Hacker News Reader

hopelesson Don't verify email addresses by sending spam to them

My first thought would be that they've been hacked (or something else, like a CRM attached to their systems, has).

hopelesson Be Careful with GIDs in Rails

A bit of a bizarre post since to_sgid has existed forever to generate signed global ids. Global IDs are probably one the most powerful and underrated features of Rails but regular global ids are only supposed to be used internally (e.g. job params) and never sent to the client.

If there’s a gotcha it’s that _signed_ global ids are only signed, not encrypted, and very few people seem to know about the optimised method (globalid::Locator.locate_many) for loading a batch of global ids

hopelesson Measuring the impact of AI on experienced open-source developer productivity

What if agentic coding results in _less_ dopamine than manual coding? Because honestly I think that's more likely and jives with my experience.

There's no flow state to be achieved with AI tools (at the moment)

hopelesson Ask HN: If Stripe turned Evil, how much damage could they do?

I think a better way question is how much damage they might inadvertently do without being evil

hopelesson Show HN: 10x cheaper GitHub Actions on your AWS account

ah, I think it was prior to the caching actions so I'll see if I can try again today. Thanks

hopelesson Show HN: 10x cheaper GitHub Actions on your AWS account

I'd love to see some more detailed write-up on how to switch to Warpbuild for different tech stacks. I tried a few months ago when the instructions were basically just to change the runs-on type but IIRC it failed with an error around setting up ruby (and caching it?) and there were no clear instructions on how to proceed.

hopelesson AI Agents That Matter

I worked on agent-based systems >20 years ago, including large research projects and standardisation/interoperability work.

Ultimately, that effort failed but I don’t see any awareness of that considerable volume of work reflected in today’s use of the word “agent”. If nothing else, there was a lot of work on the use-cases and human factors.

It’s just a bit disheartening to know that so much work, by hundreds of researchers (at least), over 10+ years, has just slipped into irrelevance

hopelesson Ask HN: Is Heroku's DNS Down?

yes (at least, that's my theory and experience too)

hopelesson Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

https://jamie.ideasasylum.com

Been blogging since ~2000 but archived most the old stuff. Just rebuilt it on Bridgetown, Tailwind, and Cloudflare Pages because I had some free time.

Best recent blog post is about my re-discovery of hobbies during sabbatical: https://jamie.ideasasylum.com/2023/07/02/hobbies

hopelesson Show HN: Mkcert – Valid HTTPS certificates for localhost

I've been using https://www.tinycert.org/ for years which basically lets you create your own certificate authority and issue certs (which obviously aren't trusted by everyone but can be trusted by you/your team). It's ideal for generating SSL certs for ephemeral apps e.g. review apps on Heroku since it can all be done using an API

hopelesson EU to recommend that member states abolish daylight saving time

yeah, I've had Americans say 6AM EST during the summer when it's EDT

hopelesson Marketing Firm Exactis Leaked a Personal Info Database with 340M Records

A lot of people complained that GDPR was too onerous on small firms and that they should be exempt. According to LinkedIn https://ie.linkedin.com/company/exactis-llc Exactis has just 10 employees (obviously some error possible. Call it 15-20?)

Now do you think small firms can’t hold large quantities of damaging data?

hopelesson Ireland's National Monuments Service Wreck Viewer

This would make a great AR app: standing at the clifftops, looking out at the empty seas, only to reveal the wrecks and stories lying underneath

hopelesson Ireland's National Monuments Service Wreck Viewer

Probably the most famous wartime loss was the Lusitania off the Old Head of Kinsale. Its fame is partly that it was a Cunard ship like the Titanic, and partly because of the controversy around her cargo. Although it was a passenger liner, it was sunk by a German U-Boat because it was thought to be smuggling arms from the then-neutral US to England.

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

hopelesson Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning (2010)

Practice spotting someone drowning from real videos of public swimming pools: http://spotthedrowningchild.com/

It's good but not perfect since the lifeguard thankfully rescues them before they drown but it's still a good exercise. I can do this exercise fairly reliably but I'm not perfect either.

A few years ago I saved a man from drowning _but_ I very very nearly didn't: https://medium.com/@ideasasylum/i-saved-a-man-from-drowning-...

hopelesson GDPR made searchable by Algolia

Particularly when the wrong flag is used. In this case, Gaelige is given the Scottish flag when it's actually the official language of Ireland in the EU. Scots and Irish Gaelige are not the same language. And Scotland is not an EU member (it's membership, sadly, is by virtue of the UK's membership)

hopelesson Publishers Haven't Realized How Big a Deal GDPR Is

If you outside the EU, it really isn’t about “anyone coming after you”. Even within the EU the enforcement actions currently err of the side of a stern warning rather than fine (except in the most deliberate cases). Though that may change.

Either way, you shouldn’t be doing it out of fear. You should be complying for practical business reason

1. This is how you should be treating personal data. 2. In exchange for complying with GDPR, you get access to a market of >700m people. If you’re a service provider, it’s illegal for any EU business to be your customer without GDPR compliance.

hopelesson Honesty is the new game changer

Love the domain name!

And some of the screenshots reveal an approach to hiring which is sorely lacking. At this stage, every single LinkedIn email and cold outreach email from a recruiter gets marked as spam.

Not a single one seems to understand that hiring should be treating people as… well, people with lives and desires. Not just a resource to plug into a hole; not a fool to be tricked into changing jobs so the recruiter can hit their targets.

Any innovation in this space is welcome and I hope there are enough "decent" companies to make it a successful business.

fwiw, part of the advantage of going freelance was side-stepping all the bullshit hiring assumptions.

hopelesson The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday

yep, you're not the first to recommend it. I was hoping there were a few others in the same vein

hopelesson The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday

oops, yeah, Crew Resource Management is what I meant — things like making sure a junior officer can question a senior officer when she sees a problem.

Crew Relationship Management is probably something else ;-)

hopelesson The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday

There's a lot we can learn from aviation: accident retrospectives, checklists, master caution alarms, crew relationship management, human factors research, etc.

However, my knowledge of these things is a bit piecemeal and anecdotal. Does anyone know a good book on these things?

hopelesson Sublime Text 3.0

Yes, happy to pay more often. Or just have smaller releases. It must have been years since I last paid for Sublime

hopelesson I made my own VPN server in 15 minutes

Congratulations! You've now secured your connection — now you have a server to secure.

Honestly, it frightens me how many people run their own servers without monitoring, security precautions, keep patches up to date, etc. And all the save a few $. Even if you can do it professionally, you probably shouldn't do it as a hobby. The idea of a transient / throwaway instance is more appealing but I still think most people will fire it up, leave it running, forget about, and not notice when it's been compromised.

But those botnets have got to live somewhere, I suppose

hopelesson Sublime Text 3 dev build 3128 released

To take the opposite position: I'd _happily_ pay $100/year to ensure Sublime continues as an ongoing business.

I've already bought my ST2 and ST3 licences and honestly just looking for a way to pay more if it would ensure continuity.

hopelesson PSD2 – a directive that will change banking in Europe

It's not about the banks selling your information but about you having (or giving) access to your information.

For example, manually retyping my bank account transactions into my accounting software will hopefully become a thing of the past. And long overdue too!

hopelesson “What’s your current salary?” is a trap question–Here's how to answer it

I've always hated this question and the best I've managed is to pick what I thought was a biggish number and tell them that.

hopelesson Submarine cable map

Personal bugbear: Ireland has a lot of connectivity but only three cables (two from Cork, 1 from the north-west) go to a destination other than the UK. All other Irish internet/telephony traffic goes through the UK. Remember that there are many European data centres and EMEA headquarters in Dublin.

Much of it goes through Bude in Cornwall, which has a GCHQ listening post perched over the submarine cable (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GCHQ_Bude). Or through Southport which is also known to be monitored by GCHQ.

I find it surprising, particularly as the UK prepares to leave the EU, that this issue isn't of more concern

hopelesson Redash – Connect to any data source, easily visualize and share your data

Metabase is my new favourite tool: I've probably use it every day to answer some question instead of dropping into the Rails console. Things like: what percentage of orders come from Stripe vs Paypal? Or export a list of users that match this criteria. Or display the top 10 users by some metric.

It makes creating BI charts from a database easy enough that a non-developer can do it. But when the going gets tough, I can still drop down to hand-coded SQL. It was also an easy installation on Heroku.

It's not entirely perfect (combining multiple series on one chart is harder than it needs to be; can only pull data from databases not APIs) but it's been a success so far

hopelesson Ask HN: What free or low-cost static site hosting do you use most?

middleman -> s3 -> cloudfront. About $0.15/mo.

Pros: Generally works well, speedy enough, free ssl with Cloudfront, cheap for many sites (most hosts charge per site which catches me out for little projects). I've mostly got the process figured out now...

Cons: not easy or quick to set up, lots of steps to get right, AWS is a terrible UI, Cloudfront invalidations are apparently sent by carrier pigeon so asset hashing is a must, even then it can take a while to see your site updates

I've noticed a high mortality rate among static hosting sites, particularly those "just add files to Dropbox and we publish your site" services. Static hosting services are to ops people what todo list apps are to frontend designers

Also, to your point: you can't, by definition, run php on a static site.

hopelesson Badgers are driving hedgehogs extinct

Background: I live in Ireland and hosted 7 hedgehogs in/around our garden last year. 2-3 are probably hibernating within 50m. I tag, track, name & write notes on them each evening. Anecdotally, I've never seen a badger around here though we do have foxes, stoats and, I would expect, badgers.

Hedgehogs represent the most accessible of wild animals. They don't mind human presence and you can literally walk outside with a torch and stand next to them. If you want to understand our attachment to hedgehogs, Hugh Warwicks' books, particularly 'A Prickly Affair', describe our relationship with humour, engaging stories and field research: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Prickly-Affair-Charm-Hedgehog/dp/014.... Likewise, if you'd like to know more about hedgehog behaviour and research, Pat Morris' book is quite definitive: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hedgehogs-British-Natural-History-Co...

Of course badgers will sometimes eat hedgehogs! They both compete for the same food sources (insects, worms, etc), and occupy the same territory (hedgerows, bordering open farmland), and badgers have the means to kill a hedgehog (strong powerful claws). But badgers don't seek out hedgehogs. In areas where food or habitat is scare, they will eat hedgehogs. Why not? You get to take out an ecological competitor AND have a meal! Win-win for the badger. But there's also countless examples of badgers ignoring hedgehogs, or feeding alongside each other both in the wild and urban gardens.

So perhaps the question should be: when don't badgers eat hedgehogs? It appears there's no problem when food is plentiful. Perhaps we should be encouraging hedgerow preservation and reducing pesticide use (i.e., the problem) instead of calling for a cull of badgers (the symptom).

It would be worth referencing the Peoples Trust for Endangered Species statement on Hedgehogs vs Badgers: https://ptes.org/campaigns/hedgehogs/

Largely, this plight of the hedgehog against the dastardly badger is a means of using a well-loved animal to support a cull of badgers aimed at reducing TB in livestock. "Won't somebody please think of the hedgehogs" is now their rallying cry.