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Comment by aktuel | Hacker News Reader

My own code doesn't break without me working on it.

Neither do your dependencies. Unless the maintainer somehow hacks into your server and updates them for you?

People in web development tend to allow dependencies to auto-update. It’s kind of a necessary evil in that the alternative is to do it only manually and then falling behind on security vulnerabilities updates and potentially getting hacked.

But by that argument, if you try to write all of the code doing the functions just by yourself and not bring in any dependencies, and that code is now five years old and you haven't touched it for five years, you might have some security vulnerabilities too.

It's not like you are always writing better code than the open source projects are. Unless you are one of the best developers in the world, then sure, then that might work, but for the rest of us, we are probably not guaranteed to ever write code that is 100% bug free for five years.

> and that code is now five years old and you haven't touched it for five years, you might have some security vulnerabilities too

Security vulnerabilities grow in unattended code then?

Or they were there from the second the code was written but with some luck someone noticed them and fixed them?

Old code isn't necessarily insecure just because it's old...

Doesnt matter if you count them from the second the code is written or when they are discovered. The same issue is in code written by someone else or yourself.

The point is that freshly updated code has the same chance of being buggy.

You want me to believe that in the npm "ecosystem" they have LTS branches that only get security updates? For anything besides maybe a few large libraries with companies behind them?

While ironically leaving themselves open to supply chain attacks.

Correct. It's broken by default because you're the only user and worked on it for 10 minutes 5 years ago. Probably wrote no tests for it.

Compare that to something like jQuery where all the edge cases have already been accounted for 10 years ago.

If I worked on it for 10 minutes 5 years ago then it’s definitely not taking lots of time and energy

As far as you know.

People who don't "over engineer" also don't track errors. So you might be losing a bunch of users because your website is broken on their devices, and you'll never know. You can't repro it because your locale doesn't match theirs.

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