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vulpino

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[ my public key: https://keybase.io/sombrero; my proof: https://keybase.io/sombrero/sigs/kN-6MHm7YEbpp0z9Dw6Sd7unzIxaa_Yx7dma7ml7eUE ]

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I'm not the author, but enabling NoSelfIntersect totally ruined the frame rate for me. I was barely able to open the controls to disable it again. It's possible it's not on by default as a performance consideration.

The bar graphs were not designed to compare total amount of lines for each gender/age-range combination. Rather, they're meant to indicate how the percentage of lines for each gender is skewed older for male actors vs younger for female actors.

If they were to determine the length of each bar using amount of lines instead of percentage of lines, all that would be immediately clear is that females have less lines, a fact well established in the rest of the article, and the point would be lost.

And heartbleed is also than example of open source not being totally secure. It was a bug that persisted for years before it was found - and OpenSSL is open source.

It's just as foolish to blindly trust OSS. There will always be holes - the main point to OSS is not to combat these, as they will exist regardless. Rather, it is so one might know exactly what they're installing/using, without having to trust the corporation behind it.

They deduct points as it's still open source. And they are more applauding the fact that WhatsApp - probably the most widely used messaging app currently - has adopted strong end to end encryption, something which other clients have been loathe to do.

This is a win. To disregard everything that WhatsApp and Signal have accomplished because WhatsApp isn't open source is silly.

They were not "forced" by court order or any other legal means, but they were "forced" because I can imagine going to court over the entire ordeal would have been incredibly draining on their finances and manpower and ultimately pointless. I'm willing to bet that whatever fallout this results in for npm (even as big as this has become) is ten times better than whatever would have happened if they'd decided to fight Kik over it. They probably just wouldn't exist anymore as a company.

That's a very slippery slope. Kik is an app and company that has been going on for years. It existed long before Azer's "kik" and, even if Azer does not know what it is, most people know "Kik" as the phone app and not the bootstrapping tool.

To extrapolate this incident to "companies will start snatching up three letter names, and nothing will ever be able to use a three letter name" is ridiculous.

Would I feel like I had been treated justly? Of course not. I would be angry. But in a situation like that, I can't blame npm because their hand was forced and I can't blame Kik for defending their trademark. Especially if they're planning on making a "kik" package that has something to do with, you know, their kik.

I'd like to think I'd be professional enough to change the name of the package once I was prompted by kik, reupload, and be done with it. I'd be miffed, but it's a piece of software. It won't ruin me to rebrand it. It'll take an afternoon, at most.

Cursing at people and calling people names, I'd like to think that we're above that as human beings, no matter how upset we are. That's something that teenagers in League of Legends do. That's not what a professional software engineer does.

This is ludicrous.

"hahah, you’re actually being a dick. so, fuck you. don’t e-mail me back."

This is the developer the community gathered behind? Not only is that incredibly unprofessional (to say the least), kik is a registered trademark.

And - I've said this before, but I will repeat it here - unpublishing all your modules from npm ("liberating") is such a selfish and childish move, especially when so many people depend on your modules. That's the behavior of a preschooler. That's not "power to the people," as Azer put it in his original post. That's just an attempt to show that Azer has the power to bring chaos to the ecosystem.

People are so quick to jump to the defense of someone who is having their "freedom" suppressed, without knowledge of the situation.

[dead] 10 years ago

I'd imagine that, if NPM were contacted by a lawyer as the developer states, that there was the threat of legal action. So, then, you are correct and technically I should title the article "NPM, Under Threat Of Legal Action, Removes Package From Registry," or "NPM Complies With Request Made By Lawyer."

I don't think NPM at any point valued the lawyer's opinion. But do you really think it's feasible for them to go to court? An app with millions of users is not going to change its name. A command line tool with less than 100 stars on github can surely afford to.

Was removing the package the morally "right" thing to do? Unlikely. It's clear he wasn't intentionally infringing on the kik trademark. But he (the developer) acts as if it was something NPM did willingly, and clear proof that NPM is a malicious organization designed to usurp the community of its power. That's an absurd claim.

Then name them.

I realize this sounds caustic, but to say "Well, you're wrong" without giving adequate reasoning beyond "I've been around a while, so I know better" contributes nothing to the discussion.

I highlighted this in a Show HN a few weeks back but I figured I'd link it here:

"dit" is a dotfile tool that isn't concerned with being fancy. It uses git hooks so all that's required of you to update your dotfiles is "git commit." It's written in Ruby, and is entirely open source.

I created it as a much easier, much simpler alternative to rcm or homesick. It doesn't have nearly the same amount of features (it's around 200 lines of Ruby), and it is only concerned with syncing dotfiles to the home directory.

I'd love to get feedback on the program, my programming, etc.

https://github.com/vulpino/dit

Dit is different in that it thinks it's git - it git hooks into any given git repository, and it does all the work in the background whenever you make a commit in the repository or pull from a remote. The only command you ever run is "dit init" and the rest is done for you.

I made dit because everything else I found to manage dotfiles seemed to be incredibly intricate (rcm, homesick), and I just wanted something simple I could install and forget about ever needing to manage again.

Any feedback as to coding style, bugs, concept, features you would enjoy, etc is appreciated.