HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

robotfelix

104 karma · joined March 5, 2013

submissionscomments
robotfelix··on The Next Generation of Heroku Postgres (Postgres Advanced)
I was surprised to come across new "Postgres Advanced" options and a pricing calculator on the add-on page today: https://elements.heroku.com/addons/heroku-postgresql

The article is dated October 2025, but I don't recall ever hearing about this before, and it doesn't look like anything has ever been posted on HN.

The separation of storage and compute is new for Heroku, though they are not the first to do so. So far it seems like there's still only fixed combinations of vCPU and RAM, and that the price of each "no storage included" instance is more than the equivalent storage-included "Classic" instance size.

robotfelix··on My astrophotography in the movie Project Hail Mary
AI-related definitions aside, if it's a strictly subtractive/destructive tool that only removes light, it's hard to characterise as "generative" and arguably not much different to filtering frequencies!
robotfelix··on SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation
You're absolutely correct and it's me who has mis-read that part. The point of the oddly relaxed wording on sexual images and behaviour still stands though!
robotfelix··on SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation
From the Code of Conduct:

> Unacceptable behaviors include but are not limited to: offensive comments, insults, jokes or ridicule; gratuitous or off-topic sexual images or behavior in spaces where they are nor other unappropriately aggressive behaviors; threats of violence or deliberate intimidation; creating additional online accounts in order to harass another person or circumvent a ban; harassment of any form.

I can't help but wonder who decided that, in an electronics forum of all places, *any* form of joke should be unacceptable, but sexual images are only a problem if they are gratuitous or off-topic!

robotfelix··on [dead]
Unable to access chatgpt.com
robotfelix··on Cloudflare was down
Our site is fine, including files served by Cloudflare's CDN and Cloudflare Workers, but the Cloudflare dashboard is definitely down.

The Cloudflare status page says that it's the dashboard and Cloudflare APIs that are down. I wonder if the problem is focused on larger sites because they are more dependent on / integrated with Cloudflare APIs. Or perhaps it's only an Enterprise tier feature that's broken.

If it's not everything that is down, I guess things are slightly more resilient than last time?

robotfelix··on Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues
> A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal. Posted 3 minutes ago. Nov 18, 2025 - 14:42 UTC

Seems like they think they've fixed it fully this time!

robotfelix··on Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues
Things are back up (a second time) for me. It doesn’t sound like they are confident the problem is fully fixed yet though

Edit: and down again a third time!

robotfelix··on Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues
> Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues

> Investigating - Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers. Further detail will be provided as more information becomes available.

Things are back up (a second time) for me.

Cloudflare have updated their status page now to reflect the problems now. It doesn’t sound like they are confident the problem is fully fixed yet.

Edit: and down again a third time!

robotfelix··on Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues
Yep - down again for me too!
robotfelix··on Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues
Back up for me now

Edit: and then back down again

robotfelix··on Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues
Back up for me now
robotfelix··on Is Slack Down?
Yep. App is down for us. Their website seems to be offline too (https://slack.com/)

Edit: aaaaaand we're back

robotfelix··on Heroku Outage
Salesforce Service Cloud is affected by the issue too, so if they are dogfooding their own customer service software there's a good chance their support team are locked out of accessing support cases too :/

https://status.salesforce.com/generalmessages/10001540

robotfelix··on Critical CSS
It's worth noting that including Critical CSS in every page load isn't the only way to use it.

A lot of unnecessary bloat can be avoided by only including it when it looks like a user is visiting for the first time (and likely hasn't got the CSS files cached already) or only using the Critical CSS technique for pages that commonly come at the start of a session.

robotfelix··on Critical CSS
It's worth noting that penthouse's last release is a few weeks shy of 3 years ago (https://github.com/pocketjoso/penthouse/releases/tag/v.2.3.3).

Given there seem to be few other Critical CSS tools out there, its utility in driving web performance, and the fact Google's web.dev recommended tool (https://github.com/addyosmani/critical) uses penthouse under the hood, I'm surprised there isn't more effort and/or sponsorship going into helping maintain it.

robotfelix··on The era of open voice assistants
Yep, Mike Hansen was on the live stream launching the new device. He also notably created Rhasspy [1], which is open-source voice assistant software for Raspberry Pi (when connected to a microphone and speaker).

[1] https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

robotfelix··on The era of open voice assistants
I've picked up an Echo Dot a few years ago when Amazon were practically giving them away, thinking that surely someone would have jailbroken it by now to allow it to be used with Home Assistant.

It was only after researching later that I discovered that this wasn't currently possible and recommended approach was to buy some replacement internals that cost more than the device itself (and if I recall correctly, more than the new Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition).

robotfelix··on The era of open voice assistants
It's worth noting that product is listed in the "Discontinued Products" section of the linked wiki.

Both of the ReSpeaker products in the non-discontinued section (ReSpeaker Lite, ReSpeaker 2-Mics Pi HAT) have only 2 mics, so it appears that things are converging in that direction.

robotfelix··on Home Assistant Voice
Very excited about this.

It represents the culmination of ~2 years of development by the Home Assistant team. They announced 2023 as the "Year of Voice" back in December 2022 [1] and during 2023 they made a lot of leaps forwards in the software, but there has been a lack of off-the-shelf hardware options.

Insta-buy for me!

[1] https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2022/12/20/year-of-voice/

robotfelix··on FTC bans hidden junk fees in hotel, event ticket prices
I'm not sure Japan is the best example here. My experience is that most shops have the price excluding consumption tax printed very prominently in large numbers, and then price including consumption tax is printed in much smaller writing underneath.

The price excluding tax is the only one you can read at a distance, that draws you in. As someone from the UK who is used to seeing price tags show the final price you pay at the till, I was constantly disappointed that items weren't quite such a bargain as I'd first hoped.

On the whole there are still many things that are much cheaper than in the UK though :)

robotfelix··on NASA validates revolutionary propulsion design for deep space missions
> to deep space destinations, such as the Moon

I feel woefully underqualified to call out NASA's PR team, but I don't _think_ the Moon qualifies for most definitions of "deep space".

Exciting news all the same, and I can only assume they meant to suggest that RDRE propulsion is useful for destinations that are nearer too!

robotfelix··on Remote driving in UK from abroad should not be allowed, says Law Commission
The article makes it clear that the UK definition of "driving a vehicle" is currently centred on the physical location of the vehicle, inverse legal question of "Is the driver considered to be driving a vehicle in the country where they are physically location country?" which I'd imagine varies quite a lot too as many countries probably didn't foresee remote operation when drafting their laws.

You could potentially end up in a situation where a remote driver in Estonia needs a driving license and insurance in both Estonia and the UK to fully cover themselves.

robotfelix··on Heroku Incident #2468 – Dyno Crashes
Some of our team were struggling to identify the cause of some issues on our site this morning until we saw this.

Just posting this here for anyone who relies on HN to highlight when services go down ;)

robotfelix··on In South Korea, robots are on the job. How is the service?
It's a little strange for an article about robots in South Korea to have such a big chunk centered around a Japanese hotel chain. I just checked and they are up to 20 branches in Japan (and also Seoul and New York) [1]

Where are the home-ground American and South Korean novelty robot hotels?

[1] https://www.hennnahotel.com

robotfelix··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2022)
ClickMechanic | REMOTE | London, UK | Full time ClickMechanic (https://www.clickmechanic.com) is a marketplace for vehicle repairs. Our platform enables customers to acquire industry-standard quotes for repairs (a first in Europe), services and diagnostics, and quickly book a vetted mechanic online. Our mission is to bring trust and transparency to car repair.

We're looking for 2 more full stack software engineers to join our small engineering team of 5, who are a great bunch and all excited to welcome some new teammates.

We try our best to offer all of the benefits of working in a startup, the freedom to innovate, to explore new technologies and to use your experience and ideas to directly influence the business.

Our main stack consists of: Ruby on Rails, ERB front-end for drivers, React+Redux front-end for mechanics, PostgreSQL, Heroku, AWS.

Full job description and link to apply here: https://clickmechanic.workable.com/j/F8DEBC3786 (Direct applications only, no recruiters please)

robotfelix··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2022)
ClickMechanic | REMOTE | London, UK | Full time

ClickMechanic (https://www.clickmechanic.com) is a marketplace for vehicle repairs. Our platform enables customers to acquire industry-standard quotes for repairs (a first in Europe), services and diagnostics, and quickly book a vetted mechanic online. Our mission is to bring trust and transparency to car repair.

We're looking for 2 more full stack software engineers to join our small engineering team of 5, who are a great bunch and all excited to welcome some new teammates.

We try our best to offer all of the benefits of working in a startup, the freedom to innovate, to explore new technologies and to use your experience and ideas to directly influence the business.

Our main stack consists of: Ruby on Rails, ERB front-end for drivers, React+Redux front-end for mechanics, PostgreSQL, Heroku, AWS.

Full job description and link to apply here: https://clickmechanic.workable.com/j/F8DEBC3786 (Direct applications only, no recruiters please)

robotfelix··on Cargo bikes deliver faster and cleaner than vans, study finds
This may just be the Guardian's wording of the data source, but it makes it sound more like the real conclusion is "parcels currently being delivered by cargo bikes are better suited to delivery by cargo bike than by van".

The subheading does add the caveat that they were only looking at city centres, but I can't help that think it's a little ungenerous to ignore some of the areas within city centres that vans might potentially still excel (eg: bulky items)

robotfelix··on Chartio acquired by Atlassian, shutting down March 1, 2022
Received this news in my inbox.

My initial impression was that Atlassian was joining in the Business Intelligence tool acquisition party after Looker and Tableau were acquired in the last couple of years, however it seems their motivations may be different as they are immediately shutting down Chartio without even dangling a possibility of an Atlassian replacement product arriving in future.

(I’m certainly not aware of Atlassian currently having any BI offerings?)

robotfelix··on Engineering productivity can be measured, just not how you'd expect
A lot of the questions listed heavily overlap with what I would expect to be covered in team retrospectives.

A team reflecting on progress at regular intervals will naturally bring up processes, meetings, tools, etc, and a manager or team lead can easily add these questions into the mix for reflection and/or discussion as part of this process.

The key distinction from this seems to be hidden in the line "Finally, turn all these questions into metrics" - but the article could definitely do a better job of highlighting the differences between their "solution" and retrospectives (as well as more general good management practices like talking to your team).

There are some interesting ideas in there that seem tied to their product (https://www.okayhq.com), but the article doesn't really progress far enough past the high level ideas to be practical and rather a lot is left as an exercise for the reader!

Page 1 of 3Next →