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finack

84 karma · joined May 27, 2024

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finack··on Man scammed after AI told him fake Facebook customer support number was real
I look forward to this never happening again and not becoming a massive problem for the next 10 years.
finack··on Ticketmaster breach affects more than half a billion users
Corporations really are amazing. They are, simultaneously, in a superposition of getting away with crimes because they don't exist, and providing goods and services and benefitting shareholders because they do. Remarkable.
finack··on Ticketmaster breach affects more than half a billion users
No they don't. Rules for companies and individuals are different in this country, unless you possess some secret to getting away with potentially ruining the lives of 1.5 times the population of the United States with the financial equivalent of a slap on the wrist.
finack··on Show HN: CommitAsync – $100K+ dev jobs 100% remote only
Ah, so you want a service that forces employers to tell the truth. I think that's called "Congress", but it looks like it's been abandoned for a few years now.
finack··on Show HN: CommitAsync – $100K+ dev jobs 100% remote only
Crazy idea: provide a search box, and when the user hits "enter", POST the data to the backend, which queries the database, and then returns the relevant results.
finack··on What We're Working on in Firefox
Until Google decides to give developers the ability to let the browser invade the rest of the system, which, in six months, will suddenly be necessary for everyone to do things like bank online and pay utility bills.
finack··on What We're Working on in Firefox
Web browsers can already do that. I'm not sure what else is desired beyond what they already do.
finack··on Road planners embrace the diverging diamond interchange
A lot of people died of heat stroke in India today.
finack··on Road planners embrace the diverging diamond interchange
I'm sorry one injury invalidates an entire mode of transit. Better luck next planet, I guess.
finack··on After Furiosa flops, Hollywood could be facing a biblically disastrous summer
It's just kind of the experience, I don't know. It has a certain familiarity, but there's also the shared experience aspect of it. I don't like to be cloistered more and more at home, despite that being the overwhelming arc of American culture. Sometimes it's nice to enjoy a shared, familiar experience (even if the popcorn costs too much).
finack··on After 6 years, I'm over GraphQL
I'm not, I'm using my decade of experience and nascent alcoholism.
finack··on What We're Working on in Firefox
None of these things are in scope for a program that is supposed to browse the web (by fetching web pages and rendering them).
finack··on What We're Working on in Firefox
Could it actually be the hundreds of megabytes of JavaScript each website insists on executing?
finack··on What We're Working on in Firefox
I truly do not understand the complaints about Firefox, the browser (and not Mozilla's questionable stewardship thereof). Every time someone starts talking about their issue, it's either something super niche and inconsequential, or something that doesn't seem to have sufficient evidence to blame on the browser (turns out, crappy web apps will make any browser slow to a crawl). I used Chrome for a few years back in the mid-teens, then switched back to Firefox, and manage to use the Web just fine. It's a browser, it renders web pages. I really don't understand the fuss. Meanwhile, Google (the advertising company) would totally like you to use Google (the browser), for totally innocent reasons.
finack··on What We're Working on in Firefox
Those web APIs aren't actually standard (WebUSB, for example, is still in draft status), and they have some gnarly privacy implications. Google steamrolls over standards bodies, and then somehow people believe their browser is the standard. I'm not sure if this is a concerted marketing effort by Google, or simply intellectual laziness. Either way, though, Firefox is not at fault for not supporting non-standard Web APIs.
finack··on What We're Working on in Firefox
Programs that don't require an entire web browser to run can already do all of those things.
finack··on What We're Working on in Firefox
Firefox has a low market share because Chrome is the default browser on so many systems and in IT departments everywhere. 99% of people don't think about which browser they want to use.
finack··on Ask HN: The Required Fundamentals for Self-Taught Programming
Learn some C, and dabble in assembly, because that's what the computer is actually doing under the hood. Every operating system you probably use is written mostly in C. It exposes you to the gory details of computation: memory management, function calls, fiddling with the stack, etc. The fundamentals are simply what the computer is doing that usually gets abstracted away from you. Learn how your computer actually works, not the Pollyanna version presented by high-level languages. Sure, use Python for playing with trees and graphs, but spend time down in the dirt with the language that still underpins a large amount of software.
finack··on Ask HN: I have many PDFs – what is the best local way to leverage AI for search?
OCR and pattern matching on text are computationally cheap and incredibly easy to do. For example, tax documents often bear the name of your government's tax authority, which presumably you are familiar with and can search for. They also tend to have years on them.
finack··on After 6 years, I'm over GraphQL
No, that's an important facet of compatibility. If a change is purely additive, existing clients will keep working, something the industry has basically forgotten all about, it seems.
finack··on After 6 years, I'm over GraphQL
Well yeah, who knew that letting your frontend developers blow up your database because nobody talks to each other or designs things anymore would be a bad idea?
finack··on After 6 years, I'm over GraphQL
I never understood why this was such a big deal... "Hey, we need an endpoint to fetch a list of widgets so we can display them." "Okay." Is that so difficult? Maybe the real problem lies in poor planning and poor communication.
finack··on Three Laws of Software Complexity
The amount of bush-league mistakes I see because people truly don't know any better is shocking. But we've gone from a world where you had to very intimately understand the machine to do your job, to one where a six-month crash course of very specific web technology is enough to net six figures. What did we expect?
finack··on After Furiosa flops, Hollywood could be facing a biblically disastrous summer
I love movie theatres. I hate stupidly expensive popcorn and people talking and using their phones the entire time.
finack··on After Furiosa flops, Hollywood could be facing a biblically disastrous summer
The solution is painfully obvious for anyone who isn't actually involved in milking every last red cent out of media: make movies people actually want to see, and not just shameless cash grabs recycling everything from 1980 onward. Of course, now every suit expects every movie to gross a billion dollars, so that's not going to happen. It's a fun dream, though.
finack··on Road planners embrace the diverging diamond interchange
What a colossal waste of land. We've emitted record amounts of CO2 this year alone (and it's only barely June), and yet we're still full speed ahead on cars. Anything to avoid smaller setbacks and bike lanes, I guess. THAT would be horrible.
finack··on Should I use JWTs for authentication tokens?
Some computers make it harder than others.
finack··on Should I use JWTs for authentication tokens?
You don't need a cryptographer on payroll to install and configure an SSO library. Maybe your developers aren't skilled enough to do that, but it is not a challenge for a proper senior developer.
finack··on Should I use JWTs for authentication tokens?
What? Session tokens have been around for like 30 years now, and every web framework worth using has a rock-solid implementation; you haven't had to do it yourself since Full House was putting out new episodes.
finack··on Should I use JWTs for authentication tokens?
No, it's a necessary feature if your credentials get stolen, which wouldn't surprise me considering how many people just cram JWTs into local storage, which is not the same as a secure cookie and has weaker security. Either you're setting the expiry time real low (which still won't stop someone who has four minutes 59 seconds left to wreck your stuff, because computers are fast), or you're maintaining a blacklist, which means, congratulations, you've just reinvented overly-complicated session tokens.
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