Hacker News: beart

New comment by beart in "Chatto is now open source"

beart — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 03:14:28 +0000

Right, I'm thinking along the same lines as what Zoom offers. Except with the additional feature that the link is custom tailored to a known, pre-configured user. So you also skip the "log in as guest or create an account" step.

New comment by beart in "Chatto is now open source"

beart — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 20:19:00 +0000

What would be really awesome is some sort of feature where, once self hosted, I can generate a package or link that will download + install + pre-configure the login. Basically a bespoke installer/setup script. that can be linked to a particular person. The goal being to make onboarding as frictionless as possible. This could have some security implications maybe (the link is shared by mistake), but for a small self-hosted instance, that seems like something that could be mitigated fairly easily. Maybe only works with local accounts or something.

That would really make it easy to send a friend a link, "hey come chat with me", without having to worry about a response such as, "I'm already on discord, I don't want to set up all that stuff".

New comment by beart in "Chatto is now open source"

beart — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 19:59:02 +0000

There is an audience for this, and it's me and my friends.

I have a small group of close friends. We are on discord just about every day, but we really don't bother with anyone outside our group, other than the very occasional invitation to another friend/coworker to join for some games.

We don't care about network effect, social media features, engagement, etc. We just want a well made application for private text, voice, and video that we never have to actually think about.

And no, matrix is not that.

New comment by beart in "Resetting Xbox"

beart — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 18:04:49 +0000

I had completely forgot MS bought them.

New comment by beart in "Reddit will require you to log in to use old.reddit.com"

beart — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 11:19:43 +0000

Third party apps used to work fine without an account. They kept track of your settings and filters locally. My usage declined rapidly when reddit killed them.

New comment by beart in "Resetting Xbox"

beart — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 03:25:35 +0000

I agree with your sentiment, but not your conclusion. The new boss is being paid millions to explain that 14 layers of management is a bad idea... I'm sure there are thousands working in the xbox division that could have told you that one for free.

New comment by beart in "Resetting Xbox"

beart — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 03:18:58 +0000

I can share nearly my entire steam library (~23 years worth) with my kids. There is no way in hell Sony or Microsoft will ever allow that. In fact, I've had to re-buy Minecraft because their account migration was such a shit show. They cannot and will not ever come anywhere close to competing with Steam on this feature. For that alone, I will never buy a console. Just glad I built PCs for my kids before the AI boom...

New comment by beart in "Resetting Xbox"

beart — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 03:06:17 +0000

Overwatch released in 2016, but the merger took place in 2008. I feel like overwatch was always more of an Activision game than a Blizzard game. Or at least, pre-World of Warcraft Blizzard would never have entered that genre of gaming.

New comment by beart in "Organic Maps"

beart — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 16:34:20 +0000

> If they need to eat or something they should get a job, presumably.

The tone of this comment is quite different from the text of the open letter to which you refer. Specifically this section. I don't have any personal knowledge either way, but this stood out to me.

> As it was revealed by Roman @rtsisyk it wasn't unusual for the Shareholders to use project's donations as their own money e.g. Alexander @biodranik paid for his personal holiday trip expenses this way. At the same time all other contributors were consistently denied any access to any financial information (even to the totals of money donated/spent). (It's fine for developers to be reimbursed for their hard work, but it should be done in a fair, transparent and accountable way.)

New comment by beart in "Military branches restore flu shot requirement after virus swept through base"

beart — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 23:46:41 +0000

I have a close friend who is an officer nearing twenty years. He has not had a tendency to criticize his job. However, he has been adamant that vaccines are incredibly important for the military and the policy changes have really angered him, specifically because of the damage it does to readiness.

New comment by beart in "Slate EV truck starts at $24,950"

beart — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 14:23:44 +0000

They did a demo and some discussion in this video. I recall some discussion on safety features www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6_9_HHLOSY

New comment by beart in "Ask HN: What's the hardest part of maintaining a legacy codebase?"

beart — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 19:00:44 +0000

Legacy expectations and requirements. It's not uncommon to see that there is a better way to do something, but be unable to do it because the customer assumes and/or expects the current way of doing things. They might even be on board with the new way, but trying to include that in any sort of project budget is a non- starter.

New comment by beart in "Microsoft new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly"

beart — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 13:21:16 +0000

As slow as Windows is (very), once you start adding the corporate security tools on top of it (Crowdstrike) and have to deal with a slow and buggy corporate DNS system, it just becomes unusable.

The only way I can do anything timely now is through WSL.

New comment by beart in "Gamers beware: malicious wallpapers on Steam found stealing accounts"

beart — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 17:35:35 +0000

So this vulnerability isn't directly the result of using Steam, or any of the Steam profile customizations, such as avatars and profile page backgrounds. But rather, it is a vulnerability in a third-party application "Wallpaper Engine" which is available on Steam.

I recall when screen savers were a common malware vector on Windows. I suppose everything old is new again.

New comment by beart in "Upcoming breaking changes for npm v12"

beart — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 01:24:12 +0000

Does the allow list in package.json pin to the package version, or only to the package name?

New comment by beart in "Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things"

beart — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 14:36:10 +0000

The compromise is to defer to a standard formatting tool such as prettier or pip8.

New comment by beart in "Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things"

beart — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 14:34:49 +0000

As long as the file extension changes to align with the format, that sounds great. There are far too many abuses of .json that allow comments, trailing commas, etc.

New comment by beart in "Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things"

beart — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 14:29:51 +0000

Most of the folks I caught pushing "changes" as a commit message are now letting AI write their commit messages for them. It has been a massive improvement.

New comment by beart in "Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things"

beart — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:40:18 +0000

That's true, but depends on your workflow and release strategy.

If you are releasing upon every push to main/master (following what semantic release and conventional commits provides you in terms of automation), then it makes sense to perform major version bumps for the reverts.

If you have a manual release strategy, then it might not make sense to use these tools in the way they have been designed.

New comment by beart in "Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things"

beart — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:35:15 +0000

This is not without struggles. Many times the changelog updates are missed. You can try to catch this in code review, but that could also be missed. So you can try to automatically verify the changelog was updated, but you can't force that as a pass/fail check since not all changes require a user facing change. Or your project maintainers simply copy the commit message and paste it into the changelog, and at that point, why not just automate it with something like conventional commits?

Could/should the changelog be considered a first-class deliverable with care and attention provided? I think so, but I'm not in a position to exert direct control over that across dozens of repos and team members.