This article is from 2016, and it should be noted that things have significantly increased since then. I no longer have to click traffic lights and motorcycles, I just have to wait a few seconds. I'm in Vietnam so my IP gets flagged for checks a lot, but they all pass automatically in a few seconds.
The only time I still get asked to click motorcycles is not Cloudflare, it's Google. They absolutely hate when you try to do a search in an incognito window and will give you an unpassable captcha until you give up and use DDG instead.
Today I looked up a word definition on tfd.com (usually a lightning-fast website), it took 3 cloudflare screens each 10 seconds to load. Why?. Because I'm in South East Asia? I aborted mission and pasted the word in a search engine and had a definition in <5 seconds. Sad to see some of my favourite sites becoming unusable.
The shorter the average interaction with the site, the worse the burden cloudflare becomes. E.g. looking up a definition is usually a 5-10 second job, Cloudflare can make it take almost an order of magnitude longer.
In defence of motorcylces and traffic lights, those captchas are annoying too, but they do help humanity in a tiny, tiny way. By contrast, watching a cloudflare loading spinner is stupefyingly useless.
(apologies for ranting. I find it disproportionately irritating even though it's only a few minutes per day, possibly due to the sheer repetition involved).
From Germany: Two redirects, one for tfd.com, one for the redirected www.thefreedictionary.com. That's the choice -- and fault -- of the domain and webserver owners to have this full redirect instead of serving from the short domain directly.
>That's the choice -- and fault -- of the domain and webserver owners to have this full redirect instead of serving from the short domain directly.
You should choose one so things like caching will work properly, also search engines really want you to keep to a single domain hostname for the same content.
Yup, the CloudFlare CAPTCHAs are a nuisance, but they're so much better than the Google reCAPTCHAs they replaced. Those things must be designed to make you give up.
I didn't realize the article was from 2016. I still have to click motorcycles and traffic lights sometimes. So nothing has changed at all! I didn't know they were using those motorcycles and traffic lights for almost 10 years already
> I've had times when I'm pressured to do a bug fix on a 5 year old project where I don't even remember how it works or review and merge an enthusiastic PR solving a problem I don't actually care about.
Also having spent years working in the OSS space, I wish it was normalized to have more nuance between "totally unmaintained" and "maintainer will literally miss their child's birthday to review your PR".
There's already all kinds of badges on GH readmes, couldn't we have a few more signifying "actively maintained, PRs welcome" or "security & critical bug fixes only" or "looking for new maintainers", etc.?
> Also having spent years working in the OSS space, I wish it was normalized to have more nuance between "totally unmaintained" and "maintainer will literally miss their child's birthday to review your PR".
The other spectrum that I’d like to know up front is where the maintainers fall on the spectrum of “I would be honored if you forked my project” to “This project is my baby and I will mobilize my users against you if you fork it”.
The refrain with open source is always that if you don’t like something, you’re welcome to fork it. But my experience with forking projects has, in a couple cases, drawn anger and attacks from maintainers. In a corporate setting when we ran up against maintainers who were unable or uninterested in even merging PRs, we had to fork the project and continue work in the fork. For some maintainers, this turns into “<corporation> is trying to steal my work!” even when the name and README were maintained. Or the maintainer gets angry that the name is kept on the fork because it is no longer under their control, we changed the name, which prompted more anger because we were “stealing their project” and so on.
To be completely clear, this isn’t all maintainers. Some have been so happy that they marked their original as maintained and referred users to the new fork in the README. But I’ve had enough cases where forking triggered anger or even calls to mobilize their Discord against the fork across social media (HN, Reddit, Mastodon) that when I run up against a slowly-maintained OSS project I try to look for alternatives or evaluate the effort to just build it in house to avoid drama.
I wonder how effective it is for an OSS maintainer to try to prevent someone from 'stealing their project' when <corporation> doing the fork is huge with plenty of resources (engineering, marketing, and legal) vs just some startup that is trying to gain some traction.
"Hi, I see you're the owner of this 6000-line mess of a component, could you answer some questions for me?"
"I don't own it, I didn't write it, and I don't understand it even slightly. I just made a one-line bug fix for one function in it a year ago and nobody has touched it since, so my name is on top of the git history."
Makes you wonder if the reason why some trivial bug in a closed source project goes unfixed for years; is because all the engineers are afraid to touch the code in some obscure library and instantly become its new 'owner'.
Yeah at work I’m paid to own some components that I didn’t write and don’t entirely understand, so I figure my job is to help discover answers for the questions that arise.
I would not want to be a public maintainer though. I don’t have the patience or motivation to use my spare time for that.
Jia Tan has entered the chat. (Jia Tan was the alias used by the group that backdoored XZ utils by becoming a maintainer)
My other comment in this thread has more details, but in my experience it’s more common to encounter projects that don’t want new maintainers or forks. They’re happy with the status quo with their name at the top but also don’t want to let go of control or see competing forks created.
> I hate the vendor lock in Anthropic is pushing with CC.
Accepting any kind of vendor lock in within this space at the moment is an incredibly bad idea. Who knows what will get released next week, let alone the next year. Anthropic might be dead in the water in six months. It's unlikely but not impossible. Expand that to a couple of years and it's not even that unlikely.
> We don't know the root cause of the human disease
It's increasingly likely that there is no "root cause" to find in humans, but rather, that Alzheimer's is what happens when there's enough external stressors acting on the brain.
I've seen an analogy of a leaky roof being used: the leaks are things like age, stress, heavy metals, mold, bad sleep, bad diet. Genetics defines the original building materials (resilience) of the roof. You can put buckets under a certain number of leaks but if there are too many your ability to repair gets overwhelmed and the result is diseases like dementia.
I think something similar applies to other diseases of aging like heart disease, arthritis, osteoporosis, diabetes, perhaps even cancer.
The downside of this is that's it's hard to imagine a miracle drug being the solution. But the upside is that a combination therapy that identifies the "leaks" and works on reducing or eliminating them will likely be effective against a wide range of age related diseases.
The therapy will likely consist of drugs and supplements in combination with lifestyle changes.
> If you look at the amounts, they’re tiny. I don’t know the doses that would be used in humans but typically ordering from chemical supply shops would be economically infeasible for just about any drug. These are meant for one-off studies and experiments, not ongoing human use
I didn't get the impression that the person above was suggesting actually buying it here, but rather just pointing out that if it does prove effective in human trials, it's going to become cheaply and easily available since it's already possible to order online for research.
Unfortunately, iPhone can't bridge wifi networks, which makes travel routers particularly useful if you have an iphone, and a laptop, and are staying at a hotel with wifi.
It's my understanding that personal hotspot can only utilize the cellular connection for the internet side since the wifi connection is being used to connect clientside. If one is hoping to use hotel wifi rather than their cellular plan data, Apple's solution won't work.
> make your own and never tell them to anyone. Keep people guessing and change your mind often. Never ask opinions. They are useless and if you never ask people think you know better.
What an incredibly lonely and antagonist life philosophy.
Not only lonely, this feels downright anxiety-driven.
A secure person who has their shit together knows that some people do in fact have valuable opinions and they won't be afraid to ask in public. And they know that too: two thirds of their HN submissions are questions for advice after all.
So this isn't about actual value of opinions, this is about a certain fright of how you appear to others and strategies to control that.
You should understand what this is in response to, though. The commenter advocates opacity for the sake of not being treated like a machine. The ideal solution is for people to not treat you like a machine, but things aren’t always ideal.
But what's a better way to be seen as machine than to become an opaque black box? And unpredictable black box isn't seen as somehow not a machine; it's seen as a broken machine.
It's an attempt to escape the control of the system but it's a reactionary approach, which at the end of the day, is just letting the system dictate how your life unfolds in a different way.
To live well and accomplish OP's goal in the modern era you have to understand that the attention economy has won, completely and totally. You can choose to live your life in a proactive manner: motivating force arises internally, through contemplation, meditation, deliberate study, and intention.
Or you can choose to live it reactively: you look at what just popped up in your feed and you write a blog post about it.
We're living more reactively than ever now. It's stifling creativity and individuality, it's creating depression and anxiety. The answer is to unplug and let the motive force for your actions start coming from your internal world again. It's okay to be influenced by the outside but we're more possessed now by derivative slop (see how all brand logos have essentially become the same) than we probably ever have been. It's time to unplug from the hive mind and wait in the resulting stillness for the next step.
The only time I still get asked to click motorcycles is not Cloudflare, it's Google. They absolutely hate when you try to do a search in an incognito window and will give you an unpassable captcha until you give up and use DDG instead.
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