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ChoHag

258 karma · joined June 24, 2016

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ChoHag··on Why I'm not rushing to take sides in the RubyGems fiasco
> But if you take my cookies, add sprinkles then resell them, I can expect a modest donation to keep the bakery running.

You cannot expect any such thing. You gave them away for free.

If you want to get paid, don't give your work away for free. If you give your work away for free, you cannot expect to get paid.

It's shocking how frequently people who deal in rigorous logic day in, day out are unable to understand this very simple principle.

ChoHag··on Open source maintainers are feeling the squeeze
If the dependencies wanted to get paid they should not have given their work away for free.

If you give your work away for free you cannot expect to get paid for it.

For people who deal with intractible logic all day it's amusing how much these simple facts fail to get through their thick skulls.

ChoHag··on French modernists were alarmed, inspired by newspaper's voracious dynamism
> First, because the social media is not reading, or newspapers, it's a different thing altogether

Are you suggesting that historical books and newspapers were not pandering to populist whims? Of course they did. Is the difference the precision of the targeting? That sounds like a difference of degree not of substance.

> It did create yellow journalism, it did create tabloids, it did redefine truth, and recalibrate leisure, and it did create doomscrolling, and make people think in different—and not necessarily better—ways.

It also created the article we just read and this web site to find it on.

> Maybe all we can do is listen to what people living through that change said

Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

ChoHag··on What I Learned Reporting in Cities That Take Belongings from Homeless People
You don't see the homeless people who keep themselves and their belongings out of your sight.
ChoHag··on Dear friend, you have built a Kubernetes
Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
ChoHag··on Cats are (almost) liquid
Now that is what a dry academic paper about cats is supposed to look like. Cat pictures on every page.
ChoHag··on World conker champion found with steel chestnut, cleared of cheating
We have conkers in London.
ChoHag··on Varlink – IPC to replace D-Bus gradually in systemd
FFI is the shell's only job.
ChoHag··on Autossh – automatically restart SSH sessions and tunnels
That's so much better than bourne/bash, which requires this monstrous wart of a code blob:

autossh() {

        # Tiny delay after failure in case of connection errors

        while ! ssh "$@"; do echo Restarting ssh "$@"...; sleep 1; done

}
ChoHag··on WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic
Is supporting wordpress development part of the license offered by wordpress that WP Engine agreed to?

No?

If you don't want people to use your stuff, don't give it away for free.

> there's nothing wrong with publicizing that they don't give much in return

That would be the case IF giving back was part of the deal which they are therefore reneging on. It was not. You are in the wrong.

ChoHag··on OpenBSD now enforcing no invalid NUL characters in shell scripts
> If you absolutely must parse ls

... stop and rethink your options. You may be able to get away with parsing the first columns of ls -l but even then a pathologically named file could make itself look like a line of ls output.

It's simply not possible in all cases. If you can constrain your input then you may be able to make use of it but in the general case, that's why xargs and find grew a -0 option.

Or glob.

ChoHag··on Open source maintainers underpaid, swamped by security, and going gray
> What happens when it's no longer fun, but 150,000 people depend on it for their job?

Then 150,000 people should open their wallet, or crack open a text editor, and pay.

> design the licence, and more, to enable you to walk away and/or get bored.

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 OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS 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.

ChoHag··on Open source maintainers underpaid, swamped by security, and going gray
It's very revealing that this response is so disliked that it's going grey.

But it is the truth. Do you not like the truth?

It is not a job. Nobody asked you to do it. You do not get to be sad when nobody pats you on the head. You are owed nothing.

Thanks for the code.

ChoHag··on Ask HN: What books should I read to improve as a software engineer?
Terry Pratchett.
ChoHag··on Xpra: Persistent Remote Applications for X11
> what's the current state of the art ?

Wayland is going to make 2024 the year of Linux on the Desktop!

Any day now...

ChoHag··on The attack against Danish, critical infrastructure [pdf]
So you found out about the vulnerability in the firewalls on your critical infrastructure, waited for a week before telling anyone and then sat on it for two more?

Nice dramatisation though. Very intense.

ChoHag··on Off-duty pilot allegedly tried to shut off engines on Alaska Airlines flight
Back in the days when you could go into the cockpit for a chat, the pilots turned the engines of our 747 off (well, idle) over the middle of the Atlantic to show my brother and I how the autopilot worked.
ChoHag··on The brain connections between our hands and tongues
> Electrical stimulation of this same area triggers a monkey’s hand to make a grip motion while its mouth opens, and its hand moves to its mouth.

Fixed Action Pattern (?) which didn't quite go away.

ChoHag··on Lie still in bed
After a while this may invert and you find that whatever time you go to sleep (within some degree of normal) you'll wake up precisely n hours later, for whatever value of n your body's settled on.

No more need for an alarm clock.

ChoHag··on Odd and unsafe baby car seats from the past
I can't lie, I like the look of that one that hangs them out the side window.

Can we get them for planes?

ChoHag··on A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team
IE didn't die until YouTube publicly dropped support for it.
ChoHag··on The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore
Correction: It's the success story of western progress at the expense of the rest of the world, which must find its own way because we've ripped up the steps.
ChoHag··on Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette
If you read that more carefully you'll see that the letter writer isn't complaining about Beethoven or his music but that his imitators can't do it as well as he does.

He's not complaining that the burgeoning romantic movement sucked compared to the true classical music from his youth but that the quality of the music being produced has tanked because the new practitioners suck at making it: Beethoven, because he was a genius and could get it right, gave them carte blanche to break the rules that previously kept the music good.

Although it's true to say that Beethoven didn't know how to stop.

ChoHag··on Amazon shuts down customer’s smart home
Don't forget 4: Bold assertions that this couldn't possibly happen in our corporate 'topia followed by silence after the non-apology by the company that did it.
ChoHag··on The Nova Kakhovka Hydroelectric dam in Ukraine has been blown open
No it's very simple.

If Russia didn't invade, Russia wouldn't be killing people and blowing up their stuff.

Russia's actions are Russia's responsibility, not America's.

ChoHag··on See this page fetch itself, byte by byte, over TLS
If HTTP or HTML were binary formats 1000s of embryonic engineers would not have been able to learn them by hacking codes into telnet or notepad and the web would now be even more concentrated in the hands of the few players who are busily engaged in fucking it to death.
ChoHag··on My building has replaced our keys with an app
And that is why it keeps happening.

Ignore the crazy person. Don't listen. Don't try to understand. Don't learn how to stop the outbursts of crazy before they happen.

It works so well. Why change?

Don't listen to me.

ChoHag··on Using a date-modified header to detect unique visitors without using cookies
Because it's not called a cookie, eg. in the UK we have biscuits which are therefore not subject to the GDPR.

It's not tracking users, it's just a special user-identifying operation.

ChoHag··on Facial Recognition’s Threat to Privacy Is Worse Than Anyone Thought
It's something you have which also represents something you are. A password is something you know.
ChoHag··on Adding a phone number to your Google account can make it less secure
And this is a surprise because ... ?
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