MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Night_Thastus | 2025-09-16 21:29:36+00:00
When it comes to programming, I generally decide my thoughts based on pain-in-my-ass levels. If I constantly have to fiddle with something to get it working, if it's fragile, if it frequently becomes a pain point - then it's not great.

And out of all the tools and architecture I work with, C++ has been some of the least problematic. The STL is well-formed and easy to work with, creating user-defined types is easy, it's fast, and generally it has few issues when deploying. If there's something I need, there's a very high chance a C or C++ library exists to do what I need. Even crossing multiple major compiler versions doesn't seem to break anything, with rare exceptions.

The biggest problem I have with C++ is how easy it is to get very long compile times, and how hard it feels like it is to analyze and fix that on a 'macro' (whole project) level. I waste ungodly amounts of time compiling. I swear I'm going to be on deaths door and see GCC running as my life flashes by.

Some others that have been not-so-nice:

* Python - Slow enough to be a bottleneck semi-frequently, hard to debug especially in a cross-language environment, frequently has library/deployment/initialization problems, and I find it generally hard to read because of the lack of types, significant whitespace, and that I can't easily jump with an IDE to see who owns what data. Also pip is demon spawn. I never want to see another Wheel error until the day I die.

* VSC's IntelliSense - My god IntelliSense is picky. Having to manually specify every goddamn macro, one at a time in two different locations just to get it to stop breaking down is a nightmare. I wish it were more tolerant of having incomplete information, instead of just shutting down completely.

* Fortran - It could just be me, but IDEs struggle with it. If you have any global data it may as well not exist as far as the IDE is concerned, which makes dealing with such projects very hard.

* CMake - I'm amazed it works at all. It looks great for simple toy projects and has the power to handle larger projects, but it seems to quickly become an ungodly mess of strange comments and rules that aren't spelled out - and you have no way of stepping into it and seeing what it's doing. I try to touch it as infrequently as possible. It feels like C macros, in a bad way.
by Aloisius | 2025-09-16 21:29:43+00:00
Those definitions are mostly from out of context quotes. Many are cherry picked from large works that go into substantially more detail about how the person defined socialism.

Paul Janet stated socialism is generally used to refer to a doctrine which undermines the principle of individual property.

Émile de Laveleye stated socialism demanded a laborer reap the whole fruits of his labor and if other factors like land and capital contributed, then they must be unified with the labor. In other words, worker ownership of the means of production.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, of course, believed property was theft and most certainly did not believe the continuation of property rights was an aspiration towards the amelioration of society, his definition of socialism.

Thomas Kirkup, who actually contributed the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on socialism in 1887, stated that "Socialism means: 1) That the working people aim at gaining, by combination or association, the control of land and capital which they lost in the individual struggle. (2) That order, economy, and prevision should remedy the confusion, waste, and demoralisation caused by competition. (3) That industry should be carried on not for private gain, but for the common good."

Émile Durheim was describing Saint-Simon who called for centralized state regulation of production and distribution.

And the 11th edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica states that "Socialists believe that the present economic order, in which industry is carried on by private competitive capital, must and ought to pass away, and that the normal economic order of the future will be one with collective means of production and associated labour working for the general good. This principle of socialism is cardinal and fundamental."

Never mind that these are but a handful of definitions for socialism in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
by gmueckl | 2025-09-16 21:29:44+00:00
C++ will always stay relevant. Software has eaten the world. That transition is almost complete now. The languages that were around when it happened will stay deeply embedded in our fundamental tech stacks for another couple decades at least, if not centuries. And C and C++ are the lion's share of that.

COBOL sticks around 66 years after its first release. Fortran is 68 years old and is still enormously relevant. Much, much more software was written in newer languages and has become so complex that replacements have become practically impossible (Fuchsia hasn't replaces Linux in Google products, wayland isn't ready to replace X11 etc)
by kypro | 2025-09-16 21:29:46+00:00
Experienced tech workers? Yeah.

One of the "problems" companies have is that it's hard to find skilled workers in the US with good experience who are not demanding SF wages. And recent graduates aren't that useful so while they might technically be "tech workers" in the sense they would like to fill open roles, companies don't really want them.

So for most companies if you want to hire the most experienced and qualified for the role, and do that at a reasonable cost, you'll need to consider the H1B route.
by klibertp | 2025-09-16 21:30:03+00:00
You're right, as much as I'd like not to be aware of it. Indeed, the bar is very low.

Whether heeding ChatGPT advice would be better or worse than no advice at all, I honestly cannot say. On the one hand, getting some advice would probably help in many, many cases - there's a lot of low-hanging fruit here; on the other, low-quality advice has the potential to ruin the lives of multiple people at any moment. This is like medical or lawyer advice: very high stakes in many cases. Should we rely on a model that doesn't really understand the underlying logic for advice on such matters? The "average" of parenting blogs can be a mish-mash of different philosophies or approaches glued together, making up something that sounds plausible but leads to catastrophic results years or decades later.

I don't know. Parenting is a complex problem in itself; then you have people generally not looking for advice or being unable to recognize good advice. It doesn't look like adding a hallucinating AI model to the mix would help much, but I may be wrong on this. I guess we'll find out the hard way: through people trying (or not) it out and then living with consequences (if any).
by Ethee | 2025-09-16 21:30:06+00:00
It's sad that we can't take an objective look at the facts of the matter without trying to point to one side and saying it's propaganda. Like is it so hard to say that both sides did bad things? I have no problem acknowledging that Israel is being the ultimate bully right now, is it not okay to say they have a reason? Or should we just ignore all reasoning and condem "killing bad" like I initially said this would devolve to? The US literally has the same problem right now it's kind of insane. How can you try to swat away historical facts, then in the same breath link me a random master's thesis from 1977... Like can we just go to Wikipedia, start from the beginning and then disagree over the facts that actually happened instead of trying to see it through the lens of some 20s something from the 70s?
by giobox | 2025-09-16 21:30:55+00:00
I don't find this particularly egregious - Google has long required ALL apps on the Android store to provide a privacy policy, even if they collect no data whatsoever.

A privacy policy can help confirm the absence of data collection as much as it can also be used to explain how collected data (if any) is used. If anything it's a helpful change, as it provides a standardized way for apps to confirm they collect no data.

Any app submitted to the iOS store has the same requirement to provide a privacy policy too, and again even if no data is collected.
by Coffeewine | 2025-09-16 21:30:55+00:00
Though I'm sure many will recoil in horror, it makes perfect sense. Modern language models are typically knowledgeable and non-judgemental, especially if you have a question which you fear reprisal from whomever else you might confide in or ask.

Given the concreteness of the output they provide, I'll be quite surprised if there aren't people out and out worshiping language models before the decade is out.
by bluGill | 2025-09-16 21:30:56+00:00
I'm not convinced - in a commercial airport taxiways are controlled by a ground control systems, not just pilots looking out the window. If the only airplanes around are also equips with the self taxi system they just report position to the central control and that tells them when to go. There needs to be emergency overrides for when that system fails, or a small plane without it is around, but that can be handled by stopping everyone else in the area until the hazard is gone.

Time will tell...
by sho_hn | 2025-09-16 21:30:58+00:00
> While building a career over such a project like KDE is certainly laudable it seems it leaves people in a very precarious position where the number of companies worldwide where you can be employed at any given time can be counted with the fingers in one hand, with some to spare

Your average KDE contributor is an expert in at least two widely used technologies, C++ and Qt, and typically in several more. Purely KDE-related work may not be a huge employment market, but trust me it's not that hard for KDE folks to find work in general, and you will find them in many high places.

That is to say that contributing is definitely not putting you into any precarious career positions :-)
by ratorx | 2025-09-16 21:31:00+00:00
I’m struggling to understand the chain of events, because the story starts midway. Is the claim that JUST the 2FA code was enough to pwn everything with no other vulnerabilities? If that’s the case, then that’s a way bigger problem.

Or (given the password database link at the end), is the sequence:

1) various logins are pwned (Google leak or just other logins, but using gmail as the email - if just other things, then password reuse?)

2) attacker has access to password

3) attacker phishes 2FA code for Google

4) attacker gains access to Google account

5) attacker gains access to Google authenticator 2FA codes

6) attacker gains access to stored passwords? (Maybe)

7) attacker gains the 2nd factor (and possible the first one, via the chrome password manager?) to a bunch of different accounts. Alternatively, more password reuse?

I guess the key question for me, was there password reuse and what was the extent, or did this not require that?

Disclaimer: work at Google, not related to security, opinions my own.
by jajuuka | 2025-09-16 21:31:05+00:00
I got distracted by the Quaker thing and went down a rabbit hole. But overall Jonathan seems like a decent person and major loss to KDE. Only thing I'm confused about is why he got shunned and I guess he had issues with his family too. Just about anything could explain that so I feel like that's a critical piece here but I'm not looking to violate anyones privacy or force them to divulge such information. Just something that could explain where Jonathan is coming from in all this.

I read Nate's response and it seems very hand wavy. Regardless hope Jonathan can continue doing what he loves somewhere else.
by phil21 | 2025-09-16 21:31:11+00:00
The easiest money I ever made was investing in natural gas infrastructure during the COVID insanity of everyone calling it dead due to renewables.

I really don’t understand the disconnect otherwise very intelligent people have on this subject. Every single person I’ve talked to in the actual industry seems to be aware of this fact and how dire things are getting. However it seems that everyone else believes that grid scale batteries are somehow going to save the day in the next decade or two.

Energy storage is energy storage. Natural gas is just a giant underground battery.

And that’s before you get to industrial uses of natural gas as a feedstock, while ignoring how much is still used for heating infrastructure and how long it would take to retrofit everything to heat pumps.

I often wonder what I’m missing, but I’m confident enough in this one to have put my money where my mouth is at least.
by LorenPechtel | 2025-09-16 21:31:23+00:00
Not my field but just looking at that I see variations as big as the signal they are supposedly detecting. Looks an awful lot like noise.

And note that it's possible for a vaccine to have a negative survival benefit yet be a good idea--in a population with herd immunity a vaccine provides little benefit to those who receive it so long as enough people receive it to provide the herd immunity. But if too many don't get it the risk from not getting it goes up considerably. Look at what has been happening with measles--measles was basically unheard of, the quacks said not to vaccinate (remember, Wakefield was attacking a specific vaccine that he stood to profit from the controversy, Worm Brain doesn't believe in infectious disease in the first place), now we have people dying of measles.
by rstuart4133 | 2025-09-16 21:31:44+00:00
> Batteries are an expensive solution that doesn't scale well at the grid level.

I'd like to see the reasoning behind why they don't pan out. LoFePO4 have dropped to $60/kWh in China. At 3,000 cycles that means they add about 2¢ to every kWh they store.

We don't get that cheap price where I live of course, but they being installed at a rapid pace now. I think most are being installed "behind the meter", which means they are being installed by people who pay retail. That's happening because paired with solar, they've dropped below the break even point at retail prices. Grid scale needs roughly another factor of 3 price drop to hit the same point. If CATL's $10/kWh sodium batteries that get 10,0000 cycles pan out, it will drive the price down by another factor of 10.

Your "demand" side response arises naturally with batteries. Those who can do without the power simply won't buy one. Or if they can get by with only a little emergency power, they buy a small one.

I experienced that first hand. I owned a 4.8kWh battery a while ago. That is by any definition is small. It costs about the same as a generator at today's prices (it didn't back then). A flood caused power to be cut off for a week. We only fired up the generator once, before discovering we could reduce our usage to what a small battery and a 6.6 kW solar array could cope with, even in the very overcast conditions that accompany a heavy rain event.
by ryandrake | 2025-09-16 21:32:11+00:00
Also, they didn't even migrate their own internal dialogs with each replacement. You can still uncover dialog styles all the way back to Windows 95-style if you poke around Windows 11 long enough. Whenever they came out with yet another successor, they haphazardly migrated a handful of P1 components and then called it a day.
by mschuster91 | 2025-09-16 21:32:27+00:00
Well, while it's hard to transport a 130 meter long windmill blade on a street... the 60 tons of water you'd need to replace it as ballast weight, that's two semi trucks worth. Easy to get to even the most remote sites, you need heavy machinery (and thus, roads) there anyway to build a foundation capable of supporting a 200m high tower.
by bigyabai | 2025-09-16 21:32:32+00:00
> It doesn't seem like a path toward a real solution.

As long as the Dahiya doctrine persists, it won't be. But that's an Israeli problem - their disproportionate response has been exploited for years. Hamas is fine letting Israel commit as many war crimes as it takes to satisfy their leadership, it very clearly hasn't changed tactics in recent years. The cost to Israeli international credibility seems to be "worth it" in their eyes.

So, if Israel wants peace they first have to stop escalation. But even if Hamas was defeated, we know that wouldn't be the end of things. Next the Druze has to be defended, which would result in a very justified annexation of south Syria and repeat of the same genocidal conditions in Gaza. They would also attempt to unseat power in Yemen, and then embroil America in an unwinnable war against Iran to sustain a true hegemony.
by andy99 | 2025-09-16 21:32:53+00:00
The bank's policies and those like it are the root cause of these scams. There are countless things like this where real "legit" behavior is completely indistinguishable or sometimes even worse than scams.

There will always be people that are "wallet inspector" stupid that you can't really shield from scams. But common sense practices and consistent messaging would solve a lot of the problem. There needs to be better accountability for companies that have these insecure practices. The same way they'd be held accountable for a data breach. Oh, wait...
by austin-cheney | 2025-09-16 21:33:08+00:00
It is not abstracted at all. It isn't awesome. It is organized according to the TypeScript definitions in the project. The rest of your opinion is challenging to infer because there isn't anything of substance. Really your opinion can be reduced to: I don't like it. That's fine, but it isn't helpful. Its also why I am forced to make assumptions.

It isn't about being proud, or awesome, or some silly vanity. Its about being fast, almost 100ms fast, and organized well enough for quick maintenance.
by caycep | 2025-09-16 21:33:12+00:00
I'm pretty sure Melton credited Forstall with giving with the support and cover for safari/khtml - she's written extensively about it.

https://donmelton.com/2013/01/10/safari-is-released-to-the-w...

And for Apple Maps, I remember reading somewhere that one reason Forstall refused to sign the infamous apology letter was that the initial release was from a team not directly under his supervision, but I can't find the old reference to that...granted, whatever went down was probably a joint failure of everyone involved
by phil21 | 2025-09-16 21:33:24+00:00
Residential energy use is the least interesting thing to think about at a grid scale. The grid actually will get more brittle and/or expensive if everyone wealthy enough to get batteries and solar gets them.

What about the manufacturing and industrial uses? Or the need for natural gas to be a feedstock?

How many batteries does it take to power a giant hyperscaler datacenter for a few days during poor weather conditions? You can’t really rely on backup generators at that usage rate as the expense (and environmental impact) gets to be crazy. Or you end up just building natural gas turbines co-located with such facilities and we are back to where we began.
by spapas82 | 2025-09-16 21:33:45+00:00
My two cents: 1. When somebody communicates with you and tells you it's urgent it's usually scam. They are trying to make you do stuff because of the urgency and so scam communication will always be urgent. Here in Greece one of the most common scams is to call older people and tell them that "your son has had a car accident and we need 5000 euros right now to operate on him, bring the money in a bag"

2. (More general) When a person initiates a communication with you it is for his benefit, not yours. If it was for your benefit then you'd initiated the communication to benefit from it. This is not only about scam but also about selling stuff or answering to polls or whatever. Be always sceptical when somebody you don't know contacts you.
by jdiff | 2025-09-16 21:33:59+00:00
Killing innocents is for the unwell, but assassinations have been a staple of politics for as long as humanity has had politics.

It also doesn't follow that an entire group can't be held for a single person's actions. There are plenty of organizations that go out of their way to shape individuals' ways of thinking in order (or otherwise compel them) to harm groups of innocent others. Those groups can and absolutely should be held accountable.
by kelnos | 2025-09-16 21:34:01+00:00
Fully disagree. The problem is that when you do need to upgrade, either for a bug fix, security fix, or new feature that you need/want, it's a lot easier to upgrade if your last upgrade was 3 months ago than if it was 3 years ago.

This has bitten me so many times (usually at large orgs where policy is to be conservative about upgrades) that I can't even consider not upgrading all my dependencies at least once a quarter.
by ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 | 2025-09-16 21:34:01+00:00
> These attacks may just be the final push I needed to take server rendering (without js) more seriously

Have fun, seems like a misguided reason to do that though.

A. A package hosted somewhere using a language was compromised!

B. I am not going to program in the language anymore!

I don't see how B follows A.
by loserGuy412 | 2025-09-16 21:34:14+00:00
What nonsense. Does he really think his friends are sharing the full extent of their difficulties? There is an exquisite feeling of shame, guilt, fear, and anger that goes with being jobless for the first time and making zero progress with the job search. When your savings is gone, when your credit cards are maxed and in collections, when you're selling your stuff to pay for food and electricity, when you're about to be evicted (and have no idea what to do with your stuff because you can't afford storage) - and you have to keep trying. Keep a smile on your face, act confident and happy because no-one wants to hire you if you're a drag. You revise your resume, you apply to tangential jobs - but you don't get any response, no interviews and no offers. The one you do get is a disinterested indian guy at a bank who is clearly not even hiring right now.

Then you think, oh well I can find some sort of job, right? Even if it's a service job. Wrong. They won't hire you with your resume. I applied to Trader Joes and was ghosted. The only people who'll 'hire' me are day labor places that pay $13/hour for digging ditches - you just have to show up at 4:45am and hope you get called on. Then there is also substitute teaching, $109/day and you have to shell out the $85 for a background check on yourself to even get started.

Long before all this starts you cancel everything that can be cancelled. You might keep internet thinking it is necessary to find work and work remotely, but eventually that goes. You even let your car insurance expire, playing the odds. You sell everything you can. You keep looking. You go through periods of terror and sanguine acceptance. No-one really knows what you're going through - the people you do tell don't know how to process it, or what it really means, and some of them get offended that you'd burden them with this when more important things are happening in the world, like Gaza or Trump.

There is something perverse about starving in the middle of such wealth. When you have always been one of the smartest people in the room, you have a ton of real-world software engineering experience and have built real systems that service millions of people, and you are discarded like you are nothing for apparently no reason. You wonder if it's you, but you hear growing rumbles of it happening to others. Honestly, I hope its just me because if this happens to us in any great numbers you WILL start knowing people who couldn't get back on their feet. I find it easy to imagine the two kinds of reactions: he must have had some problem to not get a job, or if only he had reached out I could have helped! Both useless, both avoid responsibility for your "friend" in need.
by parhamn | 2025-09-16 21:34:22+00:00
For a large subset of packages (like the browser ones), as a layman, it seems feasible to do static analysis for:

1) fetch calls

2) obfuscation (like sketchy lookup tables and hex string construction)

Like for (1) the hostname should be statically resolvable and immutable. So you can list the hostnames it fetches from as well.

Is this feasible or am I underestimating the difficulty? Javascript seems to have no shortage of static analysis tools.