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How One Dev Broke Node and Thousands of Projects In 11 Lines of JavaScript (theregister.co.uk)
An anonymous reader quotes an article written by Chris Williams for The Register: Programmers were left staring at broken builds and failed installations on Tuesday after someone toppled the Jenga tower of JavaScript. A couple of hours ago, Azer Koculu unpublished more than 250 of his modules from NPM, which is a popular package manager used by JavaScript projects to install dependencies. Koculu yanked his source code because, we're told, one of the modules was called Kik and that apparently attracted the attention of lawyers representing the instant-messaging app of the same name. According to Koculu, Kik's briefs told him to take down the module, he refused, so the lawyers went to NPM's admins claiming brand infringement. When NPM took Kik away from the developer, he was furious and unpublished all of his NPM-managed modules. 'This situation made me realize that NPM is someone's private land where corporate is more powerful than the people, and I do open source because Power To The People,' Koculu blogged. Unfortunately, one of those dependencies was left-pad. It pads out the lefthand-side of strings with zeroes or spaces. And thousands of projects including Node and Babel relied on it. With left-pad removed from NPM, these applications and widely used bits of open-source infrastructure were unable to obtain the dependency, and thus fell over.
This is just hilarious. What a shit-show, from the bullshit legal threat to the developer's hissy fit to the dependence on an apparently obscure package to implement (lol) left-padding.
Reminds me of someone I knew who was wringing his hands for a few days over which license to use for his super-awesome R function library. He asked me for advice, and I told him that it's ~30 lines of syntactic boiler-plate code so get over yourself and just put it in public domain so that the two people who ever use it can do so easily. But of course, he had to deeply consider the political implications of which flavor of "freedom" he would support.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Kik is one letter short of being kike (a racist name for a Jewish person). How brilliant.
It's also one letter short of being "kick" (an racist action to be performed on a Jewish person). How brilliant.
And your nick is one character away from including the word "reamer", and two letters away from being "screamer".
It is simply not possible to exclude every word which is one or two letters away from offending some random idiot who thinks being one letter away is the same thing.
People can give something a name which is totally innocuous to them and which someone else is going to get into a hissy fit about.
So, what's more likely, he had no idea some random guy on the interwebs would make the comparison to a racial slur, or he used a word which sounded cool to him?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Yeah, real programmer treat integers as byte arrays.
You kids and your new fangled pythons don't know how good ya'll have it.
And your nick is one character away from including the word "reamer", and two letters away from being "screamer".
I got the nickname "Reamer the Screamer" in the engineering class at junior high school. My model car required a larger opening to fit the CO2 cartridge ("reamer") and it whistled down the string ("screamer"). I never liked that nickname as it fit the reputations of several girls quite well.
This is the USPTO we're talking about here. Instant messaging services and Node.js libraries probably both fall under a category like "Products and services pertaining to computers, electronic calculators, magnetic or paper tapes, teletypes, slide rules, and abacuses"...
0 1 - just my two bits
No, real programmers use a magnetized needle to manipulate bits in memory directly. #notruescotsman
Well, I suppose that still means his library has fewer flaws than OpenSSL does, so maybe he is doing something right.
It's fucking unbelievable how much trouble plumbing has caused for so many people.
Let's ignore how fundamentally broken it is, as a technology, in almost every respect. That includes its fucking awful historical association with toxic lead, its total lack of real modularity (sorry, reservoirs are complete shit), its ultra shitty set of mutually incompatible pipe sizes, materials, and connections (which is this problem exist in the first place), and similar problems.
Plumbing has allowed too many unskilled cranks to shit out way too many leaky pipes. It was one thing when they did it in Ancient Rome, where it was isolated to a fountain in the town square. Now it's being done in people's houses, and it's a motherfucking disaster!
Worse, plumbing has enabled the for-profit water supply industry. Plumbing makes it trivial for them to track every drop of water you use. If you don't want to fall victim to it, then you have to waste your time turning off a bunch of valves, and digging wells everywhere.
Plumbing needs to go.
If you really need to use a water delivery technology, use a river, or a pond, or even a goddamn barrel . All three of them are better than plumbing in every way.