Hacker News: owl57

New comment by owl57 in "Let's Encrypt bans certificate usage in any US sanctioned territory [pdf]"

owl57 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 01:28:02 +0000

If you have a service that shares information between people all over the world, a few big companies and one government is for most cases an improvement over all the involved ISPs and all of their respective governments.

New comment by owl57 in "1-Click GitHub Token Stealing via a VSCode Bug"

owl57 — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 03:25:58 +0000

If the malicious-npm-package-of-the-week is reading arbitrary files on your workstation, isn't it usually able to run git clone/push/whatever with your current credentials anyway?

New comment by owl57 in "Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says"

owl57 — Sat, 23 May 2026 22:51:27 +0000

But then why change the renewal process for the people who were already fingerprinted for the original visa?

New comment by owl57 in "The vi family"

owl57 — Wed, 13 May 2026 08:40:34 +0000

I often use vim despite knowing only a few basic commands because I'm already running various commands on the remote machine in the terminal and don't want the context switch. And because connection / file path completion in TRAMP is annoyingly slow if the server is far enough.

As an extreme example, today I needed to combine parts of two files into one and decided that

  cat foo bar > foobar && mv foobar bar && vim bar

of all things will better keep me in the flow than either googling how to insert one file into another in vim or starting up TRAMP.

New comment by owl57 in "Ask HN: We just had an actual UUID v4 collision..."

owl57 — Sun, 10 May 2026 05:41:16 +0000

This idea of everyone producing absurd amounts of git objects is less fantastic now [1]. We're still far from these numbers, but an order of magnitude less far than last year [2].

Also an interesting bit of history here: apparently there was a time when people were already writing books on Git but "one enormous Git repository" wasn't yet the most common mode of using it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47932422

[2] https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878

New comment by owl57 in "Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit"

owl57 — Sun, 10 May 2026 04:19:56 +0000

And the U in GNU, while we're at it.

New comment by owl57 in "Show HN: Stop AI scrapers from hammering your self-hosted blog (using porn)"

owl57 — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 02:21:58 +0000

And most of them are pretending to be Chrome. If Google had a good case against someone reusing their user agent, maybe they would already have sued?

Or maybe not. Got some random bot from my server logs. Yeah, it's pretending to be Chrome, but more exactly:

"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"

I guess Google might be not eager to open this can of worms.

New comment by owl57 in "Show HN: Stop AI scrapers from hammering your self-hosted blog (using porn)"

owl57 — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 22:03:14 +0000

> scrapers can ingest them and say "nope we won't scrape there again in the future"

Do all the AI scrapers actually do that?

New comment by owl57 in "Show HN: Stop AI scrapers from hammering your self-hosted blog (using porn)"

owl57 — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 21:56:02 +0000

> Hey I wonder if there is some situation where negative SEO would be a good tactic. Generally though I think if you wanted something to stay hidden it just shouldn’t be on a public web server.

At least once upon a time there was a pirate textbook library that used HTTP basic auth with a prompt that made the password really easy to guess. I suppose the main goal was to keep crawlers out even if they don't obey robots.txt, and at the same time be as easy for humans as possible.

New comment by owl57 in "If you're remote, ramble"

owl57 — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 06:41:06 +0000

> search still can't a.) rank the alert bot that is just spamming the alerts channel as "not relevant"

I find "Exclude automations" toggle to be good enough. But we might have very different workspaces, as I usually don't see the point of "sorting by relevance" at all: for my purposes, relevance is almost always better approximated by date than whatever Slack's ML team comes up with.

New comment by owl57 in "Hacker News now runs on top of Common Lisp"

owl57 — Tue, 27 May 2025 10:24:35 +0000

But it's not about that. I don't like this decision either, but the other side of the trade-off is not just about some abstract concepts or implementation, it's about complexity of the model you need to keep in your head to know what will a piece of code do. And this has always been a priority for Python.

New comment by owl57 in "Hacker News now runs on top of Common Lisp"

owl57 — Tue, 27 May 2025 03:05:51 +0000

Most people writing any language without a linter are holding it wrong.

When a linter warns me about such an expression, it usually means that even if it doesn't blow up, it increases the cognitive load for anyone reviewing or maintaining the code (including future me). And I'm not religious — if I can't easily rewrite the expression in an obviously safe way, I just concede that its safety is not 100% obvious and add a nolint comment with explanation.

New comment by owl57 in "Hacker News now runs on top of Common Lisp"

owl57 — Tue, 27 May 2025 02:40:43 +0000

Interestingly, I think this is one of the cases where both the "For context…" comment and yours add important context for the parent comment that some readers may be not familiar with. Although that second one serves this purpose better, not because of the subject but because it's more directly informative.

New comment by owl57 in "I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)"

owl57 — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 03:41:53 +0000

> Legal size folders exist and are widely used by people who use ... legal size paper.

Sure. But I didn't know I use legal size paper or even what it is before I asked the apartment complex to print the lease agreement, and it didn't fit in their own folder with the other move in papers. In my rank of weirdness discovered upon moving to the US, this is at about the same level as the different ounces.

New comment by owl57 in "I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)"

owl57 — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 13:15:43 +0000

> legal (letter but longer)

This one surprised me quite a bit. I think most people have A4/letter-sized folders. Why does anyone think that papers slightly longer than those folders are a good idea?

New comment by owl57 in "Why Apple's Severance gets edited over remote desktop software"

owl57 — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 07:59:04 +0000

Was it like a temporary assignment to another team? Did the manager at least know what team that was? Or have any idea when the employee is going to return full-time to the tasks of their primary team?

New comment by owl57 in "Schemesh: Fusion between Unix shell and Lisp REPL"

owl57 — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 05:21:12 +0000

By the way, that's a regionally cool name. I read it at first as "shemesh", that means "Sun" in Hebrew.

New comment by owl57 in "Schemesh: Fusion between Unix shell and Lisp REPL"

owl57 — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 05:16:15 +0000

Note this part:

> That said, background processes invoked from Eshell can be controlled the same way as any other background process in Emacs

I haven't used Eshell much, but this makes a simple "command &" arguably much saner than in a traditional Unix shell.

I imagine that a new feature would be accepted only if someone can make it play nice with existing features. And in case of job control, I have a bad feeling about the complexity involved.

New comment by owl57 in "Leaking the email of any YouTube user for $10k"

owl57 — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 00:41:25 +0000

That's definitely a factor at least some people consider when choosing their job.

> Pretty much everyone in tech is responsible for great harm by this logic.

We're also responsible for great good. The question which is greater is tricky, case-by-case and subjective.

New comment by owl57 in "Is the 80 character line limit still relevant? (2008)"

owl57 — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 02:17:19 +0000

Loops nested deep enough that you need an ultrawide to avoid truncated lines!?