crabbone

8 ms·

61.
by crabbone 2mo ago
There's a whole big contentious point that the author completely ignored: using assertions in tests (like unit-tests). Some unit testing frameworks expect their users to use assertions to do the job, others are very much against it be
62.
by crabbone 2mo ago
They let you do it because GitLab was first to let you do that. MS had to match the offering of their most noticeable competitor. They also felt like thay had to one-up them... well, to win the competition. So, from the sales point of vie
63.
by crabbone 2mo ago
I've lived through two acquisitions by the world-largest companies (and few more smaller ones). Here's my impression of what often happens in situations like this: * There's a huge disconnect between the actual product and w
64.
by crabbone 2mo ago
Yes. That was my impression too. Github Actions aren't a good product in many ways. It's also very complex and requires quite a bit more infrastructure than the rest of Github. Unfortunately, I don't think that the commerc
65.
by crabbone 2mo ago
I saw a graph of Github outages somewhere. The drop in uptime strongly correlates with the introduction of Github Actions. To be fair, it's a huge chunk of functionality, also, hard to make reliable. LLMs might have an effect, but t
66.
by crabbone 2mo ago
Not going to work... I have to schedule an appointment, using the phone (they used to have special devices that could be used instead, but they discontinued them too). If I just show up at the branch office, they won't even let me in
67.
by crabbone 2mo ago
Not in my experience. My bank wouldn't even talk to me when they discontinued support for a phone I had. They don't even have anyone to complain to, which is by design. You can complain about non-technical stuff, but there&#x27
68.
by crabbone 2mo ago
I don't know what exactly do you mean by Android system. Does storage count? The idea of how applications aren't allowed to access each other's storage is very bad from the user perspective, for example. Permission model of
69.
by crabbone 2mo ago
1 in 3 is end of the line awful... Back when I was in college (former USSR), we had a subject roughly translated as "integration with industrial processes". USSR industry was highly regimented. Various norms, tolerances, recipes
70.
by crabbone 2mo ago
Look at how SELinux is structured, or AppArmor. Neither one is enough. I.e. you need both: file access permissions and permissions to run commands and more... Trying to restrict to only one security feature will make the system either to
71.
by crabbone 2mo ago
That's a tautology... But, maybe if I try to salvage what you were trying to say: while failures are a fact of life, higher-quality products will try to minimize and mitigate more of them. Making more components replaceable, is the di
72.
by crabbone 2mo ago
There's a difference. It was a matter of principle for a Web site (not) to use pop-up ads or ads in general. It would be highly inappropriate for a large and successful business to have (especially pop-up) ads in their product (unles
73.
by crabbone 2mo ago
It still makes it a single point of failure...
74.
by crabbone 2mo ago
I believe that the target market for this equipment is small / medium size enterprises that need a solution for local storage of whatever information they process in their day-to-day operations. So, they won't have a system admin
75.
by crabbone 2mo ago
You missed the point the author really complains about: soldered in memory chips create a single point of failure. What you quoted needs to be seen in the context of what author calls "increasing media demands". I.e. the author b
76.
by crabbone 2mo ago
The question about designing elevators used to be the mainstay of programming job interviews. I had an annoying interview where I was asked, for the umpteens time to design an elevator. I already made up my mind at the time, knowing I&#x2
77.
by crabbone 3mo ago
Surprisingly, I've met non-programmers who easily learned languages considered "strange" or difficult to understand by professional programmers (Forth is even somewhat popular among astronomers, but I've also met people
78.
by crabbone 3mo ago
> So let’s say you want to create a program that doesn’t have bugs. How should you do it? Fundamentally the only way to make sure a program will always do what you want is to understand everything it can do. But there’s a kind of paradox
79.
by crabbone 3mo ago
1. There was a discussion few years ago to remove the signatures from the format at all. I don't know what the resolution was, that's why I don't know if it's still supported, as in is it supported by the specification
80.
by crabbone 3mo ago
No, I didn't imply that. PowerShell introduces many different error modes that aren't possible in Unix Shell because it tries to operate on structured messages, has a type system, has a bunch of built-in functionality for accessi
81.
by crabbone 3mo ago
There are many programs that aren't applications. For example, databases. You wouldn't argue that because you can program in eg. SQL it should be able to make applications with a robust command-line interface, right? Same idea
82.
by crabbone 3mo ago
Yeah... in the place I worked, for a while, they didn't have a package index for Python packages (similar to PyPI), so, I wanted to write one. At the time I had a love-hate relationship with Ada, so, after trying to do something with
83.
by crabbone 3mo ago
PowerShell is a bad choice for the system shell because it's too complex. I'm not trying to justify all the quirks of Unix Shell, but minimalism is a very important feature of such a tool. Another important feature of a tool like
84.
by crabbone 3mo ago
1. There are multiple levels at which things are hashed, signed and checked when it comes to Python packages. Eg. each file in the Wheel beside the RECORD file is hashed using SHA256. This hash is never checked :( You can also sign your
85.
by crabbone 3mo ago
There's no reason a public index should allow any "staging" time for releases. It's the whole point of the release: once it's done, it's sealed. Oh, you messed up? -- Either make a new release, or release pat
86.
by crabbone 3mo ago
It's kind of hilarious how everything that has to do with Python is so obviously wrong, with the obviously right way of doing things being right there, on the service, having been around since before Python even existed... and yet, Pyt
87.
by crabbone 3mo ago
Basically, the problem is that the Web browser doesn't give enough control to developers to be used as an application platform. Simple things like key bindings are impossible for example (because there are some key bindings that the b
88.
by crabbone 3mo ago
> The JS code won't be able to modify the browser itself, but neither can ELisp modify the actual Emacs binary code. You misunderstood the problem. Remember when Firefox' GUI was made of XUL and that was indeed accessible from
89.
by crabbone 3mo ago
I didn't mean to say it was illegal, I meant to say it was an advantage in competition against the open-source counterparts because those usually cannot afford to make discounts of any kind. More concretely, Microsoft used to claim tha
90.
by crabbone 3mo ago
I'm sure this is a serious problem, but I'm not sure it's the main problem. The other one, that might be an even bigger problem is the way Microsoft sells its products. While, technically, most of the stuff they sell appe

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