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pickle-wizard

542 karma · joined March 12, 2018

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pickle-wizard··on Ask HN: GitHub project that showed all edits (somewhat proving human authorship)
I hadn't heard of this project. However this did give me something to think about.

I am working on a product I intend to open source for 18 months now. One thought I have had is how to keep people from thinking I vibe-coded the whole thing. I have been working on it in a private GitHub repo. When I release I was planning to copy the final code into a new public repo. I probably shouldn't do that. Just make this one public and let people see the evolution of code, even as ugly as a process as it has been.

pickle-wizard··on Ask HN: Does it still make sense to write code by hand?
I am a solo developer. I write most of my code by hand. I use LLMs to help me do research and to help find stuff in documentation. I also use it to do come reviews since I don't have anyone else to review the code. I do get a lot of value out of the code review. It often finds little things I missed or will tell me if my code sucks.

Really for what I am doing writing the code is never the bottleneck. I spend little of my time actually writing code. Where I spend most of my time on the design and requirements.

pickle-wizard··on DocumentDB – a MongoDB compatible open-source database
Microsoft built this so they can have a MongoDB compatible database service for Azure.

A few years back MongoDB changed their license to AGPL to make it harder for companies to take their code and offer it as a service. They did this because it competes with the MongoDB Atlas service.

pickle-wizard··on TIL: You can make HTTP requests without curl using Bash /dev/TCP
At a past job the security team wouldn't let us have netcat or curl on our systems. So I just used /dev/TCP to get around that. The ergonomics were not as nice as using netcat or curl, but it got the job done.
pickle-wizard··on Ask HN: What is your dev set up like?
I am still using VSCode. I do have the Claude Code extension, but I don't really use Claude to write code. I mainly use it for code reviews. Since I am a solo developer it is nice to be able to get a second opinion.
pickle-wizard··on GitHub now requiring 2FA for all contributors,what authenticator apps you using?
I use a passkey that is in iCloud Keychain.
pickle-wizard··on Ask HN: Is vibe coding a new mandatory job requirement?
There is a big difference between vibe coding and using an LLM to assist with coding. Vide coding is just accepting what ever slop it outputs and saying LGTM. You are not going to get quality code that way. You need to review what it does. I often find that it uses outdated libraries and deprecated functions.

Some ways an LLM can assist with coding: I recently needed to refactor a bunch of code. Claude was very helpful this and it completed in about 5 minutes what would have taken me a couple of hours by hand.

Also they are very handy when using new frameworks and libraries. As we all know documentation for open source projects is often lacking. Just yesterday I ran into this. I pointed Claude at the projects GitHub repo and had the answers to my questions in just a couple of minutes. Manually I would have been spending a hour or two reading the code to figure out what I needed.

They are very handy when debugging. Get a weird hours that makes no sense. Instead of banging your head against the wall for a few hours, an LLM can help you find the problem much quicker.

pickle-wizard··on WFH is becoming a benefit again
I was discussing this with a friend last night. If fuel prices get high enough I can see it happening.
pickle-wizard··on LotusNotes
In a past life I was a Domino admin and I ran it on an AS/400. It was great, handled incredible amounts of load, and required little maintenance. The only outage we had was when I accidentally deleted all the databases from the file system. Even that was pretty easy to recover from.
pickle-wizard··on Ask HN: Stripe is asking for bank statements to check financial health
What about the old school processors like Authorize.net and Cybersource? It has been over a decade since I worked with them, so not sure what they are like now.
pickle-wizard··on Puget Systems Most Reliable Hardware of 2025
It has been 25 years, but back in college I had a job refurbishing and repairing PCs. Most problems were caused by cheap no name hardware. Most the quality hardware rarely had problems.
pickle-wizard··on macOS 26.2 enables fast AI clusters with RDMA over Thunderbolt
On a lark a friend setup Ollama on a 8GB Raspberry Pi with one of the smaller models. It worked by it was very slow. IIRC it did 1 token/second.
pickle-wizard··on It's cheaper to buy a new printer every month
If you don't need color I recommend going with a laser printer. Not only for lower consumable costs, but better software support too. In 2009 I bought a Lexmark laser printer new for $120 at Frys. It has native postscript support, so it will work with anything without having to load software from the manufacturer. I systems ranging from an old Macintosh Quadra running System 7 to new Mac running MacOS Tahoe, a PC running Windows 11 and everything in between. It even works in Linux too.

The consumables are cheap too. I have just replaced the toner cartridge once and a new OEM one was about $80 on Amazon.

pickle-wizard··on Tell HN: Cursor charged 19 subscriptions, won't refund
The same way you handle any fraudulent charges. Notify the bank and they'll reverse the charges.
pickle-wizard··on Ask HN: Struggling founders, pls share your startup struggle
Pricing is something I struggle with too. I really need to figure out my pricing model and price point as it makes a difference to some deferred architecture decisions. I can't put the decision off much longer as I'm getting to the point where I need to make a decision.
pickle-wizard··on Ask HN: Struggling founders, pls share your startup struggle
My biggest issue at the moment is that development of the MVP is taking way longer than I had initially thought. It's just me working on it and it has turned into a real grind. I am just so ready to get this done. I could hire contractors, but quality contractors are expensive and cheap ones don't deliver quality. Either way I would be burning runway and I'd rather save my money for later.

My other issue is that it is just me sitting at my home office working. I don't really have anyone that I can talk to. I started this venture after I took a sabbatical from work, so everyone IRL just thinks I'm unemployed farting around the house all day. Whereas I am working 6 days a week, I'm just not getting paid. I have tried to join some online communities, but there are just people stumping for their own start ups. I am considering joining a coworking space next year that is geared toward startups. The problem is that is also expensive, especially considering that next year I have to pay full freight on my health insurance.

Right now I am living off my investments. I have done well this year, but like others I am starting to be concerned that we might be in a bubble. I am pretty conservatively invested, but it would suck to have a prolonged 20 or 30% draw back.

I really need to bring on a cofounder to help with business development. Though I have to find someone willing to work for equity only as I don't have enough cash to pay them a salary.

So I guess you could say money is one of my biggest struggles.

pickle-wizard··on Ask HN: Preferred Next.js Alternatives?
I've been using SvelteKit.I find it pretty easy to use.
pickle-wizard··on HTTP error codes illustrated with stills from Columbo
I haven't seen the site you are talking about, but I use http.cat. It illustrates HTTP status codes as cat pictures.
pickle-wizard··on Ask HN: What are people doing to get off of VMware?
In my sphere most companies are going to either Hyper-V or the cloud. Hyper-V kinda won by default as a lot of orgs already had Windows Server licenses.
pickle-wizard··on Ask HN: How to stop an AWS bot sending 2B requests/month?
Do you have any legitimate traffic coming from AWS? My thought is to just drop all traffic from their ASN. Once they can't contact you for a while they'll move along and you could unblock.
pickle-wizard··on Ask HN: Do You Use Teamblind.com?
Same. I signed up, found the conversations to be unproductive and unhealthy and deleted my account.
pickle-wizard··on How AWS S3 serves 1 petabyte per second on top of slow HDDs
At a past job we had an object store that used SwiftStack. We just used SSDs for the metadata storage but all the objects were stored on regular HDDs. It worked well enough.
pickle-wizard··on How to make team members hungry
Just from reading the posters comments and word choice, I don't think they are actually a manager. I think this is just rage bait.
pickle-wizard··on Show HN: Base, an SQLite database editor for macOS
This is great, I've been needing a tool like this. I just bought a Pro license.
pickle-wizard··on Ask HN: Tell me about the best programmer you worked with
He wasn't a programmer, but a big beard UNIX admin. Of everyone I've worked with in my career he has had the most influential. He taught me 2 core things.

1. Information is meant to shared. 2. Never do manually what can you write shell script to do.

I started at $MEGACORP on the help desk. One day I noticed one of our AIX servers had a volume filling up. So I send him an IM that says "Hey I noticed that the log partition on server BLAH is filling up". He immediately called me and told me that the server does partitions, but instead used logical volumes. He then spent the next two hours explain in detail how logical volume manger worked, how to manage volumes and the implications it had with our SAN. At the end of the call I made a comment that I was surprised he was sharing all this information with me. He responded that he didn't want the type of job security you get by hoarding information. He instead wanted by job security by enabling the team to preform at its best, and he believed you achieved that by sharing knowledge. That phone call was only the first of many such calls.

The second thing is that he believed in automating everything you could. Using knowledge he shared with me, I quickly automated most of my help desk duties. Because of this I started working more with the system administration team and was moved onto it after just a few months. In my 20 year career every job I've had has revolved around automation. I really enjoy it and without his influence I would have never gone down this path.

pickle-wizard··on Ask HN: How do you connect with other founders in your city?
I think a tool like this would be useful.

All of our local startup meetup groups only do online meetings, so something to facilitate in person meetings would be good. I'm looking for a cofounder, but it would also be helpful just to chat with other founders or early startup employees.

pickle-wizard··on Ask HN: New RevOps guy wants to switch us from M365 to GSuite+Slack
Since he is the RevOps guy, my first question would be how much is this going to save.

Once you go to buy Google Workspace + Slack + Zoom + Jamf + all the other replacements. I doubt it is going to be any cheaper.

--Edit to add. He says you need Gemini so you can be a AI company. Doesn't the Microsoft subscriptions come with CoPilot?

pickle-wizard··on Ask HN: I give in, what are the resources for picking up AI-assisted coding?
I don't use AI for writing code directly. If I am working with a new framework or SDK I'll ask it for examples of how to do something, and then write the final implementation myself. This saves a lot of time digging through poorly written docs or decade old StackOverflow posts. However do keep in mind that it does sometimes make stuff up, so you have to keep an eye on it.

I'm a solo dev and also use it to rubber duck what I am planning to do. I can give it my requirements and it helps me to refine my plan. This is what I mostly use it for.

I know people say it is great for writing boilerplate, but I just don't find myself writing much boiler plate.

pickle-wizard··on Microsoft opens a free tier for Windows 10 extended updates
That is an excellent price. Good option for folks that have old software and embedded hardware that can't be upgraded.
pickle-wizard··on Ask HN: Can't publish on the Play Store without a physical office?
I was going to suggest this too. I use my registered agent's address on all official business stuff.
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