Hacker News: sunchild

New comment by sunchild in "Between a rock and a hard place – our decision to abandon the Mac App Store"

sunchild — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 14:20:55 +0000

To keep me from advocating an unpopular, but entirely rational, position – all while other people freely misrepresent the First Amendment in response to my comments.

New comment by sunchild in "Xcode, GCC, and Homebrew"

sunchild — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 03:34:35 +0000

IAAL, and I think you should make up your own mind about what the agreement means. Personally, I think you're over-thinking it, but you shouldn't take my advice, because I don't represent you in this instance. It's a shame that something so simple has to be so dressed up by Apple's legal group in obfuscated language. I also fault Apple for deferring to its outside counsel on these matters. There's nothing stopping them from using plain english that everyone can understand in these agreements. Having said that, I read so many of these things, that I recognize 75% of it as pure "boilerplate" that is for all practical purposes ignored by everyone.

New comment by sunchild in "Between a rock and a hard place – our decision to abandon the Mac App Store"

sunchild — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 20:32:41 +0000

@cooldeal: Nope, I'm dead serious. There's no fundamental human right that entitles you to tell Apple (or any other device maker) what it can and can't sell you.

New comment by sunchild in "Between a rock and a hard place – our decision to abandon the Mac App Store"

sunchild — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 20:30:41 +0000

@recoiledsnake: (for whatever reason, I'm not allowed to reply directly to you)

You're comparing Apple's ecosystem to Earth's.

Apple is a private company that makes products that are sold on the commercial markets. The Earth is something entirely different. If Apple made planets, then yes – they could decide how to manage the atmosphere. That's how business works.

New comment by sunchild in "Between a rock and a hard place – our decision to abandon the Mac App Store"

sunchild — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 19:41:17 +0000

Yes, and never mind that just about everything you take for granted about personal computers was "given" by Apple, too. I find this notion that users are entitled to complete device freedom really annoying.

If you find it so objectionable, go build your own hardware and OS platform. This isn't a matter of human rights because no one is telling you that you can't make your own.

New comment by sunchild in "All Web Developers Should Stop Doing This Immediately"

sunchild — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 15:40:59 +0000

Right, because I can't think of any reason why Apple wouldn't support Flash on a mobile device...

New comment by sunchild in "All Web Developers Should Stop Doing This Immediately"

sunchild — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:30:35 +0000

Not to mention that once you've seen one 60 Minutes episode, you've seen them all. It's a legendary formula, but tired as hell.

New comment by sunchild in "All Web Developers Should Stop Doing This Immediately"

sunchild — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:37:29 +0000

And the "security" that they desired lost them tablet users on the dominant tablet platform...brilliant!

New comment by sunchild in "Simplified Sign-Up and Log-In Flows"

sunchild — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 22:13:34 +0000

Are you taking the position that only auto-generated passwords can be secure? I'm trying to understand what conclusion to draw from your comment.

My point was that imposing length validations on passwords is not hard. Complexity validation, while more difficult, is also not exactly a novel problem.

I feel like I'm in bizarro-world with all these people telling me that sending a plaintext password via email is more secure than giving users the option to follow an authenticated link to create their own password because...users can't be trusted to choose good passwords?! Really?

New comment by sunchild in "Simplified Sign-Up and Log-In Flows"

sunchild — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 20:05:59 +0000

Probably a draw, as you say, since someone could get ahold of an authenticated link in your email, too.

New comment by sunchild in "Simplified Sign-Up and Log-In Flows"

sunchild — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 20:03:58 +0000

Only if you (admin user) ask it to. Still a bad practice. Also, the premise is that Google trusts itself as an email provider.

New comment by sunchild in "Simplified Sign-Up and Log-In Flows"

sunchild — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 20:03:04 +0000

"email isn't that easy to intercept and properly nobody is hacking your users physical (or wireless) network".

If you actually believe this, then we will never be in agreement.

New comment by sunchild in "Simplified Sign-Up and Log-In Flows"

sunchild — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 18:58:21 +0000

A. They don't need to remember any password. They're creating it for the first time.

B. Minimum password length/complexity. It's not hard to do.

I can't believe you're actually arguing that creating a new password is less secure than using an auto-generated password that was sent via email. I hope you are just confused...

New comment by sunchild in "Simplified Sign-Up and Log-In Flows"

sunchild — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 18:53:38 +0000

And what percentage would – like me – delete their account as soon as you send them a plaintext temp password?

You're living in the past if you think this is an acceptable practice. I don't care how trivial your web service is, if you're throwing my password around willy-nilly, I don't want you.

New comment by sunchild in "Clear: doing for To Do lists what Dropbox did for file syncing"

sunchild — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 15:53:38 +0000

I wish more apps would get out of their own way and employ standard UIKit. I'm all for experimenting with UI on a new-ish platform like iOS, but the amount of parallel energy expended on checklist UIs is just depressing to me – esp. when the standard Cocoa libraries are more than adequate. There are just so many cases where turning the UI upside down is counterproductive.

New comment by sunchild in "Simplified Sign-Up and Log-In Flows"

sunchild — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 14:46:38 +0000

It's better, in that you now at least know who to contact – someone who showed enough interest to provide an email address.

New comment by sunchild in "Simplified Sign-Up and Log-In Flows"

sunchild — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 12:46:22 +0000

"... tell them their password is waiting for them in their inbox."

Nope. That email should contain a link to password creation.

New comment by sunchild in "Bootstrap's maintainer hates the semicolon"

sunchild — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 15:07:28 +0000

Actually, it has nothing to do with ruby. The problem here is that some people use minification tools that rely on semicolons. If that weren't the case, this would be a total non-issue.

New comment by sunchild in "Why we are much smarter than we think we are"

sunchild — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 07:53:58 +0000

Am I the only person who considers use of the word "smart" as a leading indicator of the absence of intelligence? The term is so vague as to be utterly meaningless, and is usually a signal that we're really talking about someone's insecurities, their feelings of inadequacy, or their passive-aggressive megalomania. /psychobabble

New comment by sunchild in "Anger for Path after Privacy Breach: So Many Apologies, So Much Data Mining"

sunchild — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 01:00:12 +0000

True, but in some cases, data integrity concerns outweigh the desire for total obfuscation.