It's ok to show generosity.

It's ok to reject the crab bucket framing.

Some of us are mature enough to be ok living in a better world even if still imperfect.

by fellowniusmonk

7/24/2026 at 7:35:16 PM

Although, I do with these LLM companies would be better about licensing their derivative works (the models) under GPL, when they ingest GPL’d code.

by bee_rider

7/24/2026 at 6:31:48 PM

The argument is not just "theft", and to the extent that "theft" is a part of it, it is not the most important part, not by large margin. The reason that "theft" is not a solid argument, is because people creating open-source often distribute it for free themselves. Piracy is not the issue.

The issue is that all attributions get stripped away by the LLM (even in cases where it is trivial to avoid). For example, as a test, I asked DeepSeek to tell me how one can do an exact substring-boolean-test in Common Lisp, and it gave me code that was, character for character, _identical_ to the code that appears in Seibel's Common Lisp Book. It clearly memorized the code. It stands to reason, that it could have also memorized where it saw it, and been trained to tell the user that the code was from that book (which is NOT in the public domain, despite being free to read on the internet)[0].

To give you an analogy, nobody has a problem with someone downloading and distributing the public domain works of Leo Tolstoy or Charles Dickens or Jane Austen or Karl Marx, etc. But to remove their names from those works, and placing your (or someone else's) name on them instead, is plainly malicious behavior. Such behavior needs to shunned.

LLMs (I believe) _can_ be trained to not plagiarize. They do not have to be original, nor to use public domain training-data, they just have to give attribution (which, as far as I can tell, requires little more than a corpus and a stack of similarity-measures).

I suspect that they are not trained this way, because fully automated plagiarism creates an ambiguous situation, where a copyleft license (like GPL or EUPL etc) can be unknowingly violated, and there is hardly any trace of the violation. Plagiarism is the product.

[0]: Such attribution can only make LLMs _more_ useful and _more_ widely and confidently integrated into workflows. The lack of such attributions, risks diluting the value of open source projects, as (1) a high-signal indicator of skill and achievement, and (2) a way to ensure the provenance and quality of the code (both very important, if you are considering to build a business on top of one or more such projects). Just look at all those repos that claim to have "made" Minecraft-like game or Unix-like OS, when all they did was have an LLM plagiarize the code for them. This is a kind of, at best, spam and, at worst, fraud.

by nz

7/24/2026 at 9:17:28 PM

> LLMs (I believe) _can_ be trained to not plagiarize. They do not have to be original, nor to use public domain training-data, they just have to give attribution (which, as far as I can tell, requires little more than a corpus and a stack of similarity-measures).

And something like attributions can be determined even if the LLM is paraphrasing, if I'm understanding Cosma Shalizi correctly[1]. He gives Grosse et al.[2] as a reference for doing so in a scalable manner.

[1] https://bactra.org/research/2026-03-10.html

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.03296

by 986aignan

7/24/2026 at 7:29:52 PM

In addition to giving credit where credit is due, attribution is important for verifying the trustworthiness of "facts". When someone tells me they asked a LLM and it says xxxxx, I want to know did it get it from a bad source, or worse, hallucinated it from thin air. And if it turns out to be good information, I might want to check out other things the guy has written.

At least with the old school web search engines, you got a hyperlink that you could use to find out more. Now the only way to learn more is to keep asking the LLM more questions. There is no way to get from the LLM to a source outside the LLM.

by fhdkweig

7/24/2026 at 8:15:09 PM

And I hope I am just being a Chicken Little, but if LLMs become the go-to place for searching, we will lose traditional web search engines. They won't be profitable if not enough people use them. For those who don't remember how the web was before Google's search engine, we had search engines that really didn't work, web rings, and people's list of random bookmarks. The web is much too complex and big to ever be able to go back to those methods. The web will be effectively unnavigable and dead. All we will have left will be the unattributed knowledge distilled in the LLM with no way back to the old methods. And please tell me I'm wrong.

by fhdkweig

7/25/2026 at 2:17:39 AM

The issue isn't correctly named "theft", but rather "copyright infringment" and "plagiarism".

Attributions being stripped gives rise to copyright infringement where the license for the material requires that they not be stripped, as a condition of redistribution.

Presenting work as one's own without attribution is plagiarism.

"Theft" is a word that corporate copyright mongers have used to paint people copying a CD as hard criminals.

by kazinator

7/24/2026 at 7:46:46 PM

> It clearly memorized the code

This code could appear many times in training data; but I wonder what decoding params did you actually used, because that effect appears likely with close-to-greedy way. Also, if it is a coding assistant model, chances are this skill was increased by additional sampling from that domain during training? Or maybe RL has teached model to provide verbatim answers for certain questions? So it was rewarded if that kind of answers is really helpful (I guess it was?).

by novaRom

7/24/2026 at 6:29:08 PM

> I don't feel like Andrew made any particularly great points, but comments both here and on the youtube link have mentioned really liking that point.

What they completely missed was that LLMs are a golden opportunity for the corpo-ratfuckers to completely work around the issue of those pesky OS licenses. Who cares if it's GPL/AGPL, just run it through the slop machine and everything is fine.

Open-source doesn't exist in a vacuum, they rely on inherently restrictive licenses to force corporations into contributing back instead of just sucking up everything.

by as1mov

7/25/2026 at 3:51:35 AM

[dead]

by wannabe44

7/25/2026 at 4:02:54 AM

I think Andrew Kelly is just a rockstar. Honestly, I find a lot of his overall perspective hard to understand. I get that he's an idealist.

He talks about developers not standing up to management's unreasonable demands, but doesn't he himself receive donations from wealthy people at his foundation? Everything seems contradictory.

The concept of 'pure will' is also really hard for me to grasp. It feels like trying to bring Plato's Forms into reality.

I always feel like the purity advocates on HN are contradictory. They just try to package their own superiority as purity. Honestly, in what sense are they pure? I don't really get it. Is not using AI somehow superior? Is using a hand drill instead of an electric drill more admirable?

I also know that dark patterns undermine user autonomy. But that has clear limits. It's like Prohibition. I understand the criticism of A/B testing in context, but shouldn't we be criticizing Goodhart's law, trying to hit metrics without understanding user behavior, rather than demonizing the tool itself?

The younger generation never experienced the open web or software sovereignty. How can they give up system convenience and choose free software?

I understand that there are problems arising from the nature of capitalism. And I agree that the world needs ethical brakes. But honestly, what I find hard to understand about this person's argument reminds me of a line from Russian literary criticism: 'Those who praise the land are those who do not farm it.

I acknowledge Andrew Kelly's technical achievements are impressive. But honestly, I find it hard to understand the people on HN who keep echoing his words. The Zig foundation runs on sponsorships from big tech companies.

The development cost of 'free software' paradoxically comes from the 'excessive profits of monopolistic big tech' that they despise.

Kelly's uncompromising will is not actually built on pure individual will alone—it rests on the autonomy provided by a very unique sponsorship structure. Can that really be presented as a universal developer ethic?

Ordinary developers don't get $300,000 in sponsorship from anyone. If they refuse a Jira ticket, they could be kicked out of their room next month.

I wish he wouldn't speak while erasing his own economic conditions. It's not that developers are evil—they're just working within the system as a condition of survival.

Honestly, the fact that he achieved that life through his abilities is admirable. But whether it's right to generalize his own minority experience and insist that everyone should follow it is a different matter.

How is that any different from a high-class courtesan telling a cheap one, 'I'm different'?

Andrew Kelly's words are just a symbol of vicarious satisfaction for cogs in the machine. Not just me, but the vast majority of programmers live as cogs—solving Jira tickets, chasing deadlines and KPIs. To them, Kelly appears as an icon of rebellion, refusing to compromise with reality and preserving his purity. But the irony of rockstars is always that they are the most devoted to capitalism.

When I strip away the halo effect around Andrew Kelly, I can't make sense of the contradictions inside.

by jdw64

7/24/2026 at 11:20:27 PM

[dead]

by jasonmp85

7/24/2026 at 6:44:23 PM

I watched 8 minutes and feel like my time was wasted. Thank you. Yeah, we always knew how to build reliable software, but it's expensive.

by jagadaga

7/24/2026 at 7:04:46 PM

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive, shallow criticisms? So far all 3 of your comments have been of this sort, and we're trying for more thoughtful conversation here.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Note this one: "Don't be snarky."

by dang

7/25/2026 at 7:03:29 AM

No problem. I love you.

by jagadaga

7/24/2026 at 9:07:01 PM

Unreliable software is also expensive. Rather, building reliable software is incompatible with a management policy that rewards and punishes people based on KPIs (basically leading indicators). The concept of KPIs is fine, but they should (a) be actual indicators of progress, and (b) be kept secret from employees (so that we can avoid or mitigate Goodhart's Law). Both of those things are difficult, because you need a rigorous statistical model of what correlates, and you need to keep that model a secret, while also changing the KPIs periodically, to prevent employees from intuitively overfitting. That whole process would be very expensive (and if it would not, why is nobody doing it).

Furthermore, software that is reliable, is also software that is done (in the sense that AVL Trees, and ZFS, and DTrace, and ZSTD, and slab allocators are done -- they are very close to perfect, and require minimal changes, related to compilers and kernels and computer architectures). A team that builds reliable software, is a team that cannot be "managed". What exactly is there to manage?

by nz

7/24/2026 at 9:51:13 PM

> … kept secret from employees [to] mitigate Goodhart's Law

While I empathize with the need for mitigation, secret goals and milestones are an excellent way to mistreat employees and eliminate morale.

by jagged-chisel

7/24/2026 at 10:34:16 PM

I mean, my point is that we would all be better off without any of the KPIs, and stack-ranking, and so on, in large part because they are not reliable metrics, and making them reliable is itself a difficult problem to solve. You need engineers that seek to understand your business, your problem, and are willing to use that understanding and their experience of building software, to solve those problems in as permanent and correct a way as possible.

The reason this is so difficult to manifest, is that only about 2% to 4.6% of the college-educated population are software engineers at any given point, which means that 95% of all the people that we interact with, have no clue what we are talking about, and do not understand why they cannot have more, more, more, now, now, now. For comparison at least 20% of people have a degree in business. And most of those, in non-concrete roles seem to be cargo-culting their way through a career.

by nz