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reidrac

2,526 karma · joined June 6, 2011

http://www.usebox.net/jjm/
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reidrac··on W3.css – A minimal alternative to Bootstrap
In DDG you can just !mdn your search.
reidrac··on After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
I don't agree, but it is true that some aggressive DNS RBL may include Digital Ocean, for example, just because [1].

The point is not that much that there are such blocking lists, the point is why admins use them. Surely that's blocking a good chunk of spam, but also legit sites.

1: "As you should know now: It is not you, it is your complete provider which got [redacted] listed."

reidrac··on SearchHut
I guess missing content can be explained by...

> Notice! This product is experimental and incomplete. User beware!

But in reality, if you know where is the answer that you are looking for, why would you use that search engine.

I use DDG and if I want to search on the Scala docs, I use "!scala whatever I'm searching" instead of just search with DDG.

reidrac··on Rust Editors to Replace TextMate 2 – The Agony of Despair
Does it matter in which language is a text editor written in?

I mean, that's not a feature of the editor, is it? There may be consequences derived from that, but that's part of the features (e.g. uses a lot of memory, or it is slow, or it is hard to build from source, or whatever).

Unless the OP wants to hack that editor, and then it may make sense if they know the language.

reidrac··on Ubuntu Unity desktop back from the dead after several years' hiatus
I profoundly dislike all that "hater" rhetoric. Sure, there will always be trolls, but by tagging any dissenting opinion as "Ubuntu/Canonical haters" I feel like there's a lost opportunity to improve.

You can't please everybody, but both Unity an GNOME shell had some very bad ideas, and it took too long to correct course (and in some cases it didn't happen). I believe some of the criticism came from people that really loved those DE, and that's why they were passionate about it.

When people don't care, they just use something else.

reidrac··on Ubuntu Unity desktop back from the dead after several years' hiatus
If I recall correctly, both GNOME and Unity shared rejection from a number of users (I don't know if that was large group or just very noisy), and an approach to community management that was basically if you don't like, go away.

In the early days, Unity was more usable than GNOME (could be my hardware, perhaps; apparently my nvidia drivers were buggy and I was told to change GPU), but back then Mark Shuttleworth wasn't the best PR person always starting flames on his blog.

At the end I got tired of the almost constant drama and gave up the new desktop trend and settled on XFCE (and I couldn't be happier).

reidrac··on FTC takes action against CafePress for data breach cover up
I submitted the link just after CafePress sent me an email with the information.

A lot of stress in "previous owners" and "before 2019". OK, fair enough. I asked them to remove my details from their DB, because I ordered something back in 2007 but I don't think I'll do it again.

The response was interesting:

"Thank you for contacting CafePress. Per your request, I will be happy to ensure that your information is no longer stored. However, I was not able to locate an account with the email address provided so it appears you do not have any information stored with us."

Yet, I got the email from them with the FTC settlement information.

reidrac··on The Power C Compiler
Discovering DJGPP (DJ's GNU Programming Platform) on a CD from a computer magazine literally changed my life.

I can't remember the year, but I had a Pentium 100MHz at home (with CD, which back then was optional).

You are absolutely right. There were tools, but knowing about them was a different story!

reidrac··on Google has been DDoSing Sourcehut for over a year
So what is your opinion on the proxy behaviour then?

I know is not like knowing what Google thinks about this, but I'm curious about how something like what is described in the post is allowed to happen.

reidrac··on Feather Wiki: app for creating personal non-linear notebooks, databases, wikis
It makes sense it is AGPLv3. When you hit save on the wiki, you get a full copy of it (that includes the source code).
reidrac··on Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?
I haven't been on that exact situation, but close. It has happened to me when I was hired to do X (as an specialist) and that changed substantially when the project got binned after 4 months and was asked to change language and stack. I wasn't as proficient as I would have liked and wasn't really excited about it.

I don't know if this applies to you, so please remember this is an stranger on the Internet sharing an experience and not advice.

In my case if is just a project, I get on with it because when is done I can move to something more exciting or inspiring and that's my motivation to move forward. If it is just what I can expect of that role from that point on, I look for a change (move to a different team perhaps, or just change jobs).

It also helps me if I can do something different at home, in my free time. It has to be challenging and exciting, because otherwise the negative mood from work can take over and nothing will happen (and may make things worse; e.g. guilt for not working on that personal project).

reidrac··on The Game: A continually-run D&D campaign, since 1982
The first thing I thought is "but, what D&D do they play?"; because D&D has changed over the years.

Turns out the game started as the D&D of the time (AD&D), with more or less house rules; and then moved on with some "homebrew" rules that are still familiar to D&D players.

I mostly tend to say I played D&D back in the day, but the truth is, I only played actual D&D on one short one-afternoon session. I played other games instead (LoTR Middle Earth, RuneQuest and Vampire), but D&D is what people mostly understand I guess.

reidrac··on Show HN: Slow Social, a social network built for friends, not influencers
> Someone else centralises the data and you have to trust them to keep it safe. Email doesn't have this problem because I can take my emails elsewhere and/or change my address, something I've done plenty of times.

I'm not going to defend any social network, and I think that in essence you are right; but using email is a terrible idea.

Is just that people don't understand email any more

When I've been added to a email chain (last time at the end of the 2010s), it was an awful experience: you can't get out, people including addresses in "To" so they get added to all recipients address book (they keep a copy of each email, security depends on each user of the chain!), windows users get infected with viruses and you start getting those as well, nobody will remove anything from the emails so you get huge emails with top-posts without context on what they are replying to, ... it was a mess!

I have no reasons to think things have improved.

So perhaps a better email is needed, and I wonder if it may look like a social network.

reidrac··on Disabling automatic refresh for Snap from store
Does it mean that apt will then install a non-snap version?

I haven't verified that, but considering that nothing suggested that I was installing a snap app (other than me not paying attention to apt's output, I guess), I'm not sure if that's even possible. I was planning to stay with 18.04 LTS and then move to something else, but seems like either snap was there already or it has been added after I upgraded.

reidrac··on Disabling automatic refresh for Snap from store
That's what I thought, until the other day I realised something I had installed was via snap. I'm afraid the only solution requires stop using Ubuntu :(
reidrac··on The end of the nice GTK button
> The feedback I get is that I should move to QT/KDE [...]

That, at least, has been consistent since first release of Gnome 3 over 10 years ago.

Honestly, I don't know why I tried that hard to like the new Gnome. I'm so much happier using XFCE.

reidrac··on Pair Programming Antipatterns
Even considering how easy things are using tmate, it is really challenging because there are a lot of Software Engineers that don't really know how to use a terminal to the point that asking to do a SSH is a bit too much.

So we end sharing the screen over hang outs, that is basically very inefficient and wastes a lot of CPU. But because it is normalized, it is "the standard".

EDIT: my comment was a bit unfair. I guess I could install VS Code, change my daily editor, and use it with the Live Share plugin with those using VS Code. So hang outs it is.

reidrac··on Ask HN: The book that did it for you in math and/or CS?
I also enjoyed it, but I read it probably a bit late in my career.

I remember reading some parts and thinking "wow, if someone had explained this to me like that when I was learning". But then, I'm not completely sure what would have been my experience if SICP was my first contact with CS. I started with GWBASIC, then COBOL, then C; 1st edition already existed by then, so I could have learned with Scheme!

reidrac··on How to set up a blog with Hugo and Cloudflare, and why you should
It is weird, because here: https://gohugo.io/getting-started/installing

...they refer you to the GH's releases page, where you can find binaries ready to use (I don't use Mac, but I see 64 bit and ARM64).

You don't need a Go dev env to use Hugo. I use it in Linux and I don't have a Go compiler installed.

reidrac··on The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed
> as someone who maintains small open source games

Are those public? Very intriguing, would you mind sharing a link?

reidrac··on Don't you lecture me with your thirty dollar website
On the same line, perhaps: https://TomArayaScream.com/

(I forgot they have a domain that redirects)

reidrac··on Gemini is Solutionism
This is a good resource: http://geminiquickst.art/
reidrac··on Why don't I have a blog?
I like how it is put here: http://sawv.org/en.html

It is an "Everything / Nothing" type of content.

"The website's content means everything to the publisher, but it could mean nothing to the rest of the world."

reidrac··on I found a one-char typo in the docs for Python's typing_extensions library
Yes, I agree there's a bit of hyperbole on those tweets (otherwise we wouldn't be discussing it here).

For example:

> But this contributor UX is holding Python back

As in, fixing one character typos?

If he didn't really want to follow the process to contribute, a bug report would have been fine (which is what finally happened, reading the PR).

He ended the PR with "I unfortunately feel that I've already exhausted the amount of energy I can dedicate to this", but he had some energy left to write that twitter thread.

reidrac··on Ask HN: Good Python projects to read for modern Python?
+1 for Tornado.

I used it early on when the docs where not there (IIRC), and spent some time reading the code. Very readable. Not sure if pythonic or not.

reidrac··on Log4j: Between a rock and a hard place
That's right. It is open source and, when it breaks, you get to keep both pieces.
reidrac··on Professional maintainers: a wake-up call
I don't know if this makes sense: sponsoring one of the open source projects your business depends on, could that work as PR?

Perhaps this could work for any company size, but I guess it depends on what is your core business.

reidrac··on Log4j RCE Found
When I started working with Scala, it really surprised me how the JVM world deals with dependencies (include an upstream jar directly in the project, as opposed to the Linux distro model where you use your distributor packages so you have security and bug fixes).

I'm a big fan of Dependency Check[1].

There are hosted services that can give you security scans, but if you don't have access to that (some have a cost) or you are maintaining an open source project, Dependency Check is mostly great (there are some issues every now and then with false positives, but the maintainers are great and responsive and they deal with reports very quickly).

There are also plugins for several building tools (e.g. sbt for Scala projects).

1: https://owasp.org/www-project-dependency-check/

EDIT: this may help answering the question "do I use log4j?", because transitive dependencies can be complicated!

reidrac··on PHP is worth learning and using
Well, early 2000s it was definitely cool.

Using ASP and want to calculate an MD5? Oh, you need to pay an add-on for that. Want to send an email? Ditto.

Then there was PHP, with all included (and cheaper hosting, because Linux). I started working on a web shop and after a month ASP was legacy and PHP the new cool thing, together with MySQL instead of using... Access as "database" in ASP.

reidrac··on Sign arbitrary data with your SSH keys
Verifying signatures is messy, because the SSH keys don't store identity information, isn't it?

So basically you know that an specific SSH key signed a file, but that's all you know. Not very useful? Who's going to maintain a file with allowed signers per key?

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