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Dan42 commented on How RubyGems.org protects OSS infrastructure   blog.rubygems.org/2025/08... · Posted by u/hahahacorn
Dan42 · 5 days ago
Reading this, I couldn't help but think these guys really know where their towel is. The opposite of enshittification?
Dan42 commented on I've Had It with Microsoft   disconnect.blog/p/ive-had... · Posted by u/speckx
wkjagt · a month ago
I have an old version (I don't remember which one) of Word running on Windows 3.11 on a 486 DX2-66.
Dan42 · a month ago
Beautiful. I had that exact computer model 30 years ago.
Dan42 commented on Trusting your own judgement on 'AI' is a risk   baldurbjarnason.com/2025/... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
flatline · 3 months ago
What's up with the typescript rant? Don't we have decades of research about the improvements in productivity and correctness brought by static type checking? It starts out strong but stuff like this really detracts from the overall point the article is trying to make, and it stands out as an incorrect and unjustified (and unjustifiable) point.
Dan42 · 3 months ago
> Don't we have decades of research about the improvements in productivity and correctness brought by static type checking?

Yes, we have decades of such research, and the aggregate result of all those studies is that no productivity gain can be significantly demonstrated for static over dynamic, and vice-versa.

Dan42 commented on Triptych Proposals   alexanderpetros.com/tript... · Posted by u/felipemesquita
alexpetros · 8 months ago
> About 20 years ago, Firefox attempted to add PUT and DELETE support to the <form> element, only to roll it back. Why? Because the semantics of PUT and DELETE are not consistently implemented across all layers of the HTTP infrastructure—proxies, caches, and intermediary systems.

This is incorrect, according to this comment from the Firefox implementer who delayed the feature. He intended the roll back to be temporary. [0]

> The reality we live in, shaped by decades of organic evolution, is that only GET and POST are universally supported across all layers of internet infrastructure.

This is also incorrect. The organic evolution we actually have is that servers widely support the standardized method semantics in spite of the incomplete browser support. [1] When provided with the opportunity to take advantage of additional methods in the client (via libraries), developers user them, because they are useful. [2][3]

> Take a cue from the WHATWG HTML5 approach: create your RFC based on what is already the de facto standard: GET is for reading, and POST is for writing.

What you're describing isn't the de defacto standard, it is the actual standard. GET is for reading and POST is for writing. The actual standard also includes additional methods, namely PUT, PATCH, and DELETE, which describe useful subsets of writing, and our proposal adds them to the hypertext.

> Trying to push a theoretically "correct" standard ignores this reality and, as people jump into the hype train, will consume significant time and resources across the industry without delivering proportional value. It's going to be XHTML all over again, it's going to be IPv6 all over again.

You're not making an actual argument here, just asserting that takes time—I agree—and that it has no value—I disagree, and wrote a really long document about why.

[0] https://alexanderpetros.com/triptych/form-http-methods#ref-6

[1] https://alexanderpetros.com/triptych/form-http-methods#rest-...

[2] https://alexanderpetros.com/triptych/form-http-methods#usage...

[3] https://alexanderpetros.com/triptych/form-http-methods#appli...

Dan42 · 8 months ago
> This is incorrect, according to this comment from the Firefox implementer who delayed the feature. He intended the roll back to be temporary. [0]

I see no such thing in the link you have there. #ref-6 starts with:

> [6] On 01/12/2011, at 9:57 PM, Julian Reschke wrote: "One thing I forgot earlier, and which was the reason

But the link you have there [1] does not contain any such comment. Wrong link?

[1] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-comments/20...

(will reply to other points as time allows, but I wanted to point out this first)

Dan42 commented on Triptych Proposals   alexanderpetros.com/tript... · Posted by u/felipemesquita
Dan42 · 8 months ago
No, please, just no.

The idea of using PUT, DELETE, or PATCH here is entirely misguided. Maybe it was a good idea, but history has gone in a different direction so now it's irrelevant. About 20 years ago, Firefox attempted to add PUT and DELETE support to the <form> element, only to roll it back. Why? Because the semantics of PUT and DELETE are not consistently implemented across all layers of the HTTP infrastructure—proxies, caches, and intermediary systems. This inconsistency led to unpredictable failures, varying by website, network, and the specific proxy or caching software in use.

The reality we live in, shaped by decades of organic evolution, is that only GET and POST are universally supported across all layers of internet infrastructure.

Take a cue from the WHATWG HTML5 approach: create your RFC based on what is already the de facto standard: GET is for reading, and POST is for writing. The entire internet infrastructure operates on these semantics, with little to no consideration for other HTTP verbs. Trying to push a theoretically "correct" standard ignores this reality and, as people jump into the hype train, will consume significant time and resources across the industry without delivering proportional value. It's going to be XHTML all over again, it's going to be IPv6 all over again.

Please let's just use what already works. GET for reading, POST for writing. That’s all we need to define transport behavior. Any further differentiation—like what kind of read or write—is application-specific and should be decided by the endpoints themselves.

Even the <form> element’s "action" attribute is built for this simplicity. For example, if your resource is /tea/genmaicha/, you could use <form method="post" action="brew">. Voilà, relative URLs in action! This approach is powerful, practical, and aligned with the infrastructure we already rely on.

Let’s not overcomplicate things for the sake of theoretical perfection. KISS.

Dan42 commented on Why pipes sometimes get "stuck": buffering   jvns.ca/blog/2024/11/29/w... · Posted by u/tanelpoder
Rygian · 9 months ago
Learned two things: `unbuffer` exists, and “unnecessary” cats are just fine :-)
Dan42 · 9 months ago
grep has a --line-buffered option that does the job fine in most cases. Just set in your aliases grep='grep --line-buffered', that way you get the correct behavior when you tail logs piped to a sequence of greps, and you avoid the performance penalty in scripts.
Dan42 commented on Testing for gender differences in Python programming style and quality on GitHub   academic.oup.com/jcmc/art... · Posted by u/bomewish
joshdavham · 10 months ago
> The underrepresentation of women in open-source software is frequently attributed to women’s lack of innate aptitude compared to men: natural gender differences in technical ability

Maybe I'm just of a younger generation, but I've literally never heard this in my life. The assumption among people my age has always been that women just generally aren't interested in software development at the same rate that men are; not that they're naturally worse at it!

Dan42 · 10 months ago
I'm 47 and I also have never heard this in my life. So I don't think it's just a matter of younger generations.
Dan42 commented on I love programming but I hate the programming industry   deathbyabstraction.com/I-... · Posted by u/conquestofdread
rrr_oh_man · a year ago
If quick and dirty gets you 10 shots, while slow and beautiful gets you 1, I’d choose quick & dirty any day.
Dan42 · a year ago
An order of magnitude is a bit much. I'd say quick and dirty gets you 3 shots, while slow and beautiful gets you 1. And if you succeed, it means the result is dirty/ugly code that must be maintained forever.
Dan42 commented on A Plea for More Mikado   dmathieu.com/articles/opi... · Posted by u/ingve
Dan42 · 2 years ago
It's the first time I hear "Mikado" but it's pretty much the commit policy I established for work, and we call it micro-commits.

http://lucasr.org/2011/01/29/micro-commits/

https://mrcote.info/blog/2017/12/04/more-lessons-from-mozrev...

https://dev.to/rpalo/plan-your-commits

The article focuses on refactoring and migrations, but it works also for regular development. One rule of thumb is: write a one-line commit message, and then write the code described by the commit, and just that. Another rule of thumb is that refactors should go into their own commit. So while you are coding according to your one-line commit message, if there are small refactors needed along the way, commit them separately. Fix whitespace? One commit. Extract a method so you can re-use it? One commit to extract, then use the extracted method in your next commit.

Having small atomic commits makes code that is much easier to review, and much easier to test. I think it's similar to unit testing: we change how we write code in order to make it unit-testable. This is for code review: we write code with micro-commits in order to make it code-reviewable.

This method is pretty much incompatible with squash-and-rebase. Squashing throws away all the useful information of micro-commits. Instead, just merge, and the merge commit itself is equivalent to the squashed-rebased version.

> Obviously, the Mikado Method cannot work if you don’t have a good and highly reliable automated test suite.

I disagree. Of course it's always better to have an automated test suite. But in the absence of one, the only thing you can rely on is thorough code review. And with micro-commits you have a much better chance of spotting problems if the code-diff you review contains only a small self-contained atomic change. Code-reviewing a large squashed commit is all but impossible.

Dan42 commented on Email addresses are not good 'permanent' identifiers for accounts   utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/spa... · Posted by u/throw0101b
MasterYoda900 · 2 years ago
What if every newborn received a chip implant under the skin (cryptographically unbreakable, unauthorized removal punishable by law), linked to a central government database with the chip’s unique identifier and a profile of the newborn’s DNA signature?
Dan42 · 2 years ago
I can't believe such satirical gold is getting downvoted.

u/Dan42

KarmaCake day97August 19, 2008View Original