Hacker News Reader

jaitsuon Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude

Because using pirated material is a civil issue, not a criminal offence?

jaitsuon High‑dose Vitamin D reduces disease activity in early multiple sclerosis onset

https://examine.com/supplements/vitamin-d/

This is a good place to get that kind of information

jaitsuon Enums in Go

I can't see why they wouldn't be in a future 1.x release

jaitsuon GitHub incident: ongoing issues with Actions, Issues and other Git operations

good catch

jaitsuon GitHub incident: ongoing issues with Actions, Issues and other Git operations

Indeed, I notice it when trying to push also:

  remote: Resolving deltas: 100% (3/3), completed with 3 local objects.
  remote: fatal error in commit_refs
  To github.com:acme/foo.git
   ! [remote rejected] HEAD -> acme/foo (failure)
  error: failed to push some refs to 'github.com:acme/foo.git'

jaitsuon Mark Zuckerberg: “Please Resign” (2010)

These two sentences are at completed odds with each other:

1. "We are a company that promotes openness and transparency"

2. "Let's commit to maintaining complete confidentiality about the company—no exceptions"

jaitsuon Ask HN: Why are toggle switches replacing checkboxes? Isn't on/off less obvious?

"X is currently disabled" resolves it

jaitsuon Major standard library changes in Go 1.20

Almost. The sql package is just an abstract layer which requires a 3rd party module to provide the concretions. I guess the API is the same, but you still need a 3rd party lib :)

jaitsuon Conc: Better Structured Concurrency for Go

You can recover from a panic though, so if you are implementing something that may panic you should have some sensible defer/recover in there if you can't afford to have your process crash.

jaitsuon You can virtually model clothing on your own body using the Walmart app

Yeah, no thanks.

Call me old fashioned, but if you really want to see what something looks like on you just go to the store. Personally, I think buying clothes is not just about how they look on you but also how you feel in them. You can't replicate this with a digital solution (yet?).

jaitsuon Soft deletion probably isn't worth it

Very similar thoughts to an article I wrote back in 2014: https://jameshalsall.co.uk/posts/why-soft-deletes-are-evil-a...

Excuse the dramatic title of the post

jaitsuon Node.js packages don't deserve trust

https://go.dev/blog/supply-chain is a very good write-up on this topic too.

jaitsuon GitHub gender-inclusive language bot – postmortem FAQ

I echo your sentiment.

I am not against gender inclusivity but to call out what is essentially innocent language as inherently “bad” is not a good path to go down.

jaitsuon Use Git tactically

Given most teams operate CI pipelines on their PRs/MRs, I like to make it a requirement to squash before merging. This means that only passing builds make it into the main branch.

The value of this cannot be underestimated, in my experience, as using things like “git bisect” mean you always have a working build.

jaitsuon Civil rights leaders blast Facebook after meeting with Zuckerberg

Of international importance, I would say.

jaitsuon When to Mock

Writing unit tests is debatable?

jaitsuon Microsoft is creating a new Rust-based programming language for secure coding

You may, or may not, be aware of this - https://blog.golang.org/why-generics

I believe it's still in the roadmap for Go 2.0

jaitsuon Apple Profit and Revenue Slide as It Copes with Slumping iPhone Sales

"Apple sales slump... compared to unrealistic expectations."

Wake me up with some news.

jaitsuon GitHub Cancer

Absolutely, a package manager server should state in their license file that when you submit a package you consent to it being cached on said server.

Having someone remove a package and breaking a ton of other packages is nonsensical.

jaitsuon “autocomplete=off is ignored on non-login input elements”

I ranted about this on my blog whilst drunk, and then went off in a tangent, you can find it at jameshalsall.co.uk, 2nd post.

This really makes me uncomfortable, standards are there for a reason, you don't just ignore them because you don't agree with them.

jaitsuon Facebook threatens to delete synced photos if users don't download new photo app

They seem to go about these things in the wrong way. Take Messenger for example, there was no good reason to remove access to this via a browser on mobile devices. I don't want to have to install an app for something that was previously available in a browser. If you can't provide me with all of the features of messenger in the browser then that's fine. I thought we were meant to be progressing towards a truly open web accessible to all, regardless of device.

This is just another example of Facebook doing whatever they please just because they can. I wonder how long that will last until people start moving away from the platform.

jaitsuon Drop jQuery as a dependency from Rails

If you've been a web dev for 10 years then you'll know that the most fundamental tool for scripting is a pain point (document ready), jQuery did a good job of abstracting the nuances away, see: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/799981/document-ready-equ...

jaitsuon LinkedIn Legal's Response to Their 2012 Breach

What makes this even worse is the fact that they're trying to cover up just how bad this really is. LinkedIn use(d) the sha1 hashing algorithm (see: http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/06/8-million-leaked-pas...) which is easily breakable through rainbow tables when not used with a salt (which LinkedIn failed to use).

The sha1 hash has been known to be cryptographically insecure since as early as 2007 (https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/02/cryptanalysis...).

The very fact that LinkedIn reset everyone's passwords backs this up.

After this data leak I deleted my account, not only is LinkedIn destroyed the art of recruitment it has been completely irresponsible with user's data.

jaitsuon Why I Haven’t Fixed Your Issue Yet

Great point. I think there always comes a time for developers of popular open source libraries where their "workload" (that is their responsibilities to their end users) becomes too much for them to deal with, even if you don't have a family.

The only sensible solution here is to bring on regular contributors as repository owners and spread the responsibility.

jaitsuon Today's Apple event spells the end for OS X

This is clickbait at it's best. There is no hard evidence to prove this (obviously, it's Apple) and it couldn't be further from the truth.

iPads are far from a replacement for your MacBook or iMac - for one you can't properly multitask, and you as a developer you couldn't properly debug and write code on an iPad.

OSX will be around for years to come.

jaitsuon Today's Apple event spells the end for OS X

For developers, yes.

jaitsuon HTTP Live Streaming in JavaScript

Great article. I think we can actually talk about flash being replaced now that we have a real solution for HTML5 live streaming. Flash was never going to go away until there was something that could handle the DRM across all browsers.

I've worked a lot with Ooyala's live streams and was just looking at moving a client over to their HTML5 offering. They claim to offer it in all browsers but that is probably with a flash fallback, they haven't open sourced their JS (or at least I can't see it on their GitHub page).

We also use StreamUK on a lot of sites (but I've never used it directly) and from what I have heard they have great support for HLS. They have no GitHub presence so not quite sure if they're using the same libs the article mentioned or something proprietary.

Obviously DRM would still be an issue unless the browser natively supports EME.