MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: I became interim CTO and want to avoid dumb fuck-ops
by oizys_throwaway | 2025-05-11 10:44:35+00:00
Yes, fuck-ops not fuck ups :)

Throwaway account

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Context: small start-up, 3 devs. Company size 10-20.

My boss burned out and has departed which has made me effectively the interim CTO. Let's call him Hephaestus[1]. I am more of what you'd consider an enlightened individual contributor and in am in some part finding myself out of my depth.

When it rains, it pours. As our previous CTO took his leave our PM - who is fantastic - went on maternity leave. We have a new one but doesn't fill her shoes. Other than myself and the non-technical CEO the rest of the organization hasn't really been around long enough to help share carrying the weight yet - they are getting there! I have one other dev who is fantastic and the other one was hired under the premise of being my old CTOs shadow - he was signed before the contract. Unfortunately, experience has shown he is wet behind the ears and I find myself having to pick up the slack not only when it comes to what he can contribute as a dev - he is intermediate at best. Let's call him Koalemos [2].

*The good:* We are managing to stay on top of our work - we've found a way to organize our backlog that gels well with everyone and so the project is progressing nicely.

*The bad:* Where I am finding myself out of my depth is with... let's call it admin? When my CTO left Koalemos was in charge of off-boarding Hephaestus and I think that was done poorly.

Hephaestus is a close personal friend of mine but for the first few months after he left it wasn't even possible to have a conversation with him - he was not coherent and would repeat the same story many times over and over again within the same hour. He's better now, at least coherent and verbal but I try to not talk to him too much about work stuff so he can recover in peace.

One time we did speak after some... pains had happened at work he said he had instructed Koalemos to:

1. Never de-activate a Google workspace admin account, and 1.1. instead sign them out of all devices 1.2. remove 2FA for that account 1.3. set a password for that account.

Instead Koalemos did de-activate Hephaestus's account and instead redirected all of Hephaestus's emails to his own inbox.

That's one of more than one things that Koalemos has done that he were allegedly instructed to _not_ do.

Are there any general rules of thumb for not only Google accounts but other accounts that I can apply to avoid these fuck-ops moving forward?

Like, if I had to off-board Koalemos myself, what should I do?

My experience is more in the lines of cleaning up `authorized_ssh_keys` and Shamir key rotation. This is... not the same.

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[1] Hephaestus is the Greek god of burnout: https://paleothea.com/gods-and-goddesses/hephaestus-god-of-burnout/ [2] Koalemos is the personification of stupidity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koalemos#:~:text=In%20Greek%20mythology%2C%20Koalemos%20(Ancient,in%20Parallel%20Lives%20by%20Plutarch.
by rcxdude | 2025-05-11 10:46:26+00:00
You talk about it like a gentle process. The proposed unit discussed in the wikipedia article stores about as much energy as 10 tons of TNT, and catastrophic failure could easily be similarly rapid. It's certainly something that would require further analysis (I don't have a good intuition for what the 'blast radius' would be underwater, especially in terms of threatening another unit).
by taylorius | 2025-05-11 10:46:40+00:00
I'm not claiming it was intentional on their part. My point was solely one of language, so how the sentence came to be written that way is out of scope. And given the word swap I suggested, I don't think it is awkward at all (unlike your examples from Dutch, which definitely are).

As for it being patronising, why is telling a non-native speaker their sentence is interesting unacceptable, but telling them it's awkward is ok? (Assuming both are genuinely held opinions).

I'll reiterate my point that common English usage (non-awkward?) has narrowed enormously in the last 50 years. I think that this is a bad thing.
by hnlmorg | 2025-05-11 10:46:47+00:00
> Nah, I don't buy it. Theyre good enough at higher level skills / comprehension that such enormous failures in more foundational skills makes no sense

It wouldn’t make sense for a scammer to make those mistakes either. So you’re not proving anything nefarious by pointing out those mistakes. All you’re proving is mistakes have been made.

You might be surprised to learn this, but people makes a lot of mistakes at the start of their career. And 16 is very early on.

I suspect there might have been some “vibe coding” going on, but that’s the worst criticism I’m willing to make. And even if I’m correct here, everyone has to start somewhere. I grew up with massive printed books, others on here learned from Stack Overflow. Vibe coding is only a problem if you don’t learn from it too.
by Hongo123 | 2025-05-11 10:47:25+00:00
This is a small "game"? Its a small app that i made where you place Sand particles and just see them fall, you can place them with left mouse click and erase them with Right Click. Pretty simple, im kinda lost cause i haven't build a program for other people and i want to make it look first of all; Safe, so people dont think im sharing some kind of virus, and portable and easy to build, i want to make everything both compatible with Windows and Linux. Im using this project to learn and applying what i learn to my other projects that im working on.

Any ideas on features are welcomed and if you can correct me on anything i would appreciate it a lot. Im not surrounded by many people that are interested on coding like i do. Most people get into Web Development and never get into building an app on low level or making games, which is my passion

If you if you dont trust my git, can you please tell me why and how i can make it more reliable and easy to trust?

If you couldn't build it why its not working?

I want to make a career out of coding in the future but it seems almost impossible. Im about to finish up college and i feel embarrassed about how empty my Curriculum and thin its gonna look :(

Anyways thanks for reading and any feedback would make me very happy
by threecheese | 2025-05-11 10:48:40+00:00
Raindrop.io has a similar feature set (plus highlighting/Readwise integration), but I had a similar a-ha moment recently when I realized I could use Raycast to search across the entire body of bookmarks. It made my years of filing things into folders and tags, agonizing (mildly) over organizing into categories and labels, wasted.

What I like about Karakeep (IMU) is because it’s open source/locally hosted and free - and has better focus on automated tagging - the content attribution abilities are going to get better over time along with the models used for classification. Theres actually meat on this bone so to speak, in the area of bookmarking. With the ability to use local models or to choose what you want your cost to be wrt commercial models, it will be very difficult for a vendor like Raindrop to compete.
by manarth | 2025-05-11 10:50:28+00:00
> "The implementation of the pressure hose led to challenges in the dimensioning even for the small prototype, because conventional pressure hoses are usually designed for high internal pressures, but not for high external pressures. In addition, the installation becomes more demanding as the depth of the water increases. Greater water depths are associated with higher pressures, longer pressure hoses with greater friction losses and higher mechanical stresses. The more stable the hose wall is designed, the larger is its bending radius and weight, which in turn makes the installation more difficult."

They tried it with a surface hose and without, and the full charge-dischage cycle were roughly equivalent, so the simpler version without the surface hose is the recommended option.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/am/pii/S235215... (PDF)
by int_19h | 2025-05-11 10:50:55+00:00
With WinForms you can do much better, in large part because .NET itself ships with Windows and thus the app can just rely on it being there, but also because C# compiles to bytecode rather than native code (so it's not exactly a fair comparison). Anyway, the identical hello world GUI app in C#/WinForms is ~11 Kb.

With Gtk, no, because it implements all widgets by itself rather than wrapping Win32, so it'll necessarily be larger. Also, statically linking it can be a pain (and AFAIK isn't even supported in Gtk 4 anymore).
by Timwi | 2025-05-11 10:51:46+00:00
> LLMs do not think.

I understand that you're responding within the thread, but to take this back to the original point, which is about human dignity, justice and labor:

LLMs do not need to “think” for the point to be valid. Chess engines do not “think” and do not have any conception of what they're really doing, but they still win at chess every time. The worry is that AI will put an end to human dignity, not that it “thinks too much”.
by graemep | 2025-05-11 10:52:11+00:00
Yes, but which is the lesser risk then?

There seems to be a bias to do nothing rather than do something even if there are known benefits to doing something.

There are definitely lots of consequences to lots of things we have done with regard to climate change and pollution. If we avoided everything with consequences the only action is do nothing.

> The difference is clear when you give an opinion about someone else's problems

The global environment is everyone's problem, surely?
by int_19h | 2025-05-11 10:53:00+00:00
That's indeed a statically linked binary. Release, with smart linking (so only things that are actually used are linked; otherwise it'd be ~20 Mb), debug symbols stripped. Measuring .exe size when linking dynamically would kinda defeat the purpose of the experiment, since you'd still need to distribute the DLLs to the users for any real world app.
by throw0101d | 2025-05-11 10:53:41+00:00
The title is a play a famous philosophy paper "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?":

> Nagel challenges the possibility of explaining "the most important and characteristic feature of conscious mental phenomena" by reductive materialism (the philosophical position that all statements about the mind and mental states can be translated, without any loss or change in meaning, into statements about the physical). For example, a reductive physicalist's solution to the mind–body problem holds that whatever "consciousness" is, it can be fully described via physical processes in the brain and body.[5]

[…]

> The paper argues that the subjective nature of consciousness undermines any attempt to explain consciousness via objective, reductionist means. The subjective character of experience cannot be explained by a system of functional or intentional states. Consciousness cannot be fully explained if the subjective character of experience is ignored, and the subjective character of experience cannot be explained by a reductionist; it is a mental phenomenon that cannot be reduced to materialism.[6] Thus, for consciousness to be explained from a reductionist stance, the idea of the subjective character of experience would have to be discarded, which is absurd. Neither can a physicalist view, because in such a world, each phenomenal experience had by a conscious being would have to have a physical property attributed to it, which is impossible to prove due to the subjectivity of conscious experience. Nagel argues that each and every subjective experience is connected with a "single point of view", making it infeasible to consider any conscious experience as "objective".

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F
by ang_cire | 2025-05-11 10:54:55+00:00
I've never heard of or seen a Software Development bachelors degree?

I've seen Information Systems programs, that are usually CE, after-hours tracks. Neither Harvard, Yale, nor MIT have a software dev one, just Comp. Sci. I'm calling BS (no pun intended) on "software dev degrees" as a thing distinct from CS in any widespread fashion.

https://www.harvard.edu/programs/

https://admissions.yale.edu/majors-and-academic-programs

https://facts.mit.edu/degrees-majors/
by BlueTemplar | 2025-05-11 10:56:04+00:00
Let's not forget that the cutting edge of modern science included alchemy at that time : one of the purposes for which the first thermostat was invented was to control alchemical fires.

Or how the "perpetual motion machine" (by the same guy, Cornelis Drebbel) led to barometers and the discovery of atmospheric pressure. (Also connected to astrology because astrologers were the ones making predictions, including of weather.)

EDIT : bonus soundtrack : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jy99ywCp3qU

(> it is only a small subset of this song, a fully differentiable song will come in the future)
by lproven | 2025-05-11 10:57:38+00:00
> Delphi and Lazarus have been around for decades. It's like asking what lisp is.

No.

Everyone thinks their pet project is obvious and self-explanatory.

This is NEVER EVER a safe assumption. Remember that our entire industry is a mysterious black box to the outside world.

I worked for A Prominent North American Linux Vendor for a while. I was hired to work on the docs for one of their projects.

I'm an industry veteran with at that time over 25 years of broad cross-platform tech experience from CP/M to Linux to mainframes.

It took me a month of hard digging to get an extremely vague overall concept of what the product was and did.

Most of the company had no idea -- it's not Linux-related in any way -- and many of them regard the entire product platform as an evil to be expunged.

This is typical for that vendor. Aside from their Linux distro, ask for a tweet-length summary of any of their portfolio, expressed in general terms not specific to that product or vague marketing-ware, and nobody in the company can give it.

Nonetheless they are a multi-billion-dollar vendor.

But they only sell into established markets.
by xrhobo | 2025-05-11 10:58:22+00:00
The majority of college students are not studying something that falls into these categories though.

It is completely absurd we have not built an alternative, online liberal arts 4 year degree that basically cost nothing.

There is absolutely no reason this could not be done for less than $1k a year right now.

I suspect a large reason is because the people who benefit from the cartel, basically every professional educator, like things as is. The massive education inflation cost is a feature for the cartel, not a bug.
by renmillar | 2025-05-11 10:58:33+00:00
You're making an assumption that doesn't match reality - vulnerability discovery doesn't work like some efficient market. Yes, intelligence agencies and sophisticated criminal groups might find 0-days, but they typically target selectively, not deploying exploits universally.

The real threat comes from the vast number of opportunistic attackers who lack the skills to discover vulnerabilities themselves but are perfectly capable of weaponizing public disclosures and proof-of-concepts. These bottom-feeders represent a much larger attack surface that only materializes after public disclosure.

Responsible disclosure gives vendors time to patch before this larger wave of attackers gets access to the vulnerability information. It's not about protecting company reputation - it's about minimizing the window of mass exploitation.

Timing the disclosure to match the fix release is actually the most practical approach for everyone involved. It eliminates the difficult choice customers would otherwise face - either disrupt their service entirely or knowingly remain vulnerable.

Most organizations simply can't afford the downtime from abruptly cutting off a service, nor can they accept the risk of continuing with a known vulnerability. Providing the fix simultaneously with disclosure allows for orderly patch deployment without service interruption.

This coordinated approach minimizes disruption while still addressing the security issue - a balanced solution that protects both the security and continuity needs of end users.
by Juliate | 2025-05-11 10:59:33+00:00
Apple perhaps did it better, stronger, than other companies, in the specific consumer mobile IT field. But every single industry has been doing this, for decades.

Displacing/offshoring production, in hardware as well as software, to "reduce costs" for manufacturing (motors, equipments, appliances, cars, factories components, etc.) as well as engineering started way back in the 1950's, after having been theorised a century before (Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage).
by throw0101d | 2025-05-11 11:00:52+00:00
> I think the USA is a textbook example […]

I don't necessarily disagree with you, but my main concern is that once you have certain laws you can never be sure how they'll be used in the future—see perhaps current situation in 2025.

You have to take into account the fact that laws could be used by the "wrong" people in the "wrong" way.
by kalavan | 2025-05-11 11:00:54+00:00
It's considered mysterious because of the hard problem of consciousness. Describing a mechanism that could be considered analogous to consciousness "from the outside" is pretty easy (just do self reference).

But the subjective quality of "what is it like to be X" is not easily captured by such descriptions - not unless you make some kind of panpsychist assumption that everything that has self-reference is subjectively conscious.

That said, a number of materialists say that there's no there there, and thus no problem. We're just all deluding ourselves into thinking that we have subjective experience. I don't think that argument is very strong, but it is made, and could explain why some find the whole business of consciousness seemingly trivial while others consider the hard problem to be very hard.

More information can be found at https://iep.utm.edu/hard-problem-of-conciousness/
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-05-11 11:01:20+00:00
This is a particularly sad situation.

I was often wondering how Russians living in the EU feel being pointed at because of what Putin does.

Unfortunately the only Russian I know is a woman living in France for 20 years, married with a French guy and claiming that Russia was attacked and is just defending against agressiin and Nazis. This is sad, I have not talked to her since.

You may want to consider France: you speak French, your daughter is integrated with the culture (I guess you are around Geneva), so it may be an easier place to live in.
by einsteinx2 | 2025-05-11 11:02:05+00:00
> The security researcher is not primarily responsible to the public, they are responsible to the corporation.

Unless the researcher works for the corporation on an in-house security team, what’s your reasoning for this?

Why are they more responsible to the corporation they don’t work for than for to the people they’re protecting (depending on the personal motivations of the individual security researcher I guess).
by derbOac | 2025-05-11 11:03:02+00:00
Usually in psychotherapy controls, there's either:

waitlist control, where people get nothing

psychoeducational, where people get some kind of educational content about mental health but not therapy

existing nonpsychological service, like physical checkups with a nurse

existing therapy, so not placebo but current treatment

pharmacological placebo, where they're given a placebo pill and told its psychiatric medication for their concern

A kind of "nerfed" version of the therapy, such as supportive therapy where the clinician just provides empathy etc but nothing else

How to interpret results depends on the control.

It's relevant to debates about general vs specific effects in therapy (rapport, empathy, fit) versus specific effects (effects due to specific techniques of a specific therapy).

Bruce Wampold has written a lot about types of controls although he has a hard nonspecific/general effects take on therapy.
by noor_z | 2025-05-11 11:04:37+00:00
One advantage of MCP being "inspired by" LSP, at least to people like myself who work on LSP tools, is that a decent chunk of existing LSP code can be reused and repurposed. For example, most editors already ship with code for managing local server sidecars over stdio. There are a few annoying differences though like the lack of a header section in MCP.
by metalman | 2025-05-11 11:06:29+00:00
It's about relevance.There is an inevitability that is expliset in our technology and human nauture, which is that our devices become extensions of the idividual, rather than the desperate attempts to turn all human activity into asymetric relationships with corporations that we are fielding now.litteraly freedom VS feedom. Right now, big tech and government are doubling down on denying people the right to self selected peer to peer groups and contacts in an unsensored format that allows financial transactions and barter in the things they want and need. IE: everybody gets webspace, with a blog and store and can then connect through open groups of there choice. There is absolutly no reason for "platforms" to exist , they are hurting society ,undermining our productivity and offer no advantage in the tasks that we must accomplish to achive a long term sustainable civilisation. Big tech and government are attempting to build an AI powered system that will institutionalise everybody in there own lives, puppeted and controlled through there devices. Luckily this is impossible, but we have to live through the maddness of the attempt, which if you are a student of history and human behavior, is tedious.
by sylens | 2025-05-11 11:06:36+00:00
Giant Bomb is a bit of a tragic tale because they essentially pioneered the idea of personality driven game streaming at a time when most video game sites were still doing the templated 5 section review. The problem is that they were a bit too ahead of their time, so they had to rely on outside funding which caused them to be sold - first to CBS, then Red Ventures, and now Fandom. If they were launching today, it would be a patreon funded YouTube channel without the overhead of an in person office, rolling your own video streamer, etc
Show HN: Postel Voice – Write X posts like your favourite creators
by JoschuaBuilds | 2025-05-11 11:07:45+00:00
Hey HN,

we just released Postel's voice feature.

You can now add any creator on twitter to your account as a "voice" and turn any information from your knowledge base into posts written in the style of any creator you like. Or just brainstorm ideas that sound exactly like any big X account.

you can try it out here for free (without a credit card): https://www.postel.app

Looking forward to hear your feedback.
by Xmd5a | 2025-05-11 11:08:21+00:00
>completely unrelated metaphors

An oxymoron.

De toute façon Anyway Les guides c'est encombrant Guidebooks are cumbersome Les romans trop longs Novels are too long J'prends la fuite I make a run for it Je ne suivrais pas le sens I won’t follow the direction De la visite Of the tour [...] À chaque tour de rue je suis éblouie At every street corner, I’m dazzled J'ai pris le train de nuit je n'ai pas beaucoup dormi I took the night train, didn’t sleep much Les sens en éveil My senses are heightened Mes sens se réveillent My senses awaken Accélèrent et s'amplifient They speed up and intensify [...] Et j'ai la tête qui tourne And my head is spinning La beauté m'entoure Beauty surrounds me Puis soudain elle m’envahit Then suddenly it overwhelms me Florence en Italie Florence, Italy Et j'ai la tête qui tourne And my head is spinning La beauté m'entoure Beauty surrounds me Ne m'aidez pas si je m’évanouis Don’t help me if I faint Florence en Italie Florence in Italy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BIpHulB1X8

Edit: the parallels abound. From the article:

And I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground. Without a local guide or a moment’s hesitation, Beyle made his way to the Basilica di Santa Croce. My soul, affected by the very notion of being in Florence