Sebb767

> Another HN commenter on this post mentioned IEnumerable<T>, which is very similar: you know nothing about T, but you need to call it _something_, and there's a common understanding in the community that you call such type variables <T>.

You know that it's the type you enumerate over. I'd agree that in this case, <T> is sufficiently common language that people understand the reference (similar to how i is understood to be the index counter in a for loop), but you could definitely use a more expressive type name [1]. This becomes important if your type has two or three generic parameters.

[1] You might argue that this is more typing overhead, but your tooling will easily auto-complete it for you or refactor it after you've written the code, but before committing it. And if you don't have that type of tooling, you're in need of expressive variable names.

On the other hand, what is the reasonable way of action here? A whole set of acquaintances grieving for days about a person only one of them knew? Next to this being quite detrimental to productivity (and you can argue all day about how bad we have it in this society), it would just lead to us being in a mostly permanent state of grieve, as there will always be someone that had some shocking event in recent times, for any reasonably large set of people.

It is, but if your organization completely forbids any non-HID USB devices, users are less likely to try their found USB stick on a company PC, since they don't expect it to work anyway.

This is true for someone manually searching for your info, but sufficient to fool spam lists and most data brokers. This really depends on your threat scenario.

Depends. It won't help against exploitative firmware or shocker devices, but most USB exploits don't come with zero-day firmware exploits or even require user interaction, which this policy will prevent.

Additionaly, even when attacked with such extreme measures, most users won't try to plug in planted, potentially malicious USB devices if they don't expect them to work.

> that I could easily burn in my car, tractor (with PTO generator), or whatever.

Or in a generator, for use in your EV :-) Whereas it will be hard to run your diesel car or tractor on solar power.

Not to mention that EVs outmileage every other type of engine in a traffic jam. Also, power is much easier to get compared to fuel (with maybe the exception of fuel for old diesels that will run on everything - but this depends on circumstance). This is really a bad dig at EVs.

On the other hand, people looking to switch jobs or having sufficient options might take the easy cash despite not disagreeing (or not caring about the feud).

The professional lawyer telling the client to do so doesn't mean the client will. See the case of SBF for the most in-your-face example.

> Unless Mullenweg is really that desperate to get rid of anyone who doesn't agree with his hissy fit.

Given his quite emotional outbursts, this does not seem that unlikely.

The thing that the parent implicitly pointed out is that a typo would be a different category of error and the comparison doesn't make much sense [0]. A more correct phrasing in the grandparent would have been "this is not a minor mistake". At least that's my interpretation.

[0] Although you could argue that typo is an example of a minor mistake and used as such, making it a valid comparison.

> but for me, living in a bog standard apartment and working remote to support kids isn't exactly blog-worthy content.

I think there are easier and far less restricting ways to have something to blog about.

> 3) a van that you can resell or give to your kids

A van that's been lived in for a few years probably won't have that much resale value and it's not exactly the best thing to inherit (his kids would probably either have their own van by the time they get the inheritance or have decided against that lifestyle).

I guess it's fun if you're content being a Nomad. But I'm with the grandparent, this lifestyle is probably just not for me.

> and pays rent for the kids?

The way I read it it's implied that they split up [0], so the (former) wife would need to pay rent either way.

[0] He also mentions getting custody as a target in an earlier post.

> Because this lifestyle has nothing to do with freedom, but with fear.

What do you presume the author is afraid of/running away from?

Genuinely curious, I have a hard time imagining the mindset you see these people in.

I actually know this. I personally know a few people who do accept major financial restraint in exchange for pursuing their passion.

To be fair, I'm from Europe, so I can't personally verify whether this still works in the US or if the stories I've heard were false, but this does at least provide a counterpoint to this not being possible in western countries.

> They pulled the plug on one user who happened to be hostile, and who was abusing their free resources by issuing hundreds of thousands of requests a day.

Well, I'm not really seeing the evidence for abuse, to be honest. They were using these resources like any other WP hoster.

> What you, and other's, are missing is that WPE is not a typical user. They're a corporation with hundreds of thousands of customers.

As are Automattic, Pressable and many others.

> This is like if you set up a free little API and then Amazon decided to use it. Would you let that fly? Would you foot the bill? What if Amazon is now your competitor? Surely then you'd happily pay the bill?

This is painting the case in a way that I don't see supported by the presented facts. Just to be clear:

If I provide a free API and Amazon suddenly starts using it, increasing my expenses by an order of magnitude, then yes, I'd block them immediately.

If, however, my API is used by millions of customers, advertised as free and some percentage of these requests are sent by Amazon-hosted versions of my software, the situation would be quite different. I understand the intention of not wanting to foot the bill of a competitor, but in that case it does not seem unreasonable at all to give prior notice, even if just for a few days.

The way you paint the situation implies that WPEngine was suddenly DDOS'ing the API and required an immediate, unannounced blockage. But, from the facts presented, this doesn't seem to be the case at all. Also, just to be clear, this blockage affected uninvolved third parties - if this was just affecting the company, I'd probably have no compassion for WPEngine. But technically they actually blocked people and companies who bought hosted WP from WPE and a little leniency would have been a _much_ better look for Automattic.

Also, just to be clear - this API was provided by the WordPress Foundation, which is not a competitor of WPE. Automattic is. This seems like a major conflict of interest.

I do get Matts motivation of not wanting to provide free services for a company he regards as really bad, but the way this was handled in terms of public communication, shaky legal accusations, actions with uncalled for immediacy and overall emotional language is just not a good look. This could have been and should have been handled much more professionally, at least in my opinion.

> I have a very high income and I still can’t afford a home

This is only true if you limit your choices of homes to popular areas. Homes out in the country are usually easy to come by, especially with the salary of someone working in tech. Now, if you want to live in a big city, this is obviously not true, but this is arguably a livestyle choice to spend money, which you then need to earn [0]. If you love farming more than anything, moving to flyover country and make your living doing that is entirely possible, which is the point PG is making.

[0] I don't mean to say that the housing bubble is not a bad situation, but this does not invalidate the argument.

> You're not obligated to provide free services to people you don't have a contract with, and who are openly hostile to negotiation. This could've easily been avoid by either not mooching off free resources, or by just playing nice.

I'm not arguing that they are obligated to provide free services. What they did was suddenly pull the plug on a free, public service for one specific user, which just happens to be a competitor. Also, this was without any announcement and clearly intent on interrupting the service for mostly unrelated third parties (namely WPEngines customers), just to hurt WPEngine.

As to them being hostile to negotiation, we don't know what happened behind close doors. But from the facts that were publicly presented, Matt wanted an amount of money, has (so far) not presented any reasonable legal basis for it and has overall been pretty emotional, so I do believe WPEngine when they claim that the demand was unreasonable and in bad faith on his side.

If this would have been a calm announcement that WP will cede any free hosting services to for-profit WordPress resellers, with a reasonable timeline for migration, he would have my full support. Maybe I could even get behind singling out WPEngine, if the case was solid. But the way this happens, Matt just looks like the bad guy.

> If I build my business on scraping X.com and then X bans my IPs, that's on me. They don't have to provide me free internet access to their content, that's a privilege.

But someone allows free passage on a toll bridge for everyone and suddenly decides to just deny your transport business specifically and publicly insult you, it looks a bit different. Especially if the owner of the bridge just happens to run a competitor for your business, things do look a bit fishy. I mean, fair enough, but this move was clearly intended for maximum damage and someone doing that does not at all look like the reasonable party, sorry.

> Wait until you discover that researchers aren't compensated by publishing corporations for their papers.

Yes, but most researchers are compensated by either the state, universities or companies hoping to profit of their research. Little high-level research is done for the fun of it.

It looks like Matt is using the WordPress non-profit to attack a competitor. Additionally, he cut off services to that competitor with the clear intent of disrupting their service and customers and talks about trademark infringement, despite their use of the trademark clearly being covered by their very own guidelines, and, to literally add insult to injury, he describes the situation in very emotional language.

It's not like I don't see Matts side, but the way he is acting is extremely unprofessional and looks like a temper tantrum. WPEngine might be a large business, but so is Automattic and this kind of scorched earth-approach is hard to support.

> Meta's company-size based licensing (as seen in Llama) is a step in the right direction.

We have been bitten by that hard in the past. As a small company (a few students, hardly 5 figure revenue) we've sold our product to a known household-brand to use as a gadget for an exhibition. In said product, we used a library that used revenue-based licensing. For some reason, the company behind that library heard of us having scored that customer and suddenly demanded insane amount of licensing fees. Luckily, the purchasing department of the customer offered to handle this and negotiate a deal; otherwise, this could have immediately sunk our company.

I work in a similar setup, but we only have 2 office days a month. I still like this very much; you get to meet and socialize with all your colleagues, but you have basically all the advantages of home office and traveling for two days a month is easy.

> I find it completely disproportionate that the police go out with such a number of devices and personnel to a registered company registered as a GmbH and not first Google the name and company in order to presumably find my YouTube (and Twitch) activities directly.

What purpose would this serve? If you receive an emergency tip like this, extensive research on what might be registered on that address and then check whether someone happens to be active on social media right now doesn't seem to be that good of a call. I don't mean to blame the developer - if I just had a few guns pointed at me, I would not be calm about this, either. But this isn't reasonable research given the time constraints.

Of course an email is easy to fake, but you really have to put things in perspective: We, as internet regulars, hear of swatting quite often, but for your average police officer, this is probably an once-in-a-career type of event and therefore the threshold for believability is quite low.

Also, as you pointed out, if it turns out to be a real situation, it will look horrible if the police knew of it beforehand. Even more, a victim in a situation that requires a swat team might have a quite limited ability to communicate, lowering the reasonable threshold even more.

Lastly, there isn't really a measured response. If you think there might be an actual dangerous situation, sending a few normal officers to check it out is reckless at best and might actually make the situation worse, as the attacker is alerted of the impeding police response and the police doesn't have the ability to respond swiftly.

> since you can express cycles with hard links

You can't if you only allow hard links to files.

> As much as I can respect the idealism about privacy and liberty etc..., I could not ignore the fact that any "really!!!" bad actor could use the same infrastructure to avoid investigation/prosecution, therefore I did not want to provide indirectly any help.

Well, what would be considered a "really!!!" bad actor for some might be a hero for others. Just as an example, depending on which side of the Israel/Palestine conflict you are on, either side using your node for military intelligence might be an use worth fighting for or terrible abuse.

In the end, this really comes down to whether you value freedom or state protection more; either of which can be abused by rogue actors or a malicious state, respectively. There is no win-win-solution, unfortunately.

The big thing about immutable infrastructure is that it is reproducible. I've seen both worlds and I do appreciate the simplicity and quickness of the upgrade solution presented in the post. The problem with this manual approach is that it is quite easy to end up with a few undocumented fixes/upgrades/changes to your pet server and suddenly upgrading or even just rebooting the servers/app becomes something scary.

Now, for immutable infrastructure, you have a whole different set of problems. All your changes are nicely logged in git, but to deploy you need to rebuild containers and roll them out over a cluster. To do this smoothly, the cluster also needs to have some kind of high availability setup, making everything quite complex and, in the end, you wasted minutes to hours of compute for something that a pet setup can do in a few seconds. But you can be sure that a server going down or a reboot are completely safe operations.

What works for you really depends on your situation (team size, importance of the app, etc.), but both approaches do have their uses and reducing the immutable infra approach to "people run k8s because it's hip" misses the point.

> I’ve seen highly skilled and intelligent engineers fall for the trap of calling Obsidian open source because they can inspect the code of the Electon app; forgetting that doesn’t actually grant them a license to do anything with the code.

That's because the terminology is pretty confusing, doubly so for ESL people. If you'd never had the whole open software vs. free software debate, it's easy to think that "open source" means "source code available", as this is pretty much in line with the direct reading of the phrase.

So you argue that you should both enjoy exploring new things together in common.

No one is arguing that you should spend every minute with your partner, but if you want to spend time together, you should have an activity that you both enjoy (which might be exploring new things!), otherwise the relationship will be hard.

I think a lot of your points play a role, but a major one is that when the employee is handing in his resignation, it's likely they have mentally already closed that chapter in their life and won't remain happy or productive. At best they leave soon anyway, at worst you're now paying a premium for worse work.