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redslazer

473 karma · joined February 27, 2011

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redslazer··on Federal judge blocks H1B visa $100K fee
Whether it is a fee or tax is less about whether it funds the government and more about whether when you pay the amount you get some benefit that you wouldn’t if you didn’t pay (above and beyond compliance with tax law). For example a fishing licence is a fee while a flood levy is a tax.
redslazer··on Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025
If the request data is larger than the limit it doesn’t get processed by the Cloudflare system. By increasing buffer size they process (and therefore protect) more requests.
redslazer··on Show HN: SuperUtilsPlus – A Modern Alternative to Lodash
We migrated to remeda from Lodash and are pretty happy. https://remedajs.com/

What do you do differently?

redslazer··on Show HN: Dispatched.dev – Background Job Queues for Your Serverless Apps
Looks interesting. What is the feature difference between this and Inngest?
redslazer··on Drawbacks and solutions for the Meilisearch document indexer
We absolutely love Meilesearch. We run it on our own servers and air has been rock solid and the search results are better than anything comparable.
redslazer··on Fly.io outage – resolved
The tech is impressive and the pricing is attractive which is why we use them. I just wish there was less black magic.
redslazer··on Fly.io outage – resolved
fly.io just has the weirdest outages. It has issues so regularly we dont even need to run mock outages to make sure our system fail overs work.
redslazer··on Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions?
Funnily enough neon does not offer an easy way to upgrade database compared to other managed database hosting.
redslazer··on Oracle, it's time to free JavaScript
Iceland the country won its trademark case agains Iceland the supermarket chain so there is probably something to it.

EUIPO "[Iceland Supermarket] cannot reasonably trademark the name of a country that has been around since the 9th century".

redslazer··on Cloudflare billing incident since 35 days including wrong invoice
Ahhhh billing the great unsolved problem.

In 2021 Cloudflare was charging me $5 a month with no way to turn it off and no help from the support desk.

It took an, unanswered, email to the CEO for it to go away.

redslazer··on Majority of sites and apps use dark patterns in the marketing of subscriptions
Jetbrains only “did it right” because there was huge community outcry about their move to pure subscription so they moved to the “if you subscribe for X amount of time you get to keep the last version you had when you stop subscribing”.

Props to them for listening to the community but question whether they should be the gold standard given it is still a compromise position.

redslazer··on Lago, Open-Source Stripe Alternative, banks $22M in funding
We are billing more than $1000 a month :). The providers didn’t want our business for less than $1000 per month (at a heavily discounted time limited price).

We talked to this many providers because it’s a huge pain point for us and the thing we hacked together was inadequate for tracking usage.

redslazer··on Lago, Open-Source Stripe Alternative, banks $22M in funding
Got trapped by the same thing. Usage based billing is a huge pain point for us we were really excited by lago but dont want to self host infra if we can outsource it.

We ended up talking to about 5 different usage based billing API providers and basically no one is interested in servicing the sub $1000 per month market which is where we will realistically be for the next year as we grow.

Additionally lago and other providers advertise "no revenue cut" and then always quote pricing as a percentage of revenue (which is technical not a revenue cut except your fee scales pretty linarly with revenue).

redslazer··on WeWork Plans to File for Bankruptcy as Early as Next Week
If they go into liquidation or restructure then all their liabilities go up for renegotiation. So the threat of this happening makes all contracts renogotiable regardless of timeline.
redslazer··on Ask HN: Easiest and cheapest full-stack frameworks that you love?
Yes huge +1 to t3. Given how opinionated t3 is I wish they added (even if optional) more must haves like testing and background workers.
redslazer··on Ask HN: What Happened to iOS Widgets?
An app that makes a great use of the widgets in iOS is Blinq, a digital business card app [0].

I find it super handy to be able to access the contact QR code without fiddling with lock screens and finding the app.

[0] https://blinq.me/

redslazer··on Figma: A Random Walk in Palo Alto
There would have been dilution at every subsequent round (or additional investments) so that profit per $10,000 is probably 30-50% less than $8mil.
redslazer··on Our Response to the Violence in Washington
The events in the US are appalling! On one hand I am glad that FB and Twitter are taking these steps but on the other I am deeply uncomfortable.

One of the things FB is removing is “ Calls for protests — even peaceful ones — if they violate the curfew in DC”. Not many years ago we as lauded the ability of social media to galvanise protest against tyrannical regimes (eg the Arab Springs). Currently FB is removing calls to protests against decisions we agree with but what happens when we need to protest again things that we do not agree with? Does FB become the arbiter of what we are allowed to protest and what not?

redslazer··on Bay Area applicants flood program that pays them $10k to move to Tulsa
If you are trying to bootstrap something, 10K (and a free co-working space) in a city where a two bedroom apartment costs $800 rather than $4000 is pretty sweet depending on your life situation.
redslazer··on Programmable Search Engine
I have been playing around with Typesense and MeileSearch. Typesense was quicker to get started with but MeileSearch sorting made more sense.
redslazer··on Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]
The consumer is harmed because there is no one incentivised to create new content, or at least the incentives are severely diminished.

In the story here the celebrity net worth data had to be created and this was worth doing due to the ad revenue. Making the existing data available to consumer is a benefit but the negative is the lack of new content. So now consumer have easier access to old, inaccurate data.

redslazer··on Do journalists pay too much attention to Twitter? (2018)
Yes because it is an easy way to craft what ever narrative is desired. There are people with ever possible view point on twitter so once you have the narrative you can find the appropriate tweet to embed.

"There was large scale outrage on twitter about decision X..." followed by an embed of one of three tweets.

It would be very interesting to chart the rise of twitter citations as compared to other sources.

redslazer··on BHP to destroy at least 40 Aboriginal sites, up to 15K years old, to expand mine
While the destruction of these sites is most probably not a good idea and there is an open question regarding the fairness of native title negotiations between mining companies and the local indigenous people it should be noted that:

"They are also unable to raise concerns publicly about the expansion, having signed comprehensive agreements with BHP as part of a native title settlement. BHP agreed to financial and other benefits for the Banjima people, while the Banjima made commitments to support the South Flank project."

From the sounds of it the two parties have agreed to the situation and now one party is attempting to escape its part of the agreement through the use public opinion.

redslazer··on Better protecting kids’ privacy on YouTube
I think the OP is saying the same thing you are, which is that smoking a joint is not the problem: it’s the random gore.
redslazer··on Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance
Shawshank Redemption
redslazer··on Supreme Court: Suspending Parliament was unlawful, judges rule
I don’t understand point 3. Why would the WTO tariff rate matter, are they not maximums? Couldn’t the UK just set import tariffs to 0 for a period?
redslazer··on Tricks to make yourself effortlessly charming
While some of these may be good tips, they don't exactly sound effortless.

Also does refocusing your eyes actually make you look engaged? Sometimes people I talk to appear to be doing that and it comes off a bit shady.

redslazer··on RethinkDB Postmortem
I always liked the concept of rethink db and I tried to get started with it a couple of times but in the end I just wanted to get my project(s) out of the door as quickly as possible.

This to me explains the massive success and quick rise of things like redis, mongodb etc. Sure the defaults are insecure but they work and they work immediately.