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plasma

1,907 karma · joined March 26, 2011

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plasma··on Ask HN: Why are printers always so unreliable?
The trick is to get a laser printer, honestly zero problems.
plasma··on Copilot edited an ad into my PR
To be honest, just a user here, it’s only recently (like a week?) you can ask Copilot to edit an existing PR, historically it’s had to open a new one (that merged back to original PR) or it had to make it to begin with, I can see this unintentionally happening as part of this improvement to edit existing PRs
plasma··on Founder of GitLab battles cancer by founding companies
I think you’d find Dr. Richard Scolyer’s story really relatable. He’s an Australian cancer expert who, along with his colleague, is using himself as "patient zero" for a world-first treatment for his own brain cancer. They’re basically doing the research and the treatment in parallel to find a new way forward: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-30/dr-richard-scolyer-sp...
plasma··on Ask HN: Do you used a cloud based dev environment?
Yes, moved to GitHub Codespaces and generally has been good.

Pros: one click setup for devs jumping between projects after you get the devcontainer setup process working, takes some fiddling, trial and error.

Has felt good for some older projects to be wrapped in the devcontainer and once it’s working feel comfortable the environment is stable, and also moving everyone to new environments has been easy.

Keeping a haywire dev/npm script away from your main machine is also good, but I know it’s not foolproof.

Cons: Codespaces CPUs are usual cloud slow so you need to pay more and single threaded perf won’t be as good as your laptop, a real shame. I think GitHub competitors would have better CPUs.

Very rarely but Codespaces can have a technical issue and you can't do your work (inaccessible), and to avoid it sleeping during the day due to inactivity you may leave it running most of the day but it demands a shutdown after 12 hours or so, so very long dev sessions can be interrupted.

GitHub also dropped support for using JetBrains IDEs which was not cool, so it’s just vscode which is usable but would have preferred other IDEs.

If Codespaces team is reading would love to see some improvements here.

plasma··on Shai-Hulud Returns: Over 300 NPM Packages Infected
GitLab's write-up mentions a dead man's switch where "The malware continuously monitors its access to GitHub (for exfiltration) and npm (for propagation). If an infected system loses access to both channels simultaneously, it triggers immediate data destruction on the compromised machine. "

https://about.gitlab.com/blog/gitlab-discovers-widespread-np...

plasma··on Launch HN: Propolis (YC X25) – Browser agents that QA your web app autonomously
Neat! How do you handle state changes during tests, for example, in a todo app the agents are (likely) working on the same account in parallel or even as a subsequent run, some test data has been left behind or now data is not perhaps setup for a test run.

I’m curious if you’d also move into API testing too using the same discovery/attempt approach.

plasma··on Launch HN: Webhound (YC S23) – Research agent that builds datasets from the web
I gave the demo a try and was able to run a search that showed "51 results" - great start! A few things I noticed though:

On the Data tab it says "no schema defined yet."

The Schema tab doesn’t seem to have a way to create a schema.

Most of the other tabs (except for Sources) looked blank.

I did see the chat on the right and the "51 items" counter at the top, but I couldn’t find any obvious way to view the results in a grid or table.

plasma··on Ask HN: Has anyone been able to contact Cloudflare Support in the last 5 days?
Note you need to also raise the configuration limit of max upload to 200mb after the plan change in settings.
plasma··on Show HN: Drop-in SQS replacement based on SQLite
Some of the slowdown will come from not indexing the FK columns themselves, as they need to be searched during updates / deletes to check the constraints.
plasma··on Launch HN: Hatchet (YC W24) – Open-source task queue, now with a cloud version
Project looks interesting, would welcome seeing an API (or c# client) to be able to use it.
plasma··on Show HN: I scraped 200M Shopify products to build a search engine
Unfortunately it seems the underlying search API is throwing '{ "message": "Not Ready or Lagging"}' for every search
plasma··on What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report
Neat, I noticed it gave me wrong data though, and when I asked for the top 3 rows it provided the wrong value, due to not using UTF8 - Asking ChatGPT to use utf8 support fixed it, perhaps update it's prompt.

Check out https://chat.openai.com/share/34091576-036a-4e82-b4e3-a8798d...

plasma··on Ask HN: What are your travel hacks?
You can download Google Maps offline while on WiFi and later access maps without Internet (or to avoid roaming charges).
plasma··on Random Load Balancing Is Unevenly Distributed
Worth noting the difference between an AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB) that is HTTP request aware, and Network Load Balancer (NLB) which is not, when load balancing HTTP traffic.

AWS ALB (and others I'm sure) can balance by "Least outstanding requests" [1] which means a server with the least in-flight HTTP requests (not keep-alive network connections!) to an app server will be chosen.

If the balancer operates on the network level (eg NLB) and it maintains keep-alive connections to servers, the balancing won't be as even from a HTTP request perspective because a keep-alive connection may or may not be processing a request right now and so the request will be routed based on number of TCP connections to app servers, not current HTTP request activity to them.

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/latest/appl...

plasma··on Show HN: Infracost (YC W21): Be proactive with your cloud costs
I’m not a target user, but you mentioned the tagging problem and git integration, perhaps you could infer at least the git user responsible for each resource cost (git blame the TF file and identify the username who added the resource) as a minimum amount of detail provided out of the box?
plasma··on Creating a search engine with PostgreSQL
A technique I've used before is to treat Elasticsearch as rebuildable at any time, consider this approach:

A cron runs every 5 minutes that looks at your database for any objects you're indexing where last_modified_at timestamp > last_indexing_started_timestamp.

Index the objects into Elasticsearch, then update the last_indexing_started_timestamp value to be when you started the original sync process, so we catch any modified objects between the start/end of the update run, next run.

Then if Elasticsearch needs rebuilding you can just clear out the last indexing timestamp and resync from the start of time, and its self-recovering / won't get out of sync.

plasma··on InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion
Hard to reverse actions need multiple safety switches, for example, turning off the machines in that region for 2 weeks before deleting them, which would bring support issues to attention ahead of the no-going-back step of deleting data.
plasma··on Ask HN: Google Load Balancer / Cloudflare Issues
I’ve had to triage Cloudflare connectivity issues before, if you have a timestamp or when the error appears you can ask CF support to check backend logs for the error reason
plasma··on Ask HN: Remote access to self hosted (back end) software
Tailscale
plasma··on Ask HN: Is it just me or GPT-4's quality has significantly deteriorated lately?
I just ran a test, mobile app under model 4 says it’s model 3, but web model 4 says it’s model 4.
plasma··on Reliability: It’s not great
Thanks for sharing!

Would it help to replace Corrosion with a simpler "Here's my local known state" blob that is POST'd to blob storage (for example) on a major cloud provider, and have another service read that at intervals? Just to make it really simple.

There will be a better way than that, but my thought is if you can make it simpler (known state is always just pushed, so missing updates auto-recovers and avoids corruption) then you can be building on top of a more stable service discovery system.

Centralized secret storage, can you keep the US instance read/write, but replicate read-only copies (a side-car tool that copies the database to other regions at various intervals?) so each region can fetch secrets locally?

Or perhaps both can be solved with a general "Copy local state to other regions" service that is pretty simple but gives each region its own copy of other region's information (secrets, provisioning states, ...).

I've needed to do similar things for some of the apps I've built, where a service needed another (simpler) service in front of it to bear the traffic load but was operationally simple (deferred the smarts to the system it was using as the source of truth) and automatically recovered from failure due to its simplicity.

plasma··on Launch HN: Infisical (YC W23) – Open-source secrets manager for developers
+1 to providing SSO to smaller plans, hard requirement for me.

I manage small teams and it would be a requirement for us, and if pricing for a few users is $14/month, normally enterprise is higher than that and an annual commitment, but you wouldn’t be able to get much budget out of me at this moment due to team size, but there is some there.

When choosing tools like this, I pick ones I can grow with so I don’t need to solve it again in the future, so while the team may be small, it can’t adopt it if I cant start from that point.

plasma··on Tell HN: My Vercel costs are exploding due to an infinite loop
Have you uploaded the image? That should stop the cycle for anyone with the old web page still open.
plasma··on My fifth year as a bootstrapped founder
Hey Michael, congrats on your success so far, you have built a community and product people are buying which is already a great achievement.

My experience as a tech founder (software) reading your blog (thanks for sharing) and your Cloud feedback at https://forum.tinypilotkvm.com/-163/tinypilot-cloud-feedback is that you need to dig deeper into requirements and your user personas, and what combination of product and software adjustments reach an enterprise / professional market that are happy to pay recurring subscription amounts to you because they receive benefits and value.

Be careful you don’t set out to build and shape software entirely focused on users that don’t want to pay (because they have simpler requirements and free options) and you then don’t offer value to enterprises that needed different features because your talking to hobbyists instead of professionals with expensive problems they would pay to have solved.

You’ve got hobbyists that may not pay $30/month for a subscription, but to me they aren’t your target audience for a new revenue stream, what’s it look like if you focus your efforts in customising the hardware / cloud software to support enterprise scenarios? Can you be doing Zoom calls with a few of your users in the professional space about what problem they wish TinyPilot could be solving that they could be paying for?

Look at the feedback from Reeman and Larry in the above forum post, they’re asking for enterprise features that you’d be best positioned to solve and charge for (and a lot more than $30 per month), schedule calls with them and dig into their problems further, build for them, so they can order 100 devices and put them under cloud management for work, not the hobbyist that has no budget and wants different features.

plasma··on Elastic: Several customer facing deployments deleted across multiple regions
To add to this, you can put destructive operations like this into phases, for example, before delete, a power off of the service has to happen, and the delete logic won’t run if the power off time hasn’t elapsed 7 days, etc.

These safety layers help present destructive operations more visibly before they are completed.

plasma··on Ask HN: How to protect against endless SSH login attempts to my server?
Run Tailscale on your server, bind the ssh port to the Tailscale local address only, then you can just logon to Tailscale to access SSH, no longer publicly accessible.
plasma··on Deliveroo is leaving Australia
The announcement's top half reads like its withdrawing without imminent urgency, but its actually because they've entered voluntary administration.

"An independent registered liquidator (the voluntary administrator) takes full control of the company. This allows the director or a third-party time to find a way, if possible, to save the company or its business." [1]

[1] https://asic.gov.au/regulatory-resources/insolvency/insolven...

plasma··on Partitioning in Postgres, 2022 Edition
Unique constraints work as long as the partition key is included in the constraint (which makes sense, so a table knows it’s the only partition for a value and checks it’s unique index).
plasma··on Show HN: TaskTXT, plain text task-timing notepad
I've used many note taking apps (VS Code extensions for todo lists, Trello, plain text files, OneNote, etc) and this is nice, a few thoughts:

1) Was there a keyboard shortcut for starting/stopping a timer and marking a task done? 2) Note the 'forgot password' link doesn't work from the subscribe popup 3) Storing the notes locally by reading from a .txt file that's synced to a personal drive would be great

Thanks!

plasma··on iPhone 14 is eSIM-only in the US: Here’s what you need to know
Apple’s perhaps positioning itself to offer a marketplace of carriers you can easily switch between, or maybe even hop between based on the daily carrier rates.
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