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Democrats win control of the House of Representatives (nbcnews.com)
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Of course this is flagged
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"THREAD on how data center-related ballot measures are faring tonight" https://x.com/jdcapelouto/status/2117786709173645427
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Is there any more important news for hackers today? But this story gets flagged. Wild
People will complain that this is on HN, but I just want to say that nothing makes me more patriotic than having faith in my fellow citizens. I am neither a democrat nor a republican. But this (House and Senate results even if Senate doesn’t change parties) shows that a good chunk of the population knows that what’s been happening at the Federal level is unacceptable. Now let’s hope we see some real change (and that isn’t advocating for a lurch left). I have my doubts real change is possible but you have to start somewhere.
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> People will complain that this is on HN Not me, though I do expect this thread may get flagged, because... HN. > I just want to say that nothing makes me more patriotic than having faith in my fellow citizens. Same. It is also very heartening to see all of that (mostly Musk) Republican donor money totally lit on fire, and to see what appears to be a lot of black voters in the south coming out to stand up for their voting rights which the Republicans keep trying to strip. > Now let’s hope we see some real change Realistically the Democrats won't be able to change much in the next 2 years because of veto power, but just kneecapping Trump into a full lame duck is good enough for now. And they better start passing lots of real legislation that addresses the needs of the American public, EVEN IF THEY KNOW it is going to be vetoed. Make Trump and everyone around him (JD Vance, Rubio) own all the lack of progress directly in the run-up to the 2028 election.
I'm begging the news agencies: stop reporting things as fact that are entirely based on projections. It says so in the body of this article, this is a projection, not actual results.
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Projected race calls are correct 99.9% of the time. NBC's last two projection errors were 2000 (Bush v Gore presidential race in Florida, which was universally just a fucked race) and 1960. It is a given at this point that Democrats have, in fact, won control of the House for 2027 (as long as there isn't any Trump shitfuckery, which I think the win this year is going to be way too big for him to even try it).
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Why? What's he got to lose? If I were him I'd do my best!8-))
I am. It states as fact something that is projected. To be clear, I'd love it to be true, but I don't think we should be reporting things as fact without a mathematical certainty or a concession.
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The sub heading immediately states it is a projection, and the majority of experienced readers will understand the headline to imply a high probability projection. Democrats win control of the House of Representatives, with a vow to combat Trump NBC News projects that Democrats will take control of the House next year, giving them the power to investigate Trump and advance legislation to check his policies.
Dear Democrats: From the bottom of our heart - THANK YOU for popping the AI bubble! We might not see eye to eye on practically everything else but regarding ai - FUCK AI. Thank you so much!
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Not sure how that works. Wouldn't be surprised of some hyperscalers are happy to have their overbuild interrupted.
I’m starting to doubt Trump can win again in 2028.
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He cannot "win again" in 2028 - he's already been elected twice to the presidency and the 22nd amendment bars him from an elected third term. OTOH he could run for VP. Then were the new president to resigned or die then Trump could serve a third (un-elected) term as president! Rinse, repeat!8-))
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> OTOH he could run for VP. No, he can't. The elected VP also has to be eligible to be elected as president.
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The sarcasm is strong with this one
C++26 Disapproved (andreasfertig.com)
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C++ should focus into turning SIMD into a higher level language instead of being a giant collection of intrinsics. Avx code is unreadable.
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At this point, changes to major programming languages have to adapt to a world in which AI systems generate and change much of the code. C++ contracts may be good or bad, but they are from before strong AI coding systems. So it's time to rethink. And we have no idea what AI systems will be doing in 2027.
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> contracts. Put simply, a number of NBs believe that this feature is not yet ready for release. The ISO National Bodies voted wisely. C++ has had so many ill defined features over the decades and they wanted to avoid yet another one. I don't have any skin in the game. I've stayed with the C++11 feature set.
I used to be a C++ programmer but I haven’t done it in a few years. I pretty much do all my low level vibe coding in Rust. Is C++ still relevant? What prevents Rust from completely supplanting it?
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C++ is the third most popular programming language according to TIOBE behind C and python. It's got an 8.87% ranking. So yes it looks like C++ is still relevant. In fact C++ usage has risen slightly. Rust is in tenth place with 1.44% ranking, it's rising fast but still has a long way to go before it catches C++. I'm not going to speculate about why Rust hasn't yet supplanted C++ but I will say I don't find it surprising.
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99.9% of all system code in the world is still written in C/++. It runs your Java, C#, Javascript, Python, PHP, basically every production language that isn't Go or Rust. It runs the two most popular game engines in the world. It runs your phone, server, and laptop, no matter which of any you use. It runs your car. It runs almost every embedded and industrial application on the planet. Is it still relevant, JFC. The way people on this forum manage to sequester themselves from reality. Let me reverse the question: is Rust relevant? Mozilla developed Rust, abandoned their Rust browser, and only 10% of Firefox is written in Rust. Maybe 1% of modules in Chrome and Linux are written in Rust, if that. And what of Rust applications written from scratch? Can you name ten applications that have, say, exposure to more than 100,000 users? Impossible mode: they can't be developer tools only used by other developers (uv, ripgrep, etc.), they must actually be applications used by enterprises or consumers.
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> basically every production language that isn't Go or Rust. Even in their case. Rust depends on LLVM which is wriiten in C++. Go needs libc on some platforms.
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I read that as "is c++ still relevant for new features, given Rust and its popularity", not "who is still using C++". Personally, I think it is still relevant. Many people thought Kotlin could overtake Java, Java reinvented itself with new initiatives/features and was saved from becoming irrelevant. Rust also has the LLM advantage which is where I think the "if it compiles it works" nature of Rust is easier for manual changes and maintenance when needed.
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As a big c++ fan, new projects are generally choosing Rust, which I would agree with, even though I do indeed love C++
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Your Rust very likely runs in a C / C++ environment.
Correct me if I'm wrong, because I don't follow C++ very closely, but based on previous discussions on HN, the opposition paper obliquely referenced in the blog post was presumably Bjarne Stroustrup's, who IIRC had already said he would work behind the scenes to make sure the final pro forma vote to standardize C++26 would fail.
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Yes that's right, and from following some threads on reddit about this, he used some really dirty tactics to get it to fail, like scheduling certain snap elections to happen with very short notice at times of the day when people who would oppose his point of view would likely be asleep.
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So is he a hero, or villain? Does it all come down to concepts?
As someone who writes high-reliability C++ but is completely outside the standards process, I see the issues with C++ Contracts. It isn’t clear that it solves a problem that anyone has in real codebases, especially after C++20 concepts. If you were already writing high-reliability C++ then the benefits are difficult to quantify. If you weren’t writing high-reliability C++ then it saves you almost nothing over doing the standard idioms of high-reliability C++ that were already available to you at very marginally more cost. It does standardize expression of it in narrow cases but the payoff seems minimal. Most of what C++ Contracts delivers is a mashup of what you can already do with constexpr and C++20 Concepts. I like reliability features but this feature, as delivered, looks fairly useless if you already use reliability features. A compelling standard would need to make much deeper guarantees out of the box. And the compiler can already see through most compositions of constexpr and C++20 concepts, which is already very expressive. C++ Contracts looks a bit like a feature that was designed long before current standard features existed.
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Huh? Concepts are types of types. Contracts are fancier, structured runtime assertions. What does one have to do with the other? They're nothing alike.
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That’s exactly my point. Contracts notionally offer the ability to lift some runtime assertions to compile-time. That is how it was sold. Except they don’t in practice. Meanwhile, concepts + constexpr if used artfully deliver that in practice, including for many cases that contracts were supposed to solve. I push all verification to compile-time to the extent possible.
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Absolutely Right! - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50361435
Your comment just made me realize contracts is different from concepts (which are basically bounded genetics, right…?)
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C++ concepts evaluate the properties of types at compile-time. You can inject arbitrary constraints on type properties anywhere in the code including conditional codegen. It is a way of asking if a type “can express this complex set of abstract things or has this enumerated set of properties” with almost arbitrary detail. They are extremely powerful in terms of expressiveness and specialization of code. Insanely good for performance and reliability engineering. One of the best features to be added to C++ in many years. C++ contracts are an attempt to bring C asserts into the C++ age. The weakness of C++ contracts is that they are mostly syntactic sugar over C asserts. If you really care about this type of thing, you probably already have a custom C++ assertion framework that is at least as nuanced if not more. The promise of C++ contracts is that they can aid formal verification, which would be great. As delivered, it can’t do much more than was already possible, which will inhibit adoption.
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Concepts are for Types at compile time while Contracts are for Values at runtime.
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Concepts are evaluated compile time and make a lot of TMP more elegant. Contracts are runtime check, akin to assertions. Phrased differently, contracts are to concepts what assert is to static_assert.
Personally I'd like to see C++ chill out on new features and maybe sort out the shitshow that is char8_t and std::filesystem.
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Maybe a slightly faster std::regex or whatever it's called; apparently it's horrendously slow for no benefit.
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Ranges need work as well, there’s lot of opportunity to improve things there.
The issue that caused this to be voted down is often seen as a memory safety solution (not something I personally 100% agree with, but thats a broad view). And the rest of this release includes other memory safety work. And it was voted down and delayed for apparent political reasons (again not a view I agree with). So most people will read your view as hypocritical/misinformed.
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It could also be read as a straight up attack. Basically, a way of saying “why not follow Rust“ without having to say the word Rust. I think it was a fair question. As someone who doesn’t follow C++ I really don’t know what else was in the proposal. It’s nice to hear there is memory safety stuff.
Safari introduces Adaptive Dark Mode in 27.3 (webkit.org)
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Why can’t HN provide a dark mode?
Hacker News itself is a prime example of a website that doesn’t support dark mode, but could do so trivially (and, IMO, would look so much better if it did!)
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This feature works well on Hacker News, just trying it on the beta.
Am I still the only one who doesn't use dark mode? My astigmatism can't take it
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I didn’t used to mind “light mode”, but then flat design took over and the midtones and grays that often composed light mode were replaced by huge swaths of stark white and near-white grays which is blinding at normal display brightness and then too low contrast to work well with low display brightness. After a while of that I started to enable dark mode whenever a platform made it available. If/when flat design goes the way of the dodo and light themes are designed sanely once again I’ll pick them back up.
> There’s a reason we don’t write white text on black paper. Because wood is bright and you can’t really print white ink on a black paper? There might be a usability advantage but using black ink on white paper doesn’t really prove that, that’s just the easier option of the two possible choices.
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It’s easier, sure. Especially at first. But we’ve had paper for a while now. Different colors of ink too. If light text on dark background was superior, we would be using it. And could have for hundreds of years for anything considered important.
Everyone deserves configurable and hackable apps, which is the only real way to work towards universal accessibility. I can't personally support light modes in my own software because I can't use/test them, but I'd still add an untested one and fix bug reports about it. I'm just curious about what people mean when they talk about astigmatism in this context, because the term is usually thrown around without qualifications (plain "astigmatism" as opposed to "irregular astigmatism" or "uncorrectable astigmatism"). So I'm curious about the astigmatism of people for whom dark mode on glowing devices is a problem. Is it typically extremely severe? Is it typically uncorrectable? Is it that people's glasses or contacts are often subtly wrong/outdated? Are many astigmatics not myopic or presbyopic enough to wear glasses all the time anyway? Astigmatism is a broad category and I'm curious about the specific impairments people who avoid dark mode have, in part because I have astigmatism and nonetheless prefer (require, really) dark mode because of other vision problems.
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My astigmatism is very regular, very mild, correctable, and corrected. Dark mode is still awful for me. Gives me visual snow side effects after too long and generally just makes the astigmatism symptoms worse. It’d be great if Apple could try this hard in the iOS messages app where there the keyboard is now only dark mode when a background is set.
You're out of luck if, like me, you have a problem with astigmatic halation. All the cool kids use dark mode. iOS since 26 has been presenting parts of the system in dark mode despite having the device set to light only. One of the ‘best’ is that launcher groups switch to dark background, but they forgot to switch the text colour, so app names are unreadable. I had hoped iOS 27 would fix it, but no, so I'm switching to Android.
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Yeah, same here. Insanely annoying to have your own phone get made less accessible for you.
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