bct

26 ms·

241.
by bct 15y ago
Hacker News was originally called Startup News; that would still be a more accurate title.
242.
by bct 15y ago
"Must" doesn't have to imply legal force.
243.
by bct 15y ago
The key phrase being " In the long run ". We won't get to that idealized reality if we make the wrong decisions in our current reality.
244.
by bct 15y ago
There was a big thread on the OAuth mailing list about this a couple of months ago. The official response seems to be "don't use native applications that you think might phish you", which isn't very satisfying. I'm not sure what the alterna
245.
by bct 15y ago
I must not have been very clear, because I'm being pro-OAuth here :)
246.
by bct 15y ago
No, that's not what I meant. It's an analogy - if sites shouldn't store their own passwords in plaintext or reversibly encrypted (which everyone here agrees on - "use BCrypt", etc), then they shouldn't store other passwords in plaintext or
247.
by bct 15y ago
I'm not sure why it matters either way; it's not like he's going to send goons to your house if you don't release your source.
248.
by bct 15y ago
There's a place for both approaches. I agree with kiba that with video games (and websites, and lots of other software for that matter), novelty is weighted much too heavily.
249.
by bct 15y ago
> A well-behaved app can have your password and do no harm. Until someone steals its database. You hash your user's passwords, right? Same thing - whether you're talking about your app's passwords, or some 3rd party app's passwords, kee
250.
by bct 15y ago
> You could get all the meaningful functionality of Oauth by letting apps request a single "permission key" when they login - with the user's password. http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-oauth-v2-22#section-1....
251.
by bct 15y ago
But he does not say " just a sandbox", or otherwise imply that a "coding sandbox" is less valuable than a non-profit organization. They're different things.
252.
by bct 15y ago
> 4. Condescension. "It's impressive for what it is" ... (but "what it is" is "just a sandbox") You're jumping at shadows and putting words into his mouth. What he said was: > Git is an impressive tool and github is awesome for what
253.
by bct 15y ago
> ...create your own session script to start up the parts of Gnome that you want along with XMonad... On Ubuntu at least I've had success with http://markhansen.co.nz/xmonad-ubuntu-oneiric/ (Having the launcher floating around is anno
254.
by bct 15y ago
That it's possible now with most hardware doesn't mean much. There are powerful entities that have been working for years to ensure that open source is only possible where & when it suits them. New devices are much more locked down than
255.
by bct 15y ago
Open source software is useless if the hardware only runs code that's been signed by the manufacturer. This is exactly what GPL3 is about.
256.
by bct 15y ago
Why does everything have to be a business opportunity? Prioritizing monetary value over other kinds of value is how we got into this mess in the first place.
257.
by bct 15y ago
Disappointing. "We can beg other powers to intervene" is not "we can fix it".
258.
by bct 15y ago
Or, to put it another way, there are two different kinds of semantics in play; the semantics of a document (this is a title, this is a paragraph, ...), and the semantics of the subject of a document (this is the price of the item, this is h
259.
by bct 15y ago
The conflation of "semantic HTML" with "the semantic web" has done immeasurable harm to both causes. Yes, debating whether to mark up your forms using UL or OL or LABEL or SPAN or DIV or DL or TABLE or ... is a total waste of time. That doe
260.
by bct 15y ago
> Rolling release isn't quite the same, because you still get frequent updates to "core" software. You don't have to install updated versions unless you want to.
261.
by bct 15y ago
Gentoo and Arch are the ones that come immediately to mind. The term to look for is "rolling release".
262.
by bct 15y ago
There always been distros that work like that. There's no such thing as the "Linux mentality" that you're talking about.
263.
by bct 15y ago
Software is only obsoleted by some other software getting adopted in its place. How well adopted a piece of software is is only vaguely related to how innovative it is, how technically sound it is, etc. You're reducing a complex problem too
264.
by bct 15y ago
> The free software approach seems to assume that what a computer should be and do has already been decided and they just need to make free versions of everything. That's really not the case. > The most popular computers and electro
265.
by bct 15y ago
> But certainly the client needs to know something about the base resources Yes, it needs to understand how they're represented, what types of links they might have to other resources, etc. A good example is the Atom Publishing Protocol
266.
by bct 15y ago
It's worth noting that this is not a new idea. In the late 60s there were at least a dozen research projects working on this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramis_(personal_rapid_transit) Maybe technological advances have made it more feas
267.
by bct 15y ago
> HTTP auth doesn't make backend authentication code easier to write. It makes it easier to shove into a library or middleware. Most of the issues you list are UI problems that could have been solved with a non-modal login prompt, a "re
268.
by bct 15y ago
A decent UI on top of HTTP authentication would have been an improvement, and it's something that more sophisticated systems can be built on top of while maintaining compatibility.
269.
by bct 15y ago
How many username/password forms are there on the web? Millions? They function basically identically, but they all had to be written (or at least configured) independently. It's outrageous when you think about it, as if every language requi
270.
by bct 15y ago
Zooko's triangle[1] in action: A BrowserID (like an email address) is memorable and secure, but not decentralized (it's centralized in DNS). A cryptographic key is decentralized and secure, but not memorable. Systems that are memorable and

More ›