I've seen this play out over and over. Companies that work on incredibly sensitive subjects don't put security first. It's like just something where you "audit it" at the end. All the while, you're just duct taping a bunch of half-working shit together so you can "ship" as fast as possible. Got to get that "traction" in, amiright guise? If customers money gets lost or a bunch of other bullshit happens that's a problem for tomorrow.

The simplest possible approach is to install the runtime on a users computer, isolated, with the package inside it. It's wasteful in terms of disk space but can be generalised to build reusable installers that work for just about any language.

Reusable installers

A reusable installer reads its own meta-data to decide on the runtime to install and the project. Linux and Mac are supported through a bash script while all windows versions use an NSIS program. The unusual thing about this is once you build the reusable installers since it's just meta-data everything can be edited inside the browser without compiling new binaries.

Like TiddlyWiki: You can actually download this entire system as a single HTML page to create installers without ever needing a server. Though Github project support only works online at the moment (not a limitation, haven't added this feature yet.)

Edit: thanks HNers for checking out my project. I am actually really excited about it. I know installers aren't exactly the most exciting topic but I thought you would all appreciate a different take on it.

I don't really get the hate. Everyone here uses AI for just about everything yet they almost never credit the models. I think this misrepresents the work so I credited the tools. But I'm by no means just handing a blank script to a model and hoping for the best.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49851879

Points: 25

# Comments: 15

It's called TiddlyInstall. TiddlyInstall is a single-page website that lets you easily build installers for all your projects. What makes TiddlyInstall unusual is there is no software to download and everything is able to work offline. Based on the project that it's inspired by: you can download TiddlyInstall as a HTML file and use it to make working binaries for Windows, Linux, and Mac.

How it works:

Most installers / binaries are custom per project. But with very few modifications they can be made general-purpose. Installers can be made to follow meta-data which can be vouched for by hashes in their file names, embedded data, and signatures. That means new binaries only need meta-data to be changed which can be done entirely in the browser.

For the installers themselves NSIS was chosen for its amazing Windows support. Otherwise, the rest is shell scripting. I am very excited about it and would love people to try it out. All the code is open source under MIT. Feel free to report issues on the Github at http://github.com/robertsdotpm/tiddlyinstall

Credits:

Claude (and the authors whose works it was trained on :/) deserve huge credits for the implementation. It would have taken me months to code this all this. This project is not affiliated with TiddlyWiki -- though I am heavily inspired by that project!

If anyone thinks my work is cool -- I'm currently looking for new opportunities. Feel free to reach out if there's a match (matthew@roberts.pm.)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49841265

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

The idea of router sounds simple and like it should implement some standard protocols. But in practice -- a lot of it is a mishmash of proprietary, ad hoc shitware. Something I never hear spoken about is the deep packet inspection filter component of the router firmware. It's a part of the router that decides on what traffic is allowed / not, and almost no company publishes this part. So you're not even in control of your own Internet traffic, tiny blobs of code written by some company get to decide if something is allowed or not.

If that sounds sus AF and kind of a bad idea -- well, it is. You can always run 100% open software with open-wrt. But the thing is -- the Internet isn't just your part of it. It's a network of networks, and all those shitty routers, with all that shitty firmware, is deeply ingrained within the entire Internet. That's millions of devices that would need to be replaced to fix the issue.