<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: lal</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lal</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Fri, 26 Jun 2026 12:09:38 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=lal" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lal in "Police in Austin, San Francisco skirt facial recognition ban"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Not speaking as a lawyer, not legal advice, etc., I would love it if this weren't the case, at least for cops, but your reply and the several siblings to your reply suggesting this are all unfortunately at least a bit wrong. I disagree with parent and think the more ability we have to discipline police the better it will be for society, but courts have other ideas. When it comes to many public employees, including and especially police, courts including the Supreme Court have regularly held a variety of due process and other constitutional rights, including some of the ones you listed, to exist for internal disciplinary matters.<p>Many states also have their own stricter codified procedural protections for disciplining public employees, and of course that's before you get into cop union shit, though obviously the whole premise of the argument here is that we would be changing those state/local rules. But that stuff is a whole other can of worms. I'm just saying that even if you change state/local law/rules, even if you abolish cop unions, any police disciplinary body trying to operate this way they would definitely lose a lawsuit from the first cop they disciplined. I've personally seen <i>multiple</i> fucking <i>volunteer firemen</i> win constitutional due process challenges over getting <i>demoted</i> (like, from assistant chief to secondary assistant chief of what is mostly a social club) because they were disciplined without a formal hearing that afforded them procedural due process.<p>Unlike parent I'm not saying this is good or that to change it would be "unfair", just that what we're describing here -- that is, making it practically possible to discipline cops -- is disallowed under our current system of laws as we understand it. It would take a variety of substantive changes in how we legislatively and judicially structure procedural rights at every level of government from the top down.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 23 May 2024 13:56:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40454795</link><dc:creator>lal</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40454795</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40454795</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lal in "Goldboot: Immutable infrastructure for the desktop"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah, it is practically true that AGPL means a project is impossible to use for a lot of people, but that doesn't have much to do with the license itself. A lot of developers work for companies that have legal departments that would rather err on the side of caution with copyleft stuff. But of course a lot of companies love GPL code nowadays. After all, the GPL allows them to exploit the loophole closed by the Affero clause, especially in the case of web services companies. From a corporate perspective, free software is good, but it's only <i>great</i> when you don't have to follow it, because then you effectively get to crowdsource some of your development costs without any reciprocal obligations.<p>The result is that a lot of developers have had to sign contracts with their employers that say they'll never use or contribute to AGPL code even in their personal time. This is often reinforced by mandatory compliance training that repeats bogus nonsense about how if you ever run an AGPL program on your personal laptop you could turn the entire company codebase into GPL code. These myths then proliferate and end up driving other companies to do the same thing. It's all FUD of course, whether the people repeating it know that or not, but the practical consequences are that a lot of people legally cannot interact with AGPL projects at all. Again, that's not because the license is all that restrictive but because of what amounts to a universal corporate boycott.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 15 May 2024 14:04:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40367108</link><dc:creator>lal</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40367108</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40367108</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lal in "Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The specific logic with user agents is that it happened (I think they've ended it now?) whenever the word "curl" was not in your user agent string. If the substring "curl" was contained anywhere in your user agent string, it did not have a delay. I cannot imagine how it could rot in that specific way non-maliciously.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 16 Aug 2023 17:42:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37150729</link><dc:creator>lal</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37150729</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37150729</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lal in "Error Handling in Zig"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think locking use of a language into particular editors is a step several decades backward into Borland-land. I'm not at all confident that "just stop writing types in source code because the magic editor will show them anyway" is a better posture than "just have the magic editor auto-fill the types".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 07 Aug 2023 14:20:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37034814</link><dc:creator>lal</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37034814</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37034814</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lal in "Guide to Finding Lemmy Communities (Subreddits)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>frankly, yes? the reddit admins didn't care about anything, really, and very rarely went on banning sprees. when they did it was just deleting subreddits that were regularly posting about wanting to kill people. and in those cases it didn't require thousands of other random people who just happened to be using an instance but weren't part of that stuff to create a new account on a different website, it just got rid of that one community.<p>the real problem isnt always <i>your</i> local bofh, it's the other bofhs, and it's the fact that your friend's local bofh who has a tiny fiefdom of a few thousand users can unilaterally cut off access between those users and the few thousand people on your instance.<p>i'm not going to go so far as to say "centralization is good", but in a centralized system, a personality clash between a couple internet janitors might lead to a new subforum being made that a few users might choose to go to. in a decentralized system, a personality clash between internet janitors leads to platform-wide technological incompatibilities for thousands of users who have nothing to do with it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 14 Jun 2023 10:05:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36323683</link><dc:creator>lal</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36323683</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36323683</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lal in "Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of “comprised of”"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This conversation has gone back in a circle though. The original parent comment here pointed out that none of the arguments given for why it's a "misuse" hold water. "I can't see how eliminating a common misuse wouldn't be clearer" is not a responsive reply to "it's not a misuse."</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 06 May 2023 14:39:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35841805</link><dc:creator>lal</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35841805</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35841805</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lal in "I’m switching from VS Code to VS Codium"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Sure, that's a good example of something else, but do you have any examples of any forced updates?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 12 Jun 2022 16:34:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31715798</link><dc:creator>lal</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31715798</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31715798</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lal in "Twitter accounts dropping “.eth” from usernames"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Not all 0x things are crypto, but it's safe to assume that nearly 100% of 0x things from people who used to have .eth in their name are references to crypto and not to any other context for hexadecimal numbers.<p>This was originally brought up in the context of saying that certain people removed eth and added 0x which is in context still clearly a reference to crypto, so the username fad just changed, and these probably (sadly) shouldn't be seen as Ethereum/crypto dying or losing popularity. Your implication is that Ethereum and crypto <i>are</i> dying and their users are en masse getting very interested in computer science and the hexadecimal numbering system and all happened to decide to change their names to include 0x for that reason, but it seems a lot more likely that the crypto cult is just playing follow the leader.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 09 Apr 2022 11:33:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30967124</link><dc:creator>lal</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30967124</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30967124</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lal in "Twitter accounts dropping “.eth” from usernames"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Why would John attempt to load a website in a Gopher client? I'm not certain you understand what Gopher is.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 09 Apr 2022 11:29:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30967107</link><dc:creator>lal</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30967107</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30967107</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lal in "Web3 is centralized and inefficient"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Maybe not <i>all</i> of the things you listed, but the comparison to forging your own materials with expensive equipment in a painstaking process that takes a long time is very, very comparable to the requirement web3 places on individuals to invest massive amounts of resources, time, and effort to do basic things that they can do right now very simply without any such obligations. Until web3 manages to overcome these limitations your vision of a future utopian internet where everything is slower and the planet catches on fire won't be adopted by anyone except niche enthusiasts (just like building your own car).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 23 Mar 2022 16:24:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30780148</link><dc:creator>lal</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30780148</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30780148</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lal in "NPM package compromised by author: erases files on RU / BY computers on install"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm just saying you'd be happier there, it even has boards for non-tech-related stuff since you don't post here about tech-related stuff. Perfect fit!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 23 Mar 2022 14:47:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30778986</link><dc:creator>lal</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30778986</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30778986</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lal in "Web3 is centralized and inefficient"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah. Tech (hell, humanity) already has a big enough problem with cults forming around bad or discredited ideas and defending them to the death, but the intrinsic characteristics of crypto make its adherents substantially more aggressive -- specifically the fact that crypto fans are not only emotionally and ideologically invested, but generally also quite heavily materially and financially invested, usually to the tune of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, if not more. The consequences if they're wrong are so much worse which necessitates a completely different level of self-deception and defensiveness.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 23 Mar 2022 14:42:13 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30778928</link><dc:creator>lal</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30778928</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30778928</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lal in "Web3 is centralized and inefficient"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Maybe it's just me, but unless I'm crazy you've just listed all of the reasons it's actually an entirely workable analogy.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 23 Mar 2022 14:20:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30778720</link><dc:creator>lal</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30778720</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30778720</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lal in "NPM package compromised by author: erases files on RU / BY computers on install"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You know, if you really want to post like you're on /g/ you can just go back to /g/. It's still there.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 19 Mar 2022 09:56:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30732501</link><dc:creator>lal</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30732501</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30732501</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lal in "NPM package compromised by author: erases files on RU / BY computers on install"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm two days late but this is an argument for a developer not removing a security vulnerability from a dead project they've stopped maintaining, not this. I feel like not actively choosing to push malware to a repository where you know many, many automated systems will pull that malware onto the systems of your end-users due to a poor security model in the ecosystem you're developing in is a very very low bar of obligation as a maintainer.<p>Like, okay, you can't expect a doctor to save the life of every person who comes into the ER, but you can hopefully expect them not to start stabbing patients to death, and something should probably happen if they do, right?<p>Your argument makes sense for inaction (and is important and not brought up enough, honestly; there is a <i>lot</i> of entitlement in the open source world and people treat library developers in some pretty nasty ways), but not for action, as is the case here. The only obligation anyone expected here was the obligation to hold yourself back from making your project that gets millions of downloads per week point to malware.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 19 Mar 2022 09:53:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30732489</link><dc:creator>lal</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30732489</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30732489</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lal in "American NGO using node-ipc lost 30k files detailing war crimes"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Russian disinfo? You're joking, right? I don't know how to say this because I never thought I would need to, but the Russian government isn't shitposting in GitHub issues. It's almost certainly just some /g/ user trolling. It turns out there are sources of untrue things on the Internet other than massive shadowy Russian conspiracies to brainwash people. As far as I can tell, people have been telling lies on the Internet for a little while now.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 19 Mar 2022 09:39:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30732431</link><dc:creator>lal</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30732431</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30732431</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lal in "Mathematicians discover the perfect way to multiply (2019)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Well, mathematics wasn't discovered, so regardless of what the right word is, it isn't "discovered".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 08 Mar 2022 23:13:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30608652</link><dc:creator>lal</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30608652</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30608652</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lal in "Man left shocked as his house is 'stolen'"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Ironically it being "the future" is at least part of the reason why it happened. In the UK, all the land records are digitized nowadays, so the scammer didn't need to steal the physical deed to the property to pull off the scam. All they me had to dk was present their fraudulent identification to the office holding those digitized records and it was over without the owner even having to know.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 02 Nov 2021 10:37:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29079319</link><dc:creator>lal</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29079319</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29079319</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lal in "The Peril of Politicizing Science [pdf]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In many, many cases trans folks change their legal name to their preferred name. A hint so your future concern trolling endeavors can be more successful: your biases become evident when you drag them into it by assuming trans people could never "legally" have the name they want, as if your actual concern with referring to trans people by their desired name is to make sure you use the name on their license. Do you card everyone you meet, or do they instead tell you their name and you use that name? Do you expect anyone to read your comment and believe that if a trans person changed their license to have their desired name, you wouldn't find another excuse to deadname them? Once again, I think you'll find your concern trolling is far more effective when you don't make it so obvious.<p>In answer to your insincere question, no one demands anything as "a matter of state mandate". C-16 does not even once mention pronouns. If I had to guess, I'd say you're probably building the house of this comment on the shaky foundation of a thousand YouTube videos from the same side of YouTube that you've gone out of your way to watch about C-16. The biggest issue you'll have with that is that it means you're going to have a hard time in discussions with people who are actually even somewhat educated on the topics you're trying to jump into.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 23 Aug 2021 12:07:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28274610</link><dc:creator>lal</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28274610</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28274610</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lal in "Even my bigoted critics deserve free speech"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Well, yeah, sure, we can pretend that's what parent was saying, or maybe the top comment could just bother actually <i>providing</i> said anecdotal evidence. Saying you have anecdotal evidence is not the same thing as providing anecdotal evidence. Nothing is even communicated by just vaguely gesturing at all of the poor melty peaches except that you spend far too many hours on YouTube, and on one specific region of YouTube in particular. Nobody can interact with your anecdotal evidence if you haven't actually said what your anecdotal evidence is.<p>Edit: It's worth noting that when the commenter actually <i>did</i> name the examples they were thinking of, it was entirely related to right-wing YouTube personalities, so it looks like I was on to something there.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 23 Aug 2021 10:43:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28274093</link><dc:creator>lal</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28274093</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28274093</guid></item></channel></rss>