Hacker News Reader

christopherbalzon Avoid TypeScript `as` Assertions

The article raises awareness of a pitfall that is easy to fall into, and that will only appear at runtime.

christopherbalzon Three Arrows Capital has defaulted on a loan worth more than $670M

Not your keys, not your coins.

christopherbalzon Microsoft Wants to Change TypeScript

Is it really that much for the browser vendors to support TypeScript? Then, the only reason to compile would be to optimize for production by removing the excess code of the data-typing.

Browser support for TypeScript would invite developers to use those browsers, which aligns with browser-vendor interests.

christopherbalzon A complete guide to TypeScript’s 'never' type

Sweet! 'never' seems to have historical roots in IE's ancient 'unknown' js type.

christopherbalzon Ask HN: Books to read when you transform from SWE into SWE Management?

+ And worth re-reading as well. Totally generic to field but definitely applicable here.

christopherbalzon Nixery: Ad-hoc container registry, powered by Nix

Why call it "NixOS" when it seems to be a package manager?

christopherbalzon Etsy’s Journey to TypeScript

Great in-depth write-up!

christopherbalzon Ask HN: I'm a self-taught programmer, what am I likely missing

My two cents: Formal Methods (e.g., "Z" and Promela) and also, teamwork stuff (from old days, Team Software Process, and any more modern material like that).

christopherbalzon Tsafe: The missing built-ins (assert) for TypeScript

A page of practical examples that are easy to understand and clearly offer advantages would help for those with limited time.

christopherbalzon TypeScriptBC – Language specification for TypeScript with a Rust borrow checker

It would be really nice to not always have to do a worker thread or iframe to get multi-threading. Web apps with more involved and/or extensive ui's would benefit a lot from this in terms of the ui responsiveness.

christopherbalzon How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum

Kind of surprising that the article doesn't mention the profits and sway that Big Tech has to afford the approaches he describes. Borrow money very cheaply, buy back stock, profit from higher stock price. As well, Big Tech has market power (not necessarily monopoly) to allow for a lot of flexibility in deadlines.

christopherbalzon TypeScript’s never type, what’s the point? (2019)

+1 Also, the author of the article was able to do the job in an article that one can read in just a few minutes - a rare feat.

christopherbalzon Young, Female Developers Burn Out Because of ‘Expectations’

Lots of good data in this article.

christopherbalzon Coinbase from YC to DPO

It is a day of true irony: https://twitter.com/RichardHeartWin/status/13823814747338219...

christopherbalzon The Last of the Hedgehogs: René Girard

Girard's theory also applies very well to mass culture movements for social and political change. Shameless plug: My book rests in large part upon his theories: https://www.nottotouchthesun.net/doorsinpoetryandhistory/

christopherbalzon Secretive – macOS native app to store SSH keys in the Secure Enclave

So, macOS keychain simply doesn't have the ability to store in secure enclave?

christopherbalzon Reddit rolls out community currencies on Ethereum

BAT rewards have been live on seemingly all reddit comments for a year or so now.

christopherbalzon New Microsoft Security ‘Nightmare’: Users Warned Your Passwords Are Now at Risk

An oldie but a goodie: https://labs.detectify.com/2014/12/08/hijacking-of-abandoned...

christopherbalzon SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

"Distributed computing project, Rosetta@Home, is using the BOINC infrastructure to model covid-19 proteins that may be drug targets. " - https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/f5as77/distributed...

I have run BOINC on my own computers for about 20 years. I really like it because it always properly steps out of the way whenever the computer is being used for something else (including config to do that when simply other processes need more resource), and because it's cross-platform.

christopherbalzon San Francisco has nearly five empty homes per homeless resident

Not surprising; the Fed is intent on ever-inflating the housing asset bubble.

christopherbalzon Cryptocurrency in the 2020s

Interesting research on stock-to-flow: https://medium.com/digitalassetresearch/plan-b-is-now-plan-a...

christopherbalzon Ask HN: What should I read while offline for a year?

I am enjoying "Quantum Computing for Everyone". It's by an MIT math professor, and is certainly for "everyone" . . . who wants to learn quantum techniques for linear algebra (e.g., everyone who wants to do some serious work).

christopherbalzon The Society of the Spectacle

Well-said.

christopherbalzon Brow.sh: Modem Text Browser That Supports CSS, JavaScript and Even WebGL

On macOS, brow.sh doesn't make it clear as to what hyperlink I am focused on when browsing.

Also, it doesn't handle terminal shutdown; it leaves Firefox running but won't reconnect if you open up a new terminal and try to run it again.

Overall, unusable at this time, imo.

christopherbalzon Beige Book by the Federal Reserve

Charts: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/

christopherbalzon VisibleV8: In-Browser Monitoring of JavaScript in the Wild

Sounds lightweight in implementation but very powerful. Seems like it could be used by the likes of `npm` to filter out packages that do operations such as `prototype` modification. Then those would be flagged in `npm audit`.

christopherbalzon Why NPM lockfiles can be a security blindspot for injecting malicious modules

Is this something that could/should be done by the package repositories such as npmjs.com?

christopherbalzon Sanejs – fast lookup and verify the hashes of the default JavaScript libraries

I think that the README could be improved by adding a brief description of how it works, in maybe 20 to 50 words. Then, consider adding another paragraph if more detail would be helpful to the reader/prospective user.

Separately, a command-line tool to do basic hash verification would also be useful - has anyone seen one?