> How about running npm like an open source project instead?
In the end such a large service requires a fair bit of hardware & costs to work. While I would prefer there wasn't as much dependency on something a single company controls. The largeness of node & npm makes it quite the target.
exactly, this has nothing to do with the LF and everything to do with the NodeJS community being OK with a for-profit startup owning their registry... the registry should be community owned and funded similar to the way say the LF runs LetsEncrypt.org as a community resource
You realize that LF is only a minor partner in LetsEncrypt, right? The major partners are EFF, Mozilla, OVH, Akamai and Cisco (and Cisco being involved is a very good reason to stay the hell away from it).
No big fan of Cisco but unless someone else will chime in and explain why this is a big deal when it comes to LetsEncrypt I think this is a bit over the top.
To be honest, i don't know if it's practical for something like this to be community funded. Ideally there would be a committee from multiple companies who have interest that can contribute. Node.js has a board for example.
It's worse than facebook because there's no one to have responsibility to be accountable. This ties in with your question about GDPR. While I'm not a lawyer, as far as I know it doesn't matter if you're a person or a company, if you're collecting data, it's something you can be liable for. So in a distributed system, all parties who maintain the data sources would be liable. I actually wonder how this works logistically in terms of storing account info on something like Ethereum.
> It's worse than facebook because there's no one to have responsibility to be accountable.
I guess I just don't understand what accountability there is to be even had? If I send an encrypted message to my friend, who is accountable? What are they accountable for?
If I'm sending illegal content to someone only I can be held accountable (and possibly the person I'm sending to). Is that any different in Scuttlebutts case?
Ah i think i may have misunderstood how the system is made. It is purely peer to peer. So any issues could be if the software has a security vulnerability, but I'm not sure how that ties in with things like "as-use" open source licensing. This post explained the network fairly well I found: https://staltz.com/an-off-grid-social-network.html
As far as GDPR goes, you're right because you're specifically choosing people to send it to. However, having a mechanism to delete your messages on other people's systems when they sync would probably go a long way.
> having a mechanism to delete your messages on other people's systems when they sync would probably go a long way.
It is my understanding at the moment that it's not scientifically possible to do this. If I'm mistaken I would love to hear a proposal for doing this, but I don't understand how full read access can be revokable once you have the data and a way to decrypt it. DRM doesn't count/work.
Not technically possible currently (well, last I checked). A client could be configured to send a "please delete message id 29342" type post, but other clients would have to know how to understand that and to honor it. The functionality would be similar to "sender has recalled this message" in exchange.
Also, the way the protocol works is that clients discover the most recent log entry number, and then request all "missing" ones. So that delete message would be more like a "please overwrite message id 29342 with zeros or something".
Is it possible to do revocable private messages in a decentralized system. My understanding it that the Zot protocol (used by Hubzilla) deals with this by keeping private data on the hub of the user sharing it, while public message can be mirrored to the hubs of any users receiving it. "Sending" a private message (or media file) to another user actually sends a notification to that user that they have permission to access it. When the receiver wants to access the message, their hub has to correctly identify them to the sender's hub, using credentials sent as part of that notification. But all of that is handled in the background, not a painful, confusing manual process users have to know about. See:
https://github.com/friendica/friendica/issues/2894#issuecomm...
From what I understand of SSB,it works by distributing messages to receiving users as part of a blockchain, making all messages effectively public, even if not published with the goal of giving the public access. But maybe similar functionality could be added by setting up private "clubs" - pub servers set up by groups of users who know and trust each other - which would play the same role as a Hubzilla hub, storing private messages and displaying them to users who can authenticate correctly.
While I hear generally about garbage collection causing dropped frames. I've had this happen to me in HTML5 land. I haven't heard about it as much with Unity, that C# was fast enough, and the under the hood pieces are C++ anyways. Perhaps I'm reading the wrong channels :). I'm curious if your game project is 3D, and what sort of intensity you tend to have with it.
It depends entirely on the details that affect the GC. The biggest factors are the size and structure of your heap data. If the game uses a lot of memory, the GC will try to collect more often. If the heap data is large and graph-like (lots of refs to refs), it takes longer to walk.
I think the only non compete i've had was for one of my 4-month co-op jobs. I think it lasted only a few months, and it was not to work at a software company in the same field. Which was fine, as I would be at school during that time anyways.
I have signed agreements where anything I do on the company laptop is considered theres. So I just made sure to only use it for work, and put nothing else on it.
> I have signed agreements where anything I do on the company laptop is considered theres. So I just made sure to only use it for work, and put nothing else on it.
That is (or should be) pretty standard both on the company's part and on yours. As someone who spends chunks of his days as an IT admin for clients, work systems should be used for work, personal devices should be personal devices and in addition should not be allowed connection to company/internal wifi.
I'm sure that "you" are the most brilliant and secure flower in the field, but if we don't have and enforce policies against personal use then it gets harder to crack down on Boris in the mailroom who wants to check his personal email on Yandex and download every elf bowling attachment that gets sent his way.
The problem is NodeJS semver major, eg breaking changes. And the nodejs modules stop working. And the high frequency of semver major makes it hard to keep up. If you are lucky the module is maintained at all that is.
In many cases I see cycling ruin life if you enjoy driving or walking ;). I do find places that i've seen be bike friendly in Europe do a much better job at this. But cyclists in Toronto can be pretty awful. Likewise can pedestrians and cars. Whichever way I travel, the other two are annoying me or causing me grief somehow.
Some people are inconsiderate :-( . Some of those people ride bikes. I've been annoyed at bicyclists while walking along holding my helmet just after docking my Dublinbike, even.
But a jerk walking is virtually certainly not going to kill me (or my kid). A jerk cycling almost certainly won't either. But a jerk driving quite possibly will - after all, where I come from there's a 9/11 on the roads every month due to drivers, and the dead are disproportionately people walking or cycling.
Of course, 100 years ago the streets were for walking (or horses, bikes, early autos, whathaveyou) and it was quite a feat that auto makers convinced people that only folks inside cars deserved to use 90% of it (all of it, in much of the US), and that it was perfectly normal to leave people walking clinging on to a shred of space at the edge.
Actually a jerk walking may kill you and your kid...its called "mugging" which can happen when you walk places, and which really can't happen easily if you are in a car. And there are many areas in an average city where it's completely unsafe to walk in.
And keep in mind, it's a lot more dangerous for a woman to walk alone than the average HN poster, especially if they need to do so at night.
> Actually a jerk walking may kill you and your kid...its called "mugging" which can happen when you walk places, and which really can't happen easily if you are in a car.
“Mugging” can't happen in a car only in the sense that when it happens to people in a car, it is called “carjacking” instead of “mugging”.
It's a lot harder to carjack someone than to mug, to be honest. Colleges in particular tend to be pretty serious about the risks of danger of being accosted,to the point of littering the campus with callboxes and maintaining a security staff. My point though is that it's not always a one to one comparison; walking has unique dangers to it.
When you say cyclists in Toronto can be awful, what do you mean? Are they mean to you, or do they not follow the rules of the road, or something else?
When I cycle I fear being killed by a motorist; when I drive I fear killing a cyclist. It's important to clarify whether cyclists are putting you in danger or if they are stressing you out. Both suck, but one sucks a lot more.
Most of them are good. But i've seen many run red lights, go the wrong way on a one way street, i've been nearly hit by cyclists a few times. In terms of driving with cyclists, I think the main thing is lack of space more than actual actions. So an infrastructure problem. When driving what tends to give me pause is people acting out of place. So someone jay walking, or a cyclist cutting across lanes, as I then need to be more aware for people doing things incorrectly.
You are quite right in terms of where the danger lies though. It's on the driver more than any other to be the most careful with their actions.
The rules are not made for cyclists, and you can see that in their riding. When you expend your own power for every acceleration and have better vision & hearing, a red pedestrian light with nobody using it suddenly looks less absolute. A one-way street that can easily take 5 of you next to each other, and probably nobody even driving there, when the way around is 500m longer - the same.
You can see the same behaviour from car drivers when the rules don't make any sense (as for example in some upcoming countries).
Cycling only really works when it is classed as a different kind of traffic from pedestrians and cars. If you lump the cyclists in with the pedestrians it will make the sidewalks dangerous and if you put them on the roads they get killed by drivers. Cycling needs separate infrastructure to be a real contender.
Ah okay. I was mainly recalling what I saw in Amsterdam as well more recently in Vienna. I have been to germany, but my memory of cyclist life there is much more hazy :)
>I think Netflix is a huge vindication of copyright. It started out as a middleman simple peddling other people’s content. But copyright forced them to start producing their own content, and they’ve turned television on its head as a result.
Really? They make license agreements with the content/copywright owners in order to stream it. It does break apart the idea of using a single copy and lending it to someone though. I thought they were investing in their own content in order to attract more users, and improve the overall offering.
Netflix realized that they couldn’t just be a distribution platform because content owners could build their own. They were forced to invest in making their own content because that was a competitive advantage its competitors couldn’t duplicate as easily. Which is exactly the point of copyright. More content was created because Netflix couldn’t simply get away with distributing someone else’s content and nothing more.
C is neither here nor there. Really anything compiling down to the platform code would improve things. Running a browser environment for these applications is just not as efficient. But also the UI tooling outside of web is also not very good. While you're right about productivity, we also just happen to have a large workforce that knows the webstack very well, but not so much QT or UWP or AppKit.
Really just this year is the first time i've been using it for larger side projects. While I still run into some things with the borrow checker, I find I'm much better at predicting them, and figuring out a strategy around it. Really once you get through the book and are comfortable with types, you really just need to start working on something bigger. You will need to change things and refactor as your original ideas don't pan out. But you learn from it.
> How about running npm like an open source project instead?
In the end such a large service requires a fair bit of hardware & costs to work. While I would prefer there wasn't as much dependency on something a single company controls. The largeness of node & npm makes it quite the target.