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psandor

34 karma · joined July 13, 2021

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psandor··on Tennessee inmate still alive after being administered two lethal injections
The problem with this argument is that being a few months older or younger would decide between life and death for the very same crime. Her boyfriend who was just a couple of months younger got a lighter sentence with the option of parole, partly because he was 17.

You don’t suddenly become a different person on your 18th birthday.

psandor··on LastPass notifies users of yet another data breach
“ the priority of sales and profits has resulted in the sacrifice of the main quality measure of their main and only product”

What do you mean exactly here What do you think LastPass could have done to prevent this specific issue?

psandor··on GPT‑5.4 Mini and Nano
“every single direction change I suggest, codex is all: "that's a great idea, and we should totally go that [very different] direction", try as I might to get it to act like more of a peer.“

That’s not the model, that’s a personality setting you can change in the codex config file.

Set it to Pragmatic, and ask it (not command it) about your new direction in planning mode.

It will tell you if your idea is not good for the given project. It’s an excellent peer.

psandor··on Pi for Excel: AI sidebar add-in for Excel
Do you plan supporting the web version of Excel?

I’m a heavy Excel user and would love to try this, but I’m on Linux, so I can use only the online version of Excel.

psandor··on Ex-GitHub CEO launches a new developer platform for AI agents
If they had wanted a moat for this part of their offering, they wouldn’t have open-sourced it.

This is not their offering, this is a tool to raise interest.

psandor··on Show HN: I scraped 3B Goodreads reviews to train a better recommendation model
You are right.

At the same time, everything you ever posted online has already been scraped by hundreds (maybe thousands) of entities and distributed/sold to countless other entities. The only difference is that OP shared his project here.

psandor··on Claude Code vs. Codex: I built a sentiment dashboard from Reddit comments
It was true until GPT-5. That model hugely improved Codex, so it being comparable with CC is a recent thing.
psandor··on Crypto investor charged with kidnapping and torturing
Of course there's an XKCD about this: https://xkcd.com/538/
psandor··on How we used GPT-4o for image detection with 350 similar illustrations
and that NASA did not spend millions on this. https://www.reuters.com/article/fact-check/nasa-did-not-spen...
psandor··on How we used GPT-4o for image detection with 350 similar illustrations
This is completely offtopic, but I would bet it was a government-funded museum. A reasonable institution would have worked with you to find an acceptable compromise, something much easier to implement with a small sacrifice of aesthetics.

Anyway, great work, and thank you for taking the time to share it!

psandor··on Silicon Valley's best kept secret: Founder liquidity
"mostly profit someone else who did nothing but write you a check"

There is quite a bit of work involved in reaching the point where you write a check for a Series A round. Also, the better VCs spend significant time with their portfolio companies.

psandor··on DKIM, SPF, SpamAssassin Email Validator
https://www.learndmarc.com/ is very similar but it's a bit easier to read and interpret.
psandor··on Ask HN: How to manage phones and PCs for elderly parents?
Strange that I had to scroll down this far for this answer. Creating a normal, non-admin user for them will greatly limit the damage they can do as they won't be able to make system-wide changes. I also disabled installing extensions in Edge.
psandor··on Back up your Bitwarden vault in a future-proof and secure way
You should never store unencrypted secrets, like this export file, on an unencrypted disk. Not even temporarily. Instead, create a small encrypted drive on a pendrive or as a file with LUKS or Veracrypt, mount it, and save the file _directly_ there.
psandor··on Microsoft begins “Extinguish” phase of dealing with Open Source
Not sure about GPL, but this is one of the very few (2-4) restrictions of a BSD license:

"Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission."

psandor··on Microsoft begins “Extinguish” phase of dealing with Open Source
An average Store user will definitely benefit from not having to sort through dozens of spyware-laden clones of VLC
psandor··on Ask HN: Teach a 5-year-old math and science over the summer?
Prodigy Game: Perfectly suitable for a 5 year old with a parent there helping. They learn math while playing a fun RPG game.
psandor··on I fell in love with low-JS
This is exactly how most web applications were written 15 years ago. Server side rendering with PHP, ASP, JSP, and then Javascript for the interactive bits.
psandor··on The Itanic Has Sunk
DEC was part of HP at that point, so it was the HP leadership that made the decision to ditch Alpha.
psandor··on The Law of Net Design Costs
Both options have risks, in 90% of the cases, the risk you pointed out is smaller then the risk from the lost opportunity cost (working on something not relevant for the service), insecure implementation, sub-optimal UI, etc.
psandor··on The Law of Net Design Costs
The example he uses isn't the best though. Unless your product is about identity or have other special circumstances, you should absolutely not implement your own login system. It's a lot more complicated than what the article suggest: security, _proper_ hashing, forgot your password, change password, change email, password strength, MFA, privacy, compliance, social logins are just a few things/flows coming to my mind that are standards today. Implementing these instead of focusing on the relevant features of the application is very rarely the right decision.