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rsyring

2,103 karma · joined March 26, 2016

keybase proof: [ my public key: https://keybase.io/randysyring; my proof: https://keybase.io/randysyring/sigs/o62LIbXLLJnsPvGLSV5A9hcVhOB9pnjZPnnDN3KuCIE ]
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rsyring··on Codex Pricing: Pro has unlimited 5.6 usage
Notably the business "Pro" plan is missing for $125 / month. So doesn't seem to be benefitting from this and maybe is being discontinued?

This pricing stuff is so frustrating. I run a small business so Enterprise doesn't fit us. The personal plans are better than the business plans. So we just do reimbursements for the personal plans.

I would mind paying $125 for SMB plans equivalent to the personal $100 plan, assuming they were as good or better than the personal plan. But I don't understand this pricing model that has the individual plans beating the business plans soundly.

rsyring··on Ask HN: What are you reading?
- Hacker News, mostly comments, and the occasional full article

- Google News and the occasional full article

- Email

- Slack

- ChatGPT/ Codex responses

- Road signs

- Various things in various mobile apps I use

- Websites

- Movie/Show subtitles

Off the top of my head, that accounts for most of the things I read on a weekly basis.

No time for books.

rsyring··on I don't want the details
https://www.radicalcandor.com/

The first chapter or two of the book is good for the general principles. I found the later chapters about big org management to be less helpful.

I personally go one step further and mentally adjust radical candor to be winsome candor. I'm explicitly adding some empathy and humanity by doing that, so that I'm more likely to treat others how I'd want to be treated, even when the conversation is hard.

rsyring··on Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?
Context will be important for answers to be meaningfully comparable:

- LLM expense budget

- What type of dev: work, personal, real time spaceship thrust vectoring, html contact forms for family, etc.

- human in the loop with short as possible turns, software factories that can run for days, or something in the middle

Just off the top of my head. I'm sure there are others I'm missing.

rsyring··on Orbs
They've basically come up with what exe.dev has been doing for awhile now?

Except, exe.dev is more about, you have a VM and can do LLM work on it. Orbs seems to be minimizing the VM machinery more and making it about the "agentic experience."

rsyring··on OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21)
It's common for different models to find holes in another's work. There are various good reasons for that.

FWIW, we use ChatGPT for our primary model and use Claude to do the reviews. This works better than ChatGPT doing it's own review even with a clean session/context.

rsyring··on fx :Tiny, open, native coding agent.
I can't say I'm super into all the agents that are being created. But I do try to keep up here on HN and I can't say that I can remember any with this particular set of attributes.

In particular, aiming to be embeddable into other projects seems rather notable. At least, not something I've remembered of other projects that have made there way across the HN front page.

rsyring··on fx :Tiny, open, native coding agent.
Originally, Warp was doing just that. Reimagining the terminal including making AI a part of it. I don't think they really found much purchase there because they ended up needing to make a platform out of it:

https://www.warp.dev/

rsyring··on fx :Tiny, open, native coding agent.
For all the people asking "Why?", it seems like TFA has a pretty good list of features/attributes that it thinks sets it apart:

- fx is a coding agent harness and CLI written in Zig, optimized for research and embeddability as part of larger systems.

- It focuses on minimalism and performance across the board, from system prompt design, to its tools, feature set, and 6.39mib binary.

- For end users, its CLI output style and form factor aims to be closer to a Unix shell than a heavy "IDE in the terminal" TUI.

- It's open source (Apache-2.0), model-agnostic, and suitable for both local and cloud inference.

- Designed for instant installation and embedding in resource constrained environments and agent sandboxes.

- fx cold starts in 10µs and does no unnecessary work or I/O prior to accepting user input, making it ideal for programmatic use.

- Optimal fx.wasm builds produced by the Zig toolchain, which further reduce fx's size, making the network stack pluggable.

- fx contributes single-digit megabytes of memory baseline, allowing you to pack many instances in one machine.

- fx preserves scroll history by default, produces minimal output, and makes sparing use of complex TUI or paints

- Minimal system prompt and tools, to save on token costs and to yield optimal time-to-first-token performance (TTFT).

- Small core, extended via skills, plugins, MCPs, with a Unix-like philosophy to extensibility.

- Designed to work with local models, gateways, direct provider API access or subscriptions.

rsyring··on Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub
Not exactly:

> Forgejo is self-hostable free software for software development, built on top of Git. Codeberg is powered by Forgejo, which is in turn a hard-fork of Gitea. Compared to Codeberg, Forgejo is not one service, but free software to help you build your own. Everyone can install their own Forgejo instance to host their own projects. There are also public Forgejo instances as well as Codeberg you can use, but make sure you find a site that is actively maintained and updated, and that you trust the provider.

https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/what-is-codeberg/#...

rsyring··on Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub
> How people managed to put all their eggs in one intermittently available service is beyond me.

It's beyond me how people on HN can be ignorant to why GitHub gained so much market share. It's because for most dev teams, the things they add to the easily decentralized git core is *very valuable.* Arguing it's not valuable or ignoring that value doesn't help anyone.

If decentralized is really going to win, then you have to have the features and DevX to match the basics GitHub provides. Because that's what people need/want. And not just the candy-ass-not-as-good-as-the-kernel-devs devs. Lots of very talented people and very well engineered projects use GitHub because it's better for what they need. Even with all the outages, people are still there. If it was so easy to move away, people would. The fact that they aren't says something important. Please consider not ignoring it.

rsyring··on RISC-V: They Should Have Known Better
That's not next...it's now. Through at least LLMs and languages that compile to JS.
rsyring··on Ethical Cold Outreach
Word.
rsyring··on Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering
But you're probably better off with Ruff these days: https://docs.astral.sh/ruff/

Similar to black but faster, written in Rust, by the same team who created uv.

rsyring··on Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering
I guess the difference in compile times doesn't matter enough?
rsyring··on Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification
Thank you.
rsyring··on [dead]
I'm a happy user and I think they are doing a lot of things different in a good way. A lot of their blog posts are highly technical and informative.

But, I agree, this is mostly a puff piece. Nothing necessarily wrong with that but not what I would have expected given the other blog posts that have shown up here on HN.

rsyring··on Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
Pi but in Rust: https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/pi_agent_rust
rsyring··on Use Task Runners for Common Coding Tasks
I recommend mise for almost everything.

But we use 1Password for secrets and I have the need to mix and match environment profiles. So I built:

https://github.com/level12/env-config

rsyring··on 13 Models and 4 Agents on SWE Tasks: Go, Java, Python, Rust, TS
https://swe-rebench.com/about

> Potential data contamination: The SWE-bench dataset, comprising a collection of GitHub issues, has been publicly available since the end of 2023. As a result, models released after this date may have seen these exact issues or highly similar data during training. This raises the risk of inflated performance metrics and makes it harder to distinguish genuine generalization from memorization.

rsyring··on AI helps Stanford scientists discover natural Ozempic without usual side effects
Title was edited slightly to fit into the max length limit. Actual title:

> AI helps Stanford scientists discover "natural Ozempic" without the usual side effects

rsyring··on Self-contained highly-portable Python distributions
You are correct. I just hadn't noticed:

- Project Status Update: https://github.com/indygreg/PyOxidizer/discussions/740

- https://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2024/03/17/my-shifting-open-so...

rsyring··on Self-contained highly-portable Python distributions
> Many users of these distributions might be better served by the PyOxy sister project [1]. PyOxy takes these Python distributions and adds some Rust code for enhancing the functionality of the Python interpreter. The official PyOxy release binaries are single file executables providing a full-featured Python interpreter.

1: https://github.com/indygreg/PyOxidizer/

From that readme, it seems PyOxy has a few related uses:

- It can produce a single file executable representing a Python app including the interpreter

- It can ship self-contained Python interpreters and related to be embedded or used as a library in a larger application

- PyOxidizer can serve as a bridge between Rust and Python - "PyOxidizer can be used to easily add a Python interpreter to any Rust project. But the opposite is also true: PyOxidizer can also be used to add Rust to Python."

rsyring··on Ruff v0.16.0 – Significant new updates – 413 default rules up from 59
If you are really concerned about my being a bot, a quick look at my comment history, going back over a decade, should dispel that concern.

Edit: I once had someone apply for a job and their written communication was pretty caustic. After rejecting their application, I wrote and explained how unprofessional I found their interactions, encouraging them to step back and reconsider how their communication appears from the other side.

To my great surprise, they wrote back and said they had never had anyone give them such feedback and they agreed with my assessment of their interactions. They just had never seen it before. They thanked me for the feedback.

Such interactions are exceedingly rare. But I sometimes offer unsolicited advice on the off chance that said advice can make a difference.

rsyring··on Ruff v0.16.0 – Significant new updates – 413 default rules up from 59
I've read through all the sub-comments you've left here.

In short, you seem to have a grievance against linters that goes way past reasonable. You assert this example you give is "perfect" below. You also complain linters waste time and commits despite able evidence in the field they do the opposite.

You seem willing to add drama, grievance, and personal bias to what could have been a rather straightforward technical discussion. The sum of which is: linters sometimes make changes to code that I don't like.

I'd encourage you to reconsider what's really important when it comes to team development and try listening more to those around you. You seem overly focused on asserting your opinion instead of having a discussion.

These types of exchanges are usually very unproductive and stressful in a team environment. They are evidence, IMO, of a dev having the wrong priorities. I'd encourage you to step back and really consider how you view craftsmanship in a team dynamic and whether or not you are fighting the right battles.

rsyring··on GM Backs Sodium Ion Batteries for U.S. Grid Storage
That would you pay for that shed size battery?
rsyring··on The startup's Postgres survival guide
FWIW, we started with a system that was essentially this. We eventually moved to pgbackrest and it wasn't any harder to setup. But the ROI on that investment is a lot higher because pgbackrest does a lot more for us than the home rolled solution.

Having done both, I'd recommend just starting with pgbackrest.

rsyring··on The startup's Postgres survival guide
FWIW, we use: https://pgbackrest.org/

Offers point-in-time recovery which is an improvement over a custom solution we used to have which gave us nightly backups.

We have it backing up to Backblaze B2 (S3 like). Was relatively easy to setup and no problems really.

rsyring··on Passkeys were invented by engineers with zero understanding of consumer brain
FWIW: I find passkeys to be a very simple and easy to use concept.

Simple: it's like a password that I don't have to type in

Easy to use: because I use 1Password and just have it installed on everything. On Android, it can be set as the default passkey provider so, even on mobile, I am using passkeys shared across devices.

Is this "less secure" because I'm sharing the keys through 1Password. I suppose, at some level. But before that, I was simply sharing passwords through 1Password in the exact same way. So, I don't think my security posture has changed any.

What has changed is the UX and IMO for the better. Now I don't have to generate/fill/copy-paste text strings for user names or passwords. 1Password knows what site I'm on and usually responds automatically when I'm in a passkey context. If I have more than one passkey available, because I have multiple accounts (for something like Google Workspace), it shows me options and I pick the one I want.

Honestly, it's mostly a "just works" system and I like it a lot better than passwords.

YMMV, of course.

rsyring··on Cheap self-hosted Kubernetes on Hetzner cloud (2025)
My experience with Hetzner VM pricing has turned me off of considering them for anything else. Maybe the experience in other world regions is not the same but this is what happened to us:

I started to use Hetzner's VM options in the Virginia, US datacenter. They had a great performance to cost ratio when I compared them to Linode/Akamai and Digital Ocean about a year ago. At that time, 4vcpu / 8GB server cost $24.99 per month.

Now, to get a VM like it, it's quoted $73.49 a month. Almost a 3x change.

I understand data center economics are changing due to LLM usage. But the Hetzner jump has not been mirrored by their competitors. I'm disappointed I made the switch from Linode. We still have some older VMs there and we'll likely continue to use them instead of Hetzner moving forward.

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