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leftnode

3,922 karma · joined November 20, 2008

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leftnode··on MongoDB CEO resigns to join Meta
It looks like that phrase was removed from the article, but that is standard for C-level jobs. When you resign, you're shown the door immediately. The same thing happened with Marissa Mayer when she left Google during a phone call. Call was ended and her accesses terminated. Can't risk any additional trade secrets leaving.
leftnode··on Why is Hacker News like that?
[flagged]
leftnode··on Apple has added persistent 'ads' to iOS, and it's driving users crazy
> Quick way to lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO.

Unfortunately, not true. Very, very, very few people are going to abandon the years of work they've put into using iOS and macOS because of a few pesky ads. Sure, they'll complain about it, but they won't actually switch.

leftnode··on Ask HN: Anyone still coding like 2021? Where do you work?
I use Codex extensively, but mostly as a sounding board for architectural questions. I'll also have it do a lot of boilerplate work, but damn, I don't get these people creating multiple Claude or Codex accounts to burn tokens all day. I still love writing code!
leftnode··on Shopify acquires Tailwind
I thought Laravel would've been the one to scoop them up, but I'm glad they landed with Shopify. Adam's a solid dude and what him and his team have done to commoditize web design is to be lauded.

To think it started as a side project and grew to the scale it did. Very impressive work.

leftnode··on Improving Heuristics for A* Pathfinding
I remember reading it in 2006 or so to better understand pathfinding algorithms for my data structures and algorithms class.
leftnode··on Why some people mow a lawn better than others
Absolutely agree. I could easily afford to hire a lawn crew to cut my lawn, but I enjoy doing it every weekend or two for similar reasons. I have a little under half an acre to mow, but I still enjoy doing it manually with a push mower.

Gets me outside and moving, accomplishes something tangible, can catch up on a podcast or two or just get lost in my thoughts, often leads to fixing other odds and ends around the house I've put off.

leftnode··on Where .env Went Wrong
I suppose I'm spoiled by the Symfony framework which has a robust Secrets Component [0].

It allows you to generate a public/private key for each environment: test, dev, and prod (by default). The 'prod' private key can't be committed to the repository. Once the cryptographic keys are generated, you can encrypt any secret you want, and the framework will automatically decrypt it and allow you to access it as an environment variable at runtime.

The encrypted values for all environments are committed to the repository. For example, the file for the `$STRIPE_SECRET_KEY` environment variable for the 'dev' environment is a file that has these contents (shortened for readability):

    <?php // dev.STRIPE_SECRET_KEY.c33678

    return "\x1Dq\x11B6\x5B\xFE7\x9B\xA4\xFE...";
This solves several problems:

1. Keys for the 'dev' and 'test' environments can easily be shared with the team because their public and private keys values are committed to the repository. No more sharing secrets file over Slack or through some other mechanism.

2. The private key for the 'prod' environment can be stored in a 3rd party vault so it can be made available to the production servers. You can also decrypt 'prod' secrets during deployment to reduce the decryption overhead for each request.

3. At worst, agents would have access to the secrets in the 'test' and 'dev' environments only because they couldn't decrypt 'prod' values locally.

4. It forces good practices to ensure you're not using the same secret value for production and non-production environments.

It's made secret management so easy I don't even give it a second thought. Do other web frameworks support a system like this?

[0] https://symfony.com/doc/current/configuration/secrets.html

leftnode··on Launch HN: Unlayer (YC W22) – Add email and document builders to your app
Not the OP, nor do I have any relationship to them, but I've had to build or maintain plenty of these in my time and sure, an LLM can knock out a basic one easily, but there are so many edge cases that need to be accounted for that it gets complex quickly.

Congrats on the launch - this looks like a genuinely useful tool. I look forward to checking it out.

leftnode··on Advertise in ChatGPT
I have absolutely no relationship with OpenAI but maybe give it some time before drawing such a conclusion.
leftnode··on GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry
Is it spying if:

1. It's anonymous

2. They're telling you they're doing it

3. You can opt out of it

leftnode··on April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini
Does this have a CLI only interface?
leftnode··on I built an AI receptionist for a mechanic shop
I build software for contractors (plumbers, electricians, HVAC repair, etc) and they're some of the fastest adopters of these systems. I believe YC has even invested in a few.

Regarding the AI receptionists, from the calls I've listened to, there's still a bit of the uncanny valley/overlapping speech issues that I'm unsure are ever fixable just due to latency.

But for low margin businesses like contracting and (I imagine) auto repair where labor is your most expensive cost, these owners are doing anything they can to reduce their overhead.

leftnode··on Locks in PostgreSQL: 3. Other locks (2020)
Yes! Just implemented these the other day for a long running process that I didn't want to lock a specific row for.
leftnode··on Production RAG: what I learned from processing 5M+ documents
The Qwen3 600M and 4B embedding models are near state of the art and aren't too computationally intensive.
leftnode··on Just let me select text
I think that's the point...
leftnode··on Why our website looks like an operating system
I think the opposite is true. Sure, it's technically impressive, but users have been trained for decades at this point to understand how a basic marketing page should look and this isn't it. These kinds of sites are best left as portfolio pages for designers to show off their skills, not for B2B SaaS landing pages.
leftnode··on Show HN: 1 Million Rows
The company names look like Amazon merchants.
leftnode··on Introduction to the A* Algorithm (2014)
I have a deep love of A* because it was the first complex algorithm I fully understood. In my first data structures and algorithms in college (early 2000's), we had to pick an algorithm to study, code, and write a paper on and I picked A*.

I spent hours painstakingly drawing similar grids that the author of this article made and manually doing the calculations [0]. I still have these notes somewhere, even though they're over 20 years old at this point, because I was so proud of the work I put into it.

At any rate, thanks for this article and the trip down memory lane.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/zRYaodL (apologies for the Imgur link)

leftnode··on Backblaze seemingly does not support files greater than 1 TB
Funny quip aside, thanks for bringing Arq to my attention. This looks excellent and isn't enshittified.
leftnode··on I still like Sublime Text
Yes.
leftnode··on Questions censored by DeepSeek
How are you running the Qwen 2.5 Coder 7B model [0]? Running locally using llama.cpp, I asked it to briefly describe what happened in China during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest and it responded with "I'm unable to engage in discussions regarding political matters due to the sensitive nature of the topic. Please feel free to ask any non-political questions you may have, and I'll be happy to assist."

When I asked the same model about what happened during the 1970 Kent State shootings, it gave me exactly what I asked for.

[0] https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-Instruct-GGUF/b...

leftnode··on Show HN: Dumbo – Hono inspired framework for PHP
Symfony 7.2 can work as a micro framework, believe it or not: https://symfony.com/blog/new-in-symfony-7-2-simpler-single-f...
leftnode··on HTML Tags Memory Test
It's funny, I've been working with HTML since 1998, and I got 36 (though I do think <font> should've been allowed). I thought I'd do a lot better, but I guess you can accomplish a lot with only a few tags, CSS, and some minimal JavaScript.
leftnode··on Microsoft's official Minesweeper app has ads, pay-to-win, and is hundreds of MBs
The standard Windows Solitaire game is littered with ads - which you can disable for $2.49/month.
leftnode··on Show HN: Curl2Url
My guess is it's shorter and easier to share.
leftnode··on Latest ChatGPT 4 System prompt (1,700 tokens)
I'm ignorant of what this is: is this the "seed" prompt, so to speak? The prompt the ChatGPT engineers have given itself so it knows what it is and how to respond?
leftnode··on Ask HN: Does Cloudflare block HN comments if you have code blocks in a reply?
Excellent article, thanks for writing and posting it.
leftnode··on 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev
A little harsh, no? Damn dude.
leftnode··on Catalyst – Tailwind CSS Application UI Kit
I instantly purchased this. I really love Tailwind and the component/UI libraries they sell. I'm shocked that a CSS library/framework is so divisive. If you don't like it, don't use it!

I'm also surprised that someone ... selling something ... gets such negativity on Hacker News of all places. Again, if you don't like it or it doesn't have value to you, don't buy it!

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