Hacker News Reader

drwlon Claude-powered AI coding agent deletes company database in 9 seconds

it's spelled out in the linked tweet https://x.com/lifeof_jer/status/2048103471019434248

Some feedback: - The constant interrupting each other made it hard to listen to - Also the interviewer Theo/T3.gg giving his CEO take on strategy to sandbag silverlake after finding out more context behind silverlake and automattic's relationship led me to have an unfavorable impression of the guy

drwlon Ask HN: Why is Pave legal?

Gusto is not pre-revenue, it has $500M+ in arr

https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/27/gusto-remote-deal-500m-rev...

drwlon Crypto 'pig butchering' scam wrecks bank, sends ex-CEO to prison for 24 years

I don’t think that’s fair to say the person is not engaging content in a meaningful way. Have you read the article? It’s pretty clean cut aside from understanding who the perpetrators were. The ceo of a bank got conned and went to prison, and there’s emphasis on calling the con a “pig butchering scam”

drwlon Crypto 'pig butchering' scam wrecks bank, sends ex-CEO to prison for 24 years

yeah I'm with you there. Pig butchering scam [1] is just a simple con, not sure why they're attributing any importance to the name of it

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_butchering_scam

drwlon Software I Pay For

Thanks, yeah it does sound like we share the same thoughts regarding paying for solutions that just work

I'm resistant to moving over to Apple because of pure vendor lock in, but also I can decouple passwords from my Apple ID. For example, I use a mac for work but I don't need to sign in to my personal apple id on my work laptop to get access to passwords.

drwlon The Health Crisis of a Texas Bitcoin Town

I read the entire article and that is tough. Up to 90 dB is wild.

drwlon Things to avoid in Ruby

I've been writing Ruby for the past 5 years or so and I think it's safe to say that these are very much opinionated takes on Ruby. There is no _one right way_.

A critique: 1. Verbosity vs Idiomatic, to me I find there are times the verbose approach is actually easier to read and understand

2. Long Expressions to Detect nil - this seems a bit like a strawman, sure there are better ways than to check the presence of an object/method chain, but doing the safe operator can bite you in the leg by compacting the complexity

3. Overuse of self - I skimmed through the Rectangle class declaration... it reminds me of writing Java. I rarely see self#method= used

4. Collecting Results in Temporary Variables - I think this is debatable, there's value in condensing method implementations when it makes sense, but also having temporary variable assignment can lead to better readability

drwlon Thorium: Cross-platform patched Chromium fork

I found the original commit [1] since the other Github link in the thread shows the removal. I'm not entirely sure what the thought process was around adding it to begin with

[1] https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium/commit/26655c920b6a9e4...

edit: the commit link is nsfw

drwlon A decent VS Code and Ruby on Rails setup

Gusto adopted it when I was there (I left at the end of 2022). Like other comments, it's a bit polarizing but I found it to be useful when working in large codebases because you one didn't have to reason about return types and could just read them from function signatures.

Getting it to play nicely with Rails and other gems that did metaprogramming magic was a constant pain in the butt though.

drwlon Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

I’m sure you can find individual coaches but the cost will exceed what most people are willing to spend or invest. Take executive coaches for example, they exist but from what I understand they’re largely private coaching and cost $$$.

drwlon Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

My take is that there’s such variance in people’s skill levels and so it’s really hard to cater educational programming content. Personally, I’ve found getting introductory books/courses and skimming through it until you hit something that you don’t understand and then diving deeper into that bit.

drwlon Scientist: A Ruby library for carefully refactoring critical paths

I’ve used this gem to remove a Rails Model that was heavily tangled and used in production. It had a bit of a learning curve, such as seeing how errors get handled in try {} blocks, but really nice otherwise when doing the equivalent of open heart surgery.

drwlon Migrating our backend from Vercel to Fly.io

I’m a bit out of the loop but I thought heroku died or is languishing under Salesforce. That’s my current perception of everything and no longer see it recommended in HN threads. Hopefully this does not come off as an attack (it’s not).

drwlon Ask HN: Help with Gusto? 2021 payroll being double reported to IRS

It’s unfortunate but tweeting or getting attention on LinkedIn can get you greater visibility. Depending on your company size too I would imagine you would have higher level of support.

Am ex gusto

drwlon Microsoft is killing custom domain names in Outlook.com

Have you tried this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32793838#32797052

drwlon Zoho became a $1B company without external investment

I think that's correct. It should be free though.

drwlon Zoho became a $1B company without external investment

I came across this discussion and was shocked as well. Turns out there's now a button here: https://support.google.com/a/answer/2855120?product_name=Unu...

"I used my account for personal use"

drwlon Adding a fiber link to my home network

Yeah I got the same feeling that this is an ad, or at least in part sponsored by fs.

drwlon Citing revenue declines, Airbnb cuts 25% of workforce

A lot of tech is getting hit, it seems like Airbnb is more in the spotlight

drwlon Trends in Show HN posts

It would make a lot of sense if the number of active users have grown over the years. Which I suspect it has.

drwlon Zoom has a signed binary that runs any unsigned script

what version of macos are you using?

drwlon Airbnb Racks Up Hundreds of Millions in Losses Due to Coronavirus

> Airbnb was never profitable (I think)

Do you have any sources for this?

drwlon Launch HN: Dex (YC S19) – personal CRM that reminds you to keep in touch

What's behind the name?

drwlon Bitcoin expert scams a scammer, donates the money to charity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Venezuela

It's highly probable - food or anything needed for daily life

drwlon Bitcoin expert scams a scammer, donates the money to charity

He scammed a scammer for $50, that's it?

drwlon Don't donate canned goods to food banks (2017)

Consider watching this video on rethinking charities https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfAzi6D5FpM

drwlon Justin.tv's Live Video Broadcasting Architecture (2010)

Justin Kan goes a bit into Kyle's accelerated learning - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzyatiQrQlQ

drwlon All the balls are the same color: brown

I would imagine it has to do with the retina where photoreceptors exist

/e all of the physical stuff has to do with magnification of the image (or incoming light) onto the retina

drwlon Dark Web Drug Sellers Dodge Police Crackdowns

I think if anything, the opioid epidemic was improved through dark web market places. I'm sure if you search on the news throughout the years, there were more overdoses related to substances sold being misrepresented or cut with something like fentanyl.