MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Doing moral work as software engineer?
by rk65536 | 2025-10-22 23:40:35+00:00
Recently I've been thinking about my job (fintech) and realised I'm having (at best) a neutral to negative impact on society.

Does anyone have experience working in an organisation or on their own that is fulfilling their moral compass/needs? Is it even possible to do this in a for-profit corporation? Maybe working for an NGO could help with this moral vacuum? Doing some volunteering outside of software could be an option but a lot of those require a significant commitment which is hard to manage with a full-time job.

Would be great to hear your experience if you faced this problem and how you dealt with it? And if you managed to do it within the software industry?
by anarticle | 2025-10-22 23:41:05+00:00
No grand secret, just sharing info with the guild. Wield these tools and become powerful.

All my work is homey network, no corpos needed. See how far your white collar net goes when hiring freezes continue into 2026. I agree that your network is extremely popular.

I knuckled under during COVID with one job and was rewarded with layoffs, while our CEO made record profits. I will no longer accept this as the deal. https://layoffs.fyi

I deliver. It is as simple as that.

If you're here, we are peers whether you believe it or not. You're certainly right.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-10-22 23:41:12+00:00
The relatively benign legacy kernel level pointer-bug CVE chosen is hardly the worst thing from WireGuard or strongSwan over the years. However, it makes the point a priority reliable network side-channel administrative login is more robust under some use-cases.

Adding layers of complexity rarely improves security, and doesn't usually address the underlying issue of accountability. And I often ponder if a bastion host is even still meaningful in modern clouds. =3
by toprerules | 2025-10-22 23:41:25+00:00
> Coding is the means to an end, not the end itself.

For the early MIT hackers, and for many of us still today, it absolutely is.

It's also not about the input mechanisms, which have changed over the years. Solving problems, turning complexity into simplicity, cool hacks, that's what the hacker ethos is about. It's not about driving "value".

I suppose you also feel that there's no value in learning a musical instrument either.
by bayouborne | 2025-10-22 23:42:05+00:00
I am such a fan of Patrick O'Brian's "Master and Commander" series of books that I could not let myself even consider the possibility of listening to audio book narrated version. I felt O'Brian's prose voice on the page was so powerfully distinctive that any attempt at putting a real voice to his material would be awful. Imagine my surprise when I found Patrick Tull's work shockingly good.
by _ache_ | 2025-10-22 23:44:06+00:00
That is a very good question.

The short answer is you can't. But There is enough hints that he maybe implicated at least as much as his collaborators.

One for example, is a testimony of a "smuggler" that he deposited the dirty money 2 times to his collaborator and once directly to Sarkozy. Not enough, he could lie.

A write-up of a meeting preparing the coming of Sarkozy (in arabic) that suggests there is another important subject to the visit of Sarkozy in Lybia. In a way that coincides, we know that the discuss alone (Gaddafy, Sarkozy and Guéant without any diplomatic representative only translators). Not enough, maybe it was another secret subject.

That may explains the famous trip of Gaddafy in Paris. (10 of December 2007, which was an unexpected move regarding his implication in multiple "plane terrorist attacks" (DC10 UTA ( UTA 772),Pan Am Flight 103 (Lockerbie)) and the "greatness" of the trip which was in "great fanfare" very uncommon one. https://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=3984020 Maybe Sarkozy really trade welcoming trip for good contracts but nobody trusts that.

It can also explains the implication of Sarkozy in nato air strike on Lybia to help the rebels (that leads to Gaddafy death). Gaddafy may have ask for help to interfere the revolt, and Sarkozy couln't politicaly explains it so did the opposite. At that moment, Lybia official reported that he must get the money back and that he was financed by their money (one of the two who reported it is dead, the other one is in exile and it's more complicated because he first support Sarkozy to get extracted from Lybia as he was caught by the rebels). At that time, nobody trusted the Lybia representative as the regime was a terrorist state.

Sooo, you can't tell that he knows, but it does explains a lot.
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-22 23:44:09+00:00
> The same argument could reasonably be used to explain why no YouTube influencer would ever get more than 1,000 subscribers -

No, that would require a radically different argument, in pretty much every way.

> if everyone can upload videos that anyone can watch, nobody will really be famous because fame will become very evenly distributed, right?

No, Youtube makes distribution cheap, but it doesn't substitute for most of the other things that differentiate between videos; most of the skills that provide variation between videos are still there, and not cheaply substituted via YouTube.
by actsasbuffoon | 2025-10-22 23:45:17+00:00
It would be ridiculous if it were true. The methodology here seems a bit muddled and I’m not confident that they’ve measured what they think they’ve measured.

Many people do perceive a difference in how upsetting a death is. For example, we’ve got two people. Kevin killed an able-bodied adult male. Tom killed a 3 year old girl.

Based on nothing more than that, do you dislike Kevin or Tom more? Maybe I’m not supposed to have a preference here, but I’m definitely feeling angrier at Tom.

The same is true with men and women. There was a rather famous case with John Ellis, the executioner. He’d executed many men and he’d been okay with it. But when he was ordered to execute Edith Thomas, she was so terrified that she collapsed and had to be dragged to the gallows. He resigned the following year and had multiple suicide attempts, and was ultimately successful in taking his own life. He killed people for a living, but killing a woman affected him more deeply. This was over a century ago, so I don’t think this had anything to do with wokeness.

Meanwhile, studies have shown that people tend to view things as being more dangerous when they’re tied to immorality. For example, when asked how dangerous it is for a doctor to leave her child in a car for 15 minutes while she performs lifesaving CPR on an accident victim, people thought that was safer than the woman who left her child in a car for 15 minutes to have sex with her affair partner. Obviously the danger to the child is the same, but our moral judgement is different. So questions about ICE agents are probably colored by that. If a poor African villager doesn’t feed their child because the have no money or food, is that better or worse than an ICE agent who doesn’t feed their child because they’re too busy arresting people for “looking like an illegal immigrant?”

Is there some kind of bias being measured here? Yes, I think so. But I’m not confident that it’s even remotely comparable to what the author claims it is.
by Anthony-G | 2025-10-22 23:46:03+00:00
Thanks for the clarification about playing to a loop.

I have an iPhone and was thinking I could probably learn enough Garageband to create some simple loops that I could play along to. I’m currently at the stage where I’m still working on my timing and developing a solid rhythm (which doesn’t come naturally to me) so until now I’ve been focussing on strumming chords.

I’ve been following Justin Sandercoe’s lessons and was recently learning to play “A Girl Like You”¹. Up until this lesson, Justin always told the learner exactly what notes to play in a riff but for this one, he left it up to the learner to figure it out themselves. He gave enough clues for a beginner like me to figure it out (e.g., that notes are in the C minor pentatonic scale and that they go up and down followed by a big jump up, etc.). I had to listen very carefully and it took me a while but with the clues, I eventually figured out how to play the riff. I got a much greater buzz from learning this way, instead of simply being spoon-fed the notes so this has sparked my interest in ear-training and transscribing.

A looper pedal does sound like something that would be useful in the future when I start to learn more lead parts but I don’t think I’d benefit from it right now. Thanks, also, for the Hub Guitar recommendation. I hadn’t come across that site before and it looks like a good resource.

There’s a lot of bad shit in the modern world but if you want to learn music, it’s a great time to be alive: there are so many great resources for learning, good quality guitars are cheap, my €120 Spark Go modelling amp can emulate more tones than I could ever want, my smart-phone can be a metronome, tuner, ear-trainer, or digital audio workstation – and with Apple Music play 90% of the music I might want to listen to.

¹ https://www.justinguitar.com/songs/edwyn-collins-a-girl-like...
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-22 23:46:15+00:00
> Journalists are wrong all the time, but you still treat news like record and not a sample

Straw man. Everyone educated constantly argues over sourcing.

> I'd put money that AI mischaracterizes events at a LOWER rate than AI does

Maybe it does. But an AI sourcing journalists is demonstrably worse. Source: TFA.

> narratives shift over time, and journalists are more likely to succumb to this shift

Lol, we’ve already forgotten about MechaHitler.

At the end of the day, a lot of people consume news to be entertained. They’re better served by AI. The risk is folks of consequence start doing that, at which point I suppose the system self resolves by making them, in the long run, of no consequence compared to those who own and control the AI.
by underlipton | 2025-10-22 23:46:24+00:00
Legacy admissions policies account for a larger number of admissions and a greater boost than affirmative action policies (which are not racial quotas, which have been illegal since 1978) did. You're clearing space on your hard drive by going after midi files instead of mp4s. AA policies (again, not racial quotas, which haven't existed for half-a-century) had little effect on the admissions of straight white and Asian men (essentially the only demographics not covered under them). They're also currently illegal in college admissions themselves, so there seems to be no good-faith point in harping on them as something that gets "abused" (because they don't, because they literally can't be employed in any sense).

Use your non-sockpuppet, please.
by kjs3 | 2025-10-22 23:46:34+00:00
When a restaurant which you've been going to for years one day decides to serve you your favorite meal with a bit of poop on the side, do you not have the right to be upset about it? They're not under any obligation to serve you meals you're happy with.

That has got to be the most fallacious analogy I've seen in a long time, and that's ignoring the fact that serving poop would get you in serious trouble in most jurisdictions. "False equivalence" barely covers it.

There is a basic social contract of not being an asshole to users of your product

Nope, nope...you win. Even more fallacious. Being an asshole to your users is a meme in OSS it's so common. Someone should tell that Linus guy about this 'social contract' he agreed to and signed that he's in violation of. /s

Claiming you support this philosophy, while acting against it, is hypocritical, and abusive towards people who do believe in it.

You think there's a philosophy. Some other people here do. There is no consistent OSS philosophy. There wasn't back when Stallman was thinking "what should I call this thing that is Not Unix" and there isn't today. If that was remotely true we'd still be happily using GPLv2. Because at the end of the day there is what is written in the license, and then there is wishful thinking. Sometimes wishful thinking results in nice things, and sometimes...well...here we are.

If you want to place restrictions on how your software is used and who gets to enjoy it, that's fine, but make those terms explicit by choosing the appropriate license and business model from the start.

Ignoring the laugh-out-loud silliness of "you should pick all these things about your startup day #1 and NEVER CHANGE THEM", exactly what terms of their OSS license did they violate? Be explicit. Don't wave your hand and say "but social contract that doesn't exist!", "but philosophy I made up and want to apply to people who didn't agree to it!". Because a license only means what's written down in it, not what we want it to mean. I get that you think there should be a "No assholes, we'll never, ever pivot to meet market changes and we pinky swear we won't rug pull on you" license that people should be forced to use, but I don't think to many people will sign up for it. See: GPLv2.
by Marsymars | 2025-10-22 23:47:10+00:00
> That’s fine, then those games are not available to you.

See, this is my problem. I have no interest in online multiplayer, so anti-cheat is purely of negative value to me.

I understand the problem with cheaters, and if I did play multiplayer games, I'd want every effort taken to eliminate cheating.

I'd be perfectly happy if I could uncheck the "anti-cheat and online capabilities" checkbox in the game installer (or have it default unchecked when the OS indicates that anticheat isn't supported), and I could go on my way and play my single player game.

IMO that's a better solution technically, and for me personally, but I don't know that there's much money to be made in sales to single-player-only non-microtransaction-consuming gamers who were otherwise forgoing games.
by trollbridge | 2025-10-22 23:47:20+00:00
A friend / client of mine used some kind of WordPress type of hosting service with a simple redirect. The host got on the bad sites list.

This also polluted their own domain, even when the redirect was removed, and had the odd side effect that Google would no longer accept email from them. We requested a review and passed it, but the email blacklist appears to be permanent. (I already checked and there are no spam problems with the domain.)

We registered a new domain. Google’s behaviour here incidentally just incentivises bulk registering throwaway domains, which doesn’t make anything any better.
by linguae | 2025-10-22 23:47:51+00:00
From the article: “France is different. France is romantic. It’s poetic. It’s revolutionary. It’s meticulous. It’s the land where the word craft still means something. We don’t dream big; we perfect small. We don’t scale; we sculpt. We don’t pitch; we argue. The first quality of a French entrepreneur has always been craftsmanship. We don’t create to conquer. We create to master. There are no better artisans in the world… Look around: restaurants, fashion houses, perfumes, wines, software, architecture, even mathematical elegance. Craftsmanship isn’t a niche here; it’s the baseline. It’s a national religion.”

As a computer science professor in Silicon Valley who has never been to France, I now have the sudden urge to learn more about France and visit one day. I don’t know much about French culture, but I’m very interested in craftsmanship and elegance.

I’ve noticed over the years that many interesting contributions to programming language research were made in Western Europe, especially statically-typed functional programming. I could be wrong, but I get the sense that there’s a lot of theoretical CS research coming out of Europe, while there’s more of an applied focus in the United States.
by mikestorrent | 2025-10-22 23:48:08+00:00
I haven't seen anyone post any progress on factoring large numbers with quantum computers in a while. Annealers won't do it efficiently, but probably still hold the record anyway, for a relatively small number you could do classical hardware. Gate model machines with enough qubits to do it are still ages off. Bitcoin should find a way to transition to a post-quantum algorithm, but that's about it. As long as they do it before anyone has a big enough QPU, they're fine, and nobody is even close, it seems.
by 9rx | 2025-10-22 23:48:16+00:00
It is a huge boost in developer ergonomics.

But doesn't change the tests you need to write, and those tests are going to incidentally cover anything the type system is also going to catch, so the type system isn't going to somehow make your software more reliable.

A much more expressive type system can get you there, but you won't find that in any language anyone actually uses on a normal basis.
by jonstewart | 2025-10-22 23:49:18+00:00
What I miss from the Perforce and Subversion days is committing directly to trunk in a team environment. Now everything revolves around PRs and lengthy code review. With direct commits to trunk, everyone was in a rush to get their commit in before someone else did, so they didn’t have to update and have conflicts. This made commits small, frequent, and usually well-scoped. What -sucked- was when you did need to do a large refactoring or other big change, then that was work best done on a weekend because branching and merging didn’t work very well.

Git’s model is right for PRs for open source projects where one day you could wind up with code from someone you don’t know and you need to take your time in review and possibly making further changes before merging. But as much as git’s a meaningful upgrade over Perforce and (especially) Subversion, branching and merging is not the right default model for normal team development.
by fhsm | 2025-10-22 23:49:47+00:00
The article is clear — lottery offer of a seat in a school which met inclusion criteria. Inclusion criteria are clearly outlined in the supplemental materials which are a single URL away which also include details on the allocation.

https://www.pnas.org/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.1073%2...

Talk of causation anywhere other than the unit of randomization is speculation.
by solarkraft | 2025-10-22 23:50:06+00:00
Stalwart is, from what I’ve read, an excellent JMAP server.

JMAP is, from what I’ve read, a great protocol for building an E-Mail (and now also others) client on top of.

Since I would like an innovative way to access my E-Mails, but do not want to self-host, I would find it interesting to use Stalwart as the server component of an E-Mail client: Data is somehow synced into Stalwart via the “ugly” protocols and I get a nice API to build an elegant client on top of.

My basic research shows that something like IMAP-IMAP sync seems to be a thing. Has anyone done something like this, perhaps even with Stalwart? (this of course grows in complexity for each new protocol to be proxied).

I believe having this kind of setup easily accessible could jumpstart a new generation of E-Mail clients on top of JMAP because it (relatively elegantly?) circumvents the chicken-egg problem by allowing all existing IMAP mailboxes to be accessed via JMAP.
by exdeejay_ | 2025-10-22 23:50:49+00:00
This code only does the most basic and naive regex filtering that even a beginner XSS course's inputs would work against. With the Node example code and input string:

<p>Hello <scr<script>ipt>alert(1)</scr<script>ipt> World</p>

The program outputs:

$ node . <p>Hello <script>alert(1)</script> World</p> { sanitizedHTML: '<p>Hello <script>alert(1)</script> World</p>', wasModified: true, removedElements: [], removedAttributes: [] }

Asking a chatbot to make a security function and then posting it for others to use without even reviewing it is not only disrespectful, but dangerous and grossly negligent. Please take this down.
by arjie | 2025-10-22 23:50:49+00:00
A few I use are:

#!/usr/bin/env bash # ~/bin/,dehex echo "$1" | xxd -r -p

and

#!/usr/bin/env bash # ~/bin/,ht highlight() { # Foreground: # 30:black, 31:red, 32:green, 33:yellow, 34:blue, 35:magenta, 36:cyan # Background: # 40:black, 41:red, 42:green, 43:yellow, 44:blue, 45:magenta, 46:cyan escape=$(printf '\033') sed "s,$2,${escape}[$1m&${escape}[0m,g" } if [[ $# == 1 ]]; then highlight 31 $1 elif [[ $# == 2 ]]; then highlight 31 $1 | highlight 32 $2 elif [[ $# == 3 ]]; then highlight 31 $1 | highlight 32 $2 | highlight 35 $3 elif [[ $# == 4 ]]; then highlight 31 $1 | highlight 32 $2 | highlight 35 $3 | highlight 36 $4 fi

I also use the comma-command pattern where I prefix my personal scripts with a `,` which allows me to cycle between them fast etc.

One thing I have found that's worth it is periodically running an aggregation on one's history and purging old ones that I don't use.
by Gigachad | 2025-10-22 23:51:00+00:00
Idk about that. The selection is pretty huge. Sonic racing just came out with 4 player local multi player, stardew valley has it, the majority of Nintendo games. Almost the majority of games designed for a TV and controller have local multiplayer. And there’s software you can use to split screen most games which don’t have it by just running two instances of the game.
by fallingfrog | 2025-10-22 23:51:52+00:00
I am unable to comprehend the state of mind that would lead a person to publish an ad like this. Like, you can't make a job a part of your core identity. Everyone there is going to forget you 10 seconds after you quit. Which, you can know with certainty is something that will happen sooner or later. So then what happens to your core identity? Do you just become an empty shell, waiting on the sidewalk for someone new to tell you what to do?

But yeah the attitude on display here is terrifying to be honest. Honestly this guy needs medication and therapy. There are some deep seated issues here.
by beaker52 | 2025-10-22 23:53:04+00:00
Perhaps take a look at jj and give it a go. Maybe you’ll like it.

I know I did. The fact I can use it with git and it doesn’t interfere with any GitHub PR workflows means no-one needs to know I use it. I enjoy the jj model. Maybe you could too, and it’s not a crazy investment of time and energy. It’s an evening playing around with a code kata or something.

Then working with vcs becomes that little bit more enjoyable.
by torginus | 2025-10-22 23:53:15+00:00
So much this, considering the wave of shitty cloud subscription based smart home products (half of which have already been bricked by their backing companies going out of business), Home Assistant sounds like something that's too good to be true.

It also demonstrates to a wide, non-technical audience that home networking, and eschewing cloud services is not difficult at all. I have strong hopes for a local-first future.

In fact, I hope, considering how much the EU has been pushing digital sovereignity, I'd love if they introduced some legislation that mandated that any product that could be concievably made to work without a cloud, should be forced to do so.

Half of the home automation crap they are selling phones home to some central server (Tuya I'm looking at you mainly), and there are lot of products like my AC which also only work with a cloud integration which I'm not super comfortable with.
by toprerules | 2025-10-22 23:53:25+00:00
> there are teams already that absolutely do not hand-code anything anymore

The only instances I've seen so far are from developers who are really, really bad at coding, but, under the false delusion of the Dunning-Kruger effect, believe they're generating reams of "high quality" code.

Unfortunately this isn't like isn't a rare occurrence at all.