_sdegutis

I'm the same way in general, I prefer "past of least friction" for my OS and IDE and programming languages etc. I'm using Mac OS X right now. (They may have changed the OS's name by now.) But I also like new and shiny novelties. Sometimes it's nice to configure Arch Linux with dwm and all sorts of stuff like that.

Btw I'm big fan of your games, like Link to the Past! 16-bit era was best era.

I'd love to try out Linux again. Is the rMBP story any better than it was in 2014? Last I heard there were way too many driver problems.

Thanks for the kind words, and glad to hear it made an impression! The code is sitting here on my computer just waiting to be deployed again, but it would have to be somewhere those demonic trolls can find. That said, they don't go to HN and I do own the domain name for another year, so maybe a subdomain is in order...

EDIT: (Apparently my HN account is rate-limited so I can't reply directly.) How about this: anyone who wants access, email me and I'll send you a link. The site is up and running. People can send the link to their friends, and it'll be a private HN-only sub-community.

It is a random string, I just created it with uuid(). Nothing was ever verified. Is minting tokens an official term that has to do with JWT? I thought it was just short-hand for the process I just described.

EDIT: I misunderstood what was meant by minting tokens, my entire comment is pointless. Save yourself the time.

What's the headache about minting tokens? You create a new uuid() on the server, store it in the DB in its own table which has references to accounts, keep an isValid field next to it for server-side invalidation, and store it in localStorage in the client. Is there a security flaw or something in this?

I've come to the conclusion that at least 1% of users are actively malicious with at least enough free time, resources, and coordination of a small full time team of professionals. I created and hosted a free self-moderated community which went well for a little while, until at least a couple people became obsessed with spamming the site with extreme gore (see the Mr. OP comment in http://old.reddit.com/r/editfight which is relatively tame compared to other things they've done) and evading every single method I had of stopping or banning them, until I had to just give up altogether and shut the site down. I feel bad for the moderators on imgur.com (where I got the majority of my users) because I read somewhere that many of them now have to go to therapy for some of the things they've seen in doing their job. Online communities and the moderation of them in the modern internet is problematic enough that I personally never want to tackle that again, not even by delegating it to someone else.

> I fear I would have spent _way_ too long on, shall we say, an "appropriate" reply.

When someone's only interest is in being right and explaining how right they are, it's not worth talking to them when you disagree. You can listen of course, but that doesn't need a conversation.

> I appreciate the TIL regarding a community to call out and avoid.

This was 3-4 years ago, I'm sure the community has changed at least a little since then, like any online community does. It also may be completely different today.

> With such people, it seems you have two options - argue against their views and suffer the continuous backlash; or implicitly agree by not arguing, and risk the potential expectation to behave contrary to your personal standards as a result.

Silence is not implied assent. Silence is the right solution to most situations. Having been on the arrogant end of those kinds of "debates" for far too much of my life, I've learned that silence is effective because it does not give the arguer any satisfaction in their prior arguments nor the opportunity to continue showing off their arrogance with further arguments.

> HN's moderation does a reasonably good job

Having been in many, many online communities for the past 20 years, HN is in fact a minor miracle. It is a bit of an echo chamber, but you can't really escape that while still having a "peaceful" community. cake.eat(); cake.have(); throws "Error: cake reference has become invalid"

Fun little story, I used to be sympathetic to the all software sucks movement and attitude. Then I tried to port `st` (simple terminal) to Mac OS X by separating its core from its X11-dependent code and pulling the globals into a single struct, so that I could wrap it with NSView. When I tried to ask the `st` community if they wanted my changes[1], they replied that these changes were unnecessary, that coupling the core with X11 was perfectly fine, and especially that there's no reason to port it to such an awful non-free OS as Apple's. I now prefer to take a constructive and positive approach to software development, instead of just having a negative or cynical attitude.

[1] https://lists.suckless.org/dev/1408/23366.html

No. Even without background checks, every employer ends up googling my name when I get hired, and rescinds the offer 100% of the time. My only hope of being a professional programmer is to do contracting with people who give second chances. I had two clients who have done that, but one cut off contact with me. So I have one client. No way to expand that.

I went job hunting for the past 8 months and got 30 jobs and all of them rescinded their offers because my reputation is radioactive. So I would love to get a full time job. But it's not my path right now unfortunately. I would absolutely love that though.

This is where I get stuck actually. I try to digest some information, but then I start worrying that I'm taking unreasonably long, that my client is definitely going to ask for a justification for why something that should have only taken 1 hour ended up taking 3 hours (because it could take him 1 hour or even less), and I won't have a good answer.

I'm not talking trash. You and I have had different experiences with poverty. I meant that if I was homeless, I'd have more time like I did in jail. And I only meant that in contrast to how right now I have no time.

Technically I should be working right now, but I came here to ask for help thinking it might save me a few hours of frustrating non-billable time spent staring at code and not getting it.

We have looked into every single possible resource. My wife has a disability that's incredibly difficult to prove with insurance or the government. It makes her unable to move for large parts of the day several times per month. She literally drops things and is unsafe to drive, and it just randomly comes on out of nowhere. So she's unable to work because of this, and we're unable to get disability for it either.

We've gone through every single local church and food bank. She just stopped at the food pantry yesterday. We are on food stamps.

I'm saying all this knowing that it's a waste of billable time, because I think it's important that you know that first of all I don't mean any offense, and second of all that I'm not exaggerating when I say that we really have no other recourse at this point.

That'd be great. Wish I could get one.

The thing about being homeless is that you have a lot of time. I had a lot of time while in jail too. I exercised 2 hours a day and ate healthy and felt great physically. If I spend any time exercising or taking a walk or spend my time doing anything other than working every waking minute, my wife and kids will be homeless.

> Not sure from your post whether or not you realize the age of woman does not matter.

It does matter. It makes it worse that they were still in formative years.

> I have to wonder if that sense of strangeness is also apparent in your face to face demeanor.

I think what's coming off as "strangeness" in my writing to a lot of people here, is that it seems like I'm treating what I did very casually, like it was just something that happened. But it's just that I'm so panicked over how we literally don't have money for next month's bills, and not sure where that's going to come from, that I really can't spend any energy on anything else. The guilt of what I did has weighed me down a lot and slowed me down, and I can't afford that, so I have to shut out everything else around me and just focus on solving this one gigantic problem right in front of me, of how to avoid my family becoming homeless and starved this summer because of my past actions. That's all I can think of.

Yep. I wasn't very cooperative with treatment after the first incident. I was very defensive. I felt that I needed to protect myself from the unfair world. That mindset prevented me from healing as a person and receiving proper treatment.

It's interesting to look at both of my HN accounts. I can actually see my gradual mental deterioration and then gradual recovery.

I took it down because I just applied for another job, probably the last one I'll try. And I linked to my portfolio/blog site, but didn't want that to be the way they found out. Either way, I realize it's probably better for me to either remove this HN post, or to put the blog post back up, to avoid having discussion with too little context. So I pushed it and it should be back up now.

Oh, I forgot my repo is public :)

The thought of that was on my mind for a very long time. But the fact that I have no money coming in and no money planned is starting to take over all my thoughts. I'm in a giant panic and this blog post was written from that perspective.

Thanks will look into it.

I've had to deal with this nightmare living in my head for almost 10 years now. I've accepted that it's my fault, and in no way am I trying to place blame on anything else. All the choices I made were wrong. It was wrong of me to drink when I was stressed about work. It was wrong of me to turn to adrenaline tactics to relieve stress too. It was wrong of me to flash teenage girls. It was wrong of me to try to get a software job when I knew I wasn't qualified for it. It was wrong of me to tease my family with a middle class life I realistically knew all along that I couldn't afford. It was wrong of me to not quit from my jobs when I knew I wasn't doing well enough at them. Everything here was my fault and in no way am I avoiding responsibility for any of it. This blog post is an obituary of my software career. It's written from that perspective.

I'm able to pass interviews very well, but when it comes down to doing senior level programming stuff, I really suck at it. I tried rewriting old.editfight.com the other week in React + Express + TypeScript and it took me 3 days just to get the basic boilerplate working. But I can tell an interviewer what big-O notation means and can write a working fizzbuzz using functional programming techniques in ESNext.

Even if I were qualified, I don't think anyone would like to take online tutoring from a sex offender, and I doubt even more that people would like to fund a felon and sex offender via Patreon. But I really do appreciate the idea.

That seems very unethical, doesn't it? Hiding information that would make a client definitely not choose you, so that they would choose you?

In terms of solving harassment issues, it wouldn't help. My address and new name will still pop up on the registry.

In terms of getting a job, yes, I could get a name change, but I feel like that would be unethical. If a company wouldn't want to hire me knowing my past, then hiding it from them so they would hire me seems really wrong.

inb4 "too bad so sad, stop flashing teenagers you pervert, you did this to yourself it's your own fault" - thanks, heard this a million times in my mind, let alone from other people, but thanks anyway.

I've always had the drive to do things like this in my spare time. I'd love to get paid for solving technical problems for an employer. I think besides the obvious, I'd make a good candidate for an employee at something like Facebook.

More companies should encourage hiring developers who would solve problems in their spare time. When I applied for an apprenticeship at 8th Light, they had me write a tic tac toe game, and I wrote it in 4 or 5 different languages, just for fun. I think that's why they hired me.

Man, it would be good to have an employer. Any takers?

From the article:

> "You might be tempted to work around these limitations by setting up a domain name in the global DNS that happens to resolve to 127.0.0.1 (for instance, localhost.example.com), getting a certificate for that domain name, shipping that certificate and corresponding private key with your native app, and telling your web app to communicate with https://localhost.example.com:8000/ instead of http://127.0.0.1:8000/. Don’t do this. It will put your users at risk, and your certificate may get revoked."

EDIT: oops, it's not exactly what you were talking about, since you suggested only pointing it to 127.0.0.1 in your own /etc/hosts file, so I don't think the article answers your idea directly

I haven't found a markup language that I really prefer for configuration files, but JSON has been reasonably nice to me in NPM configurations and VS Code settings and I haven't ran into problems yet. I understand the motivation for TOML but it has the same ambiguity problems that YAML does. There's something to be said for not being too flexible, or it'll fall into the same trap as AppleScript did. Humans might prefer the convenience of ultra-flexibility at first, but sooner or later our intuition will just not match up with the actual rules, and we'll have to spend longer than we wanted to looking up arcane syntax documentation. That's been my experience with YAML anyway, like every single time.

What should the code be instead?