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Comment by lithos | Hacker News Reader

Just more engineering leaning than you. Actual engineers have to analyze their supply chains, and so makes sense they would be baffled by NPM dependency trees that utterly normal projects grow into in the JavaScript ecosystem.

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Good thing that at scale, private package repositories or even in-house development is done. Personally, I would argue that an engineer unable to tell apart perfect from good, isn't a very good engineer in my book, but some engineers are unable to make compromises.

Do you think companies using node don't analyze supply chains? That's nonsense. Have you cargo installed a rust app recently? This isn't just a js issue. This needs to be solved across the industry and npm frankly has done a horrible job at it. We let people with billions of downloads a month with recently changed password/2fa publish packages? Why don't we pool assets as a collective to scan newly published packages before they're allowed to be installed? These types of things really should exist across all package registries (and my really hot take is that we probably don't need a registry for every language, either!).

> Do you think companies using node don't analyze supply chains?

I _know_ many don’t. In fact suggesting doing it is a good way to be looked at like a crazy person and be told something like “this is a yes place not a no place.”

It is solved across the industry for those who care. If you use cargo, npm, or a python package manager, you may have a service that handles static versioning of dependencies for security purposes. If you don't, you aren't generally working in a language that encourages so much package use.

2FA would certainly help, however you'd still have malware like these silently updating code and waiting for the next release.

We'd have to rely on the developer to notice, and check every line of code they ship, which might be the norm but certainly not 100% of cases.

Ah yes, this old way of thinking. Bro we live in a world where at least in web (and plenty of other domains) the velocity demanded from developers is exceedingly high; not necessarily because that's what those developers want, but because that's what management wants.

Most of my career Node.JS has paid the bills and I'm very grateful to fate for that; but I have also worked in C/asm/etc for embedded firmware etc. Implying that the JS ecosystem is only comprised of terrible devs is classic gatekeeping holier than thou type shit.

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