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#vacation#curl#don#support#more#company#during#month#days#still
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Discussion (316 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
many engineers actually work that way, right? We are employed for 12 months and give our availability fully to the company and we get salary for it, why isn't it allowed to others?
What do you mean by non-existent?
Of course, "European companies normally ignore their paid customers too from May to August" is factious, but there is a slight hint of truth in there, in that things generally is slower, at least in the South/West countries I'm more familiar with.
> Probably not. But we will.
A pleasant dose of humanity in decidedly inhuman times.
> Or you get a support contract and we get to read about it earlier.
If you ever really need anything fixed in the open source world, there is always the option of doing it yourself
As opposed to when?
Do tell.
I see this crap so much online. You just want an excuse to give up and be a victim. I hear it online and irl. You young people are broken, broken yet you have everything.
How old are you, and where do you live?
Life is better now than ever. I in Sweden can buy everything, access everything, and I own my apartment. Problem?
As opposed to what?
WW1? WW2? Vietnam war and corrupt nixon? The cold war when Russians accidentally invaded Sweden? Nuclear bomb fear? the 90s debt crisis? 90s balkan war? And refugee crisis? 9/11 and all that? 2015 refugee crisis?
When?
What do you compare to?
The truth is, life is getting better. All the time. We had 10% unemployment in 2016 and even worse in 2008 when I graduated. Grow up.
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/05/11/mythos-finds-a-curl-v...
In other words, I would always go at full speed (as an evil AI slop model) and most likely never release any findings of flaws and loopholes, so they can be exploited lateron. Bad folks don't want to be caught; remember the xz utils backdoor.
I am sure some AI slop models are used by criminals. And they may exploit things at a later time, but they most likely have found issues already. Not every AI slop model would report.
The notion of "the bad guys will now be more active" is strange really in the AI slop age. (We had the stone age; now we have the slop age)
Signed: Former workaholic.
In Germany, if you are on vacation, you are simply not available. You are dead to the world until you return. Emails do not get read, and devices get left at the office.
Another neat thing is that if you get sick on vacation, you get your vacation days back, because vacation days are for resting and recovering.
It's funny because that's kind of the definition of a vacation in my book. I find it weird that some places in the world handle it differently.
Note that it's also much better for the company in the long run: It's a test of resilience and redundany, the famous bus factor. It simulates what happens if someone is not available, and forces the organization around to have a backup plan. Having those is important for cases where employees leave the company or team (switching jobs/teams, accidents, sickness, parental leave, death, burnout, layoffs etc.). It's mind-boggling how many leads at various levels just don't understand that.
The thinking was that if you were cooking the books of doing some dodgy dealing on the side it would come to light without you there to actively 'manage' it.
This year I used my vacation time well and I already had 3 weeks off while I still have almost 4 weeks left.
This slightly blew my American mind but it makes sense. What about getting sick on calendar holidays?
On the other hand, I've been in a company where there were long discussions about whether the extra day on leap years is a working day or a vacation day...
I'd also add that the culture allows and encourages sick days. The average is 15 sick days per year IIRC.
I remember years ago needing urgent support for some bespoke European hardware we were developing software for. When we called support, we were greeted with a phone message stating the company was closed for the entire month due to vacation. This was not a one-man operation; the whole office closed for a summer holiday. We thought it was a joke.
Needless to say we started to look for a new vendor shortly thereafter...
Many companies force staff to take vacation days during this time, and there are four (yes four!) public holidays during this period.
I also think you should normalize for yourself and your workplace that there are times when you are not there. If only you can answer a question then there needs to be better documentation. See it as a trail run for when you get hit by a bus. If they will struggle without you then that is a problem that needs to be fixed. If you are always reachable these problems will never surface.
IMO this is not a universal truth - I’m sure some people need that level of disconnection, but I don't find I'm one of them. I generally like my job, and don't find that forcing myself to disconnect does me any particular mental good. But other people report needing that separation, and that's fine! I don't think there needs to be a one-size-fits-all answer here.
I do agree with your bus factor argument though.
If I can answer a question with a 30-second response to a Slack message, I will, and I won't mind it as long as it's not frequent. I won't join a call, and I'm only logged into Slack and Outlook on my phone, so if answering requires checking something on Confluence or Jira, I can't help.
Maybe I feel this way because actually being asked something is exceptionally rare. I'll be gone for a week and MAYBE I'll get one message.
Fantastic tool for shaking out hidden bus factors.
Work during work time, don't work during not-work time. Good practices mean that everyone is important, but nobody is irreplaceable, the team and the work will move along a little slower, but that's fine.
"If I see you log on, I'll disable your account."
Some people are just workaholics and need interventions to actually take a proper holiday.
Personally I’m sure I’d forget to sign out of something.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5E7kBOH9owI
The only people who should suffer this much are the true busines owners.
Real engineers think about handling things when stuff goes wrong, not "everything will be on the happy path forever".
Yes, there are constraints, but to me this sounds like an unacceptable level of exposure.
My manager doesn't stop overworking. When told on peer performance review that we have people who are consistently overwork because they are swamped, he played it down.
But hey, at least he doesn't encourage overworking either.
I used to have a desktop that I could VPN+RDC into from my personal laptop or desktop to work away from the office¹. I've now got a laptop, that refuses to let me authenticate remotely and they have no interest in fixing that as there are other priorities, so I simply can't work if I don't have that laptop with me and I'm not carting it around when I'm already carting my own around (and if I'm not carrying my own, it is because it isn't a suitable situation to be bringing any laptop).
Not a workaholic, I don't think, but a 24/7 stress monkey when I think that I could be helping. Simply not being able to work away from the office actually helps with that: if there is literally nothing I can do, especially given it is work that has made that impossible, I don't stress the same way.
--------
[1] other than the VPN connector and the MFA doo-hicky on an old² phone, nothing work related, even Teams, even email, ever touches my personal devices
[2] a small old thing, factory reset with a dummy google account and just the MFA apps installed
I er... think you might be a workaholic.
But I'm glad for you that your current setup is helping :)
Music to the ears of a workaholic :)
Seriously, that'd be nice if everyone would do this (and I do it now, very strictly) but I also know how easy for one to start blurring the lines between work and personal lives.
Specifically, if your job offers (a) to pay for your personal phone line, or (b) a work mobile phone, choose (b).
We have the choice at $WORK, and many teammates chose (a) as it allows them to save some money each month on their phone bill, but now you're basically constantly tethered.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5E7kBOH9owI
Seems like a lot of extra work, just to go on vacation :)
I would suggest another approach. Automate your work, that you can work from your phone. I go on multi day hiking trips, or a week long family beach holidays, without taking PTO...
Edit: I do not get negative reactions. Big part of my work is to monitor system, and answer questions. I spend less time on my phone than most social app users! I still do heavy coding in office a few times a month. And I am self employed for nit pickers.
Work does not have to be sufering, you can enjoy it!
>> Signed: Former workaholic.
> Seems like a lot of extra work, just to go on vacation :)
That's the point, this person and plenty others, are NOT able to "just" go and disconnect. If you can do that, wonderful for you, but please don't assume others are like you precisely when they are humble enough to clarify that they do have a problem and try to help others to overcome it.
Truly disconnecting from our work is necessary for our mental health. When I'm on vacation, I want to be on vacation, which means not working.
Again, maybe you don't want to actually fully be on vacation from work. I guess that's fine; you do you. But I don't think that's healthy for most people, and regardless of health, many people do just want to completely disconnect from work for some number of days.
That's going to work in some situations, but it's not broadly applicable for many reasons. In particular it's way more work than the act of backing up 2FA and logging out of everything. So yeah, it makes a lot of sense for people to think that's not good advice.
[1] https://github.com/libexpat/libexpat/issues/1277
[2] https://github.com/uriparser/uriparser/issues/323
* curl is mature enough that the chance of an impactful bug is basically zero * if there is such a bug, I'm sure someone will figure out how to get in touch with Daniel and co * if there is such a bug, it's more important that it gets patched in package managers and rolled out. Upstream releases can wait.
No, that is the point, they are not going to accept your vuln report. They are taking a holiday.
But the message is pretty clear: if you’re not a paid customer, you are not getting patches or support from upstream during this month.
Plan accordingly.
Curl is also something that should be thoroughly sandboxed to begin with, because even if there are no vulnerabilities in curl itself, its a tool for downloading arbitrary data over the internet, and you may well accidentally trigger vulnerabilities in every other part of your environment just by downloading arbitrary data to your shell...
Pipe it to bash? game over
Pipe it to less/more? Better hope your distro keeps those patched
Open the file in a browser or PDF reader? Hey, look at all this shiny new attack surface!
There is something unhealthy in this relationship only if you project "no warranty" into unrealistic expectations.
cURL also offers paid support and also paid access to the rock-solid (LTS) version, with guaranteed response times, and the blog post states that there's still people to respond to these.
In most cases this is extremely impractical.
Then you send the patch upstream, they incorporate and maintain it for you. Congratulations, you just FOSSed.
There is nothing unusual about this, businesses face this all the time, the only difference is that you do have some agency with FOSS.
What's the alternative when it is not FOSS? Eg. build it yourself from scratch (and maintain it too), or move to a competing product.
If you're using any complicated FOSS professionally and you have SLA with your customers to say fix issues within day or two you don't have a choice anyway.
I guess the whole point of the article is to show that people should buy a support contract if they need support.
> Everyone with a paid support contracts will of course still get full and appropriate service even during this period.
Is it that they can't or don't want to. I'm sure curl is popular enough that it could attract a co-maintainer if it wanted to. Of course there is a cost to that. Software projects done effectively by a single person are often more focused and designed more coherently. I'm not sure curl would be as good a product if there were multiple maintainers with potentially conflicting visions.
I have seen there to be an more influx of open source software as people are starting to create more software with vibe-coding and other things and just open-sourcing it, which while good in OSS'ing it but its mostly less valuable as compared to the curl codebase which was created by hand and over the years improved itself.
Yet the funding is going towards making more and more (OSS/non-OSS) AI slop by people, companies and dare I say countries yet we are unable to take the same wealth and money into, say, the curl project (and the likes)
There is also an visibility issue. We all know curl and this is the state of curl. Imagine all the projects which we all don't know that much about or aware about going through same issues.
For whatever reason, real people seem to desperately want Openclaw regardless of it being AI generated slop.
OpenAI is certainly not wasting the money they're spending on Openclaw, even if I personally wouldn't want to touch that particular piece of software.
I can agree with it but I am unsure how much the desperation is out of FOMO or out of real use-cases.
Surely curl has more use-cases and projects relying on it than OpenClaw.
The demand seems to be generated out of hype rather than sustainability. Openclaw project isn't even an year old and from my time hearing about it, it isn't safe or sustainable in any fashion and it seems that the hype around Openclaw has now started to slow down as I hear less about it (which to me is actually a good thing imo) but it shows what the market reality of these tools currently are (at the moment).
It’s not their problem that you, or anybody else, think you are owed 24/7/365 emergency support.
Also, what's an example of this rent seeking in open source you're talking about?
IMO Writing correct software the first time around - so formal methods.
But the tooling isn't there yet (though lightweight versions, e.g. strong type systems like rust's, are and significantly reduce the security issue load).
If you get sick during vacation, you get those vacation days "refunded" back. If you suddenly are called in to work, somehow, during vacation, that time cannot be vacation time.
You can't (generally) be fired without a notice period, resulting in job security to such a degree that ~6k in an emergency fund is plenty to be VERY secure, as you also get unemployment support otherwise anyway. Does this result in incompetent people not getting fired? No. You still fire them, you just have to deal with them another month after that. It's not a big price to pay.
How is this all possible? Who subsidizes it? We all simply pay some % of our income to support this system. That's it. A couple percent, a couple bucks, and we get to basically never worry about starving or becoming homeless.
You can have this, too, if you vote and protest and use democracy to make life better, not worse, for everyone.
(See https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-och-lagar/dokument/sven...)
Is this at the executive level?
2 weeks is the acceptable limit in the UK for example (where also has 20-35 holiday is common) though if you can convince your boss otherwise, you can take longer, but most people can't
This is Exceptional. Perfect EuroMaxxing
I can see something like nginx being in that spot but curl is primarily user initiated and pointed at a known target rather than internet facing accepting connections
They aren't. If you ignore vulnerability report from an entity without a support contract, the vulnerability doesn't disappear just because the entities with support contracts are not aware of it
I thought this was due to AI slop spam before I read the blog entry.
Wonder if this means just publishing vulnerablities without contact with curl team would be responsible (you have no other path to tell vulnerable users)
I'm not sure it's be reasonable to leave an actively exploited critical bug until August. Nor would I be too interested in playing middle man or paying for support from curl to get it out.
The responsible thing would have been to simply wait another month, considering you've been warned about the delay.
Naturally some people find that this offensive since this puts a price to that “bliss”.
And if you find something halfway through the month then oh no two weeks to reply, that's basically a standard business interaction at that point.
There's no such thing as "responsible disclosure on a technicality". Don't be a dick, and work in good faith to keep users safe.