saguntum

100% agreed on no magic strings

One potential point of disagreement: it's easy to implement structural prohibition of magic strings in low-level languages too if you consider Rust a low-level language (which I've heard before, even though I didn't really consider it to be one for our application of it).

I'm not a Rust expert but do run a few thousand lines of it in prod for some perf/correctness critical code, and I wish it didn't have the reputation of being so difficult to comprehend. There's so much resistance to introducing it or new languages in our large org, that I'm surprised we were able to introduce our thin slice at all. I am not sure I'd use it where you need easy async primitives like goroutines, but it prevents whole swathes of bugs that are repeated over and over again with devastating impact, like the OP's bug, via thoughtful language design.

Maybe this resistance is an artifact of where I work more than large organizations generally, though. Curious about others' experiences. I'm not really an evangelist for the language but would really like to work in a more polyglot environment one day.

If your use case and budget allow, hardware exists for physically enforcing read only networking properties: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_diode

I'm not that familiar with applications/current state of this type of hardware, but it seems like it will become more relevant with all the new vulns dropping with higher frequency.

+1

I have learned recently that I don't inherently hate JIRA, I hate our JIRA and byzantine process flows.

I think because other task trackers like Trello are simpler and have less config options (per my last use, long ago, pre-Atlassian-acquisition), it's impossible knock on wood to get into the antipatterns I've seen in those tools.

Ironically I think one of the main goals of management I have seen consistently over time - ensuring tickets are accurate, up to date, and reflect reality - would end up much more true if the task tracking tools were just much simpler, with fewer fancy features.

you may find this article interesting: https://elpais.com/tecnologia/2026-04-29/es-un-error-pensar-...

archive: https://archive.is/Ggfma

the españa vaciada continues due to wage stagnation :(

i hope salaries improve, but i'm not optimistic for new grads short term. i'm hoping big companies will learn their lesson that not hiring newer engineers is a mistake. no one will be around to supervise the ai agents if a talent pipeline is not built. there's too much short term thinking in today's gold rush

Yes. It's a little sad to see other comments assume that people have something to hide for doing something as basic as wanting to send money back to family.

Banking services with hidden fees can be inherently less predictable than working with cash and fee-based financial services for folks who have low income or irregular pay.

I'm moving there.

Climate change is going to affect everywhere, and yes, a lot of Spain will experience desertification over the course of my lifetime. I am moving from Texas to Spain, though, so I am used to heat from a pure personal comfort perspective.

One interesting point is that Spain is well-situated in terms of its energy mix: it's a leader of renewables in Europe. It was also able to negotiate a carve-out from collective energy pricing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iberian_exception), so Iberian energy markets are generally cheaper than broader European markets. This will have downstream economic effects for the country and makes it easier to afford using AC. I will always install AC wherever I live. There are far too many avoidable heat deaths in Europe in particular given their level of economic development. I don't blame them at all given the need is relatively new, but it's really a sad phenomenon.

If you are a true climate doomer (realist?), also, Spain is going to fare as well as one can in Europe should the AMOC collapse. It's not the best place to be globally in a scenario like that, though, to say the least.

For me, with everything going on in terms of world events, life choices are basically just placing bets about the future. There is no truly safe or best choice in a lot of scenarios.

Bogleheads forum is great: https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/index.php

There's a Spain equivalent forum also if you poke around

> I think the key is that Spain has a large corps of civil engineers working for the government.

I agree with this. In general jobs with the government are seen as high quality jobs from my understanding. Another commenter mentioned that the high salaries in the private sector in the US brain drain away from the US public sector. In Spain salaries are much lower, so this is perhaps less of an issue in certain fields.

The recent citations are definitely interesting, but none of this is really new. I met with some VCs in the early 10s, and some of them talked about "free enterprise zones" in various areas in the region. Frankly, I'm a little surprised this isn't discussed more. Maybe because the need for "liberty" is less in the realm of bits & bytes for these developments, it is less publicized.

Gay Texan here leaving the country next year. Maybe culturally in the cities you have a point, but the gerrymandered state government still very much affects you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Senate_Bill_12

Thanks to SB12, it would be illegal for a teacher to answer when a student in my kids’ class asks why they have 2 dads. They would also be unable to join a support club like the Gay Straight Alliance which was (barely) tolerated when I grew up here in the 00s. This isn’t even mentioning performative BS like teachers having to hang the 10 commandments in schools, or the rabid anti-trans laws affecting adult treatment and identity documents. Discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity is also banned in higher education, as well.

This isn’t even covering the abortion ban or other issues. A friend’s sister almost died of an ectopic pregnancy because she couldn’t find a doctor to help terminate. She wanted the child, but nature had other plans.

I love Texas and agree with a lot of the positive points you raised. I wish I didn’t have to abandon my family and friends having lived here for over a decade as an adult and having grown up here, but I can’t raise my kids here.

Switzerland is, however, a member of the Schengen Area, which is very relevant to this discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Area

EU citizens can freely live and work in Switzerland and vice-versa. It would be difficult to reliably cap immigration from other EU countries and stay in the Schengen Area.

Three moments:

1. When ChatGPT came to the masses, it trivially solved my standard phone interview problem for new SWE hires. It's not particularly complicated, but it screened out a lot of candidates pre-AI and was a good filter.

2. At one point, there was a bug in some client software we ship that was erroneously displaying a protocol-level disconnect message to clients when the server shut the connection unexpectedly.

In very few turns, ChatGPT gave me working code to intercept the error at the client level via a pseudo-server that intercepted the requests and implemented the proper teardown procedure. It essentially implemented a micro-server for the protocol we were working in as a bug workaround.

3. I'm working on a major rearchitecture (6+ month project of very senior engineers) of an internal system for scalability and maintainability with tight latency bounds where correctness with the old system is necessary.

I came back from an international vacation quite jet lagged and was having trouble doing actual coding work for a bit since my focus was shot. Taking additional days off wouldn't have helped recover from the sleep issue more quickly due to childcare responsibilities.

I tried instead building a pipeline where I'd run an integration test suite, throw a list of failing tests at Claude, and make a PR if it made more tests pass. I automated as much of the AI "loop" as possible in my state at the time.

Using this technique, a coworker and I fixed over 200 failing integration tests for parity with the old code in 1 week. We subdivided failing tests between engineers and re-sub-divided with each success.

I re-reviewed the code before we launched when I was more well-rested, but this was an extremely effective technique and makes me think that AI-enhanced test driven development (TDD) is the future.

Your son is not alone:

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/no-lawyer-no-money-...

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/06/04/1138391/courts-c...

Good luck to him. I get worried about people using AI for serious work in a field they aren't specialized in, but if it helps him achieve a good outcome, that would be interesting.

I have often felt that the legal system is divided between haves and have-nots: if you can afford to participate, you get "justice" tilted toward you. Easier participation for those without the resources for a lawyer would be good.

The second article I linked, from the MIT Technology Review, is quite interesting. It seems like judges are experiencing some version of what open source maintainers and seniors at companies are experiencing: a much larger review burden due to the cost of generating code or legal arguments dropping drastically.

I wonder what form this structural shift in output versus specialist review capacity will take in other professions. The frontier labs seem to be trying to automate more and more of the "specialist review" process. I am not sure that is feasible in the legal world, but we'll see....

I know you are asking rhetorically, but this occurs routinely under the current US immigration regime.

There have been over 100,000 children separated from their parents in the United States due to immigration enforcement since 2025.

The feature story in the linked article is about a now 2 year old whose parents were not there for them beginning to walk or talk.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/18/us/brookings-institution-...

You can ban the commercialization and mass scaling of the technology. Just because you can't prevent something at a small scale doesn't mean you can't prevent corporations and government agencies from doing it without exposing themselves to unacceptable legal risk.

I feel like trying to "trick" the RNG into providing stability is the wrong approach here given all the footguns that can occur with having a low entropy seed, but I am not sure what an alternative to IP stability would be short of doing session management, which may introduce too much state into the problem to be acceptable for a VPN service.

Maybe a clientside hint that gets rotated in some circumstances with options to toggle it off would be appropriate. That should be fine as long as you don't care about someone being able to control their exit IP reliably.

I don't read German well and don't care to run this through a translator, but this is fascinating. I wonder how this list was compiled, by whom, and when it is used (is the gold audited)? You could randomly sample bars from the list to check the status of the gold periodically. I'm curious if other countries maintain similar lists.

fwiw i agree with you that the current situation is much worse than in the past, given all the horror's being done in the open without any nod toward reason, multilateralism, or public consent

take a look at this though, in the interest of examining past US actions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War#Ira...

Yeah, our basic integration test suite takes over 20 minutes to run in CI, likely higher locally but I never try to run the full test suite locally. That doesn't even encapsulate PDVs and other continuous testing that runs in the background.

The other day, I wrote a claude skill to pull logs for failing tests on a PR from CI as a CSV for feeding back into claude for troubleshooting. It helped with some debugging but was very fraught and needed human guidance to avoid going in strange directions. I could see this "fix the tests" workflow instrumented as overnight churn loops that are forbidden from modifying test files that run and have engineers review in the morning if more tests pass.

Maybe agentic TDD is the future. I have a bit of a nightmare vision of SWEs becoming more like QA in the future, but with much more automation. More engineering positions may become adversarial QA for LLM output. Figure out how to break LLM output before it goes to prod. Prove the vibe coded apps don't scale.

In the exercise I described above, I was just prompt churning between meetings (having claude record its work and feeding it to the next prompt, pulling test logs in between attempts), without much time to analyze, while another engineer on my team was analyzing and actually manually troubleshooting the vibe coded junk I was pushing up, but we fixed over 100 failing integration tests in a week for a major refactor using claude plus some human(s) in the loop. I do believe it got things done faster than we would have finished without AI. I do think the quality is slightly lower than would have been if we'd had 4 weeks without meetings to build the thing, but the tests do now pass.

man ssh_config is even more interesting and hidden

ProxyCommand is fun

Thanks. Is this one officially not getting released?

https://www.amazon.com/dp/151078604X/

I was thinking it would be nice to have a final print edition for the book collection, Amazon seems to be under the impression that this newer version is coming out in April.

What is a mess about the Eurozone and reckless about the ECB?

I haven't tried it, but Signal supports not sharing your phone number/just communicating with usernames: https://signal.org/blog/phone-number-privacy-usernames/

You still need to use your phone number to sign up, though.

I haven't used any but there are several it seems: https://european-alternatives.eu/alternative-to/google-docs

NextCloud looks ok.

For some reason I thought it was open to the public, but France also maintains a full sovereign cloud office suite for use by civil servants: https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/en

Maybe one day they'll open it up publicly.

You might enjoy the plot of Cryptonomicon

You might need to disclose social media accounts, phone numbers, email accounts, and a lot of other information, regardless of your burner: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1dz0g2ykpeo

Depends on when that goes into effect and how thoroughly it's actually implemented.

Yeah, even those looking for the full segment will have trouble finding it if they are not tech savvy and highly motivated.

A relative in their 60s saw headlines about the cancellation and wasn’t able to find it until I sent them the archive.org link. They are relatively well informed and competent with technology but never go around digging for hard to find media.

I think people on HN tend to overestimate how closely people follow news and how hard they are willing to work to seek out alternative sources of information. I’m with some extended family over the holidays. They might have seen this segment had it aired - I believe it was airing after some football game - but now there’s no chance of that happening. I don’t judge them for it at all, but most of their news consumption is passive through TV or social media. I think a lot of people follow news that way. Life’s busy.

It kind of makes me understand a little better how the censorship regime in other countries is so effective despite it being so easy to hop on a VPN. Raising the barrier to entry even a little reduces the audience from 10,000,000 to a fraction of that, even with the censorship itself being public knowledge.

For context, this is close to all venture capital spending in the US in 2024 ($215B): https://nvca.org/press_releases/nvca-releases-2025-yearbook-...

In some states you do need ID to vote. Texas, for example.

Link to the blog for anyone else looking

https://blog.trailofbits.com/2025/10/31/the-cryptography-beh...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45770875