Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by inimino 3516 days ago
That's not exactly the same as choosing to use something that is hosted on someone else's server, which they could then subsequently modify now that you are using it in a very high-profile project.

Of course, judging candidates' by the code quality of their campaign websites is a rather obscure and somewhat useless pastime.

2 comments

True (on both counts). And yet it's common practice to include libs, fonts, and other bits from third party sites that the dev has no control over
It's a stupid and lazy practice. It's common because most web developers aren't exactly highly trained specialists who know what they're doing.
I agree that it's still bad practice. My main objection was to the statement "Since GitHub is for open-source projects, it also meant that any user could submit a request to modify the code and impact Trump’s website". If don't trust the maintainers' judgement in merging PRs, hosting it yourself isn't a solution (short of reviewing the entire project yourself).
I think the concern here is that the maintainer could subsequently merge a malicious PR knowing who was using the library from GitHub. That wouldn't be an issue if that group was hosting a version themselves (before the maintainer might find out who was using it).