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No, I don't think tech leaders have kissed the ring like this before: private dinners together promising made up investment numbers, Musk buying Twitter to help Trump win, donations to his inauguration fund, various moderation policy changes, and the TikTok ban reversal so a special deal could be made for only the most loyal minions.

>No, I don't think tech leaders have kissed the ring like this before ...

That's not what I asked. Stop trying to derail the thread.


Asking for past "examples" is like trying to compare apples to oranges in this scenario. My comment illustrates why this isn't comparable to another administration.

I think your comment exemplifies why people have an issue with "just regulate it" because there are endless nitpicks and carve-outs that seem arbitrary and will likely have unintended consequences. It's easy to go "then just do this" but in reality the government and private sector can only deal with so much from an enforcement and compliance perspective.

saying "businesses over a certain size must comply" and "data must be anonymised" are not endless nitpicks, they're simple rules that can be and are regularly enforced the world over. I think your comment exemplifies why people have so much distaste for the corporate sphere and its disingenuous ideology in general

We need to start working on the premise that large corporations are different beasts than small businesses. I mean as a people of the world as a whole.

There is a tipping point somewhere and that is definitely up for conversation but we need to pick a point and start making sure regulation hits where it does good.

Frankly, the outcomes of both "regulate it" and "don't regulate it" have already both been captured by the biggest offenders to use as they wish.


> There's more red tape than ever before.

It's not the DoD, but this is happening out in the open at DHS where the secretary is requiring her personal sign-off on any purchase over $100k[0] when the previous limit was $25M.

  Deployments of critical resources, such as tactical and specialized search and rescue teams, were delayed as a result of a budget restriction requiring Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem to approve every purchase, contract and grant over $100,000[1]

0: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/acquisition-policy/2025/06/ab...

1: https://archive.is/Ky7d5


> It's not the DoD, but this is happening out in the open at DHS where the secretary is requiring her personal sign-off on any purchase over $100k[0] when the previous limit was $25M.

This is EXACTLY what the PE firm did to my company after acquisition to "cut costs" and make numbers go up. I used to be able to sign off on my own purchase reqs up to $2000. That allowed me to easily acquire just about anything I needed and get my work done. Now I have to have EVERYTHING signed off on by upper management. As If I was an irresponsible spendthrift throwing money away on spare parts we actually needed. It's useless performative micromanagement by incompetent people. It's honestly insulting.


Government doesn't turn a profit, so the only way to get more money and prestige in the government is to have a higher headcount under you and more power. A good way to get more power is to add a bunch of red tape and also to slow down all the processes so you need more people and thus require a higher headcount which makes your management more prestigious.

All the incentives line up that this will only get worse.


> Obama did far more severe cuts and re-orgs in his second term.

You fail to mention that Obama did this through legislation and actual proposals rather than giving random tech bros and billionaires access to government systems to stop payments on a whim. Did you even read your own links?

> Nobody cared because we weren't in the sensationalist era where one becomes a "nazi" for wanting a smaller government.

This is a strawman. No one is claiming that wanting government efficiency is the equivalent of being a Nazi. Although, there are plenty of other actions from Trump and his ilk that warrant that view.

> Did you know that Obama deported more people than Trump as well? Was he somehow a fascist for respecting the border?

I'm not sure what this has to do with DOGE but I'll bite: Did Obama send people to a foreign labor camp in El Salvador? Did Obama deport international students for the their protest against Israel? Did Obama create a detention facility called Alligator Alcatraz?


  git add --patch
...is your friend if you want to leave all your changes unstaged for awhile then break it out into multiple commits later.

To add, when I’m breaking my changes down into multiple parts for review, I tend to:

  * squash everything I’ve done into one commit
  * create a new branch off main/master that will be the “first commit”
  * cherry-pick changes (easy from some git guis) that represent a modular change.
  * push and make an MR from the new branch
  * rebase “the big commit” on top of the partial change.
  * wash, rinse and repeat for each change, building each MR off its requisite branch.
The squashing part is vital because otherwise you enter merge conflict hell with the rebase.

How about:

   * squash into one commit
   * git reset HEAD~1
   * git add -p
   * git commit -m commit1
   * repeat until no changes are left
   * add any file deletions/additions
I use this because you can have several commits marked e.g. "commit1". Then you make a final interactive rebase to squash them together.

> It's often a lot better to just let kooks speak freely.

They have always been able to speak freely. I still see vaccine conspiracies on HN to this day. It was rampant during COVID as well.


The political right have no principles and were actively cheering on FCC censorship when this story initially broke. Why should anyone care what they ostensibly think?

The “right” isn’t a single voice. Many voices did not cheer it but called it for what it was:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/ted-cruz-fcc-brend...

The left is not a single voice. A few dangerous voices cheered assasinations while many decried it for what it was.


If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck,... you know what they say

> The “right” isn’t a single voice.

I disagree. Trump, IMO, has been a cult-like leader for the GOP since 2016. And he even called for more networks to lose their licenses over "dishonesty" after this incident[0]. Not to mention the multitude of scandals that we've seen like: law firm security clearance revocation as retribution for supporting Trump's opponents, deporting legal residents over their protest against Israel, and various lawsuits he's engaged in as President against media corporations, pollsters, etc.. who disfavour him[1].

> Many voices did not cheer it but called it for what it was

"many" is Tucker Carlson and Ted Cruz? To my knowledge, they haven't called out Trump specifically for attacks on the First Amendment, only Brendan Carr. That's fine and dandy, but no one on the right seems willing to take the plunge for some reason on the huge array of issues that cropped up before this FCC threat against ABC.

0: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5514110-trump-ne...

1: https://www.ibanet.org/Trumps-assault-on-the-First-Amendment


I think rank and file folks are waking up a bit. Things are hard in the economy and tgey are seeing their moms, aunts, sisters, and daughters get impacted by reductions to women's healthcare.

I don't think so at all. I think some are waking up to the fact that Trump is becoming a liability and that his time is limited. They're preparing to shift to someone else who is just as bad, if not worse, such as Vance.

Nobody has any principles here my friend. There is a long list of people canceled for making content that displeased the Democrats, and now a few murders too.

But yes, apparently everyone hates Disney and wants them to go bankrupt. So finally the left and right agree on one thing.

Unfortunately for Kimmel, late night TV is irrelevant dinosaur so he better extract as much money as he can before he inevitably ends up like Colbert.


"long list of people canceled for making content that displeased the Democrats"

If we exclude the people advocating violence and discrimination against others due to their immutable characteristics, we find that its not such a "long" list after all.


> long list of people canceled

This FCC action was censorship, not cancel culture.


What, exactly, was the FCC action here? Not comments by people at the FCC, what specific actions did the FCC take?

Comments by government officials aren't protected free speech because government officials control policy.

There have been market panics ended by the right words at the right time. It's a different kind of speech entirely from criticism of the government by those without direct political power.


https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/18/media/brendan-carr-jimmy-kimm...

  When Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr suggested Jimmy Kimmel should be suspended and said, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” ABC and its local affiliates were listening.


  On Wednesday afternoon, Carr tapped into preexisting MAGA media anger about a Monday night Kimmel monologue and used a right-wing podcaster’s platform to blast Kimmel and pressure ABC’s parent company Disney. 

Those are the actions he took as an official at the FCC.

He couldn’t act alone. If a senate majority leader made stupid comments on a podcast would that be “the senate”?

[flagged]


> so no actions, just statements

This is mind-numbing goal-post reconstruction.

If they'd issued an order, it wouldn't be final until it reached SCOTUS! Most regulatory interaction happens informally. A regulator tells a regulated entity to do something, and they do it. Public statements by the FCC commissioner are significant enough to make it into court cases as evidence of the Commision's intent.


That's not "goal post reconstruction". Someone said the FCC took actions. I thought I might have missed them actually _doing_ something, so I was asking about it. The response was to highlight the statements they said.

The point is the FCC Chair making public statements threatening specific regulatory actions against a regulated entity is an action. You're trying to hold the word action to a higher standard than a judge would. The Rubicon was crossed.

[flagged]


> You're certainly very sure of what I was thinking, but you are again wrong

Nope. You're confusing regulatory actions, broadly, with official actions. The FCC didn't take any official action. The FCC Chair absolutely conveyed a credible threat of official action in response to specific political speech; that constitutes a regulatory action.

Like, the SEC announcing they're going to launch an investigation is a regulatory action. The Fed Chair saying they believe the job market is cooling is a regulatory action.


They literally said the easy way or the hard way. What do you think the hard way is?

Reuter's reported that Disney did this to protect the company’s interest and was not due to the FCC.

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/disney-says-j...


Protect the company from what? What is the quote you're referencing here?

> The decision was guided by what was in the entertainment company's best interest, rather than external pressure from station owners or the FCC, the sources said.

That's a word salad.

From today's statement: "Last Wednesday, we [Disney] made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country" [1].

[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/09/22/nx-s1-5550330/jimmy-kimmel-ba...


It's not a word salad. It says this wasn't because of the FCC. Disney made the decision. And then they unmade it.

> There is a long list of people canceled for making content that displeased the Democrats, and now a few murders too.

The list I keep seeing from people on the right is Rosanne Barr and Tim Allen... who were "cancelled" in 2018 and 2017 respectively.

My memory is bad, so.. who was the wokie leftist President in office in 2017 and 2018 again?


We shouldn’t need to clarify this, but Tim Allen and Roseanne Bar were not threatened by high-ranking government officials, right?

These are two completely different situations. If conservatives want to vote with their dollars and boycott Disney, that’s something I wholeheartedly support. If they want to use their power as federal officials to silence voices they disagree with, that’s unacceptable.


You're not aware of the simplistic, single header C library culture that some developers like to partake in. Tsoding (a streamer) is a prime example of someone who likes developing/using these types of libraries. They acknowledge that these things aren't focused on "security" or "features" and that's okay. Not everything is a super serious business project exposed to thousands of paying customers.

Hobby projects that prove useful have a tendency of starting to be used in production code, and then turning into CVEs down the road.

If there is a conscious intent of disregarding safety as you say, the Readme should have a prominent warning about that.


> Hobby projects that prove useful have a tendency of starting to be used in production code

Even if that is true, how is that the authors problem? The license clearly states that they're not responsible for damages. If you were developing such a serious project then you need the appropriate vetting process and/or support contracts for your dependencies.


I didn’t say it’s the author’s problem. It’s a problem with the code.

Why play all these semantic games? You're saying it's the author's problem. You want them to even edit their readme to include warnings for would be production/business users who don't want to pay for it.

GP is arguing about licences. Yes, formally there is no obligation, and I'm not saying the author has any such obligation.

In the present case, either the missing overflow check in the code is by mistake, and then it's warranted to point out the error, or, as I understood GGGP to be arguing, the author deliberately decided to neglect safety or correctness, and then in my opinion you can't reject the criticism as unwarranted if the project's presentation isn't explicit about that.

I'm not making anything the author's problem here. Rather, I'm defending my criticism of the code, and am giving arguments as to why it is generally good form to make it explicit if a project doesn't care about the code being safe and correct.


I understand your point and if I were the author I would want either a disclaimer or a fix. File an issue or make a pr. Filing an issue is quicker and more fruitful than dealing with folks here

It is useful to understand the limitations of such hobby programs to know what they are useful for.

[flagged]


Layer8 DID the thing though, skimmed through the code and thought about security issues.

> If there is a conscious intent of disregarding safety as you say, the Readme should have a prominent warning about that.

What do you consider this clause in the LICENSE:

>> THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.


A standard clause you can find in every open source license? It doesn't say anything about how serious the project takes security

You write only Rust code don't you?

I wish ;) You're talking about how Rust code usually uses the MIT license and this is a part of the MIT license?

Every open source license has a very similar clause, include but not limited to BSD, GPL, CDDL, MPL and Apache.


then that is their problem, not the code author's. If you use a hobby project in production, that's on you

When such a library is used in production code, that's on the person who chose to use it in production, not on the original author of the library.

You are responsible for the code you ship, doesn't matter whether it's written by you, an LLM, or whether it's a third-party dependency.


While that is certainly true, we could also be nice and reduce the workload of someone reviewing their dependencies and write it down in the readme.

My personal take is: if the code is good enough, it should be trivial to switch to a better library at the point when needed.

> They acknowledge that these things aren't focused on "security" or "features" and that's okay.

where? single header is just a way to package software, it has no relation to features, security or anything such...


Either you are :

- overestimating the gravity of a UB and its security implications

- underestimate the value of a 150 line json parser

- or overestimate the feasibility of having both a short and high quality parser.

It sometimes happens that fixing a bug is quicker than defending the low quality. Not everything is a tradeoff.


I have tsoding fatigue. Took a long time to get him out of the main page. I like the DIY attitude, but it gets old really fast.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44345740

No one cares. Stop complaining or GTFO.


Au contraire, I think people do care. Now I will continue complaining and raising awareness with renewed fervor.

So if its a hobby project designed for just a handful of people, its suddenly okay to endanger them due to being sloppy?

This is an open source project that you're not obligated to use nor did you pay for it. Who is it endangering?

The license also makes it clear that the authors aren't liable for any damages.


> The license also makes it clear that the authors aren't liable for any damages.

The license disclaims liability but that doesn't mean the author cannot ever be held liable. Ultimately, who is liable is up to a court to decide.


...and what open source software license in the world makes the author liable for damages?

None. That is how RedHat makes money.

Probably more of lack of explicit liability in the license.

Pretty sure the all caps text on the bottom of most open source licenses out there makes it clear

every OSS license I've ever seen is "use at your own risk" essentially. That's how this whole system works.

You find a vulnerability? patch it, push change to repo maintainer.

https://xkcd.com/2347


The code nor author don’t endanger anyone. Whoever uses it inappropriately endangers themselves or others.

Why are you using random, unvetted and unaudited code where safety is important?


Open Source is about sharing knowledge.

They are sharing their knowledge about how to create a tiny JSON parser. Where is the problem again?


Refer to the original comment. Seems like you are incapable of connecting the comment chain.

Have some manners please.

Yes, pretty much. It has enough of a warning.

Unpredictable tariffs specifically. Even if one disagrees with tariffs, you can still roll them out in a predictable and legal manner. Cooking up a national emergency then changing them arbitrarily is a recipe for disaster.

Legally they don't seem to be valid either (how does an emergency require tariffing the entire world?), but of course the federal courts are letting them stay in place while it works its way up to SCOTUS.


Well said. Thanks for the clear distinction!

> it would be easier to fight that from in the US

Would it? Aren't ICE agents showing up to court hearings and deporting people?


At least you could meet with your lawyers in person, during mutual daylight.

Do you even have standing to sue from abroad about a visa revoked capriciously?


It's all relative.

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