It's entirely possible that this is the smartest place on the internet, but also often dumb. In fact, it seems likely. More of an indictment of the rest of the places on the internet.
Intelligence has many dimensions.
Readit Newsssdspoimdsjvv commented on Tell HN: HN was down · Posted by u/uyzstvqs
ssdspoimdsjvv commented on Ruby and Its Neighbors: Smalltalk noelrappin.com/blog/2025/... · Posted by u/jrochkind1
And then what?
Say you made the foreground text color the same as the background text color, so you could no longer see the source code. You can no longer do anything. You can no longer save those changes. And then what?
Better, say you did that in a script file which additionally saved the image, so that image was now unusable. And then what?
The parent comment was talking about a deployed application, and making sure users can't modify the source code.
In that case, your image hopefully was built using source code from a VCS and no such changes will have been applied. This is not so different from building an app by pulling the latest version of the code from Git.
And if you did manage to commit changes that completely mess up your environment, you throw that image away, take a vanilla one and load your source code into it. Again, not so different from using Git.
ssdspoimdsjvv commented on Ruby and Its Neighbors: Smalltalk noelrappin.com/blog/2025/... · Posted by u/jrochkind1
> makes supporting client side applications so much easier
I was thinking that supporting a Smalltalk application must be a nightmare because it is so malleable. Users can inspect and modify the entire system, no?
Smalltalk being so malleable also makes it possible to completely disable source code inspection/execution.
ssdspoimdsjvv commented on You can't cURL a Border drobinin.com/posts/you-ca... · Posted by u/valzevul
Yeah wasn’t checked. I’m pretty sure it was a smaller airport than Heathrow. I definitely went through the wrong path out
Perhaps your passport was checked on departure instead of on arrival? At least that's how it worked when taking the Eurostar train.
> Software like PGP is easy to use
Criminalize encryption. Oh you're using cryptograhy? Well then clearly you are a child molesting, money laundering, drug trafficking terrorist. No need to actually decrypt anything when cryptography is incriminating evidence unto itself.
Computers are subversive. Cryptography alone can defeat police, judges, governments and militaries, and computers have democratized access to cryptography to the point even common citizens have it. They cannot tolerate it.
It's a politico-technological arms race. They make their silly laws. We make technologies that completely nullify those laws. They need to increase their overall tyranny just to maintain the exact same level of control they had before. The end result is either an uncontrollable, ungovernable, unpoliceable population, or a totalitarian state that surveils, monitors and controls everything. There is no middle ground.
We are rapidly advancing towards this totalitarianism, and we are eventually going to find out if the people have what it takes to resist and become ungovernable.
One day we will need government signatures to run software on "our" computers. All the free software in the world won't help if we can't run it. The only way to resist that is to somehow develop the means to fabricate our own chips at home. Computer hardware fabrication must be made as easy as 3D printing random objects. Anything short of this and we're done for. Everything the word "hacker" stands for will be destroyed. Our privacy will be destroyed. Our freedom will be destroyed. It's over.
How do you define cryptography? Let's say my files are written in a format that only my software can read. Is it then illegal to distribute said files?
ssdspoimdsjvv commented on The key to getting MVC correct is understanding what models are stlab.cc/tips/about-mvc.h... · Posted by u/csb6
I once wrote a small class at work and by the time I left it was like over 8k lines long. People jokes it was my fault I called it HelperUtil instead of something more descriptive. It was a dumping ground for all the stuff people didn't want to think about. I wonder if something like that is possible in the microservice world?
Of course, it just becomes the HelperUtilService!
Deleted Comment
XML/XSLT/XPath are great, but XSLT ecosystem has been effectively "frozen" for over a decade in terms of innovation and tooling. The last major step was XSLT 3.0 (2017), which introduced streaming and function integration. However, in practice, no new engines or radically different approaches have emerged since then.
And there is only one free XSLT 3.0 processor available, SAXON-HE (it lacks schema-aware & streaming though)
There's a working group dedicated to breathing new life into the standard:
https://qt4cg.org/specifications/xslt-40/Overview.html
Last updated just under a week ago!
ssdspoimdsjvv commented on Ask HN: What do you use to write and take notes? Is there a cursor for writing? · Posted by u/fir3dvst
What do you mean with the cursor question?
An AI-powered editor I assume. Always having to come up with your own thoughts must be tiresome.
ssdspoimdsjvv commented on Why Companies Don't Fix Bugs idiallo.com/blog/companie... · Posted by u/foxfired
Personally I've never found it a problem to just fix things that I see are broken, as a dev, without PM approval, even in very dysfunctional organizations. Sometimes it even goes noticed and people applaud you for it.
In other words: though I acknowledge that the phenomenon described in the article is real, I sometimes feel it's just because developers accept a reality that doesn't need to be accepted.
What about QA, code review, documentation,...?