skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: HackBud – I no longer struggle to find teammates for Hackathons
Hey there,

Last year, I participated in a hackathon and wanted to connect with people to build a team. I went to Discord and other channels to find people who would be interested in participating, but it took a lot of time to find people and reach out to them and decided to participate alone.

Then came the idea of solving my problem by building a platform where I could find people with the same mentality who want to build cool stuff in hackathons, without much effort. Hence, HackBud was born.

I am launching it on Product Hunt today: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/hackbud
KeepassXC.

https://keepassxc.org/

Recently switched over from a premium Bitwarden account to it. Import from Bitwarden was a breeze.

Note that KeepassXC only writes to a local encrypted db file. Syncing that across devices is left to you. I used Syncthing for that.
Wow. I had no idea. That would explain why no one's uploaded a csam detection model to Hugging Face yet. Smartest thing to do then is probably use a model for detecting nsfw content and categorically delete the superset. Perhaps this is the reason the whole Internet feels like LinkedIn these days.
Overall interesting read. I'm rooting for Sean. If he has faith that C++ is not too far gone to be saved...perhaps I can, too.

> Explain the infeasibility of making legacy lvalue- and rvalue-references memory safe.

> Relocation must replace move semantics

He advocates for adding lots of things to the language, but that point is a massive change to the language IMO. I definitely think move semantics are awful; as is the hierarchy of rvalues (xvalues and glvalues) is nuts, but at this point can they be removed from the language? Or do I misinterpret the point? Perhaps this is different between unsafe blocks (vs default safe blocks)?
> I don't know how you could even assume that a whale skeleton would drip petroleum.

Rather than being an ass, perhaps you could read my comment and note that I quote the article in which it appears to reference a goddamn oil tanker as the cause of death. We fucking know whales were hunted for their oil, now are you ready to join the adults in the conversation or are you going to continue to be a know-it-all prick?
One of the most important roles that titles play in the tech industry (at least the US-centric tech industry) is to help evaluate compensation.

Companies subscribe to reports which provide "salary band" compensation data across the industry. When it's time to consider raises, management with access to those reports can then see if their pay is more-or-less in line with other similar companies.

This means titles like "Senior Engineer", "Staff Engineer" etc do actually have very meaningful purposes - they can be used to attempt to map together different levels at different companies in order to determine if you are being under- or over-paid for the role you are in.

If you've never held a management position that includes decisions around compensation increases you are likely unaware of quite how much thought and effort goes into this process.

Don't get me wrong: it sucks, and it's still mainly a bunch of tea-leaf reading (with serious real-world consequences for employees) - but it's important to understand this any time you're wondering why titles work the way they do.
They never had any meaning to begin with. Outside of ostensibly knowing how to program, the title carried with it no firmly held, measured, or maintained any baseline expertise of any kind. It's always been a hodgepodge of ad hoc criteria on a job by job and hype cycle by hype cycle basis.
Title inflation generally occurs when a profession becomes old, standardized, and uninteresting. See investment banking, etc, where the median title is a VP
I've been using LTS releases for just about everything since 10.04. It's been very stable; the transition through all the init systems wasn't that fun (sysv, upstart, systemd), but it's mostly just always worked. And it's sorta the default for 3rd party software to support first. Congrats to the team.
I can't help but notice the irony in pointing out that Software Engineering titles have lost their meaning without addressing the fact that it may be one of the largest misuses of the title "Engineer" (legally protected in many countries as requiring a professional engineering license by an accredited engineering body) that is in common use today.

If the author went a little bit deeper they might be able to make the same arguments about how the title "Engineer" has lost a lot of meaning in the public due to the cavalier attitude with which many organizations throw it around.
Not sure what to make of this. Is this a feature, or a whole design?

The idea here is simply that if the whole call tree can be examined, rather than only looking at one module at a time, less annotation is needed. That's reasonable enough, although it may result in long compile times.

What I don't see here is:

- How are circular references handled?

- C++ objects implicitly have links from parent to child and child to parent. So there's built-in circularity. How does that work?

- What about interior mutability?

Examining the whole call tree is useful. It allows catching mutex deadlocks where a thread locks against itself and stalls. It may be possible to replace something like Rust's RefCell with something, perhaps "SafeCell", that supports the same .borrow() and .borrow_mut operations, checking them at compile time for overlapping borrow scopes.
I'm a BBCode engineer specialising in AI prompts.
I worked with a very popular and senior journalist in India and after decades of experience he was, well, a Senior Journalist. I was, at about 3 years of experience then, a Senior Software Engineer. It felt so funny for me at that time.
We Need to Stop Treating Technology Like It's Foolproof
There was never a time in human history when Senior Software Engineer had a consistent definition. It’s fine to write a nostalgia piece about your past experiences, but this blog post doesn’t go very far beyond that.
Is having the 'await' keyword really necessary?

What if every time I call an async function the interpreter would automatically "await" for its result?
> Syncing that across devices is left to you. I used Syncthing for that.

So it doesn't really solve my problem
Completely agree. I've seen people with like 1 year experience being in "Manager" roles without any prior experience. Title inflation is real.
BBCode?
How fast is ASP.NET Core? (2022)
They all just write code, imho - software guys are considered very low status and have no pull compared to other professions like doctor, lawyers - i never seen a woman being excited about a programmer haha.
Most people are totally fine relaying everything through a third party. A vanishingly small number of email users host it themselves.
In my first job there were two 'Senior Engineers' and a 'Chief Software Engineer' when I started.

None were over 25. This was over 20 years ago. FWIW one of them was, to this day, the best coder I've ever worked with. I think he's a diving instructor these days.

It's been largely meaningless for at least two decades.
True, one great thing that did come out from it is that the language needs to natively support asynchronous programming with syntactical sugar otherwise you get an explosion of libraries/frameworks that solve the problem with their own problems. How-ever this is a chicken/egg problem, did everyone really need async or did it come about because the proliferation of frameworks to solve this common pattern?
The "child identifies as wolf" story was only ever about bullying
No support for passkeys, either.
Making it seem like you can use a premium feature, only to present you with a "You need to upgrade" view after a few steps.

Eg for Keypass and authenticator.
Same, borgmatic has been running flawlessly for a long time, it’s great.

Also backing up to a Hetzner storagebox, so it’s quite cheap too.

https://torsion.org/borgmatic/
This is because the US does not require this, and the US arguably lead the charge in internet innovation, standards, and commercialization and continues to be the highest paying country for SWE roles. Thus, most discussion is US focused.

In other countries like Canada, the title is just s/Engineer/Developer.

To add, the author is talking about the levels no longer indicating experience due to level inflation. Not word semantics along the lines of “senior no longer means the oldest on their team”.
Indeed, downvoted advice has done great.
Disappointing that a website that touts itself for, among other things, "Open Source News", is missing the core definition issue in that headline: what is at issue here has zero to do with how open or closed the source code is. It's only related to how free/libre the license is.

That's a big deal to some, no doubt, but it's important to be precise about language in cases like this, especially since folks will undoubtedly assume that this means secret user-hostile things will now be embedded in the source code, sight-unseen.
I agree with this approach generally, but I needed to use some lua plugins to do something specific fairly quickly, and didn't feel like messing around with it for weeks on end to get it just right.
The author isn't wrong that "Senior" is probably a bit of an inflation for what it means in the industry - competent enough to work on medium to large projects with little oversight - but Staff, Senior Staff and Principal titles all exist to fill the gap the author is talking about, as does architect, although I don't see that one as often. It's definitely confusing if you aren't intimately familiar with the industry though.

For what it's worth, I can't think of any notable company where senior is anywhere close to the terminal level for a software engineer.
That's the funny thing about the AI boom. There's way more hype about shovel sellers than shovel buyers.

No one is getting excited about "AI slop", just the models that generate it. Funny situation.
Yes. You can pretty easily think of an experiment where a waterborne person throws a switch that changes some distant object, only to see that object change "before" they threw the switch because the experiment actually communicated the switch change via an airborne method unavailable to the waterborne observer.
The bureaucracy of protecting titles or jobs with licensing is mostly unnecessary, often regulatory capture, and crippling to innovation.
I don't think this article describes a new thing. I got my first real job as a Programmer/Analyst (that was the entry-level title) back in 1979, at Nike. In less than two years I got promoted to Senior Programmer/Analyst. I clearly didn't count as "senior" in the industry at large, but within the logistics/inventory group at Nike I had significant seniority. Like at a lot of companies titles corresponded to pay ranges, so a raise came with a new title.

Back then Nike laid out their business cards vertically. When I got my new cards the title read "Senior Prog/Anal," a title I still cherish. My manager noticed and had the cards reprinted with the title on two lines.

I got a Senior title at my next job, and by 23 I got named Manager and reported to the CTO at a mid-size logistics company. All of the programmers there got Senior in their title. I have worked with people all through my career who had inflated and meaningless titles.

At some point in my career I realized titles don't communicate anything meaningful. I started using Programmer. Even now with 40+ years experience I use Programmer if I have to give a title. That at least describes what I do most of the time.

I have never willingly called myself an "engineer," though I have worked at places that called all of their programmers "engineers." That seems like stolen valor to me, I didn't get an engineering degree and I don't think of programming as an engineering discipline.

Every company has its own hierarchy of titles, but those don't correspond to other companies. I got asked in an interview once why I hadn't made it to senior after so many years in the business, I just laughed and said I made senior at 21 after two years working, and didn't think titles said much -- my actual experience speaks for itself.
In the US there's no such protection and it's actually a good thing.

We have the formal designation of "professional engineer" (PE) but outside of civil and mechanical engineering (and some government work) it's not that meaningful. You have to complete a 4-year degree at an accredited institution, pass some licensing tests, and then apprentice under a licensed PE for four more years before you can earn a PE license.

In some states you can't legally call yourself an "engineer" without your PE license but I have never seen it enforced. I live in one such state, I'm not a PE, I call myself an engineer, I've worked with engineers for years, and even the entry level jobs in this state the title is "engineer." No one cares about it and not many people see it as worth much, unless they're doing engineering work for local governments in which case it's required.

Not surprisingly, it just makes that work more expensive for everyone involved.

Creating barriers to entry that benefit existing players in the market are not good if they don't add value. For certain projects where there is legal liability (like building a bridge, and some human needs to certify it's "good" and if they're wrong, people die), that makes sense. For everyone else it just adds overhead that doesn't need to be there.

And given that the US has led the world in engineering for the back half of the 20th century, the attitude that there must be some professional licensing body to tell us who is and is not an engineer is nothing if not smug and elitist. Some of the best software is built by people who would never have become PEs, and the entire establishment is contrary to innovation.
Thanks - I completely missed the “concluding remarks” paragraph the first time. After the “problems” sections, I apparently just stopped reading.

For others who are curious:

> But please don’t misunderstand our diatribe to mean that we don’t think you should ever use PostgreSQL. Although its MVCC implementation is the wrong way to do it, PostgreSQL is still our favorite DBMS. To love something is to be willing to work with its flaws.
I always have doubt on this, who is developer and who is engineer?

I think,

Who are capable to using existing languages, frameworks are developers.

Engineers are the one who can design & create those frameworks, can understand algorithms and techniques / working principle. A engineer can reinvent the wheel (worst or better engineering from existing one makes good or bad engineer)

The term `Senior` always refer the working experience on the field more than 1 time. Not necessarily the years.
I agree, and I'll add more irony...

Titles don't intrinsically mean anything. They cost nothing to assign, and have no requirements.

So the only people complaining about titles being inflated are those to whom they have "meaning". And the only reason they're being inflated in the first place is because the same folk want "better sounding titles".

They're given out like candy to those who want candy.
So much this. I wish we could embrace this more. Not everything needs to be for everyone. If you make something for everyone you've just made something for noone[0].

I fear we are just hyper focusing on being over the top, to be monopolies. It's good business, but is it good for us? I'm sure you can find some metric to say it is, but is that what the metric actually measures? We should make sure we are building the things people want, not what we think people want. To make life better for our communities, states, countries, or everyone. I have no doubt you can get rich while doing this. But if we're chasing a score harder than we're chasing a goal we'll always rationalize the former is the later. It's a great trap we've seemed to have fallen for.

[0] we even have good mathematical intuition to believe this. In high dimensional systems when things are normal distributed (really just not uniformly distributed) the mean is not representative of the whole. I think it's clear that there's lots of different people with different opinions about a lot of things (high dimensions) and that there's not a smooth even distribution of opinions (they clump)
> Remember when being a “Senior Software Engineer” actually meant something? I do, and I can’t help but feel nostalgic for that clarity.

I am one and I do. Thankfully, the post provides a reasonable definition thusly:

> A true senior engineer is a battle-tested problem solver. They’ve faced and conquered complex technical challenges across multiple projects, dealing with more than just tricky bugs. These are the architects who’ve untangled system-wide issues that require deep understanding and creative solutions. They’re the ones who can navigate and refactor sprawling legacy codebases with confidence, understanding the delicate balance between maintaining existing systems and building new ones.

As the author explains above, being a senior engineer does not require a specific title. It is a mindset, an understanding reached not by years but by enlightenment.

A CIO to which I once reported shared with me a perspective that remains with me to this day:

You can't take a title to a bank and cash it.
My title became what it is purely so employers could fit me into a comp band that was competitive.
And from his bio: "I've been coding professionally since 2014", that wasn't that long ago, I started around the same time and senior was definitely just as meaningless.
> Remember when being a “Senior Software Engineer” actually meant something?

No, I do not. I’ve been doing this for almost 20 years and “senior” was always a title earned in <5 years. It’s never been all that lofty.
Internet archive allows full text search of books, newspapers, etc.. Or anyway it did, before being breached.
I hope said intern finds a new job working for anti-AI causes.
>As the common refrain goes: "in a gold rush, sell shovels!"

What happens when everyone constructs a shovel factory, the shovels become dirt cheap, but there are no buyers?
How the brain contends with the strangeness of zero
another vague term is "doctor", as lawyers and education professionals share the same term with practitioners of medicine and so on.
I see more Cypher fans out here - check out https://cyphernet.es if you work with Kubernetes!
I think, yes and no.

Yes, there is no formal standard or certification, and that opens the door for charlatans and sloppy crap.

No, designing and implementing software systems well requires planning, fail safes, redundancy and all kind of things "physical" engineers deal with.

It may be time to certify to differentiate between script kiddies and the folks managing the software systems that back our modern world.
Also sometimes a certain word just becomes more fashionable than those used previously, “analyst” is entirely generic title and gets used in every field and that previously had roles of clerk, associate, specialist, etc. which are mostly generic words themselves
Completely agree with this article. I essentially ignore titles at this point. Senior has no meaning for me anymore.
I believe that Eng. Manager and HR are mostly at fault for it, confusing seniority and familiarity as creating and giving higher title to keep people without doing the requirement part of the job: accessing the title, drawing a ladder linked to a skills matrix.
I’ve always thought that “senior” has evolved to be a relatively, well, junior title because you don’t want to give it to anyone potentially perceived as old, which could be legally problematic or just awkward.
Real-Time HTML/CSS Editor
The Cartesian Crisis: Why You Will Believe Nothing
A wearable in-sensor computing platform based on stretchable transistors
> like building a bridge, and some human needs to certify it's "good" and if they're wrong, people die

Even in things like civil engineering jobs, not all of the work is done by the PE, they just need to review it as if it was their own work. Some tech industries taking over critical parts of life could use oversight like that.
Old age isn't a cause of death. It can be a contributing factor, but it isn't an immediate cause.
(continuing with the Papyrus sketch supposedly "insane" person mentality)

I'm sorry, I am but a simple man with an opposing thumb.

The term "opposing" is supposed to mean something, isn't it? What is it opposing, exactly?

> It looked good on the rendering.

My index finger! My thumb opposes my index finger! You have forsaken millions of years of human evolution, for a rendering???

I knoowwww what you diiiid!!!
At some places, the title used to simply be: "Member of Technical Staff"
In some countries teaching is a highly respected profession.

Switzerland and Finland comes to mind.
I think people understand that "senior" can have different meanings depending on the context. As an actual senior (over 60 years old) I don't take offense -- give me the senior discount! As part of a job title "Senior" doesn't mean anything, and probably never did, but it certainly never referred to age.
Network medicine-based epistasis detection in complex diseases: ready for QC
There really was a bug in an application that just about every team runs on their VMs (simplifying here) that pushes application logs to storage. Even my team had to restart processes to get logs going again. It was a "sev 0" incident - an oopsie that was not easy to fix without many, many teams taking manual steps to restart agents which normally just hum along in the background.
Tackling AI's Climate Change Problem
Engineering titles have always had limited external meaning, but it's not an issue that needs to be "solved".

At a tech company I worked at, we started with no engineering titles (everyone was a SWE) but management eventually added them. My impression was this was due to (1) some candidate wanted a title in order to join the company and (2) executives wanted to quickly distinguish how respected + compensated someone was within the engineering org.

The reality is what one company/team values in terms of engineering skillset could completely differ from another. One company could be working the latest techniques in machine learning, while the other is working on web apps requiring database expertise.

Software engineering is far from a single linear skillset, so expecting titles to accurately reflect that doesn't make sense.
I agree with this. I think we've managed to produce a good UX on a new protocol, which is important but not what the market measures us by. The market is looking for great products. That's going to take us improving at design execution as an org. I've said this before on HN; I'm sure you can find it in my history.

We started as a protocol design company. Shifting to a product & services company has been a process, and "moving quickly" as a new org in an established market-space is a comical challenge. We got pitted against Threads, which was able to reuse the scaling and moderation infra of Insta and take on 100M signups in their first week. The only way to be competitive here is to find a differentiated & novel execution which finds PMF.

The protocol work is the PBC mission, but new technologies need PMF to gain distribution. We're not trying to sell people on ideology or ethics. I do want folks to know how the technology works, however, so I will post threads like the one linked here.
I've been coding since 1998. Wherever I've worked, 'senior' has always just meant 'doesn't need to be supervised'.

The standard pattern is to work 2 years as a junior developer, then jump ship for a senior job and double your salary.
A lot of the software that built this modern world was created by people who would be disgusted by this credentialist crap.