I'm surprised you've had an apolitical experience up until two weeks ago. HN has always had politics creep onto the front page, less so during the off-season, but still pretty present IME. Especially prevalent over the last two years. Lots of side conversation bickering in random threads.
It's definitely been increasing compared to what it used to be, but this may also be natural consequence of the fact that big tech itself has become much more "political". It didn't use to be the case that the owners and managers of technology corporations displayed their political preferences quite so brazenly (in the case of Elon Musk, even to the point of taking on a leading government position).
Of course, corporations have always had policy preferences, but those tended to be mostly about taxation and regulation, where debate is less emotionally charged, and compromise is more achievable. These days, though, it seems that tech and political culture have become almost inextricably linked.
Maybe it is, but I know that lots of us used GitHub way before Actions launched. I think even if Actions wasn't free, GitHub would still have a massive advantage because it is the most well known place to host code, especially by less technical users (which is where I see a lot of finger pointing going with the increase in GitHub usage).
I would not be surprised if a serious amount of this usage is not user-intended and instead the LLM just inserts some sort of CI job off the bat and people roll with it.
Not everything is writing code and search. My uncle works in mortgages and the (very large) firm he works for is entirely Gemini. The way he talks about it is with wonderment in his eyes while he goes into detail on how it went through multiple documents and found unaccounted for cases. I think Google is doing fine in these kinds of industries.
I wouldn't even bet that Google is better than OpenAI and Anthropic for these categories, but they seem to be well used outside of our direct space.
Then, not completely relevant. The US government was not *hiding secret court rulings about how it spies on Americans" since the day the FBI was founded.
Spying on Americans? You could say that, perhaps, but you would have to say it about every law enforcement organization (including the local police) since 1776.
What the actual article is talking about is a massive extension, not covered by the regular "get a warrant in court" mechanism. Saying "just like the FBI" ignores how different this is, and how alien to the Constitution.
All the big federal law enforcement agencies engage in various degrees of unconstitutional surveillance. The fact that the FBI also gets a lot of warrants as part of its job doesn't change that. The FBI also did it first and has been doing it since it's inception. Heck they named their HQ after the guy who really took it to the next level.
Even outside of the human body, appreciating things that have aged, served a purpose, and have been repaired so they can still accomplish that goal is a beautiful thing.
Kintsugi and wabi sabi are probably the most convenient terms to capture this.
I find nothing more satisfying of clothing that I've personally patched up and repaired the sea on. I have memories tied up in that. The same goes for the scar on my wrist from falling off that longboard in college when I was trying to learn (that was the end of that).
I fought hard about four years ago at a previous company to upgrade us from PHP 5 to 8 because I think 5 was going EOL or something like that (could be wrong about that now). Based on my experience in software, I have to imagine the vast majority of normal developers do not give a damn about security in being in security patch lifecycles on software.
> I have to imagine the vast majority of normal developers do not give a damn about security in being in security patch lifecycles on software.
I just don't think it's the developer's responsibility.
Depending on the size of the team of course, but the work that developer's do comes from someone else. Empower me to make decisions and I'll make them, but don't blame me for the choices other people make if you won't empower me.
I think I get where you're coming from. I've worked mostly on small teams (sub 30) so it's always been on us. The engineering leadership never prioritizes security unless it's something as big as the log4J stuff because it was on customers' minds.
That said, if they're software packages from something like Node or PyPI, I do think that it falls on the developer. If the point is that leadership needs to give devs the ability to act on that, that's very fair.
Exactly. It's not the bricklayer's responsibility when mortar fails. It's the person who specified that mortar.
So I'd agree it isn't not a coder or developer's responsibility when they're given a bill of materials and told how to build, but it is an engineer's responsibility. Comp should recognize that as well.
I've worked at a company that delivered on-premise software, and the runners of said software were... risk-averse, but in a strange way in that they didn't really want to upgrade software if it didn't need to. So the software was stuck on PHP 5.something, also because newer versions required a RHEL update which they also didn't like to do.
I find that LLMs can write poorly structured code if not given a good foundation to do so. The existing code in a repo is what the LLM will see and generally output similar code to.
Given that, I'd recommend the mainstays on good general software design. One of my favorites is "A Philosophy of Software Design" by John Ousterhout. Good general design practices.
Other than that, I think a lot of books generally stay relevant. If it's topic specific, it'll give you a good background on understanding of that topic so you can make sure you or an agent are making sound decisions. Architecture of course is more valuable than ever.
reply