MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kypro | 2025-09-17 10:55:14+00:00
> How do you reconcile that with developers over 45 finding it impossible to find jobs, are all of them asking for "unreasonable" pay?

What's "reasonable" depends on perspective. Truth is it makes relatively little sense hiring tech workers in the US today. I'm not saying I'm happy about that, but unlike a few decades ago, the majority of tech talent in the world today is overseas, and increasingly in low-labour cost countries like India which previously didn't have the internet access or education to compete.

Given this today a reasonable cost to a business for software development is lower in the same way a reasonable cost for manufacturing is lower because of low-cost manufacturing in places like China.

I'm just pointing out what's happening. For a while now people with an education thought the reason they could find good work and were doing okay relative to uneducated people was because of effort. And while this was somewhat true, it's probably better explained by much lower levels of international labour competition from low-wage countries. It takes skill to be good at manufacturing too, but that skill doesn't protect you from extremely low cost labour which doesn't quite have comparable skills, but can do the job almost just as well.

People should be thinking about this. Economists will argue (perhaps correctly) that allowing the free market to do its think will result in higher GDP growth. But if people are unemployed and struggling to find good work, what's the benefit of that GDP growth? There should be some effort to balance what's reasonable from an employers perspective with what's reasonable for employees.
by mattlutze | 2025-09-17 10:56:10+00:00
Recall please Grover Norquist. In the 90s and 2000s he leveraged proximity with the post-Reagan new conservative wave to grow a relatively modest org, Americans for Tax Reform, to a near universal policy chokehold on the Republican party.

Through a socially viral "no net new tax" promise, once Norquist secured pledges from party leaders, essentially all federal elected Republicans had to pledge as well. They were otherwise threatened with losing endorsement from Norquist and faced being ostracized and primaried. The leaders themselves were then caught in the net and none felt like they could break.

ATR influence has waned in the face of MAGA's more populist fiscal liberalism, but that was pretty much just one guy.

Extend that singular goal to a network with a narrow and aligned interest, and it can be very effectively maintained with intelligent and shifting messaging and reputation management. Consider how people like Loomer and Raichik that have emerged, not through established power brokers, but organically through social media platforms, and the significant influence they possess even in the White House.
by user34283 | 2025-09-17 10:56:11+00:00
There is little point in you scrutinizing new dependencies.

Many who claim to fully analyze all dependencies are probably lying. I did not see anyone in the comments sharing their actual dependency count.

Even if you depend only on Jest - Meta's popular test runner - you add 300 packages.

Unless your setup is truly minimalistic, you probably have hundreds of dependencies already, which makes obsessing over some more rather pointless.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-09-17 10:56:12+00:00
I hope in the future I can work with that kind of designer. Maybe it is just my limited experience, but in that limited experience, web designers care way too much about details and design features/ideas/concepts, that are not part of HTML or CSS and then frontend developers would have to push back and tell the web designer, that form follows function and that the medium they design for is important. Basic design principles actually, that the designers should know themselves, just like they should know the medium they are targeting (semandic HTML, CSS, capabilities of them both, a tiny bit about JS too), to keep things reasonable. But most frontend devs are happy to build fancy things with JS instead of pushing back when it matters. And not so many frontend devs want to get into CSS deeply and do everything they can to avoid JS. So needless things do get implemented all the time.
by iainmerrick | 2025-09-17 10:56:37+00:00
You're reading an awful lot into something not being included in a radio interview.

We should consider the possibility that the UN report does in fact cover that point. To find out we should look at the original source: https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies...

There are many occurrences of "intent" and "destroy" in that document. It includes both the definition you mentioned, and analysis of how it applies in Gaza.

To answer the point that a lot of the data comes from Hamas, the other major data source is the Israeli military (e.g. the "COGAT" link somebody posted above with pictures of grocery stores overflowing with produce) so it's surely equally suspect. If third parties were given free access to do their own investigations, that would be useful, to be sure. The party blocking access (and blocking humanitarian aid) is the Israeli military.
by squirrellous | 2025-09-17 10:57:20+00:00
Even new projects have good reasons to use c++. Maybe the ecosystem is built around it. Maybe competent c++ programmers are easier to find than rust ones. Maybe you need lots of dynamic loading. Maybe you want drop-in interop with C. Maybe you’re just more comfortable with c++.

I agree with the discipline aspect. C++ has a lot going against it. But despite everything it will continue to be mainstream for a long time, and by the looks of it not in the way of COBOL but more like C.
by bayindirh | 2025-09-17 10:57:28+00:00
These type comments always remind me that we forget where we come from in terms of computation, every time.

It's important to remember Rust's borrow checker was computationally infeasible 15 years ago. C & C++ are much older than that, and they come from an era where variable name length affected compilation time.

It's easy to publicly shame people who do hard things for a long time in the light of newer tools. However, many people who likes these languages are using them longer than the languages we champion today were mere ideas.

I personally like Go in these days for its stupid simplicity, but when I'm going to do something serious, I'll always use C++. You can fight me, but never pry C++ from my cold, dead hands.

For note, I don't like C & C++ because they are hard. I like them because they provide a more transparent window the processor, which is a glorified, hardware implemented PDP-11 emulator.

Last, we shall not forget that all processors are C VMs, anyway.
by fdsfdsfdsaasd | 2025-09-17 10:57:50+00:00
> We scanned 1338 dependencies and found 94 problems.

Just what I want in my terminal app.

I don't like the endless "security audit" noise, but there are 13 critical issues, some dating back 4 years, and including cryptogrpahy-related flaws (and that's just the top-level yarn.lock).
by thombles | 2025-09-17 10:59:59+00:00
I think if somebody wants to see library distribution channels tightened up they need to be very specific about what they would like to see changed and why it would be better, since it would appear that the status quo is serving what people actually want - being able to create and upload packages and update them when you want.

> But right now there are still no signed dependencies and nothing stopping people using AI agents, or just plain old scripts, from creating thousands of junk or namesquatting repositories.

This is as close as we get in this particular piece. So what's the alternative here exactly - do we want uploaders to sign up with Microsoft accounts? Some sort of developer vetting process? A curated lib store? I'm sure everybody will be thrilled if Microsoft does that to the JS ecosystem. (/s) I'm not seeing a great deal of difference between having someone's NPM creds and having someone's signing key. Let's make things better but let's also be precise, please.
by ACCount37 | 2025-09-17 11:00:13+00:00
The primary source is: measured LLM performance on once-human-exclusive tasks - such as high end natural language processing or commonsense reasoning.

Those things were once thought to require a human mind - clearly, not anymore. Human commonsense knowledge can be both captured and applied by a learning algorithm trained on nothing but a boatload of text.

But another important source is: loads and loads of mech interpret research that tried to actually pry the black box open and see what happens on the inside.

This found some amusing artifacts - such as latent world models that can be extracted from the hidden state, or neural circuits corresponding to high level abstracts being chained together to obtain the final outputs. Very similar to human "abstract thinking" in function - despite being implemented on a substrate of floating point math and not wet meat.
by thesegfault42 | 2025-09-17 11:00:24+00:00
We’ve been rethinking observability at Blueground and decided to document the process.

The first post in the series is about logging, with some lessons we found valuable:

• Logs are primarily for troubleshooting, not alerting. • Standardization across services makes debugging far easier. • Context matters — and we’re moving into an era where logs will be consumed by AI as much as by humans.

This is part of a broader series (intro here: https://engineering.theblueground.com/a-software-engineers-g... ), but Part 1 stands on its own.

Curious how other teams enforce (or don’t enforce) logging standards, do you use schemas, guidelines or let teams define their own?
by sho_hn | 2025-09-17 11:00:33+00:00
I used to work for Blue Systems for about 7 years, including a turn as its CTO, until 2019. I was not party to the Techpaladin transition in any way and have no special knowledge on that, but I did work with many of the people who remain there now and recruited quite a few of them from the commmunity.

I just want to say that none of that team are "techbros" or in it for the money. I was a volunteer, entirely unpaid KDE contributor for another 7 years before BS came along, and many of the other contractors and employees were similarly long-time contributors already. BS as well operated for a long time without a specific profit motive.

I was the person who very initially set up the Valve project that TP now continues to work on, and as a team we simply took to the idea of working with Valve because it meant having a solid customer who was interested in doing foundational work upstream to improve KDE software, which is what we all wanted to do the most. Valve's user audience - gamers who take their computers seriously and love using them - overlaps KDE's in spirit in many ways, Valve's engineers absolutely know their stuff and ask for the right things, and it all made a lot of mission sense immediately.

This is all very much still done by oldschool hackers who will keep the lights on probably till the end of their productive careers.
by superice | 2025-09-17 11:00:48+00:00
That still really isn't a reason. I think I can extrapolate where they are going with this, which will be something like 'I have a ton of 720x400 hardware CRTs sitting around that I need to use/support/deal with'. But that is never explicitly stated, you can completely read it as 'oh it's neat that 80x25 matches up with the number of image lines on old CRT displays and here is the math to show it'.
by liampulles | 2025-09-17 11:02:03+00:00
Because I need the scripts and snippets I write for my repos to work for other developers, I'm going to write them to be bash compatible. That applies also to scripts and snippets written by others that I consume.

So if a shell is not bash syntax compatible, then it really has to offer some astonishingly useful features to offset my having to translate and map the scripts I need to run for it.

Murex does not interpret "$(cmd args)". So unfortunately, I cannot use it. I know it's not fair, and I know that is promoting a lock-in of what shells can do, but I need to get shit done I'm afraid.
by account42 | 2025-09-17 11:02:50+00:00
> you can and should use char[] in both languages

Not for temporaries initialized from a string constant. That would create a new array on the stack which is rarely what you want.

And for globals this would preclude the the data backing your string from being shared with other instances of the same string (suffix) unless you use non-standard compiler options, which is again undesirable.

In modern C++ you probably want to convert to a string_view asap (ideally using the sv literal suffix) but that has problems with C interoperability.
by mat0 | 2025-09-17 11:03:44+00:00
Whenever I open one of these sites that asks me to confirm tracking, if it doesn’t have an easy way to cancel or reject, I just leave the page. The banner had hundreds of different companies listing “legitimate” reasons to track, and after turning off around 10, I noticed that I had hundreds to go. Sorry, I hope people enjoy your website. I just cannot see a reason to accept that amount of tracking. I don’t care that much about C++ anyway
by unwind | 2025-09-17 11:03:46+00:00
Wow, massive ego boost, thanks a lot!

I thought I had released the GTK 3.x version, but I guess not, then. It might have been that there was something I just couldn't get to behave right, gentoo is somewhat picky about its UI and tries to make it do the right thing in ways that GTK sometimes isn't ready for.

Today I guess the target would be GTK 4.x, I tried to align with the latest main version back when I was maintaining it more.

Oh and 2016 makes sense, had my first kid in 2015 ... :|
by 2d8a875f-39a2-4 | 2025-09-17 11:03:46+00:00
It's a stretch to pin blame on Microsoft. They're probably the reason the service is still up at all (TFA admits as much). In hindsight it's likely that all they wanted from the purchase was AI training material. At worst they're guilty of apathy, but that's no worse than the majority of npm ecosystem participants.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-09-17 11:04:05+00:00
I bought a Clevo-based gaming laptop for programming because it had a good CPU. It was a really bad decision.

It will thermal throttle itself to uselessness within seconds of a load being placed on it. The dGPU idles at about 15 W, the entire power budget of a single board computer, and it's one of those problematic nvidia GPUs that will never be properly supported on Linux. The Windows app that controlled things like fans and keyboard LEDs was so obnoxiously bad they required over one minute to show a window on the screen, reverse engineering that thing was one of the best things I've ever done. Mercifully the firmware wasn't broken by default but I still didn't manage to reverse engineer the ACPI nonsense, I dumped the tables and decompiled the code but there was nothing useful.

Looks like Apple has a monopoly on good taste and giving half a shit about the quality of the products they sell. I wish the Apple silicon macbooks existed at the time.
by nurettin | 2025-09-17 11:04:12+00:00
This is a failed attempt at muddying the waters. You don't know what move semantics is? You go learn what they are. Best/simplest way is to just disable your copy ctor.

You need to know the operator overload semantics for a particular use case? It is not exactly hidden lore, there are even man pages (libstdc++-doc, man 3 std::ostream) or just use std::println.

You are stuck instantiating std::vector? Then you will be stuck in any language anyway.
Ask HN/PG: Is the average screen resolution good enough for serif fonts yet?
by Y_Y | 2025-09-17 11:04:16+00:00
You say in "Taste for Makers" that setting text in sans serif fonts was a mistake. So why do you use them on your site?

(From https://paulgraham.com/gfaq.html 2025-09-17)

I was thinking about this statement from pg. Nowadays most of the screens (ymmv) I deal with have more than 400 ppi. To my average eyes there's no resolution difference with a standard paperback.

Is it time to switch? Should I guard serifs behind a resolution check on my website? Maybe gradually introduce them on a sliding scale?

I was talking about books. The resolution of computer screens is much lower.
by InfinityByTen | 2025-09-17 11:05:09+00:00
I actually was looking for a modern age terminal recently, even though I'm sort of happy with how xfce4-terminal has worked for me with regards to tabs and customization.

I was trying to make ssh work on tabby when I realised it's just a glorified browser, I stopped in my tracks and purged the thing. I do enjoy the UX of moving around tabs and changing my mental contexts, but this is too much a price to pay. I don't mind download sizes as long as the application is performant, customizable, and don't have unnecessary backdoors.
by Longhanks | 2025-09-17 11:05:51+00:00
This chat control topic is undemocratic, allegedly illegal in many jurisdictions (such as Germany), yet, keeps coming up ever and ever again, and the politicians face no consequences whatsoever.

Endeavour like these make people vote for extremists, distrust the EU and democracies, or just give up on politics for good. These EU politicians endangering freedom, justice and democracy must be held accountable, with the most powerful punishments available.
by nlitened | 2025-09-17 11:06:08+00:00
> nature existed long before humans and exists beyond humans and will exist long after us

If this is true (and I believe it is), then it does not really matter much what humanity does in the big picture. Might as well drain some swamps and seas to reclaim some land.

> On earth, there are living creatures with their own motivations that inhabit all the remote wildernesses and deep seas

You can both acknowledge that, and believe that human must do what's good for humans and animals that are good for humans.
by diordiderot | 2025-09-17 11:06:50+00:00
A persecuted minority was granted independence from a previously colonial, totalitarian, theocratic state. Since then they have been engaged in an perpetual war of terror.

Japan and Germany had it 'easy' because their defeat was so brutal, and their de-radicalization was so thorough.

Israel's real crime was being too lenient after the 6 days war, exposing themselves and radicalized Palestinians to the violence that's lasted to this day.
by slacktivism123 | 2025-09-17 11:07:23+00:00
Tracking-free link: https://old.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1nifp6c/they...

PSA: Much like YouTube's "si" parameter which tracks your individual share of a video, the /s/ value in the URL is a Reddit tracking ID generated upon selecting "Share".

These new links work like short URLs and will only redirect you after Reddit associates your visit with that particular short URL.
by johanneskanybal | 2025-09-17 11:07:28+00:00
I think that’s the article but tl;dr that’s only part of the problem and already widly adopted with mutexes in say dynamo or whatever flavor you chose. This is about not having global locks or 10 arbitary random locks per subdomain but rather figuring out the exact resources affected and locking only those.

Sounds very neat if you’re an big enough org.
by lawnchair | 2025-09-17 11:07:30+00:00
You are right that the simplicity of the state file is a strength and we do not want to lose that. One of our goals with Stategraph is to make state just as easy to inspect through both the command line and the UI.

Not every Terraform setup runs into scaling pain. The trouble tends to show up in larger repos with thousands of resources where teams share big chunks of infra. That is where global locks and full refreshes become a bottleneck and where we think graph semantics help.
by p_l | 2025-09-17 11:08:03+00:00
Macbook essentially involved Apple hardcoding 11th hour fixes selected by product code in their OS level drivers after utterly fucking up ACPI tables in ways that would make the discussed bug blush. Pretty much most of what BootCamp did on later models, and what various hackintosh "special drivers" did, was fix things like HDA tables located in completely wrong place.

Steam Deck is just... extensively tested and debugged in ways that I don't think Apple did unless they got an egg on the face in national media (remember "you're holding it wrong?")
by Sharlin | 2025-09-17 11:08:04+00:00
Signed overflow is undefined behavior in C, so pretty much anything could happen. Though this crash seems to be deterministic between platforms and compilers, so probably not about that. TFA says the variable is being compared to its previous value, and that comparison presumably assumes new < old cannot happen. And when it does, it could easily lead to eg. stack corruption. C after all happily goes to UB land if, for example, some execution path doesn’t return a value in a function that’s supposed to return a value.
by pclmulqdq | 2025-09-17 11:08:44+00:00
What makes me a C++ "cultist"? I like the language, but I don't think it's a cult. And yes, they do implement their own wheel all the time (usually expertly) because libraries are reserved for functions that really need it: writing left pad is really easy. They also use third-party libraries all the time, too. They just generally pay attention to the source of that library. Google and Facebook also publish a lot of C++ libraries under one umbrella (abseil and folly respectively), and people often use one of them.
by varispeed | 2025-09-17 11:09:00+00:00
Calling it “also about catching criminals” is a framing trick. Sure, if you surveil 450 million people you’ll find some criminals - that’s statistically inevitable. But you’ll also drag far more innocents into suspicion.

Even under generous assumptions - 0.01% offender prevalence, 90% detection accuracy, and just 1% false positives - you’d correctly flag ~40,500 offenders while generating ~4.5 million false alarms. For every offender, over 110 innocents are treated as suspects.

That imbalance isn’t collateral damage - it’s the defining flaw of mass scanning. It would overwhelm police, damage lives, and normalise suspicion of everyone. And “compromise” here only means deciding how much of that broken trade-off to accept.
by giantg2 | 2025-09-17 11:09:56+00:00
I remember joining my company right out of college. In the interview we started talking about open source since I had some open source Android apps. I asked if the company contributed back to the projects it used. The answer was no, but that they were planning to. Over a decade later... they finally created a policy to allow commits to open source projects. It's been used maybe 3 times in it's first year or so. Nobody has the time and the management culture doesnt want to waste budget on it.
by trhway | 2025-09-17 11:10:15+00:00
I didn't get it - do you agree or disagree that the Ministry of Health is HAMAS which is a terrorist organization which in particular perpetrated genocide of Jewish people on Oct 7, 2023.

HAMAS perpetrated the genocide of Jewish people, and now its propaganda is used as the basis to declare genocide supposedly perpetrated by the Jewish state while fighting against HAMAS. You don't see anything strange here?

And another strange thing - why UN didn't call out the genocide of Jewish people by HAMAS?
by DoctorOW | 2025-09-17 11:10:22+00:00
> Proof: this comment being downvoted. Downvoting as a mechanism is akin to censorship. It's being abused.

I agree it's hard to talk about anti-establishment issues on corporate owned media, but I feel like HN isn't really putting a thumb on the scale. As my proof, you assumed the comment was being downvoted, but it shows no sign of that (isn't particularly low, not faded at all). Unpopular opinions will obviously do poorly in a popularity contest, but I feel the tide is shifting among those informed on the issues.