Hacker News: ChoHag

New comment by ChoHag in "Why I'm not rushing to take sides in the RubyGems fiasco"

ChoHag — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 21:15:14 +0000

> But if you take my cookies, add sprinkles then resell them, I can expect a modest donation to keep the bakery running.

You cannot expect any such thing. You gave them away for free.

If you want to get paid, don't give your work away for free. If you give your work away for free, you cannot expect to get paid.

It's shocking how frequently people who deal in rigorous logic day in, day out are unable to understand this very simple principle.

New comment by ChoHag in "Open source maintainers are feeling the squeeze"

ChoHag — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 13:44:12 +0000

If the dependencies wanted to get paid they should not have given their work away for free.

If you give your work away for free you cannot expect to get paid for it.

For people who deal with intractible logic all day it's amusing how much these simple facts fail to get through their thick skulls.

New comment by ChoHag in "French modernists were alarmed, inspired by newspaper's voracious dynamism"

ChoHag — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 01:28:26 +0000

> First, because the social media is not reading, or newspapers, it's a different thing altogether

Are you suggesting that historical books and newspapers were not pandering to populist whims? Of course they did. Is the difference the precision of the targeting? That sounds like a difference of degree not of substance.

> It did create yellow journalism, it did create tabloids, it did redefine truth, and recalibrate leisure, and it did create doomscrolling, and make people think in different—and not necessarily better—ways.

It also created the article we just read and this web site to find it on.

> Maybe all we can do is listen to what people living through that change said

Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

New comment by ChoHag in "What I Learned Reporting in Cities That Take Belongings from Homeless People"

ChoHag — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 20:44:37 +0000

You don't see the homeless people who keep themselves and their belongings out of your sight.

New comment by ChoHag in "Dear friend, you have built a Kubernetes"

ChoHag — Sun, 24 Nov 2024 15:04:44 +0000

Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.

New comment by ChoHag in "Cats are (almost) liquid"

ChoHag — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 16:32:38 +0000

Now that is what a dry academic paper about cats is supposed to look like. Cat pictures on every page.

New comment by ChoHag in "World conker champion found with steel chestnut, cleared of cheating"

ChoHag — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 12:05:18 +0000

We have conkers in London.

New comment by ChoHag in "Varlink – IPC to replace D-Bus gradually in systemd"

ChoHag — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 06:54:17 +0000

FFI is the shell's only job.

New comment by ChoHag in "Autossh – automatically restart SSH sessions and tunnels"

ChoHag — Sat, 28 Sep 2024 18:54:16 +0000

That's so much better than bourne/bash, which requires this monstrous wart of a code blob:

autossh() {

        # Tiny delay after failure in case of connection errors

        while ! ssh "$@"; do echo Restarting ssh "$@"...; sleep 1; done

}

New comment by ChoHag in "WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic"

ChoHag — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 05:09:43 +0000

Is supporting wordpress development part of the license offered by wordpress that WP Engine agreed to?

No?

If you don't want people to use your stuff, don't give it away for free.

> there's nothing wrong with publicizing that they don't give much in return

That would be the case IF giving back was part of the deal which they are therefore reneging on. It was not. You are in the wrong.

New comment by ChoHag in "OpenBSD now enforcing no invalid NUL characters in shell scripts"

ChoHag — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 18:36:06 +0000

> If you absolutely must parse ls

... stop and rethink your options. You may be able to get away with parsing the first columns of ls -l but even then a pathologically named file could make itself look like a line of ls output.

It's simply not possible in all cases. If you can constrain your input then you may be able to make use of it but in the general case, that's why xargs and find grew a -0 option.

Or glob.

New comment by ChoHag in "Open source maintainers underpaid, swamped by security, and going gray"

ChoHag — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 10:40:53 +0000

> What happens when it's no longer fun, but 150,000 people depend on it for their job?

Then 150,000 people should open their wallet, or crack open a text editor, and pay.

> design the licence, and more, to enable you to walk away and/or get bored.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

New comment by ChoHag in "Open source maintainers underpaid, swamped by security, and going gray"

ChoHag — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 07:36:27 +0000

It's very revealing that this response is so disliked that it's going grey.

But it is the truth. Do you not like the truth?

It is not a job. Nobody asked you to do it. You do not get to be sad when nobody pats you on the head. You are owed nothing.

Thanks for the code.

New comment by ChoHag in "Ask HN: What books should I read to improve as a software engineer?"

ChoHag — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 05:41:52 +0000

Terry Pratchett.

New comment by ChoHag in "Xpra: Persistent Remote Applications for X11"

ChoHag — Mon, 08 Jul 2024 12:22:49 +0000

> what's the current state of the art ?

Wayland is going to make 2024 the year of Linux on the Desktop!

Any day now...

New comment by ChoHag in "The attack against Danish, critical infrastructure [pdf]"

ChoHag — Mon, 13 Nov 2023 00:24:31 +0000

So you found out about the vulnerability in the firewalls on your critical infrastructure, waited for a week before telling anyone and then sat on it for two more?

Nice dramatisation though. Very intense.

New comment by ChoHag in "Off-duty pilot allegedly tried to shut off engines on Alaska Airlines flight"

ChoHag — Mon, 23 Oct 2023 18:10:49 +0000

Back in the days when you could go into the cockpit for a chat, the pilots turned the engines of our 747 off (well, idle) over the middle of the Atlantic to show my brother and I how the autopilot worked.

New comment by ChoHag in "The brain connections between our hands and tongues"

ChoHag — Wed, 30 Aug 2023 07:15:53 +0000

> Electrical stimulation of this same area triggers a monkey’s hand to make a grip motion while its mouth opens, and its hand moves to its mouth.

Fixed Action Pattern (?) which didn't quite go away.

New comment by ChoHag in "Lie still in bed"

ChoHag — Sun, 27 Aug 2023 14:10:41 +0000

After a while this may invert and you find that whatever time you go to sleep (within some degree of normal) you'll wake up precisely n hours later, for whatever value of n your body's settled on.

No more need for an alarm clock.

New comment by ChoHag in "Odd and unsafe baby car seats from the past"

ChoHag — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 15:58:43 +0000

I can't lie, I like the look of that one that hangs them out the side window.

Can we get them for planes?