Hacker News: agmcleod

New comment by agmcleod in "ESLint compromised, may have stolen your credentials"

agmcleod — Tue, 17 Jul 2018 13:49:27 +0000

To be honest, i don't know if it's practical for something like this to be community funded. Ideally there would be a committee from multiple companies who have interest that can contribute. Node.js has a board for example.

New comment by agmcleod in "ESLint compromised, may have stolen your credentials"

agmcleod — Thu, 12 Jul 2018 19:13:39 +0000

Why does this tie to the linux foundation?

> How about running npm like an open source project instead?

In the end such a large service requires a fair bit of hardware & costs to work. While I would prefer there wasn't as much dependency on something a single company controls. The largeness of node & npm makes it quite the target.

New comment by agmcleod in "McDonald's Says Goodbye Cashiers, Hello Kiosks"

agmcleod — Thu, 12 Jul 2018 19:01:36 +0000

I remember people saying that when they were raising the minimum wage in ontario. Really though those machines have been around for much longer.

New comment by agmcleod in "Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook"

agmcleod — Thu, 19 Apr 2018 18:39:51 +0000

Ah i think i may have misunderstood how the system is made. It is purely peer to peer. So any issues could be if the software has a security vulnerability, but I'm not sure how that ties in with things like "as-use" open source licensing. This post explained the network fairly well I found: https://staltz.com/an-off-grid-social-network.html

As far as GDPR goes, you're right because you're specifically choosing people to send it to. However, having a mechanism to delete your messages on other people's systems when they sync would probably go a long way.

New comment by agmcleod in "Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook"

agmcleod — Thu, 19 Apr 2018 18:25:24 +0000

It's worse than facebook because there's no one to have responsibility to be accountable. This ties in with your question about GDPR. While I'm not a lawyer, as far as I know it doesn't matter if you're a person or a company, if you're collecting data, it's something you can be liable for. So in a distributed system, all parties who maintain the data sources would be liable. I actually wonder how this works logistically in terms of storing account info on something like Ethereum.

New comment by agmcleod in "Godot at GDC 2018"

agmcleod — Mon, 26 Mar 2018 13:39:30 +0000

While I hear generally about garbage collection causing dropped frames. I've had this happen to me in HTML5 land. I haven't heard about it as much with Unity, that C# was fast enough, and the under the hood pieces are C++ anyways. Perhaps I'm reading the wrong channels :). I'm curious if your game project is 3D, and what sort of intensity you tend to have with it.

New comment by agmcleod in "Why I Don't Sign Non-Competes"

agmcleod — Wed, 21 Mar 2018 13:59:46 +0000

I think the only non compete i've had was for one of my 4-month co-op jobs. I think it lasted only a few months, and it was not to work at a software company in the same field. Which was fine, as I would be at school during that time anyways.

I have signed agreements where anything I do on the company laptop is considered theres. So I just made sure to only use it for work, and put nothing else on it.

New comment by agmcleod in "Node v9.8.0"

agmcleod — Thu, 08 Mar 2018 21:23:30 +0000

I think that person meant npm 5 perhaps?

New comment by agmcleod in "Diesel cars can be banned from German cities, court rules"

agmcleod — Tue, 27 Feb 2018 20:23:18 +0000

Ah okay. I was mainly recalling what I saw in Amsterdam as well more recently in Vienna. I have been to germany, but my memory of cyclist life there is much more hazy :)

New comment by agmcleod in "Diesel cars can be banned from German cities, court rules"

agmcleod — Tue, 27 Feb 2018 20:18:34 +0000

Most of them are good. But i've seen many run red lights, go the wrong way on a one way street, i've been nearly hit by cyclists a few times. In terms of driving with cyclists, I think the main thing is lack of space more than actual actions. So an infrastructure problem. When driving what tends to give me pause is people acting out of place. So someone jay walking, or a cyclist cutting across lanes, as I then need to be more aware for people doing things incorrectly.

You are quite right in terms of where the danger lies though. It's on the driver more than any other to be the most careful with their actions.

New comment by agmcleod in "Diesel cars can be banned from German cities, court rules"

agmcleod — Tue, 27 Feb 2018 13:53:36 +0000

In many cases I see cycling ruin life if you enjoy driving or walking ;). I do find places that i've seen be bike friendly in Europe do a much better job at this. But cyclists in Toronto can be pretty awful. Likewise can pedestrians and cars. Whichever way I travel, the other two are annoying me or causing me grief somehow.

New comment by agmcleod in "Why Mickey Mouse’s 1998 copyright extension probably won’t happen again"

agmcleod — Tue, 09 Jan 2018 15:31:17 +0000

>I think Netflix is a huge vindication of copyright. It started out as a middleman simple peddling other people’s content. But copyright forced them to start producing their own content, and they’ve turned television on its head as a result.

Really? They make license agreements with the content/copywright owners in order to stream it. It does break apart the idea of using a single copy and lending it to someone though. I thought they were investing in their own content in order to attract more users, and improve the overall offering.

New comment by agmcleod in "Energy Efficiency: A New Concern for Application Software Developers"

agmcleod — Sun, 24 Dec 2017 20:02:07 +0000

C is neither here nor there. Really anything compiling down to the platform code would improve things. Running a browser environment for these applications is just not as efficient. But also the UI tooling outside of web is also not very good. While you're right about productivity, we also just happen to have a large workforce that knows the webstack very well, but not so much QT or UWP or AppKit.

New comment by agmcleod in "What's a reference in Rust?"

agmcleod — Wed, 29 Nov 2017 15:12:32 +0000

Really just this year is the first time i've been using it for larger side projects. While I still run into some things with the borrow checker, I find I'm much better at predicting them, and figuring out a strategy around it. Really once you get through the book and are comfortable with types, you really just need to start working on something bigger. You will need to change things and refactor as your original ideas don't pan out. But you learn from it.

Good luck!

New comment by agmcleod in "Justin Trudeau explains why Canada really ‘gets’ AI and smart cities"

agmcleod — Thu, 02 Nov 2017 18:29:54 +0000

> More like I can make 3x for the same job here.

I know that silicon valley pays a fair bit, but cost to live there is also rather high. Is that true for most jobs across the US? I know developers in the US who are starting around similar salaries to myself, or lower in some cases.

I agree with the rest of your points. Was hoping this to be more interesting than it was.

New comment by agmcleod in "The new Google Calendar for web"

agmcleod — Wed, 25 Oct 2017 15:53:33 +0000

Search has been faster than it used to be. I've noticed this in Mail on iOS as well. I use airmail, which i don't think it downloads all emails locally.

New comment by agmcleod in "Why We Must Fight for the Right to Repair Our Electronics"

agmcleod — Wed, 25 Oct 2017 15:52:16 +0000

That would then also apply to games. Anything that really runs on a device.

Really I think we just need better regulation around it all. So making sure that you are allowed to hack your own device if you wish. Able to extract your data. SaaS companies being required to give you data exports (unless unsafe to do so).

New comment by agmcleod in "Why We Must Fight for the Right to Repair Our Electronics"

agmcleod — Wed, 25 Oct 2017 13:55:11 +0000

I feel like taxing proprietary software, or making it illegal would be awful. Many companies big to small run businesses off of proprietary software. You have the big players like Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook. Not sure how some of these compare in size, but you also have Github, Shopify, Squarespace, Reddit, Atlassian, Basecamp, robo advisor companies. Then you consider not purely based online companies like banks or retail stores that sell their products online, or give you the ability to trade ETFs. Some of those they could use open stuff instead, as they make money off of trades.

I do agree that making DRM is a losing battle, and they are transferring that cost to legitimate customers. Really though I don't have much other options for streaming. Amazon prime has the same setup, and CraveTV probably does too. Though Crave doesn't have much for content that I'm interested in.

New comment by agmcleod in "The new Google Calendar for web"

agmcleod — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 19:40:51 +0000

I generally like Inbox as well, feels faster than gmail. Though i've recently gone back to using a local client instead of the web. It's a bit of a change, but just feels simpler to use.

New comment by agmcleod in "Introducing Surface Book 2"

agmcleod — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 14:58:42 +0000

agreed. I have a gaming PC at home, as well as a separate gaming laptop that I use for events. I've tried coding on it, and it's just not as good. Little things like the apps you mentioned I miss. Soulver, text expander, proper twitter clients, spotlight, brew.