llm/3a862c31-848e-4e32-be93-99402d2b43b6/batch-8-630a39ab-dbdb-4bc5-a317-feb5222fc267-input.json
You are a comment classifier. Given a list of topics and a batch of comments, assign each comment to up to 3 of the most relevant topics.
TOPICS (use these 1-based indices):
1. Bugs Having Users at Scale
2. Automation Impact on Workers
3. Workplace Politics vs Technical Skills
4. Google's UX Quality Criticism
5. LLM-Assisted Writing Detection
6. Career Advancement and Networking
7. Clarity vs Cleverness in Code
8. User-Focused Engineering Culture
9. Innovation Tokens and Boring Technology
10. Abstraction and Complexity Management
11. Silent Resistance in Debates
12. Glue Work Recognition
13. Performance Optimization Strategies
14. Engineer-Customer Communication Barriers
15. Time vs Money Tradeoffs
16. Psychological Safety in Teams
17. Process and Bureaucracy Critique
18. Code Plagiarism Ethics
19. Big Tech Organizational Dysfunction
20. Goodhart's Law and Metrics Gaming
COMMENTS TO CLASSIFY:
[
{
"id": "46496801",
"text": "And how are they supposed to do it if users did not add proper 2FA (and backup those recovery keys)?\n\nEven banks are struggling to authenticate folks. For a longtime in EU people with 3rd world passports cannot create accounts easily.\n\nGoogle cannot connect identity of a person to email address easily. Or they need to create CS - that will authenticate passports? And hundreds of countries, stolen IDs?\n\nNay.\n\n> The thing is that at scale your edge cases are still millions of people\n\n> never seem to be capable of handling the other parts that come with it\n\nSame thing with govts. If you go to driver license. passport or any govt office then there will one person with some strange issue."
}
,
{
"id": "46490750",
"text": "That is a great point too. For a company which effectively does not have a customer service, how can they claim to be obsessing about helping users at all?"
}
,
{
"id": "46490980",
"text": "Hell, in my experience they often don’t even help ad customers that are having issues that prevent them from buying ads."
}
,
{
"id": "46490454",
"text": "> 1. The best engineers are obsessed with solving user problems.\n\nThe author lost me right here.\n\nNot because he’s wrong about this in general - he is not. But it seems to not be any kind of differentiator at Google. Maybe the opposite is true- make it as screwed up as physically possible, then make it a little worse, then release it - that seems a lot closer to the lesson Google engineers learn. As long as you are “first” and shipped it.\n\nThen get promoted, move on and meanwhile your crap code eventually gets the axe a decade later."
}
,
{
"id": "46497815",
"text": "Technically he said these are lessons he learned after working at Google, not that Google was necessarily doing these things. If we’re being generous maybe he learned this by counter example haha"
}
,
{
"id": "46489184",
"text": "Every engineer should read this. It's a wonderful collection of heuristics that might seem banal, but which are shimmeringly true.\n\nThe two that stand out are\n\n> Novelty is a loan you repay in outages, hiring, and cognitive overhead.\n\nand\n\n> Abstractions don’t remove complexity. They move it to the day you’re on call.\n\nas a warning against about being too, too clever."
}
,
{
"id": "46489668",
"text": "There's rarely a bullet point advantage that some new language or tech stack can offer me that would outweigh ten years of observation of how a familiar setup behaves in production, such that the space of unknown unknowns is reduced to almost nothing."
}
,
{
"id": "46489709",
"text": "My personal rule is that the new technology stack item needs to either make is possible for me to build something that I couldn't have built without it, or needs to provide a productivity boost significant enough to overcome the productivity lost by straying from the more familiar path - even harder for team projects where multiple people need to learn the new component."
}
,
{
"id": "46489757",
"text": "Yeah. I'm in agreement there. I guess that it's an application of The Law of Least Surprise for a future developer (who might actually be me, which it often is)"
}
,
{
"id": "46489530",
"text": "Agreed.\n\nNot just engineers, but basically everyone involved in creating products including designers and PMs.\n\nEvery single bullet point here is gold."
}
,
{
"id": "46490495",
"text": "Google still suffers the most from not understanding those two. Probably more than other companies."
}
,
{
"id": "46491338",
"text": "Have they ever had an outage in recent years though? Pinging 8.8.8.8 is the gold standard of making sure there's internet in my book."
}
,
{
"id": "46492248",
"text": "GCP has had some multi-region outages"
}
,
{
"id": "46489824",
"text": "Eh, sure.\n\nBut at the same time lessons aren't learned by reading what someone else has to say. They're learned by experience, and everyone's is different. An engineer with \"14 years at Google\" hardly makes them an expert at giving career advice, but they sure like to write like it does.\n\nThis type of article reads more like a promotion piece from self-involved people, than heartfelt advice from someone knowledgeable. This is evident from the author's \"bio\" page: written in 3rd person, full of aggrandizing claims of their accomplishments, and photos with famous people they've met. I'm conditioned to tune out most of what these characters have to say.\n\nIf this is the type of people who excel in Big Tech, it must be an insufferable place to be."
}
,
{
"id": "46491326",
"text": "And google wasn't founded by people who just kept their heads down and employed the simplest, most direct solution to the problem. If they had done that, google search would have been done on a super-fast server or mainframe using an RDBMS."
}
,
{
"id": "46490380",
"text": "Mood. As someone who normally leaves after two years because the opportunity never raises to what was offered in the job spec these really don't for for me these bullet points as well wouldn't work for office culture in the EU.\n\n15 Years worth of jobs and none gel. I'm a contractor now which feels more me. I have a contract length, don't have to deal with red tape political bullshit.\n\nTurn up, do work and leave when contract had ended."
}
,
{
"id": "46490759",
"text": "If you can easily acquire new projects and are happy with what you do, that can be very nice. I would probably fail at selling myself"
}
,
{
"id": "46491015",
"text": "I've never needed to sell myself. $corp will advertise needing a contractor and you apply as usual. If you have the skills and experience you tend to get hired.\n\nThe only difference is you don't get job security, pension or any perks. But you do get a lump sum though. Where you can then decide what's best."
}
,
{
"id": "46489774",
"text": "I am going to file this line\n\n> If you win every debate, you’re probably accumulating silent resistance."
}
,
{
"id": "46491276",
"text": "Sun Tsu said you have to either give your opponent an out or completely destroy them. I’ve always said that you can only skin a sheep once but can shear them over and over. Or to be more blunt, it’s better to be effective than right.\n\nIt’s about keeping the bigger/long term goals in mind. That means relationships and being an asshole."
}
,
{
"id": "46491005",
"text": "This is one of the Five Dysfunctions of a Team (fear of conflict, caused by absence of trust).\n\nHighly recommend the book.\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_Dysfunctions_of_a_Tea..."
}
,
{
"id": "46490079",
"text": "That one makes me uncomfortable, which is a bad sign..."
}
,
{
"id": "46490384",
"text": "I'd say it's a good sign – at least now you're aware it might be happening. A worse sign would be thinking you're definitely not that sort of personality; you'd be accruing silent resentment from both being loud _and_ clueless."
}
,
{
"id": "46489751",
"text": "Nothing novel, but all true, well expressed, and worth repeating. This should be part of every CS curriculum.\n\n#2 and #14 are tough pills to swallow. It's not enough to be right, or even have a long track record of being right. You usually have to convince others that it was their idea all along, but still advocate for yourself at performance review time."
}
,
{
"id": "46489971",
"text": "I clicked through to the bio and am super confused. Third person, extremely long, lots of pictures with CEOs and smelling of LLM writing.\n\nHere's a sample:\n\n> His story isn’t just about writing code, but about inspiring a community to strive for a better web. And perhaps the most exciting chapter is still being written, as he helps shape how AI and the web will intersect in the coming decade. Few individuals have done as much to push the web forward while uplifting its developers, and that legacy will be felt for a long time to come.\n\nhttps://addyosmani.com/bio/"
}
,
{
"id": "46495364",
"text": "Few individuals have done as much to push the web forward while uplifting its developers, and that legacy will be felt for a long time to come.\n\nAnd modest too."
}
,
{
"id": "46490045",
"text": "He led Chrome DevRel for many years - if you were learning about new web platform technologies circa 2010-2015 you probably ran across his writing.\n\nThe bio is cringe, but the important thing to realize about these professional-networking bios is that they are sales pitches, intended to sell a person (and specifically, their experience and connections) to a large corporation who will pay them even more money. An ordinary person, with ordinary authentic emotions, is not the intended audience. They're specifically selling to people whose job is to deal with bullshit."
}
,
{
"id": "46490099",
"text": "The linked post itself also reeks of LLM writing (negative parallelisms in every other paragraph). But sadly, it seems like this is just the new standard for highly upvoted front page posts."
}
,
{
"id": "46492268",
"text": "Reading that bio makes you wonder if anyone else works at Google…"
}
,
{
"id": "46489786",
"text": "Seems reasonable. Many points maybe more applicable Google/Google-like companies. With layoffs and overall job shortages a lot of workplaces are having a cake and eating it too. They demand fast delivery and taking shortcuts (calling it creative thinking ) and once things blow up directly due to shortcuts put blame on developers / testers for taking shortcuts and compromising quality in the process."
}
,
{
"id": "46491696",
"text": "> 15. When a measure becomes a target, it stops measuring.\n\nThis is Goodhart's law - \"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure\" [1].\n\n[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law"
}
,
{
"id": "46493448",
"text": "Right, this annoyed me too - it was stated w/o attribution as if novel.\n\nWhat is the name of the law when someone writes a think piece of \"stuff I've learned\" and fails to cite any of it to existing knowledge?\n\nMakes me wonder if (A) they do know it's not their idea, but they are just cool with plagiarism or (B) they don't know it's not their idea."
}
,
{
"id": "46496689",
"text": "I don't know if there's a named law, but the word for not knowing and believing that something remembered is a novel idea is \"cryptomnesia\".\n\nKnowing that you know something by teaching is Feynman's method of understanding. Basically, on scanning, I don't particularly disagree with the content of the post. However, treating these things (many of which regularly show up here on HN) as being due to \"14 years at Google\" is a little misplaced.\n\nBut, hey, it's 2026, CES is starting, and the hyperbole will just keep rocketing up and out."
}
,
{
"id": "46492899",
"text": "> The engineer who truly understands the problem often finds that the elegant solution is simpler than anyone expected.\n\n> The engineer who starts with a solution tends to build complexity in search of a justification.\n\nI do agree this is a good point, I just find it funny that it comes from \"staying 14 years at Google\".\n\nThis is literally the reason why I left Google first, and Meta second. Finding simple solutions will get you absolutely nowhere in a place like those. You have to find complex solutions with a lot of stakeholders, alignment, discussions, escalations... Why ship one button if you can ship 100 and get you, your team and your manager promoted in the process?"
}
,
{
"id": "46491172",
"text": "> In large organizations, decisions get made in meetings you’re not invited to, using summaries you didn’t write, by people who have five minutes and twelve priorities. If no one can articulate your impact when you’re not in the room, your impact is effectively optional.\n\nVery true in large organisations. But... in a company whose stated mission is to \" organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful \" ... this feels like a failure.\n\nWhen a truly data driven company manages to quantify impact by more than the volume of hot air emitted :) then it's going to eat the world.\n\nPerhaps it's for the best that nobody does that?"
}
,
{
"id": "46490467",
"text": "> First do it, then do it right, then do it better. Get the ugly prototype in front of users.\n\nGreat, give users something that messy, horrible and not fully functional.\nCustomer who spend big for production environments are exploited to \"be\nthe outsourced QA\""
}
,
{
"id": "46490489",
"text": "It's ok if the users are internal"
}
,
{
"id": "46490414",
"text": "> If you win every debate, you’re probably accumulating silent resistance.\n\nThis is very true in personal lives as well."
}
,
{
"id": "46490664",
"text": "This is actually slave morality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%E2%80%93slave_morality\n\nAccording to Nietzsche, masters create morality; slaves respond to master morality with their slave morality. Unlike master morality, which is sentiment, slave morality is based on ressentiment—devaluing what the master values and what the slave does not have. As master morality originates in the strong, slave morality originates in the weak. Because slave morality is a reaction to oppression, it vilifies its oppressors"
}
,
{
"id": "46493996",
"text": "> 13. The work that makes other work possible is priceless - and invisible.\n\n> Glue work - documentation, onboarding, cross-team coordination, process improvement - is vital. ... The trap is doing it as “helpfulness” rather than treating it as deliberate, bounded, visible impact. Timebox it. Rotate it. Turn it into artifacts ... make it legible as impact, not as personality trait.\n\nI see my own experience in this, but I don't think he's identified the problem correctly. Timeboxing, rotating, etc, is easy. Convincing management that it is as important as non-glue work and therefore worth allocating your time for it is the hard part. And if you can't do that, you end up stuck in the situation described.\n\nThe other option is to just let things fail of course, but then you have to convince both management AND the rest of your team to do this, otherwise someone else will just pick it up between the cracks too."
}
,
{
"id": "46495429",
"text": "> Before you build, exhaust the question: “What would happen if we just… didn’t?”\n\nWell said! So many times I have seen great products slide down. If they just froze the features and UI, and just fixed performance, compatibility and stability issues for years, things would be better. (this applies to any company). Many programs I use are years old. They are great programs and don't need constant change! Updates can only make it worse at that point (minus critical security issues, compatbility, performance regressions)"
}
,
{
"id": "46489666",
"text": "> \" Writing forces clarity. The fastest way to learn something better is to try teaching it. \"\n\nSomething that seems lost on those using LLMs to augment their textual output."
}
,
{
"id": "46490201",
"text": "This article is partly LLM generated or edited, fairly certain"
}
,
{
"id": "46490253",
"text": "I think it's inevitable everyone will use LLMs to assist with writing, such as editing, if it hasn't happen already. It's like having a free editor, beyond grammar or spell-checking."
}
,
{
"id": "46491638",
"text": "If the only reason you write is as a means to and end, sure. Inevitable. If you pursue it as a craft then the struggle and imperfections are part of the process. LLM usage would sand away those wonderful flaws."
}
,
{
"id": "46491199",
"text": "The AI slop voice is grating to me and many others. If you can avoid it or make it not feel like slop or make it feel unique, people will like it more. I don't care how you do that tbh"
}
,
{
"id": "46490021",
"text": "> You can edit a bad page, but you can’t edit a blank one."
}
,
{
"id": "46490156",
"text": "Ideally, yes, but the final result of LLM assisted textual output by many users shows that they often have neglected the editing part just as much as they have neglected the writing part."
}
,
{
"id": "46491358",
"text": "My father-in-law did a fair amount of editing back in the day (on paper, with red pencil/pen). He said that, when you saw something that had \"blood\" (red) all over it, that meant it was good . When things are bad enough, it becomes hard even to edit it.\n\nIt may not be just that people don't edit LLM output. It may be that the stylistic blandness is so pervasive, it's just too much work to remove. (Yeah, maybe you could do it. But if you were willing to spend that kind of effort, you probably wouldn't have an LLM write it in the first place.)"
}
,
{
"id": "46490267",
"text": "Airplane meme: you only see the bad LLM or obviously LLM-assisted writing."
}
]
Return ONLY a JSON array with this exact structure (no other text):
[
{
"id": "comment_id_1",
"topics": [
1,
3,
5
]
}
,
{
"id": "comment_id_2",
"topics": [
2
]
}
,
...
]
Rules:
- Each comment can have 0 to 3 topics
- Use 1-based topic indices
- Only assign topics that are genuinely relevant to the comment
- If no topics match, use an empty array:
{
"id": "...",
"topics": []
}
50