HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

cbsmith

5,111 karma · joined August 14, 2010

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/cbsmith; my proof: https://keybase.io/cbsmith/sigs/nP8URtm6XA5qzP57tnSxsg-p5it6k0aCslh2VGxY3ow ]
submissionscomments
cbsmith··on Topcoat is pushing the boundary of server applications with Rust
Yeah, but only the Rust guys are right. ;-)
cbsmith··on Cloudflare Quick Tunnels
What could possibly go wrong? ;-)
cbsmith··on Oracle’s 6am layoff emails hit staff amid new wave of cuts
I kind of like the whole Paramount acquisition as something that is just going to drag them down.
cbsmith··on IBM Bob
Anyone else immediately think "Clippy for developers".
cbsmith··on HTTPX2 – A next-generation HTTP client for Python
I thought we all moved over to Niquests and/or aiocquic and HTTP/3 these days.
cbsmith··on Yadda 3.0.0: BDD in the Age of AI Agents
"my bet is that close to no one knows what the acronym BDD stands for".

That's disconcerting. Software engineers ought to know.

cbsmith··on The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist
As a guy named Chris Smith, I can tell you, people do absolutely "match people on first and last name", and it causes me no end of trouble.
cbsmith··on AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
> I don’t know if that’s true. More schooling does not mean more trustworthy or careful doctors. And I suspect some negative trait selection.

The medical boards are well aware of this, which is why the standards are far more than just about having more schooling.

I am familiar with Friendman's dissertation, and while the economic claims it makes are solid, it isn't a take down about the medical impact of the boards. It really doesn't say one thing or another about them. Let's put it this way: if you are going to inflate the cost of a service, it's hard if the quality of the service is terrible and easily replicated by someone else.

cbsmith··on HTML over WebSockets: real-time SPAs with barely any JavaScript
Everything old is new again. ;-)
cbsmith··on Baseload Is a Myth (2024)
The article concedes that there is a minimum power consumption. Thinking that therefore defines your generation strategy (e.g. I will have plants that constantly generate that minimum amount and the rest I'll handle with separate peak plants) is a myth.
cbsmith··on Baseload Is a Myth (2024)
...because they have other goals beyond reduce carbon emissions.
cbsmith··on Rocketlab acquires Iridium
Better a financial barrier than a physical one. If satellites and spaceships are literally smashing in to each other, I have a hard time interpreting it as anything other than a regulatory failure.
cbsmith··on AI OSS tool repo goes archived over night after raising $7.3M Seed
Are there other OSS LLMOps projects that have overtaken you? I couldn't think of one.
cbsmith··on Domain expertise has always been the real moat
As someone who has jumped from one industry to another: I'm sorry, but domain expertise isn't much of a moat. Yes, it takes a while to learn a particular industry/business, but it doesn't take that long, and worse still: one advantage that LLMs have over us humans is they have such a broader inventory of human knowledge at their disposal. I've literally used LLMs as product managers for new domains, and while I see the rough edges that LLMs have, they always have significant domain expertise.

I don't think that's the moat.

cbsmith··on Velonus – Open-source AppSec scanner that deduplicates SAST noise
Confirming it was fixed and it worked well.
cbsmith··on Velonus – Open-source AppSec scanner that deduplicates SAST noise
Installing collected packages: sortedcontainers, boolean.py, urllib3, typing-extensions, tqdm, tomlkit, tomli-w, tomli, tenacity, stevedore, shellingham, ruamel-yaml, regex, PyYAML, pyparsing, pygments, pycparser, platformdirs, pip-api, packaging, packageurl-python, msgpack, mdurl, marshmallow, MarkupSafe, license-expression, joblib, idna, h11, filelock, defusedxml, click, charset_normalizer, certifi, annotated-types, annotated-doc, typing-inspection, requests, pydantic-core, py-serializable, pip-requirements-parser, nltk, markdown-it-py, jinja2, httpcore, dparse, cffi, anyio, rich, pydantic, httpx, cyclonedx-python-lib, cryptography, CacheControl, typer, safety-schemas, joserfc, bandit, pip-audit, authlib, safety, velonus Successfully installed CacheControl-0.14.4 MarkupSafe-3.0.3 PyYAML-6.0.3 annotated-doc-0.0.4 annotated-types-0.7.0 anyio-4.13.0 authlib-1.7.2 bandit-1.9.4 boolean.py-5.0 certifi-2026.4.22 cffi-2.0.0 charset_normalizer-3.4.7 click-8.3.3 cryptography-48.0.0 cyclonedx-python-lib-11.7.0 defusedxml-0.7.1 dparse-0.6.4 filelock-3.29.0 h11-0.16.0 httpcore-1.0.9 httpx-0.28.1 idna-3.15 jinja2-3.1.6 joblib-1.5.3 joserfc-1.6.5 license-expression-30.4.4 markdown-it-py-4.2.0 marshmallow-4.3.0 mdurl-0.1.2 msgpack-1.1.2 nltk-3.9.4 packageurl-python-0.17.6 packaging-26.2 pip-api-0.0.34 pip-audit-2.10.0 pip-requirements-parser-32.0.1 platformdirs-4.9.6 py-serializable-2.1.0 pycparser-3.0 pydantic-2.13.4 pydantic-core-2.46.4 pygments-2.20.0 pyparsing-3.3.2 regex-2026.5.9 requests-2.34.2 rich-15.0.0 ruamel-yaml-0.19.1 safety-3.7.0 safety-schemas-0.0.16 shellingham-1.5.4 sortedcontainers-2.4.0 stevedore-5.7.0 tenacity-9.1.4 tomli-2.4.1 tomli-w-1.2.0 tomlkit-0.15.0 tqdm-4.67.3 typer-0.25.1 typing-extensions-4.15.0 typing-inspection-0.4.2 urllib3-2.7.0 velonus-1.0.0a1

(venv) $ velonus scan data

Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "~/venv/bin/velonus", line 5, in <module>

    from shield.main import app

  File "~/venv/lib/python3.12/site-packages/shield/main.py", line 15, in <module>

    from shield.commands import auth, config, scan

  File "~/venv/lib/python3.12/site-packages/shield/commands/scan.py", line 32, in <module>

    from scanner.pipeline import ScanPipeline
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'scanner'
cbsmith··on Computer Hobby Movement in Canada
Wow. I remember the Toronto PET Users Group. That takes me back.
cbsmith··on A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
He he. If you think the costs for an education will go down because they're seeing fewer applications and they're getting less funding from other sources, I have bad news for you.
cbsmith··on The limits of Rust, or why you should probably not follow Amazon and Cloudflare
This is a bizarre article, and it kind of reminds me of the concept that the only truly good software is the software you've never used.
cbsmith··on Facebook Has a Health Scam Problem
Also correct. I see the problem as particularly rampant with the video sites.
cbsmith··on Facebook Has a Health Scam Problem
I was going to say: "in what way is the problem restricted to health?"
cbsmith··on GTFOBins
It's kind of a comprehensive guide to all the ways that restricted shells don't.
cbsmith··on Framework Laptop 13 Pro
Yup. Sounds right. Interestingly though, you can use the new input cover with the older frames.
cbsmith··on Framework Laptop 13 Pro
More like the reverse: if you want the new battery you need a new bottom.
cbsmith··on Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds
Ask yourself why airlines deliberately overbook flights while venues do their best to never overbook events, why are subject to identify verification before a flight, and why you go through the TSA before you board... and you'll start to understand why airline seats are maybe not such the perfect metaphor for concert seats.
cbsmith··on Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds
> If only the federal government were allowed to pursue this case, it would have ended when the administration changed.

This is more why DOJ cases should remain independent from the executive branch. Politically controlled prosecutions means justice is intrinsically unequal. Having states be independent is helpful, but not in this regard.

cbsmith··on Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds
> Because artists don't always want to extract the maximum money possible from their fanbase?

I think that's both true and not. The larger truth is that trying to maximize the extraction during a single ticket sale is incredibly short-sighted of an artist. Having fans attend shows is a very effective way to grow your fan base and your brand, and that brings so much more lifetime value for an artist than you'd ever get from a single ticket sale (except for maybe on your retirement tour --and even then).

cbsmith··on Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds
> They don't seem to mention the most obvious reason: the same companies profit from both the primary and secondary market.

That's not true. Ticketmaster has a monopoly (or near-monopoly) on the primary market. On the secondary market they have a fraction of the market; the dominant players are StubHub, SeatGeek, and Vivid. Furthermore, most of the revenue from primary ticket sales goes to the venue and the artist/promoter, and they are usually completely disintermediated from the resale market.

cbsmith··on Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds
> Why not just ban the transfer of tickets and allow refunds?

There are laws against transfer bans. Also, people don't like being required to provide identity information just to buy a ticket to a live event, and venues HATE enforcing identity checks.

...and you'd be surprised how often you can get a refund on tickets just by asking your venue for a refund.

> First choice in seats goes to the most passionate and attentive fans.

Now you've opened the debate about how to determine which fans are the most passionate and attentive... ;-) Ticketmaster has a service for this that attempts to address this called Verified Fan.

cbsmith··on Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds
> A perhaps bigger issue is the vertical integration (if that's the right term) of first-party ticket sales and resale in one company.

The monopoly findings were about vertical integration, but the resale issue wasn't. I think, if you do some research, you discover that the vertical integration issues they were concerned about are actually a bigger part of the problem.

> Ticketmaster has no real incentive to try to prevent resellers from buying up all the tickets on first sale, because it gets to charge fees on all the resales through its platform.

The incentives for to prevent abuse of the primary ticket sale is that the venues, who actually decide how tickets are sold, don't like it. If Ticketmaster doesn't make them happy, they go elsewhere and lose out on the primary market. Perhaps ironically, they are often less concerned about abuse if they still have control over the ticket resale as well, which they often do when the resale happens on Ticketmaster. In practice though, most of the resale doesn't happen on Ticketmaster; this gives both the venues and Ticketmaster plenty of incentive to combat abuse.

> I'd like to see tickets sold by dutch auction.

Pretty much everyone who first enters the ticketing industry thinks auctions are a better way to sell tickets until they learn how the industry works. Interestingly, Ticketmaster offers auction-based ticket sales. You wouldn't know this, because venues don't want to use it. You might think a dutch auction for tickets would be great, but people who experience the reality often don't. Dutch auctions work when you're selling a commodity where each item is effectively the same as the other. Often people value each seat for an event differently. Dutch auctions, by their very nature, require the a fixed time window for the auction, which makes them difficult to fit the outcome you're describing... that would more be handled by some form of yield management where venues release blocks of tickets for sale at specific time windows, which is something that already happens in the live event business.

There's all kinds of dark aspects to the live event business, but it's generally completely different from the perception of the general public.

Page 1 of 34Next →