Hacker News: joepie91_

New comment by joepie91_ in "Veracrypt project update"

joepie91_ — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 15:29:24 +0000

I'd be very wary about such specific surveys, because they're often very much not conducted in a scientifically responsible manner, and based on actual studies across the spectrum of political issues there's basically no alignment between public opinion/preferences and actual policymaking in the US.

Could this be the one exceptional case where people agree with the direction of policymaking? Sure. Is that likely? No, not really.

New comment by joepie91_ in "Show HN: PyDoll – Async Python scraping engine with native CAPTCHA bypass"

joepie91_ — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 13:07:37 +0000

This is a defeatist argument. That it's technically possible to abuse things doesn't mean the responsibility needs to fall on the defending party, especially not when that is brought up in response to asking someone to reflect on possibilities for abuse - by that point it starts looking a lot more like a "well you'll just have to deal with it" argument that socially defends the abusers, and a lot less like genuine advice.

New comment by joepie91_ in "Crawlers impact the operations of the Wikimedia projects"

joepie91_ — Fri, 02 May 2025 13:54:59 +0000

Have you actually tried blocking these scraper bots? The whole problem is that if you do, they start impersonating normal browsers from residential IPs instead. They actively evade countermeasures.

New comment by joepie91_ in "FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies"

joepie91_ — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 18:24:57 +0000

> The crawlers could just as well be search engine startups.

And yet they are not. So what does that tell you?

New comment by joepie91_ in "FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies"

joepie91_ — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 18:21:25 +0000

None of the AIs have any 'knowledge' to begin with, so that's an easy one to satisfy.

New comment by joepie91_ in "FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies"

joepie91_ — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 18:18:17 +0000

There are a few ways in which bots can fail to get past such challenges, but the most durable one (ie. the one that you cannot work around by changing the scraper code) is that it simply makes it much more expensive to make a request.

Like spam, this kind of mass-scraping only works because the cost of sending/requesting is virtually zero. Any cost is going to be a massive increase compared to 'virtually zero', at the kind of scale they operate at, even if it would be small to a normal user.

New comment by joepie91_ in "FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies"

joepie91_ — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 18:14:01 +0000

> I think uncontrolled price of cloud traffic - is a real fraud

Yes, it is.

> and way bigger problem then some AI companies that ignore robot.txt.

No, it absolutely is not. I think you underestimate just how hard these AI companies hammer services - it is bringing down systems that have weathered significant past traffic spikes with no issues, and the traffic volumes are at the level where literally any other kind of company would've been banned by their upstream for "carrying out DDoS attacks" months ago.

New comment by joepie91_ in "Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices"

joepie91_ — Thu, 28 Nov 2024 18:09:50 +0000

What likely happened here is that they were raising prices due to increased costs for energy and various other costs, and if they hadn't made this change then they would have had to increase the price more, so relative to that it keeps it cheaper for low-traffic customers - and they just communicated this poorly.

New comment by joepie91_ in "Grace Version Control System"

joepie91_ — Fri, 10 May 2024 20:01:37 +0000

> Git, or any file-server based software, is not built to scale up well in today's world. Large Git hosters have to invest entire teams to manage their file servers and their Git front-end systems to create a web-scale service on top of a file-server based piece of software. I'm just skipping to the part where you don't need that anymore because Azure / GCP / AWS PaaS services already handle that.

This doesn't really make any sense. Most people are not "large Git hosters" (and so for them there is no functional difference between "outsourcing Git hosting" and "outsourcing to a Grace hoster that is outsourcing file handling", and even for those who are large Git hosters, they're still going to need a team of sysadm- sorry, "cloud experts" to manage the AWS/Azure/whatever infrastructure.

What actual material benefit is being provided here? It seems to me like it just trades "administrating a standard hosting environment" in for "administrating a vendor-locked hosting environment".

New comment by joepie91_ in "A leadership crisis in the Nix community"

joepie91_ — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 16:09:55 +0000

It does not. And not only is this particular letter signed by many active contributors, the issues far predate this one letter (with this one demand), and many well-known contributors have been involved in speaking out against the current situation.

You're not going to understand complex governance issues and their history from a read of a single article or letter. Consequently, you probably should refrain from drawing conclusions that way.

New comment by joepie91_ in "A leadership crisis in the Nix community"

joepie91_ — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 16:06:56 +0000

The license allowing for something does not mean you are okay with anyone being part of your community.

New comment by joepie91_ in "A leadership crisis in the Nix community"

joepie91_ — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 16:05:56 +0000

That is about licenses, not about community participation, let alone community policy or sponsorships. Those are all very different things with very different considerations.

(Signed, someone who absolutely does not want military contractors in their community, but feels that a license is the wrong place to enforce that.)

New comment by joepie91_ in "A leadership crisis in the Nix community"

joepie91_ — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 15:58:36 +0000

It's a bit more complex than that. They applied to be a sponsor twice; the community objected twice; the Foundation approved both. In one of those cases, the sponsorship was eventually rejected because the venue where the conference was held did not allow it.

New comment by joepie91_ in "A leadership crisis in the Nix community"

joepie91_ — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 15:57:02 +0000

I imagine that the people who are unhappy about things are well aware of that, given that they generally are the people who have built NixOS to the point where it is now...

It sure is remarkable how many people seem to be assuming that the people complaining must just be some outsiders with no involvement in the project. It's maybe worth asking yourself where that assumption comes from.

New comment by joepie91_ in "Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by Not Going to the Cloud (2023)"

joepie91_ — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 20:51:15 +0000

During the time that this became a frequently-repeated marketing talking point, 'regular' hosting providers with one-day turnaround or even instant provisioning were already widespread. It was never really the revolutionary feature it was pitched as, honestly.

New comment by joepie91_ in "IP Geolocation Is Twenty-Five Years Old"

joepie91_ — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 19:01:01 +0000

That "default" is typically set by the language choice in the OS, which is exactly why it is reliable, because people understand language selectors just fine.

New comment by joepie91_ in "Warning: $14k BigQuery charge in 2 hours"

joepie91_ — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 22:03:49 +0000

> It is your money so it is your responsibility to protect it.

This is victim blaming.

New comment by joepie91_ in "Warning: $14k BigQuery charge in 2 hours"

joepie91_ — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 22:01:24 +0000

You can call someone an 'engineer' with the associated responsibilities when they are getting paid for what they are doing like an engineer, in a setting that provides them with the protections of an engineer.

Until that point, they are just an individual who got screwed by disguised billing practices.

New comment by joepie91_ in "Tom Scott: After ten years, it's time to stop making videos [video]"

joepie91_ — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 10:06:06 +0000

I wouldn't say this about a lot of channels, but in the case of Tom Scott I think it applies: just pick a couple-minute video from his channel that seems interesting from the title, and give it a shot. The quality and enthusiasm are impressively consistent throughout all of it, if you ask me :)

New comment by joepie91_ in "Posts, profiles, and user search are now available without login"

joepie91_ — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 23:51:41 +0000

I mean, there's plenty of UX innovation going on in the fediverse, for example. But for some reason bringing that up is consistently met with "that can't ever work! nobody can understand this! it's too difficult!" and complete bafflement from the peanut gallery.

I think tech companies' lack of interest in experimenting with UX might have something to do with that...