bluefox

I did not visit this link. Just the title makes me sick. Flagged.

Not only that, but we also know that no one pattern matcher fits all: with or without segment patterns? how to designate pattern variables? should it be extendable? what would we actually be matching? should we actually use a unifier? etc. Pattern matchers are easy to write, anyway.

We also know that they don't always make things clear, so we don't use them everywhere. Programmers using languages that have a pattern matcher "built in" tend to use it all the time, and it's not always a pretty sight. I conjecture that with this addition, Python codebases will become dichotomized: either it will be used everywhere, or it will not be used at all. The latter obviously has a head start :)

Well, people _are_ entitled to telling other people their thoughts. You say "complete lies" but it's not black and white. This devault post is an emotional hyperbole, and you're just dragging it on.

Welp, as a user of Xorg I'm fine with what I have. You seem to be playing on both senses of Xwayland both being Xorg and not being Xorg, but Xwayland will continue to be irrelevant to me.

You say "now or never" but I've no idea what you're talking about. Your reply makes zero sense. If there's any trouble in the future, I'm sure someone will step up, as I said.

I'm a bit confused about your post.

Why would Xorg users care about XWayland, or new releases or contributor patches?

Those who contribute to Xorg and feel stuck could step up to maintain it, if they wish. (Don't they do it already?)

If they don't wish to maintain it, maybe their contributions are a waste of everyone's time? (Then again, maybe they get paid to do it, in which case it's their money-misery trade-off to make.)

Over time, Xorg users may indeed need fixes. Then, I'm sure someone will step up.

Sure, I can understand people working on software X for a long time getting fed up with it and start working on software W.

I can also understand that these people have strong opinions on why W is so much better. The only trouble is that others, who are possibly not developers of window systems, may not care, or may find that it breaks their software, or may not want to write software that depends on W and doesn't work on X.

So what if Xorg is "barely maintained"? It works. Hell, as long as it works, it's likely better for it not to change. If there are issues, in the free software world we say "patches welcome". No developer should feel chained to a project.

I don't understand the point about maintenance. Is Xorg maintained? If so, are the current maintainers handcuffed to it? I assume they aren't, so what's the problem? If Xorg is not maintained, again, what's the problem? Software is known to outlive its creators and maintainers. If there's a need, it will eventually get new maintainers. Software is not magic.

People using software that breaks with Wayland keep to their existing window system. News at X11.

GitHub's "archive" and this guy's "closed for contributions" is easily solved by forking: congratulations, you're the new maintainer. That's all there is to it.

Every now and then we all get a glimpse, for a flash of a moment, that the house of cards has already collapsed. Too invested in our current systems to face this truth, we just update and forget about it until the next time.

Seems you're reading too much into what I said. I wasn't talking about a metaphorical hotdog, nor was I talking about the Elastic case. The post makes no mention of it either, people on HN just assume it was about it because of the timing (and maybe it was, but I am talking about the general issue of free software). Personally I don't care about companies like Elastic or Amazon, anyway, and I look at it from the point of view of a single programmer writing software.

A hotdog is not utopia, it's a basic means of survival (food). When you can't get the basics, you may have trouble figuring out how to exploit that kind of "wealth".

The issue is that the pyramid is upside down. Everyone should receive a basic universal income that allows the freedom to give away value to society without starving.

Furthermore, free software devalues software development. This is why much of the industry nowadays is about services or products where software plays a small part or is very specialized.

The author of this post praises free software, but makes his money from providing a service. That's great, and I like free software as a user (who doesn't), but the post misses a bunch of elephants in the room.

> It increases wealth for everyone.

Yeah, "everyone" but the original author, in most cases. That's usually how things go when you give something for free. Also, "wealth" is very broadly defined here. We're all "rich" with free software, yes, but still can't buy a hotdog with all that "wealth".

There's no need to trust them. You assume they log everything that your device sends them, as well as the time, IP address, etc. and infer all they can from it. Then you act accordingly. You can apply similar conservative assumptions to your device and the programs it runs, but for practical purposes you may want to relax them somewhat.

Yeah, there's something fishy with Signal, though it's been obvious for years that HN is one of its propaganda hubs.

The other day I described one of my concerns with it here [0]. I made no demands or anything like that (this is HN after all) yet someone chose to basically label me "entitled"... that must address all concerns, right?

Anyway, today I woke up and it seems this global campaign to ditch Facebook works, because some contact of mine added me to a group of "friends", people who "forgot" about me for years (because I'm not on any social network) and who had no idea what Signal was until now, who never knew or cared about privacy, but apparently decided to start using it this week. Neither he nor Signal asked for my consent, and now I'm faced with the unpleasant task of leaving that group and possibly hurting people because I never wanted to receive hundreds of vacuous messages every day. Thus I'm one step closer in my mind to moving to set up Matrix on my own server.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25692885

So when Signal decides to stop supporting your device, you're left with no choice but to get a new one.

So there's no point in auditing a Signal release.

So as Signal becomes more and more disagreeable (something that's bound to happen with any actively changing software), you're forced to take it or leave it.

It's a trap.

I am a user of Signal, and have been using it for a number of years now, but this concern remains.

Why do Signal releases contain an expiration time bomb?

That is, why is the user forced to update in order to use the application, even if no critical security issues arose?

The passage of time is not a good excuse for a mandatory update.

These things happen when you depend on a middleman to distribute your product.

Are you working for GitHub? If not, nobody asked you anything. That you are taking such offense at my simple request that you have to create a "non-JS kook" personality type to satisfy your vindictive feelings is mystifying. Try to improve yourself.

Don't forget the endless stream of security updates, bundled up with whatever new UI/tracking/arbitrariness they want to force upon you. After all, the world wide web is a dangerous place, and your data is at risk. Don't you trust us to keep you safe? As if you had a choice.

I don't know how much programming experience you have, but let me tell you that bringing back an HTML dropdown menu is not a big deal. I don't know about "spite", but I would say it's either an oversight, or incompetence, or some grander goal to force JavaScript on their users for what could be termed "business-related reasons".

You picked up on "newer technology" as if it's pertinent to the matter. It is not. This usability checkpoint is still 100% valid today. I gave reference to that document to show that the matter is related to accessibility, and to provide evidential support to userbinator's view that the term has been hijacked by the web giants and munged up to exclude whatever is inconvenient to them.

You, like others in this thread, bring "disability" and "self-imposition" to this discussion. I dare you to imagine a world where not everybody who wishes to make basic use of GitHub is able, even if willing, to run JavaScript in every conceivable context. Can you imagine such a world? In this totally imaginary world this inaccessibility is not self-imposed. Given such a world, would you be willing to accept that my simple request is reasonable?

I wonder what makes people so eager to push back on such a simple request, to make basic functionality available without JavaScript. In GitHub's case, they only recently screwed it up in a major way, so surely it shouldn't be a big deal to add back the functionality?

Is it "frontend programmers" feeling hurt? Or business types who think it hurts their telemetry channels? Do their salaries depend on it? Or perhaps it's just people who just need to disapprove of someone else's preferences?

It's a simple request. Yes, more than 99% of your users use JavaScript, are not blind or deaf, have reasonably fast links, powerful machines, large enough screens, don't mind updating their browser every week (very important! security matters _so much_ when you regularly run arbitrary code), etc.

So I'm in the 1%... why do so many people feel such a strong need to tell me this issue of mine is a non-issue for everybody else?

It wasn't always like this. Look at WCAG version 1.0 [0] section 6.3. It's very sensible advice. Then through the magic of "Web 2.0" and bigco work on "Accessible Rich Internet Applications" the advice was made to disappear [1].

Nowadays when you mention the issue on the web, instead of trying to understand and imagine low-powered devices, limited browsers, restricted environments, or maybe just security-concious people who are effectively disabled by this "Web 2.0" bullshit, people claim that you're using the term "accessibility" wrong.

[0] https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/ [1] https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG22/

In my case, yes, it is by choice. But do you think everyone has a choice? JavaScript is a power-hungry, memory-hungry, bloated, security nightmare. Requiring JavaScript for basic functionality (that was available not that long ago!) is simply hostile.

Says you.

I guess our experience with regards to CL differs. A lot. The spec is lie? Implementations are all the same? To me it sounds like you're talking about a different language.

I can take source code from the eighties and nineties (say from CMU AI archive) and, in all likelihood, with a few modifications make it respect the ANSI specification and have it run in 2020 on pretty much any CL implementation. This code is several times older than Clojure. I have a lot of code from 15 years ago to this day that works flawlessly on pretty much any CL implementation. Granted I also have some implementation-specific code and code that would suffer in efficiency and that would hit implementation limits.

I use mainly two CL implementations (SBCL, ECL) that serve purposes that are quite different. I know applications where CLISP was chosen because of its size and mostly-portable bytecode. People who care about Appleware tend to like CCL for its support on that platform. Some companies prefer the more enterprisey LispWorks/Allegro. These implementations are all meaningfully different. They all strive to conform to the specification. CLISP and Allegro have nonconforming modes as well, which not many people care about.

GitHub have the gall talking about accessibility while flinging their octotentacles, dragging users screaming down to the firey pits of JavaScript hell.

I was thinking about ClojureCLR. While my argument could be applied to ClojureScript, I did not think it was fair because ClojureScript calls itself a (proper) subset of Clojure, which is fine and no one expects it to run actual Clojure programs. Again, I apologize for undue harshness.