Hacker News: invaliduser

New comment by invaliduser in "Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan"

invaliduser — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 12:35:40 +0000

How can you come to that conclusion, given the specific examples I have given, which are tedious to write, but easy to proof-read and test?

New comment by invaliduser in "Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan"

invaliduser — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 11:05:22 +0000

For a lot of code, I switched to generating code rather than using 3rd party libraries. Things like PEG parsers, path finding algorithms, string sanitizers, data type conversion, etc are very conveniently generated by LLMs. It's fast, reduces dependencies, and feels safer to me.

New comment by invaliduser in "Ask HN: Remember Fidonet?"

invaliduser — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 11:58:59 +0000

2:320/104 represent!

New comment by invaliduser in "Show HN: Xmloxide – an agent-made Rust replacement for libxml2"

invaliduser — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 08:09:42 +0000

I understand it can be difficult to label, and there's an inconveniently large grey area here, but there is a difference between plain vibe-coded software and software built with AI under the control, direction and validation of a developer.

The distinction is probably not very important for small applications, as nobody cares if a minor script or a one-shot data processor has been vibe-coded, but for large applications it surely matters in the long term.

New comment by invaliduser in "Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?"

invaliduser — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 21:14:57 +0000

The first ad blocker was released in 1996 [1] and in 1999 we had a lot of shiny, blinking and very colorful ads already [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_blocking#History

[2] https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/exhibitions/web-banners-in-t...

New comment by invaliduser in "Steam Machine"

invaliduser — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 09:21:58 +0000

Just found about this skin market/casino thing, and also that my teenage son purchased a skin for 100€, but is still pretty excited and happy about it because «its real value is around 700€». I am still processing this information.

New comment by invaliduser in "How to build your own VPN, or: the history of WARP"

invaliduser — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 03:51:07 +0000

I wouldn't lie even to strangers, and my point was solely about people having little to no sense of security.

New comment by invaliduser in "How to build your own VPN, or: the history of WARP"

invaliduser — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 07:52:21 +0000

Most people have no sense of security. They say yes to strangers if asked to plug in a USB device on their laptop. When I said no in the train to someone asking to plug their device "for charging", I was definitely the bad guy.

Just find anything plausible, for backup storage, or say, to share family photos with grand parents but it does not work on my home wifi because my ISP is blocking ports, whatever.

New comment by invaliduser in "VLC's Jean-Baptiste Kempf Receives the European SFS Award 2025"

invaliduser — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 10:21:23 +0000

In the early 2000s the video field was flooded with fast paced releases of new codecs and new codecs versions, and there was codecs implementation to downloads right and left, and people were bundling them and releasing them with names sounding like a warez group. It was a little crazy to watch a video at the time.

This was mitigated by vlc and mplayer, two video players that integrated most codecs as fast as they could, and it was a breath of fresh air. You just started them and any video would play, no codec issue anymore. MPlayer has not been updated for some times, and traction was lost, but VLC, although looking a bit old on the UI-side (and a little buggy on ARM Windows) is still here and is solid when someone just wants to watch a video on any platform.

New comment by invaliduser in "Apple's "notarisation" – blocking software freedom of developers and users"

invaliduser — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 08:16:37 +0000

The same thing exists on Windows, developers have to code sign their binaries. It's even worse in my experience because you have to use a token (usb key with cryptographic signing keys in it) and that's impractical if you want your ci/cd to run in a datacenter. At my company we had a mac mini with a windows VM and a code signing token plugged in just for the purpose of signing our macos and windows binaries.

Another solution that is not mentioned in the article is that users of both macos and windows should be able to easily integrate the certificate of a third-party editor, with a process integrated in their OS explaining the risks, but also making it a process that can be understood and trusted, so that editors can self-sign their own binaries at no cost without needing the approval of the OS editor. Such a tool should ideally be integrated in the OS, but ultimately it could also be provided by a trusted third-party.

New comment by invaliduser in "Why IP address truncation fails at anonymization"

invaliduser — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 08:38:52 +0000

The main issue with this article is that it claims to be about anonymization, but reject HMAC because it's not reversible, and promotes IPCrypt because it is. Except that if it's reversible, it's not anonymization, it's pseudonymization.

New comment by invaliduser in "It's just a virus, the E.R. told him – days later, he was dead"

invaliduser — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 07:10:42 +0000

Happened in France too. It was put in place in the late 70s, and ended in 2020. Called the «numerus clausus» (closed number, in latin) and it restricted the number of medicine students allowed in the country every year.

The number of students fell by 50% between 1980 and the mid 90s: 8500 new students/year in 1972, 3500 in 1993.

Of course, now the number of doctors in France is far from enough for an aging population, in every specialty and it will take at least a decade to improve. It's not uncommon to have 1-year waitlists for ophthalmology appointments, and several weeks or even months for dermatology.

New comment by invaliduser in "Show HN: Tips to stay safe from NPM supply chain attacks"

invaliduser — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 10:53:35 +0000

Or maybe just read the commits between now and a reasonable date far enough in the past so that if there is some hostile code injected before that point in time, then at least you will share the walk of shame with a lot of people and you can play the sound of "who could have guessed?"

New comment by invaliduser in "Ask HN: How can ChatGPT serve 700M users when I can't run one GPT-4 locally?"

invaliduser — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 20:05:22 +0000

Even is the AI bubble does not pops, your prediction about those servers being available on ebay in 10 years will likely be true, because some datacenters will simply upgrade their hardware and resell their old ones to third parties.

New comment by invaliduser in "Using Microsoft's New CLI Text Editor on Ubuntu"

invaliduser — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 14:54:06 +0000

taglines where witty one-liners posted at the end of messages, after the signature, as a way to add a bit of humor or personality.

I think we also used them in fidonet echomail, but I don't remember for sure.

New comment by invaliduser in "Show HN: Chawan TUI web browser"

invaliduser — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 07:04:18 +0000

But how can it be a problem? Working on a project just for fun is totally valid. Is this not «Hacker News»?

For the record, this is the definition of being a hacker by Stallman: «Being a programmer doesn't mean being a hacker: it means appreciating playful cleverness. Now, you can program without being playfully clever and you can be playfully clever in other fields without programming.»

New comment by invaliduser in "Why SSL was renamed to TLS in late 90s (2014)"

invaliduser — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 05:28:53 +0000

1. I say both somewhat 50/50. I say SSL instinctively, and TLS when I think about it and remember we don't say SSL anymore. It's been like that for around 10 years now, before that I'd only say SSL.

2. I started programming professionally in 1998 and I'm in my early 50s.

New comment by invaliduser in "Plain Vanilla Web"

invaliduser — Mon, 12 May 2025 04:51:25 +0000

I have a similar experience with providing users with excel files, but would also like to add that in a lot of business, the number 1 competition for a web application is the good old excel file (or its modern cloud version), and it's sometimes a challenge to beat.

New comment by invaliduser in "But how to get to that European cloud?"

invaliduser — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 17:00:24 +0000

You are right on that, not including the UK in a European list (whatever the reasons) is a shame.

New comment by invaliduser in "But how to get to that European cloud?"

invaliduser — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 13:02:02 +0000

To be fair, the non-geographical definitions that excludes Britain, actually only excludes Britain because Britain excluded itself of the European Union in 2020.