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invaliduser

470 karma · joined June 13, 2015

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invaliduser··on EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'
If "70% of Canadian exports are to the US", that's probably why the US has so much leverage, and I can see why the Canadian government would like a change. Hence the need for a rebalancing of trade partnerships.
invaliduser··on Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
I mainly use them as macros. Not even an advanced and smart macro system, just plain basic macros to avoid copy-pasting recurrent prompts. Is there more to them?
invaliduser··on Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
I basically create a skill when I'm tired of always writing the same prompts, and then I adapt it over time.

I have like 3 skills, and so far so good, most of my recent changes have been asking Claude to please stop using metaphors and creative figures of speech that make the documents so much harder to read and understand (maybe it's only annoying to non-native speakers, I don't know)

invaliduser··on DeepSeek Harness developer preview
«It uses an architecture where everything is a plugin» Ok, that's enough for me. I have developped over the year a plugin fatigue.

Every product relying on "community plugins" for their features implies it works fine the 6 first months, then it's a nightmare of incompatible, deprecated, incompatible plugins, with no consistency and no governance.

I understand how attractive it can be to companies to think, hey, let's make a very small product and rely on other people to make features, and I hope it works, but I'm personally staying away from that.

invaliduser··on Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan
How can you come to that conclusion, given the specific examples I have given, which are tedious to write, but easy to proof-read and test?
invaliduser··on Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan
For a lot of code, I switched to generating code rather than using 3rd party libraries. Things like PEG parsers, path finding algorithms, string sanitizers, data type conversion, etc are very conveniently generated by LLMs. It's fast, reduces dependencies, and feels safer to me.
invaliduser··on Ask HN: Remember Fidonet?
2:320/104 represent!
invaliduser··on Show HN: Xmloxide – an agent-made Rust replacement for libxml2
I understand it can be difficult to label, and there's an inconveniently large grey area here, but there is a difference between plain vibe-coded software and software built with AI under the control, direction and validation of a developer.

The distinction is probably not very important for small applications, as nobody cares if a minor script or a one-shot data processor has been vibe-coded, but for large applications it surely matters in the long term.

invaliduser··on Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?
The first ad blocker was released in 1996 [1] and in 1999 we had a lot of shiny, blinking and very colorful ads already [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_blocking#History

[2] https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/exhibitions/web-banners-in-t...

invaliduser··on Steam Machine
Just found about this skin market/casino thing, and also that my teenage son purchased a skin for 100€, but is still pretty excited and happy about it because «its real value is around 700€». I am still processing this information.
invaliduser··on How to build your own VPN, or: the history of WARP
I wouldn't lie even to strangers, and my point was solely about people having little to no sense of security.
invaliduser··on How to build your own VPN, or: the history of WARP
Most people have no sense of security. They say yes to strangers if asked to plug in a USB device on their laptop. When I said no in the train to someone asking to plug their device "for charging", I was definitely the bad guy.

Just find anything plausible, for backup storage, or say, to share family photos with grand parents but it does not work on my home wifi because my ISP is blocking ports, whatever.

invaliduser··on VLC's Jean-Baptiste Kempf Receives the European SFS Award 2025
In the early 2000s the video field was flooded with fast paced releases of new codecs and new codecs versions, and there was codecs implementation to downloads right and left, and people were bundling them and releasing them with names sounding like a warez group. It was a little crazy to watch a video at the time.

This was mitigated by vlc and mplayer, two video players that integrated most codecs as fast as they could, and it was a breath of fresh air. You just started them and any video would play, no codec issue anymore. MPlayer has not been updated for some times, and traction was lost, but VLC, although looking a bit old on the UI-side (and a little buggy on ARM Windows) is still here and is solid when someone just wants to watch a video on any platform.

invaliduser··on Apple's "notarisation" – blocking software freedom of developers and users
The same thing exists on Windows, developers have to code sign their binaries. It's even worse in my experience because you have to use a token (usb key with cryptographic signing keys in it) and that's impractical if you want your ci/cd to run in a datacenter. At my company we had a mac mini with a windows VM and a code signing token plugged in just for the purpose of signing our macos and windows binaries.

Another solution that is not mentioned in the article is that users of both macos and windows should be able to easily integrate the certificate of a third-party editor, with a process integrated in their OS explaining the risks, but also making it a process that can be understood and trusted, so that editors can self-sign their own binaries at no cost without needing the approval of the OS editor. Such a tool should ideally be integrated in the OS, but ultimately it could also be provided by a trusted third-party.

invaliduser··on Why IP address truncation fails at anonymization
The main issue with this article is that it claims to be about anonymization, but reject HMAC because it's not reversible, and promotes IPCrypt because it is. Except that if it's reversible, it's not anonymization, it's pseudonymization.
invaliduser··on It's just a virus, the E.R. told him – days later, he was dead
Happened in France too. It was put in place in the late 70s, and ended in 2020. Called the «numerus clausus» (closed number, in latin) and it restricted the number of medicine students allowed in the country every year.

The number of students fell by 50% between 1980 and the mid 90s: 8500 new students/year in 1972, 3500 in 1993.

Of course, now the number of doctors in France is far from enough for an aging population, in every specialty and it will take at least a decade to improve. It's not uncommon to have 1-year waitlists for ophthalmology appointments, and several weeks or even months for dermatology.

invaliduser··on Show HN: Tips to stay safe from NPM supply chain attacks
Or maybe just read the commits between now and a reasonable date far enough in the past so that if there is some hostile code injected before that point in time, then at least you will share the walk of shame with a lot of people and you can play the sound of "who could have guessed?"
invaliduser··on Ask HN: How can ChatGPT serve 700M users when I can't run one GPT-4 locally?
Even is the AI bubble does not pops, your prediction about those servers being available on ebay in 10 years will likely be true, because some datacenters will simply upgrade their hardware and resell their old ones to third parties.
invaliduser··on Using Microsoft's New CLI Text Editor on Ubuntu
taglines where witty one-liners posted at the end of messages, after the signature, as a way to add a bit of humor or personality.

I think we also used them in fidonet echomail, but I don't remember for sure.

invaliduser··on Show HN: Chawan TUI web browser
But how can it be a problem? Working on a project just for fun is totally valid. Is this not «Hacker News»?

For the record, this is the definition of being a hacker by Stallman: «Being a programmer doesn't mean being a hacker: it means appreciating playful cleverness. Now, you can program without being playfully clever and you can be playfully clever in other fields without programming.»

invaliduser··on Why SSL was renamed to TLS in late 90s (2014)
1. I say both somewhat 50/50. I say SSL instinctively, and TLS when I think about it and remember we don't say SSL anymore. It's been like that for around 10 years now, before that I'd only say SSL.

2. I started programming professionally in 1998 and I'm in my early 50s.

invaliduser··on Plain Vanilla Web
I have a similar experience with providing users with excel files, but would also like to add that in a lot of business, the number 1 competition for a web application is the good old excel file (or its modern cloud version), and it's sometimes a challenge to beat.
invaliduser··on But how to get to that European cloud?
You are right on that, not including the UK in a European list (whatever the reasons) is a shame.
invaliduser··on But how to get to that European cloud?
To be fair, the non-geographical definitions that excludes Britain, actually only excludes Britain because Britain excluded itself of the European Union in 2020.
invaliduser··on But how to get to that European cloud?
Can you give a hint for [1] ?
invaliduser··on But how to get to that European cloud?
You are so right about computers, except from Raspberry Pi (UK) not much as been done in Europe.

Regarding the eu cloud, it is definitely about sovereignty, specially since the CLOUD Act (H.R. 4943). In the context of the global trade war initiated by the US of A, it also makes sense from a European Union perspective.

invaliduser··on But how to get to that European cloud?
Although you are from UK, so not the european union anymore, you could try getting listed on https://european-alternatives.eu/category/transactional-emai...

Anyway yes, we need to better list and advertise the european alternatives for services like yours.

invaliduser··on But how to get to that European cloud?
OVH (french) is very well known and I like them a lot. Used them for domains a lot, because they are very cheap and their management is nice. I also like very much ScaleWay (french also) for price and quality of service, have used them for years on my startup, can highly recommend. Also heard a lot of good things about Infomaniak (swiss), but never used them myself.

Would love to hear about european cloud providers with comments from users.

invaliduser··on Sunsetting Create React App
Maybe I was not paying attention, this is of course a possibility, but until at least early 2019 the react website's main page was only mentioning the class-based "stateful component" as the way to write components.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190105060636/https://reactjs.o...

Although they were mentioning function components at the time in the documentation, I can't say how mainstream that was. Hooks were introduced in Feb. 2019.

invaliduser··on Sunsetting Create React App
Not primarily, as primarily it was just "we're the V in MVC", and people were using classes. The hooks came when the react team got on the "functional programming" wagon, and suddenly everything was about immutability, side effects, etc. and very little about giving control to the developers on their components life cycle.
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