Hacker News Reader

Eiriksmalon I used AWS cognito for a startup. I wouldn't do it again

I noticed this week that the menu button on LinkedIn posts now lets you choose "Seems like AI slop" as an option. How bold of them to call it what it is...

Hacker News is ready for something besides "flag," because it's very frustrating to have so much LLM-generated noise clogging up /classic.

Yes, Cognito is a mess. But why can't you write about it in your own voice? Hope the clicks and SEO juice was worth insulting your readers' limited time, Josh Karamuth.

Eiriksmalon I don't think AI will make your processes go faster

I ask myself these same questions every workday. Are you cooking any new articles on this topic, Gwern? Reading your (thoroughly researched) thoughts often helps me clarify my own.

Eiriksmalon Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

I think I asked Nathan B all of my important Flickr-post-your-aquistion questions at a 7CTOs event way back in 2019, but that was a lifetime ago. Do you make enough money off my Flickr Pro subscription to keep it going indefinitely? I'd rather pay you then funnel more cash to AWS or Google for cloud backups, but I'm not a professional photographer, so the actual SmugMug products aren't valuable for me and there's always the slight dread that you kill Flickr because it's a blip of a side hustle to the main business.

Eiriksmalon Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)

Maybe it's because the comment you are replying to is from a new account posting paragraphs of LLMese in multiple comments in the same minute. It's unsurprising that soulless LLM output doesn't match your mindset!

Eiriksmalon Why some clothes shrink in the wash and how to unshrink them

I bought a SpeedQueen washer-dryer set to have a dedicated wool wash option to care for my Gustin wool flannels and various 100% merino wool sweaters. Does that count?

I would imagine most people on this site don't deal with clothes shrinking any more because they are wearing screen-printed, startup-logo-emblazoned tri-blend t-shirts with a very low cotton count. So even though the shirt is presumably using the cheapest, gnarliest short-staple cotton the manufacturer could get his hands on, the sheer amount of manmade fibers in it allows that Custom Ink goodness to remain firmly a Medium for years. Well, that and the hugely boxy fit. How would you notice if any of it shrank?

"Modern" dryers' ability to tumble clothes on low until they are still pretty damp, but now wrinkle-free, then pull it out to finish on a rack means I don't have to give much thought to the proper maintenance of 99% cotton jeans or 100% duck canvas pants. I don't think the 100% cotton American Giant shirts and hoodies are particularly prone to shrinking, either, but they do seem to soak up stains more readily than American Apparel's tri-blends given away as swag.

Eiriksmalon UPS plane crashes near Louisville airport

I saw Penske Truck Leasing trailers on fire at Kentucky Truck on WHAS"s helicopter footage from last night. 15 years ago, I'd be there once a week doing parts runs from the PTL branch off Newburg. The security cam footage of the plane rolling from Kentucky Truck was insane. Thanks for working the scene. That smoke looked incredibly toxic.

Eiriksmalon Anthropic raises $13B Series F

https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/litigation-releas...

A fascinating investor. I just finished re-reading Microserfs. The buzzwords may have changed between 1993 and 2025, but the human behaviors certainly have not.

Eiriksmalon When the Dotcom Bubble Burst

And then, 20 years later, I meet a kid on the local playground who claims to be the son of one of the Cloudflare co-founders or CTO. I was thinking, wait, isn't JGC in Britain, not Boise? Even though the kid was visibly disappointed that I'm bearish on nVidia and LLMs, he strained my understanding of how puts work in stock trading. So that amusing conversation, sporadically interrupted by loading and unloading my toddler from the swingset, encouraged me to get more familiar with the broader investment market, beyond the simple kid invest products I've been working on the past four years. So thanks for that proverbial push on the swings, Cloudflare kid!

Eiriksmalon Furnace – the biggest multi-system chiptune tracker ever made

Treewave used something similar, to great effect, on his Cabana EP. Prominently here on Sleep: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byKx8bZ5eq8

He hacked up the firmware of a dotmatrix printer to send it commands from his Atari 2600 or 80286 Compaq to make music. "Sound is generated by the print head pins striking the paper and the sound is picked up by a tie-clip mic on the print head. By adjusting the frequency of the printing process in software, different pitches can be played (with about a two octave range.)"

He thoughtfully includes all the source you need to do this to your own Epson LQ-500! https://www.qotile.net/dotmatrix.html

Eiriksmalon How to save $13.27 on your SaaS bill

This makes me tired. I know it's supposed to be humorous self deprecation, but it's soul crushing to see the pseudo real-time thought process behind the fantastically over-engineered setups from my day jobs. All for someone's humble blog?

Obligatory HN footnote: My blog costs $6 a month to serve HTML from digital ocean. Landing in the top five links a few times on HN didn't make the Linux load blip much past 0.20. GoAccess analyzes nginx traffic logs for free, if you want to know what countries are scraping your pages.

Eiriksmalon Re: Do people IRL know you have a blog?

Ah, Lars-Christian! No one wants to talk to you in real life about your blog because you're in Norway. If you lived here in the United States, you'd have a perpetual string of very interesting conversations about your personal website because Americans are all about technology and hearing how any of us peons are fighting the power, man.

At least, I think that's what my wife's reaction is before she leaves the room to find a book to read. And my friends who think a blog is just part of my weird, personal brand, like using a phone with a keyboard.

Eiriksmalon Ticketmaster breach affects more than half a billion users

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_A._Davis

A prolific poster on Hacker News before his death. You'll need showdead enabled to see most of his comments.

Eiriksmalon Dungeons and Directories, an exploration game in your file explorer

Or Operation: Inner Space. It used the file system to generate sectors to visit to clear viruses from your EXEs, and collecting non-contaminated EXEs to use as currency.

It works great with Windows' backwards compatibility, but modern filesystems have so many thousands of directories the game is now impossible to complete.

http://www.sdispace.com/

Eiriksmalon How does Shazam work? (2022)

Was the reason for the Shazam office in Rancho Bernardo, San Diego because you were originally from San Diego before moving to England? Lawn Love rented a suite above theirs from 2014-2018. The Shazam mobile app devs working out of that office were quiet and kept to themselves, even after the acquisition. We never heard any celebratory champagne!

Eiriksmalon A Zoomer explains her generation's malaise to older generations

>The Millennials were largely spared from the carnage because all but the last few years of them were beyond puberty when the phone-based childhood swept in.

Every generation thinks its suffering is unique and worse than those before it. Read Douglas Coupland's early 90s novels (Generation X and Microserfs) to see how Gen X fared in contrast to their parents. Watch Eden of the East to see how middle-Millenials struggled with the rising concept of the NEET (in Japan, the US, and western Europe alike) as our Gen X and Baby Boomer parents couldn't understand the difference in economic and life circumstances between being 23 in 1980 and being 23 in 2008.

Smartphones and social media are accelerating the decline, but there's evidence collected over the past ~60 years that points to a trend of diminishing quality of life. A great non-fiction economics-oriented book on the US version of this is The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War by Robert Gordon. (https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691147727/th...)

Eiriksmalon Is Y Combinator worth the money? Brutally honest review of W22 batch experience

Even if you can't have personal connections with the founders of 80 companies in a batch, having hundreds of companies in each batch--twice a year!--is seriously diluting my own worked-for-a-YC-startup brand equity. "Oh, yeah, I met Jeremy at $EVENT" becomes a thing of the past when there are thousands of founders with tens of thousands of early-stage employees.

Eiriksmalon A cyberpunk bathroom in the middle of nowhere

The cyberurinals coupled with the bleak sculpture garden[0] outside Eddie's truly do make for a great Stephenson aside, come to life. It's only missing Gibson's combat hovercraft tanks parked by the statues, instead of Ford Raptors.

0: https://www.google.com/maps/@34.9079089,-116.844012,3a,75y,9...

Eiriksmalon US jet shoots down unknown object flying off Alaska coast

For posterity, I'm pretty confident Anamanguchi were the first men to send Italian food to space, for the Endless Fantasy music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fdr-Fiv92c

The raw space pizza footage even has the Gopro's audio from the little speaker looping the album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfGvVjEN1u8

After it fell back to earth, the local police in New Jersey were nonplussed and thought it might have been a terrorist device. The interview with Anamanaguchi on the topic is well done, but didn't surface after some quick DuckDuckGoing.

Eiriksmalon Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)

Definitely some are lurking out of sheer addictive habit. But there's fewer reasons to leave comments because a) the community grew and there's already someone who articulated your point, so no sense in repeating it and b) the hivemind has moved in a different direction and it's more challenging to have reasonable discourse here without it feeling like you're "debating" 14-year-olds on Reddit.

Eiriksmalon The smash and grab of Kroger-Albertsons

A big shout-out for Winco--albeit their ~140 stores is dwarfed by the Kroger, Albertsons, and Publix triumvirate. Winco is without a doubt the best non-luxury grocery store I've been to in decades.

How did tiny Boise, Idaho birth both the worst mega-grocer (Albertsons) and one of the best?

Eiriksmalon Ask HN: Where do you post your writing?

So, statistically, how many more years will it take for me to be hit again? Writing something less useless and and more frequently would probably decrease that epoch.

On the lightning itself: Some of the consulting offers I got in response to the post on dev hiring strategies were... interesting. I didn't pursue any of them, but they showed the world is a weirder place than our whitewashed walled gardens make it out to be.

I'd certainly agree that the most "professional" (polished? well-written? organized?) writing I read these days is on Substack. In five more years, that writing will inevitably be found on a new platform that displaced Substack which bumped Medium, which ate Blogger, etc. Any bets that Evan William's next business will also involve publishing people shaking their fist at clouds?

Eiriksmalon Ask HN: Where do you post your writing?

Sometimes, it turns out the wind carries your voice farther than you thought. I submitted my blog to Hacker News a few years ago to see if I could get some sweet, sweet SEO juice for my name as I ramped up a job search. It managed to get to the top 5, which was enough to set the SEO flywheel spinning for quite some time. Months later, someone randomly submitted another of my prolix posts to HN--a mind-blowing moment. Is it one of you, dear RSS subscribers? How do you find me?

My original thesis was https://lawler.io/scrivings/long-form-websites-and-typograph...

Tufte CSS + Pelican static Python generated, hosted on a ~$5~ $6 a month DO droplet. Easy to write in a JetBrains IDE in Markdown, preview in Firefox via running `make devserver` in the console, then publish with a simple `make rsync_upload`.

Eiriksmalon TSA confirms controversial Amtrak passenger screening program underway

https://www.tsa.gov/about/tsa-mission

>Mission: Protect the nation's transportation systems to ensure freedom of movement for people and commerce. >Vision: An agile security agency, embodied by a professional workforce, that engages its partners and the American people to outmatch a dynamic threat.

I suppose that is vague enough to prevent anyone the government decides is not a person from using our "transportation system." Hmm...

Eiriksmalon Twilio employees, associates charged with insider trading by SEC

Being tempted and acting on those temptations are two different things. There is nothing damning in this comment. I appreciate the author's honesty.

Eiriksmalon Google no longer producing high quality search results in significant categories

The point of those groups is that they are closed. Similar to how "Secret" Facebook groups became the late 00s equivalent of invite-only PHPBB forums (think what.cd). If you're part of whatever political or ideological movement is en vogue, you're free to candidly speak on whatever public platform you choose. If you aren't... You end up inviting a few like-minded friends to a Signal group to share your real thoughts and ask questions. They, in turn, invite a few more people. After a few months, you find yourself in a full-blown community; one where you can get all kinds of useful information.

But those communities aren't interested in advertising their existence.

Eiriksmalon Midwest Developer

That's hilarious.

I recently moved to Idaho, the other I state. People occasionally call it Iowa multiple times in the same conversation! Similar to that Ohio/Iowa shirt, there's also an excellent one sold at the hipster grocery stores in Boise that has the outline of Idaho with some lovely drawings of a farmer working a field of (presumably) potatoes... IOWA is printed across it in huge, bold letters. The Idaho<>Iowa confusion must extend past my circle of friends and coworkers.

That being said, I'll freely admit I don't know where Des Moines is inside Iowa's confines.

Eiriksmalon Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?

But while you're along for the ride (or trapped on the slowly sinking ship), it can be really helpful to see where the big company's policies and procedures are outright dysfunctions. Not everything they do is merely "this is how things are done in all large organizations." Then you can take a list of a few practices that result in ossification and a slow death to your next small startup. Maybe you won't take away a polished playbook on how an industry leader handles product development, but having firsthand experience on what breaks at "scale" is also useful.

Some hypothetical examples: What happens when there are more than four engineering teams? What changes when dedicated scrum masters are introduced and begin arguing about whether work belongs in sprint 133 or sprint 134 while walking past your cubicle? How do enterprise contracts for PaaS providers work? And, at my current employer, what happens when more than 100 engineers' work is shelved for holiday "frosts" and "freezes?"

Afterwards, you'll have more interesting conversations with the bright-eyed 23-year-olds working with you at The Next Startup. Instead of "I feel like this is a bad idea," or--heaven forbid--"Because I said so," you can confidently state "Company X tried Y. Z was the tragic result. How can we implement Y, but avoid Z?" It's one thing to have head knowledge of why frequent releases are beneficial, but watching what happens the moment a code freeze is lifted and hundreds of commits hit production? That's priceless.

Eiriksmalon Zillow to stop flipping homes, loses more than $550M, lays off 25% of staff

I don't know the exact percentage of properties not in Zillow but in the MLS, but it is a very small amount. Zillow changed the game when it came to us non-Realtors(R) having access to housing price data. So much so, that some housing economist types have noted what appear to be permanent changes in months of active inventory (eg https://www.piggington.com, who analyzes San Diego's market)

I don't think it's hyperbole to say Zillow has more data on residential real estate than any other company in the US.

Eiriksmalon We're seeing an ongoing attack against our primary network provider

>I'm a happy Fastmail customer, but the number of outages recently has been a little concerning.

From that thread 9 months ago, who goes on to complain about not having post mortems sent to him via Twitter.

I've been using Fastmail since 2014 and can't remember a time I couldn't log in and access my email. I'm sure the service has gone down in the past 7 years, but I can't tell any difference from Fastmail's uptime vs Microsoft's for Outlook 365 and Google's for GMail.

I just read some emails before opening HN and seeing this, in fact. Their caching works well enough that I didn't even know they were down. Now it's showing that it can't connect to the server. Well done, Team Fastmail--that's pretty slick.

Eiriksmalon The Tech Worker Handbook

I can't resist this bikeshed, but you've written the Maximum Hacker News aside of the week. I have several car factory service manuals. They do not include cost benefit analyses on when to remove a vehicle from service. Instead, they are full of flow charts on how to diagnose problems. Each flow chart ends with a "If nothing failed a test, but the symptom persists, replace the entire part/assembly."

The goal is to pinpoint which piece of an assembly might have failed and only repair or replace that one piece. eg bad wiring harnesses, a single controller in a complex system such as antilock brakes, a single fuse, etc.

The decision whether to keep attempting to repair an ailing car, or stay in a role that supports a company doing "wildly illegal stuff" is beyond what tech writers can determine for you--even given thousands of pages of information in dozens of PDFs.