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jorams

4,053 karma · joined August 1, 2014

You can reach me at hn at joram dot io
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jorams··on Backblaze IPO
> I have paid for Backblaze for 4 years, after signing up for two 2 year subscriptions a few years apart.

> I have never got it to backup my files ever.

Why are you signing up for a two-year plan twice if you can't get it to work? They offer a free trial, so it's not like they're forcing you to pay before figuring out if it works.

jorams··on GitHub degraded performance – resolved
I understand your point and agree, but "pick a ticket" can be hard if you use GitHub issues for those.
jorams··on Building the Brex API
The specified (rfc7235) syntax of the Authorization header is that it starts with an authentication scheme, followed by the parameters for that scheme. "Bearer" is one of those schemes. "Basic" and "Digest" are others.
jorams··on YouTube: filmmakers presumed guilty until maybe proven innocent
Unfortunately this isn't really a technical problem. Content ID exists to appease large organizations that sued YouTube into the ground for not doing enough to counter copyright infringement.

This claim process takes place before the legal copyright claim process. The legal process would require YouTube to take the video down immediately, and it would be required to stay down for at least two weeks even if the claim is bogus. (Or YouTube could decide not to follow the process and be held liable in case of actual infringement.)

There is no presumed innocence. The DMCA is constantly being abused, and the only possible punishment for malicious claims is an expensive lawsuit. It wouldn't surprise me at all if half of all DMCA takedown requests would be considered fair use in court, but the vast majority never get there.

jorams··on NixOS and the Art of OS Configuration (2018)
This is definitely something Nix is very good at, but it's not a problem with Arch. Staying up to date with upstream is basically the point of the distro, so if you're going to postpone an update for a year you should be using something else.
jorams··on Reddit uses “reddit.com” itself as the endpoint for logging usage data
That approach (sans AI) hasn't fallen out of favor. Ad blockers still do it, they just also support blocking them from loading. There's no benefit to loading an ad if you're going to hide it, it's always wasteful. Growing computing power and bandwidth doesn't change that.
jorams··on Dutch watchdog finds Apple App Store payment rules anti-competitive
> If Apple allows external IAP, but _also_ requires strict dispute resolution and simple subscription cancellation, that would probably be deemed anticompetitive as well, even though it's thoroughly pro-consumer.

Why would that be considered anticompetitive?

jorams··on Sinch to acquire Mailgun
Just a heads up: If scripts from cdn.paddle.com fail to load your pricing page is currently very confusing, with no real indication that anything is going wrong: The "Solo" plan shows as $40 per month, while the "Scaling" plan starts at $10 per month. In other words, Solo looks 4 times as expensive for 10% of the emails. I spent some time trying to find other differences, but it's just wrong.

Maybe default to showing something like $-- instead, as a clear indicator that prices have not loaded.

jorams··on Masked email from Fastmail and 1Password
> unless you keep meticulous records, there's no way to figure out the exact email you used very easily

I haven't found this to be a problem. Usually it's in my password manager. Otherwise they've sent me an email, which I can quickly search my inbox for.

jorams··on Masked email from Fastmail and 1Password
> I think a lot of people have been spoiled by gmail's longevity.

> I personally prefer trusting something with more longevity than fastmail

Fastmail launched 5 years before Gmail, in 1999. It's also a paid product with a sustainable business model. It's hard to get more longevity than that.

jorams··on Shodan Search Engine: Search Engine for the Internet of Everything
> I think one weird difference is that we can passively observe things in the real world. But you can't passively observe an IP-address. You need to send data at it to see how it responds.

The other part of that is that you also can't passively show anything. The other side needs the actively respond with something that you can then observe.

jorams··on The Case for ‘Developer Experience’
> We have too many single page apps / Jamstack sites, where the default is to send the entire application in Javascript bundles, and do little to no HTML over the wire.

This is a confusing statement. Pre-rendering is a core principle of "Jamstack". To quote the site[1]:

> With Jamstack, the entire front end is prebuilt into highly optimized static pages and assets during a build process.

That seems the complete opposite of what you're saying the default is.

[1]: https://jamstack.org/what-is-jamstack/

jorams··on Why I Use Nim instead of Python for Data Processing
This is explained a bit further into the article:

> A nice feature of the lines function is that it automatically strips newline characters such as LF and CRLF so we no longer need to doline.rstrip().

jorams··on Grommunio an open source Exchange replacement
It's straight up FOSS. What they're selling is support. I don't know if anyone responding here has read the rest of the Product page[1], but I thought it was quite clear:

> In order to be able to use the features with support...

> Our individual support services for the features of the product can be found below under ‘Packages & Pricing‘.

The comparison table distinguishes between features with and without support, and "Support not included" in the part of the table that is just about support. They never mention selling anything but support.

[1]: https://grommunio.com/product/

jorams··on Miniflare – Simulator for developing and testing Cloudflare Workers
It was first posted on HN 3 months ago[1], and moved to the cloudflare org a day ago[2].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27736706

[2]: https://twitter.com/_mrbbot/status/1441143456106094595

jorams··on It's tough being an Azure fan
> I’ll still continue to use Azure

And this is the actual problem. Azure doesn't compete on quality. Microsoft rarely does. They have a few products and a market position that make them the default choice for countless customers. Nobody punishes them for their failings as long as the feature boxes keep being checked, and so the cycle continues.

jorams··on Google classroom and Google docs can not be used when YouTube is blocked
The linked thread doesn't contain any information about what these people actually blocked or in what way they can't use other Google services anymore.

If they blocked DNS resolution and SSO is causing trouble, like people here are speculating, then the fix is unblocking accounts.youtube.com.

If they blocked connections to YouTube's IP addresses they've just blocked most of Google, because YouTube is served from the same (relatively small) set of IP addresses as a lot of other services.

jorams··on Gitlab S-1
> almost none of the languages is use are supported by Pygments for highlighting

What languages are those? Pygments supports a lot of languages[1].

[1]: https://pygments.org/languages/

jorams··on Steam Top 50 Games: Over 70% now work on Linux
The statement that started the talk about resellers was:

> Similarly if you’re building it yourself you can buy for significantly less from a reseller, many of which are wholly legitimate.

The horses mouth charges $140+, which is significantly more than the $100 that was about.

jorams··on Germany wants smartphone makers to offer 7 years of software updates
I don't know anything about these directives, but

> they force the seller to provide the update, not the manufacturer.

This (like warranties) is normally because there's no actual relationship between the consumer and the manufacturer. You do enter a contract with the seller, so they can be held liable when the law is broken.

For smartphones this can be different, since they tend to come with EULAs, but not necessarily.

jorams··on Gitpod shipped GitHub a launch cake for Codespaces
While I don't know the answer, I would guess it has something to do with it not just being the English word. It's also the Dutch word (spelled exactly the same) and, based on some random clicking in Google Translate, Croation, Norwegian and Czech. It's a secondary translation in a bunch of other languages. I don't know how much of that changed after the road signs, but it looks like a good international basis.
jorams··on Nimforum: Lightweight alternative to Discourse written in Nim
> Discourse serves up a page with JS disabled. Try it!

The only content is in a <noscript> tag, so this complaint is probably coming from people only blocking third party JS.

When reading a random Discourse forum I don't intend to participate in, blocking all JS usually results in a smoother experience than accepting scripts from discourse-cdn.com. The only exception I've found is for massive threads, because there's no JS-free search.

jorams··on If you could change one thing about Emacs what would it be?
What platform do you use it on? My default install has a GTK menu bar, tool bar and scrollbars, as well as windows that can be resized by mouse.
jorams··on Debian 11
PHP releases once a year. They've been doing that for almost a decade now.
jorams··on WinCompose – A Compose Key for Windows
The constant downside to that is that you can no longer type these characters without considering what the next character is going to be, and pressing space if you want to opt out of the combination. If you type the accented characters much more often than the quotes it can be fine, but it gets annoying very quickly while programming.

The compose key is basically an opt-in alternative to combining those characters that also allows a lot of other combinations.

jorams··on GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces
> nobody gives a crap about anti-user features which everyone has had to deal with for literally decades

The one thing that used to set Microsoft apart from the likes of Google and Facebook was that their main product, Windows, was not anti-user. No matter what you thought about the OS or Microsoft's business practices, it was a paid piece of software that worked for the user. Windows now is filled with user-hostile features and it works for MS instead. And they don't even grant us the courtesy of giving it away for free.

Market share or the fact that the public at large isn't punishing them for it doesn't mean anything. It was already clear that most people are willing to walk headfirst into a dystopia.

jorams··on Why Valve Is Switching from Debian to Arch for Steam Deck's Linux OS
If you don't update, it'll stay usable indefinitely. If you do, you can skim arch-announce in less time than it takes to keep up with the release cycle of any other OS.

In return you'll never need to update a Debian release name in sources.list, click away a nagging update prompt, wait for a double-reboot cycle for some registry changes, or anything of the sort.

Yes, you will need to understand what's on your system to know what news is relevant for you. You automatically will because you set it up yourself.

jorams··on Why Valve Is Switching from Debian to Arch for Steam Deck's Linux OS
You really don't have to. If you're subscribed to the mailing you just get an email every month or two. Most of the time it either won't apply to you, or it'll just be a nice-to-know. Every once in a long time (last time for me was 18 months ago) you'll actually have to remember for the next time you upgrade. Otherwise you can just upgrade and you'll be fine.

It's honestly incredibly low-maintenance. You just have to spend a relatively long time setting things up first.

jorams··on Why Valve Is Switching from Debian to Arch for Steam Deck's Linux OS
> One thing about Arch, its possible to dig yourself a real bad hole if you don't keep updating regularly and I get that's sort of the point, but it can cause a lot of issues if for example, you go on vacation for a few weeks.

Any changes that could be problematic are announced on the site and the arch-announce mailing list. It's really not a matter of weeks. I've gone many months without updating, without any problems.

jorams··on A street snack that has baffled botanists
The comments don't mention anything that isn't in the article.
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