Item — HN Reader

This reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1172/ (how do I re-enable spacebar heating?) and https://weblogs.asp.net/alex_papadimoulis/408925 ("A client has asked me to build and install a custom shelving system. I'm at the point where I need to nail it, but I'm not sure what to use to pound the nails in. Should I use an old shoe or a glass bottle?").

Usually, when "the YX problem" happens, "Y" is something like "SSH won't let me use my private key because the permissions are too open. I can't change the permissions because [insert reason that would make any security-conscious person cringe]. How do I get SSH to let me use a world-readable private key?"

So yes, there's probably some technically valid use-case, but it's a really big footgun and it probably would be a much better idea to fix the underlying problem the right way.

1 comments

The difference is perspective. When you are asking a question, you are a professional who has considered the normal way to do things, worked out why it isn’t suitable, and carefully reduced your question to only contain the minimum amount of information, as the site guidelines suggest.

When you are browsing such a question, it was obviously written by three raccoons in a trench coat and you can’t understand why they wouldn’t do the obvious right thing and the question is missing all the relevant information about why they want to do what you don’t like.

For a site full of software developers there often doesn’t seem to be much willingness to accept compromises or trade-offs.

That said, I concede that I often see questions with silly constraints but those constraints are usually because the question was homework and designed as a teaching exercise for the environment which the question is constrained to.