notpachet

> Unless you want a Soviet system where jobs are kept to keep people busy.

There's an argument that even under capitalism, a lot of jobs still only exist in order to keep people busy.

You're saying it's de facto selfish to not have kids? What if someone can't have kids?

In reality everyone who's thinking about having kids exists on a spectrum of what's possible: either it's going to be really easy for you (because you're Elon Musk and you don't give a fuck) or it's going to be borderline impossible (because you're infertile, or you're broke, or whatever).

Just because someone looked at the odds and said "you know what, maybe this isn't a great idea" doesn't make them selfish. Meanwhile you're the one imposing your worldview on them...

For me, it's tabs-vs-spaces, but doesn't every codebase have its own peeing-against-the-wind patterns that are necessary because of some historical reason or another? What's the way to mitigate against this trend towards the center other than throwing up my hands and admitting defeat?

I wonder how many vibecoding/automatic programming zealots are fluent in a multimodal editor.

> in a brand new project

Must be nice. Claude and Codex are still a waste of my time in complex legacy codebases.

Everything else? Higher demand for electricity drives up prices across the board.[0]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/business/energy-environme...

> do you also disassemble every library you use and understand it?

Sometimes.

Not enough financial upside for it to be worth the trouble.

What if increasing global instability renders them sporadically unavailable for certain markets?

> Will admit It's not great (probably not even good)

You lost me here. Come back when you're proud of it.

TIL Cunningham's Law[0]. I knew about that phenomenon but not the proper name. Thanks!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham#Law

> And I'm the most junior member of my team at 37 years of age

This sounds fucking awesome.

"Mortality as home entertainment -- this cannot be the future!! ...Can it??"

- McCabe (Kurt Russell), Vanilla Sky

"First we have to build a Bingo service. See, Bingo knows everyone's name-o..."

- 'Microservices' sketch by Krazam

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ

This is also true of alt text for images. I'm active on Bluesky, and so often I see an image with an "ALT" tag (meaning that the user has specified alt text for the image) only for it to be some meaningless offhand bullshit like "lmao i guess i showed them". Pisses me off.

Cancer detection is not a process. That's a discrete step in a process.

My name isn't Russ. Russ Ackoff was a business process optimization leader from the last century -- a contemporary of Deming and the Toyota school etc.

How is what you linked a business process? Cancer identification is a step in a larger process, specifically the "analyze unstructured data" part that the author alludes to.

AI won't take a shoddy process (say, your process for reviewing and accepting forms from patients) and magically make it better if you don't have an idea of what "better" actually entails.

"Improving a system requires knowing what you would do if you could do exactly what you wanted to. Because if you don't know what you would do if you could do exactly what you wanted to, how on earth are you going to know what you can do under constraints?"

- Russ Ackoff

Wouldn't there necessarily be correlative effects in professional settings a la programming?

Reading this was such an immediate "aha" for me. Of course we should be using GraphQL for this. Damn. Where was this comment three months ago!

> lachrymosely

Learned a new word, thank you!

The truth is typically somewhere in the middle. I feel you though. I'm that way with Ruby/Bundler.

Maybe we can convince Shopify to hijack NPM too while they're at it.

I feel like there are merits to your argument but that you have a larger anti-JS bias that's leaking through. Not that there aren't problems with Node itself, but as many people have pointed out, there are plenty of organizations writing in Node that aren't pwn'd by these sorts of attacks because we don't blindly update deps.

Perfect is the enemy of good; dependency cooldown etc is enough to mitigate the majority of these risks.

> pretty deterministic

This is an oxymoron.

Can we edit the submission title to match what's in the actual article? Not just because I'm annoyed at how transparently Gen Z the HN title is...

> I've realized it's probably for the best since the average dev would only use it to create elaborate foot guns

see also: react hooks

This made me laugh. Take my upvote.

Also: a little more widely known, but the Black Company series by Glen Cook.

The Steerswoman series by Rosemary Kirstein. It's become my go-to recommendation for anyone I know that likes to read. Most people I've recommended it to have ended up buying all four books.

> They keep trying to make it work until they hit a wall -- and then they just keep banging their head against it.

This is because LLMs trend towards the centre of the human cognitive bell curve in most things, and a LOT of humans use this same problem solving approach.