Comment by janice1999
3 days ago
Toxic developers turned me off Home Assistant. The same developer is the star of this issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27505277
3 days ago
Toxic developers turned me off Home Assistant. The same developer is the star of this issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27505277
interesting that the crux of the Nix dispute was about how he wanted to self-modify the HA after install, and the crux of the current dispute is how HA should be able to scan your secrets and upload truncated hashes
It's not a good look taken together
I doubt the guy is malicious, but it should really be obvious why people are nervous about this stuff. If I put a password into a home automation tool, is my default expectation that it's going to phone home and send any information (even if it's just a bit of information about a hash) about my passwords?
Which option will minimize the feelings of betrayal and violation: making this feature opt-in or opt-out?
Any level of understanding of humans will produce the right answer.
maybe he isn't malicious but he also doesn't seem to have a great deal of respect for the ownership and privacy of his customer's computers
Was thinking of setting my own assistant using Home Assistant to replace the Google Home device I got rid of. Looks like I should slow down and take a closer look at this.
As someone whose smart home need is minimal -- I just use it to turn on/off lights with voice -- I'd rather have nothing than support such behavior.
Nothing and no one is perfect, but Home Assistant is orders of magnitude better than any other home automation suite. The fact that there's enough transparency for this to be discovered, for this conversation to happen, and for the maintainer to publicly apologize is evidence of that.
He hasn't apologized for the feature existing, or acknowledged that it is a security problem (information leak). He apologized for being an asshole. He hasn't acknowledged that its the wrong default.
His judgement is so poor we simply can't trust him to make correct decisions about the software he is building, there are doubtless other security issues.
Better, but apparently not good enough: I would have expected a bit more from a company that goes all in on "your home your data and privacy".....
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Holy shit, what a read. How do people not understand open source licensing? In every license I'm aware of, you don't get to decide whether or not someone else can use your stuff. Nothing stops you from asking, of course, but it just looks bizarre. If you want to control distribution, design a license to do so, or don't release it in the first place.
Odd; the first comment I see from them explicitly mentions that he can't actually stop it due to the license, and it's just a request; per GitHub, that text existed in the first revision of that comment.
> As the author of the package that is being re-packaged here. I'm against it being repacked into here. > While licensing wise I cannot stop you, I do hope you can honor my request.
Yes, I understand that. My point was that’s not how it works; if you want to be able to control distribution, don’t use an OSS license, because it’s just weird to ask someone to not do something you implicitly granted them permission to do.
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Hah, his profile sure has a lot of bullshit about being human and positivity...
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My experience is that people don't typically change their behavior. Even if they do, I don't see any issue with bringing up this GitHub issue on HN which is a very suitable place to discuss technical topics (and others)
> My experience is that people don't typically change their behavior.
Probably a good thing that you aren't in the therapy business
I found it helpful and informative.
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14 replies →
Nothing to be ashamed of? The behavior in that issue is petulant and embarrassing.
And it’s not bad faith to call out bad behavior. That’s some twisted logic.