bionoid

If you are delivering software or hardware products that include weather forecast, do not rely on anyone else's API directly. Build a wrapper service and direct your clients there.

As a particularly disasterous example, the Yahoo Weather API was unchanged for the longest time. Integrators worldwide deployed thousands - no probably millions - of systems using an unofficial "Yahoo Weather Module". It was the canonical solution.

Then they made a breaking change to the API and everyone cried.

> but I’m certain that they will be able to find another position in a company where their jQuery skills will be very valuable. However, I don’t expect that they’ll learn anything new in that place, and in 3 years or so, if they will be looking for a new job, they will be in the same exact same place.

As opposed to React or any other modern web stuff. Those skills will last a lifetime.

First off because they are generating that revenue by exploiting my community. Secondly because them rolling out broken updates generates work for me as a moderator; we'll need to update everything to work for a completely new system. It's going to be a lot of work, and they are changing shit all the time.

I don't want to spend my time to support their exploitative and slimy tactics.

Just as a small protest to the hostility, and to spread awareness.

It seems to me like they are deliberately sacrificing the old userbase for a younger, "more naive" audience. I moderate a medium-sized subreddit, and I am seriously considering just closing the thing down, because I'm not going to be willing to adapt my bots to a work with a crippled API (its bad enough as it is). And let's be real here, the API will be crippled in the near future. Do you really think you'll be allowed to have an ad-free and tracking-free experience in a third-party app when they are done with this redesign project?

* They went closed-source.

* They removed the cloudsearch syntax from the search API. That may not seem very signifficant since very few people used it for their day to day redditing. But this was the only way of acquiring submissions older than the most recent 1000 for any given subreddit. Now there is no way to obtain old data, short of searching for random keywords and checking the date. I guess they don't want you to benefit from the aggregated data.

* They abandoned iterative development to do a redesign-by-giant-committee. They are just pushing hostile shit and adjust if the complaints get too loud. That's a clear warning sign of things to come.

* They rolled out the redesign on wide scale while it was not even close to alpha state. Half of the endpoints just straight up didn't work, and the remaining half was broken, like flairs, rules, css, and basically everything else.

* The new system refuses to serve hosted image content to non-trackable clients (ie, you need img.png?sid=valid_sid to get image data). It also includes some rather hostile tracking technology, I forget the details but it was described in /r/privacy somewhere.

At this point, it seems like the best thing to do is to set my subreddits to private so at least I am not contributing to their $100M revenue... but yeah, unfortunately it sucks for the community (and possibly other mods interested to keep the place running), hard decision to pull the trigger :/

> Sill nothing beats creating your own website, and taking the recurring payments directly with Stripe.

Sorry to go off-topic here, but I'd love to hear suggestions from the HN crown on this.

What are the best ways to handle video content on a self-hosted website? Browser-based player, streaming server, etc? Is there a reliable service that offers a solution to paywall video content on your own website?

> Its name is systemd and Devuan does not permit lovers of init freedom to use it.

I don't understand your tone here. The Devuan project is ~150 packages on top of Debian that aim specifically to remove the systemd dependencies. "Init freedom lovers", as you put it, can still use Debian, no?

The actual GitLab instance appears to be at [1], I couldn't find this in the link or the gnome.org announcement.

Good news, though! I am hopeful it can help lower the barrier to entry.

[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME

> that is a very abnormal experience.

I don't have links handy, but there were official blog posts and such about how they endeavored to fix the problem. Of course I'm not saying it was universal, nor trying to take away from the fact that there are a lot of great people in the Perl community (PerlMonks is a good example)

They did fix it, as far as I can tell anyway, but it was too little too late.

> Python beat Perl for two reasons [...]

The reason I personally left Perl was the extremely hostile community. When someone asked a simple question, not only would they get an overhaul and namecalling, but so would anyone that tried to help them.

Python seemed to do a much better job at onboarding new people. To me, that seems like the most important reason they won in the long run.

Not trying to be pedantic or anything, but it's also extremely insecure, extremely unreliable and extremely hard to implement correctly when compared to a normal procedure call.

It just seemed weird to me to leave that out.

All I'm saying is I don't think the result will be a real improvement to privacy or data safety. I think it'll be some adjustments on paper, then business as usual.

> They can't, and they'll learn it the hard way.

I doubt it. The fines will be completely irrelevant, and they won't even need to notify more than 1% of their lawyers and lobbyists to ensure they can keep it up for the next decade.

I found it interesting to just glance at the code, having never touched Go (but familiar with SDL). Some day I will find the time hack around in one of these new languages, whether it be Go or Rust or Red or Perl6 .. :)

I have some trouble understanding the rationale for using SDL_ttf in an editor implementation, though. Did you just cut shaping, bidirectional text and font fallback as acceptable losses, or is it on the roadmap? If so, what is your strategy?

Thanks for the clarification -- is there an official writeup about the incident somewhere? (should have asked that initially, sorry)

> created and run by a third party not affiliated with the company.

Are you saying you never hired the third party, they went about and did this of their own accord without talking to you first?

> In other words you can track both people who click through an ad directly, or who see your ad and then visit your site a bit later (this is known as a "view-through conversion"). It's magic.

It's not magic, just evil.

> (you can generally trust PayPal)

I agree, but I also have a counterexample:

"Oh, you bought SOFTWARE?? All those pretty marketing pages about our amazing safety and protection system do not apply to virtual products. We agree this vendor totally screwed you over, but it's not our problem."

(this was a few years ago, may have changed)

edit: It eroded my trust in the company completely. I don't really have an opinion of their technology.

I will take this opportunity to promote the YouTube channels of Brady Haran[0], Numberphile specifically. It has all sorts of interesting videos, including Graham's number [1] (one of the videos featuring Ron Graham) and TREE(3) [2].

His other channels are worth checking out too, Sixty Symbols and Deep Sky Videos being my favorites. To be clear, I have no affiliation with this, just a fan.

[0] http://bradyharan.com/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX8bihEe3nA&list=PLt5AfwLFPx...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3P6DWAwwViU&t=54s

> I believe there’s a lot of truth to it, from my experience it totally matches a mini psychotic event.

Jan Irvin at GnosticMedia has an interesting article about this "Entheogens: What’s in a Name? The Untold History of Psychedelic Spirituality, Social Control, and the CIA" [0] (note: this is part 4 of a 5-part series).

"Today there are many names for drug substances that we commonly refer to as “hallucinogens,” “psychedelics,” “psychoactives,” or “entheogens,” et al. But it hasn’t always been that way. The study of the history and etymology of the words for these fascinating substances takes us, surprisingly, right into the heart of military intelligence, and what became the CIA’s infamous MKULTRA mind control program, and reveals how the names themselves were used in marketing these substances to the public, and especially to the youth and countercultures."

edit: There is some interesting etymology here, Irvin claims it evolved from the word "psychotomimetic" (mimicking psychosis)

[0] https://www.gnosticmedia.com/Entheogens_WhatsinaName_Psyched...

> I'm sure I'm sitting on the wrong side of countless user studies that say to the contrary

This is completely off topic, but I was a UX study participant last year, it was an interesting experience. They told me to do as I usually do when surfing the web, and to verbalize my thought process.

I opened the website, and a huge nonmodal advertisement to win some $15 piece of garbage pops up. On pure instinct I click ctrl-w to close the tab, and state "what an obnoxious advertisement, I am boycotting this site".

It went downhill from there.

> Or they could be, you know, acting.

Yes, precisely like Tom Cruise is just an actor. Let's forget about the scientology thing.

I don't have a link that explains the situation well, which is why I am [slowly] working on a documentary project to bring it to the public.

> calling porn a "cult" seems like a stretch

That is the general perception, but as I said initially, girls are indoctrinated and trained using advanced psychological manipulation, indistinguishable from what most people think a "cult" is.

Everyone is free to believe that massive numbers of young girls just absolutely love the taste of cum, rimming, and so on. Nothing fishy is going on...

> One person's abuse can be another person's pornography.

That is accurate for virtually all pornography. If you research how the "industry" works, you will quickly discover that it's built on advanced psychology, specifically hypnosis, torture, culture of fear and other brainwashing techniques.

The porn cult is every bit as vicious, evil and destructive to women as any cult you can name.

This looks interesting, but I don't think I can commit to mac-only software for this personally. I stumbled on TeXstudio [0] about a year ago, it has been very nice, though I still have a ways to go as I had not used any TeX before... It's GPLv2, cross-platform Linux, MacOS and Windows.

[0] https://www.texstudio.org/

I recently discovered that Ghostery was purchased by Cliqz [0], which is a company partially owned by Mozilla. They offer a free privacy-oriented browser "Cliqz" which is described on Wikipedia as:

"Cliqz plans to eventually monetize the software through a program known as Cliqz Offers, which will deliver sponsored offers to users based on their interests and browsing history. However, these recommendations will be processed locally based on a remote repository of offers, with no personally identifiable data sent to remote servers." [1]

I haven't looked further into it, but it makes me feel like I should contribute to a browser project...

[0] https://www.ghostery.com/blog/ghostery-news/ghostery-acquire...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz

I don't call those "accurate" personally, but YMMV

> Though to be fair the W10 experience is still a significant improvement over the XP and W7 days (I haven't had an update repeatedly fail yet).

I am on the other side of that fence, managing about 100 machines across all versions W7-W10 and Server 2008-2016.

Win7 boxes are by far the most stable desktops, in the past year I have had at least ten win10 systems blow up due to updates, stuck in and endless loop of installing at shutdown and reverting at startup. A few weeks ago two stock server 2016's with nothing but SQL Server installed outright died to a windows update (unbootable).

I am never upgrading my personal windows machines past windows 7.

3) Include an accurate description of each update, so you can determine if it is worth installing or not.

Leary, you mean? He admitted that straight up himself, and you can just look at the 1979 MKULTRA reunion video if you have any doubt that he was involved with the CIA [0]. That it's not covered on wikipedia is hardly surprising.

Regarding reliability, Irvin promotes critical thinking through the trivium method [1], and the conclusions are drawn from primary documents. You really should look into it.

[0] https://www.gnosticmedia.com/ccn-unspun-020-mkultra-reunion-...

[1] http://www.triviumeducation.com/