Hacker News: binaryturtle

New comment by binaryturtle in "CERT is releasing six CVEs for serious security vulnerabilities in dnsmasq"

binaryturtle — Wed, 13 May 2026 13:21:18 +0000

Surprisingly a lot of popular projects are mainly one-person projects.

In my experience projects lead by large corporates burnt me a lot more in the past and caused more serious friction in my setups (e.g. breaking backwards compatibility for the sake of killing 5 lines of code that could cause some extra "development costs".)

Anyway… that's not saying one is better than the other. Trust into a project builds different over time (unrelated to the size of the development team).

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Seeing it here, how someone "shamelessly" (in their own words) adverts their own competing project and then uses dummy accounts to bend the voting and discussion in their favouring… that's definitely NOT how trust is build up. It's something which instantly makes me stay away from a project (better or not).

New comment by binaryturtle in "CERT is releasing six CVEs for serious security vulnerabilities in dnsmasq"

binaryturtle — Tue, 12 May 2026 20:46:37 +0000

That's a bit shameless, indeed.

dnsmasq has served me well for like an eternity in multiple setups for different use cases. As all software it has bugs. And once located those get fixed. Its author is also easy to communicate with.

Why should I switch over to something way less proven? I'm quite sure your software also has bugs, many still not located. Maybe because it's less popular/ less well known nobody cares to hunt for those bugs? Which means even if the numbers of found bugs is less in your software at the moment, and it may look more audited for this reason, it may actually be way less secure.

New comment by binaryturtle in "Just Use Go"

binaryturtle — Tue, 12 May 2026 12:27:46 +0000

Bootstrapping a modern/ up-to-date C/C++ compiler works, getting an up-do-date Python onto the system works too. No such issues with either of those. But try the same with Go or Rust and you hit nasty roadblocks (in both cases the older OS was previously supported just fine.)

New comment by binaryturtle in "Scaffold a 1990s Geocities-themed static website"

binaryturtle — Mon, 11 May 2026 19:08:28 +0000

Nothing really changed then. Same old, same old. :)

New comment by binaryturtle in "Scaffold a 1990s Geocities-themed static website"

binaryturtle — Mon, 11 May 2026 18:48:36 +0000

It doesn't work properly in Netscape 4 actually. B)

New comment by binaryturtle in "Guy Goma's Accidental BBC Interview Lives on After 20 Years"

binaryturtle — Sun, 10 May 2026 23:46:22 +0000

But this needs a Cloudflare subscription, or something? I can't open it either. :)

New comment by binaryturtle in "Removing fsync from our local storage engine"

binaryturtle — Sat, 09 May 2026 16:00:36 +0000

To truly guarantee things you probably also would need an uncached read afterwards (to verify the data comes back properly from the device). Now that would kill any sort of performance, of course.

New comment by binaryturtle in "Just Use Go"

binaryturtle — Fri, 08 May 2026 14:35:36 +0000

Dunno about Homebrew (haven't used that since many years for various reasons), but Apple is certainly pushing things in a way that makes 3rd party developers quickly abandon old systems too. That's true. At least lots of 3rd party developers are very quick to give up if their new Xcode will not cooperate.

New comment by binaryturtle in "Just Fucking Use Go"

binaryturtle — Fri, 08 May 2026 14:31:23 +0000

The post was about Go and uses the "The boring choice is the right choice." point at the end. But a compiler that's so quick to abandoned previously perfectly fine supported systems, and basically is bleeding edge, is anything but the "boring right choice". I personally prefer long term stability in the toolchains I use for my projects at least.

New comment by binaryturtle in "Just Use Go"

binaryturtle — Fri, 08 May 2026 14:01:01 +0000

Go, similar to Rust, has a horrible ecosystem, IMHO. I want to like it, but they already broke backwards compatibility with older systems (try to get the Go compiler running on a slightly older OS X, f.ex.), and for a compiler that's a no-go to me.

New comment by binaryturtle in "AI slop is killing online communities"

binaryturtle — Fri, 08 May 2026 09:38:55 +0000

I can't access gnu.org, because their extreme measurements against the AI bots blocking my slightly older browser.

New comment by binaryturtle in "Dithering with CSS"

binaryturtle — Fri, 08 May 2026 09:18:41 +0000

I have to admit I don't think it's visually very appealing like that. It looks more like some sort of error/ glitch. Maybe my old Firefox does it weirdly?

New comment by binaryturtle in "From CVS to Git, thirty years of source control"

binaryturtle — Mon, 04 May 2026 18:49:39 +0000

It used to be possible to use GitHub via svn too (but I think they removed that feature a while ago.)

New comment by binaryturtle in "From CVS to Git, thirty years of source control"

binaryturtle — Mon, 04 May 2026 09:17:17 +0000

I use Subversion w/o a server too. You can have your repositories locally (file:///Path/to/repository). All my own (single man) projects are in local SVN repositories. For my use case git is just too much extra friction, and I still love to have my one single unique global revisions number that is linearly increasing with each commit. :)

New comment by binaryturtle in "Do_not_track"

binaryturtle — Sat, 02 May 2026 20:58:49 +0000

This is just sad. Luckily I do not use any of the listed programs. I threw out Homebrew many years ago when they started this nonsense.

The only tool I have installed currently that does %/"($& like this is Deno (required for yt-dlp now). It phones happily home even if you wrap it into a wrapper script that forces the env variable (in no way I'll pollute my default environment with stuff like this):

    $ cat /usr/local/bin/deno
    #!/bin/sh
    exec env DENO_NO_UPDATE_CHECK=1 /usr/local/packages/deno/latest/bin/deno "$@"

I wish bad dreams to whoever puts such crap into their software! Thankfully I have Little Snitch to catch most of those kind of invasions of my privacy.

New comment by binaryturtle in "I'm done making desktop applications (2009)"

binaryturtle — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 17:14:23 +0000

No, "grass always looks greener on the other side" is a perspective thing. If you stand on your own grass then you look down onto it and see the dirt, but if you look over to the other side you see the gras from the side which makes it look more dense and hides the dirt. But it's the same boring grass everywhere. :)

New comment by binaryturtle in "I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support"

binaryturtle — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 17:07:00 +0000

I have a simple rule: I won't pay for that stuff. First they steal all my work to feed into those models, afterwards I shall pay for it? No way!

I use AI, but only what is free-of-charge, and if that doesn't cut it, I just do it like in the good old times, by using my own brain.

New comment by binaryturtle in "Kernel code removals driven by LLM-created security reports"

binaryturtle — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 14:39:54 +0000

I used GitHub's Copilot once and let it check one of my repositories for security issues. It found countless (like 30 or 40 or so for a single PHP file of some ~400 lines). Some even sounded reasonable enough, so I had a closer look, just to make sure. In the end none of it was an issue at all. In some cases it invented problems which would have forced to add wild workaround code around simple calls into the PHP standard library. And that was the only time I wasted my time with that. :D

New comment by binaryturtle in "GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry"

binaryturtle — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 13:57:06 +0000

Wouldn't telemetry solve this problem automatically? I mean: they should get some signal back when people opt-out no? :)

New comment by binaryturtle in "All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027"

binaryturtle — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 14:57:19 +0000

How about computers to have replaceable SSDs? There's no point you can exchange the battery when the hard-soldered SSD dies first. (I had more dead SSDs than batteries)