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spellboots

612 karma · joined August 11, 2010

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spellboots··on You said no MCP
There are many ways to do this without using mcp, for example one of the many proxy servers that inject the token into requests. I use a custom solution that redacts all secrets to agent transcripts before the agent sees them in a hook.

I find it way better to be able to confidently tell agents to use CLIs than worrying about partially implemented mcps that need configuration and are often yolo’d with npx @latest anyway

spellboots··on Pgtestdb's template cloning approach to testing is fast
I'm actually curious if this is faster than a tmpfs clone, I suspect it might be as depending on how many underlying files it's copying, it might effectively be doing "nothing" for each file.

Obviously operations after that will be a lot slower reading / writing to a normal disk

spellboots··on Pgtestdb's template cloning approach to testing is fast
I do know that if it's not supported by the underlying filesystem if falls back to the default.

What I don't know is if it's faster to copy than a regular copy on a ram tmpfs - since it may be essentially be doing "nothing" - updating some pointers instead of copying stuff in ram.

So if your workload is limited by copy not execution speed it might be worth testing.

However at that point you're running on a regular FS so if you're trying to benefit test speed by having all your regular postgres operations on a ramdisk, that part will end up being slower.

spellboots··on Pgtestdb's template cloning approach to testing is fast
Many people are unaware of a relatively recent method that allows almost instant copies of postgres databases that I use very heavily:

  CREATE DATABASE new_db TEMPLATE templatedb STRATEGY FILE_COPY
Combined with

  set file_copy_method = 'clone'
This copies arbitrarily sized DBs sub-second - I use it on dbs larger than 1TB regularly - and has the advantage of being copy-on-write - the new db doesn't take up any extra disk space until you start writing to it in which case only the differences are used.

Only supported on linux and macos AFAIK

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/18/runtime-config-resource.h...

spellboots··on Accelerando (2005)
All I need to know about the project is that the creators didn't read a relatively obscure SciFi book from 2005?
spellboots··on Claude Code gets native LSP support
Yes, you can do this with hooks: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/hooks
spellboots··on PhD Timeline
I worked for US companies for over a decade, and travelled there multiple times a year. I worked remotely from my home in the UK as a software engineer and and CTO, including as CTO of a YC startup for a number of years.

I would not travel to the US any longer, it's just not worth the risk. From the outside it's how I imagined Germany looked in the mid 30s, but streamed live in HD.

For context I'm a white British man, and whilst I wouldn't go out of solidarity and disgust at the treatment of people who don't look and talk like me even if I wasn't worried about myself, right now I would also be seriously concerned for my own safety. I wouldn't trust rogue ICE agents to know exactly what things are permissible on an ESTA visa waiver vs B1 vs B1 in lieu of H1B.

Genuinely and without hyperbole, if you have the ability and means to leave for a different country, you should consider it in case it becomes something you can no longer do in the future; even if you don't believe your government will prevent you, I suspect other countries will start making it a lot more difficult for US citizens to get visas in the coming years.

spellboots··on JSX over the Wire
This feels a lot like https://inertiajs.com/ which I've really been enjoying using recently
spellboots··on Toyota patents plans for EV with manual transmission and clutch
There are economic and regulatory factors involved, it is more complex than people being resistant to change which no doubt makes up part of it.

In the UK, for example, automatic cars are more expensive to buy and insure [1]. They also tend to be more expensive to learn how to drive as instructors mostly have manual cars to teach with.

This incentivises new drivers towards manual cars, especially as younger drivers are more likely to be in lower-paying jobs and therefore more price conscious.

There is also a separate license category for automatic cars. If you have this license you are not allowed to drive manual cars, whereas the manual license entitles the holder to drive both. Therefore most new drivers opt to learn manual for the flexibility and the cost reasons.

1: https://www.moneysupermarket.com/car-insurance/automatic-car...

spellboots··on How to send $ETH in 19 lines of Python
It sounds like you have some additional constraints that you didn't make clear in your original question.

You said, "Tell me how to do something worth doing with ETH and I'll be impressed."

Also, you need things that you can do without capital, and that fit a specific risk profile that you haven't elaborated on. It sounds like you're assuming that making these yields are too risky for you, so are you looking for zero risk, or can you accept some risk?

Can you specify up front your constraints?

Here are two things you could do with ETH right now:

1. You could use it as the coordination layer for a decentralised git repository, that is fully distributed and censorship resistant. Hopefully you can see how this could easily be adapted to many similar use cases: https://github.com/cardstack/githereum

2. You could purchase flight delay insurance that pays out automatically if your flight is delayed: https://etherisc.com/

> Cue the intellectualization from "investors."

Cue the moving of the goalposts

spellboots··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2021)
Enzyme | HQ San Francisco, CA | REMOTE

Think TurboTax, but for FDA compliance.

We’re building a software platform to handle the compliance aspects of running a drug or medical device company. Compliance is an ongoing activity for companies in this space, and annual costs per company range anywhere from $100K to $100M. Being deemed not compliant can be devastating, preventing a company from selling any new product for months and sometimes years.

In lieu of hiring costly consultants or employees to address this problem, customers provide our platform access to their data, and the platform outputs documentation in the manner that FDA and other regulatory agencies are looking for.

By using our software platform, customers will cut their annual regulatory costs by 50% (on average) and reduce the risk that their products will not get approved for sale.

* Full Stack Developer (Ruby / Elixir) - Senior - https://angel.co/company/enzymecorp/jobs/287059-full-stack-d...

* Sr. DevOps Engineer (AWS / Terraform) - https://angel.co/company/enzymecorp/jobs/921769-sr-devops-en...

spellboots··on Show HN: Gitorials – Tutorials as Git Repos
I made a similar tool if you want to output a nicely formatted HTML tutorial:

http://github.com/alexspeller/kondiment

spellboots··on Ask HN: How do you deal with cold fingertips when you code?
https://gizmodo.com/262981/this-heated-keyboard-is-the-best-...
spellboots··on Dear GitHub
:+1:
spellboots··on Paris Shootings and Explosions Kill Over 100, Police Say
Assuming that humans will behave rationally is, in itself, quite irrational
spellboots··on Decoding the Enigma of Satoshi Nakamoto and the Birth of Bitcoin
Why wouldn't this be protected speech under the first amendment? As long as the newspaper believes it to be true, why wouldn't they be allowed to publish it?
spellboots··on Working Remotely From A Tropical Island In Thailand
This seems to be contradicted by this recent article:

http://asiancorrespondent.com/125980/thai-immigration-offici...

spellboots··on “We have decided not to integrate the Dart VM into Chrome”
Anyone creating a new Ember.js application today is using babel by default. It works very well in my experience. I haven't used typescript however.
spellboots··on Y Combinator ups the ante with bio startups for 2015
They are in other countries. I just did my kit in the UK.

https://www.23andme.com/en-gb/

spellboots··on Ask HN: RapGenius for code?
"Omniref (YC W15) Is Rap Genius for Code":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8821117

spellboots··on $500k of Azure credit for YC startups
Perhaps, perhaps not. You could argue that choosing not to enable data scrubbing was a deliberate decision by DO to place cost savings (simpler / less costly not to scrub SSDs and saves cell wearing) over security, wheras linode was just the victim of a targeted attack and were unlucky but are overall more competent. Or perhaps not.

In short, unless you have inside information, there is not enough information to determine which company is more competent or more trustworthy - it's not possible to judge which company you should trust with your business based on the available facts in an objective way currently, as the available data is easily attributable to simple bad luck.

In contrast, the performance difference is objectively measurable: http://joshtronic.com/2014/06/22/ten-dollar-showdown-linode-...

spellboots··on $500k of Azure credit for YC startups
Every provider will have security issues occasionally. Including digital ocean:

http://venturebeat.com/2014/01/02/digitalocean-fixes-securit...

spellboots··on $500k of Azure credit for YC startups
I've found this to be very untrue - digital ocean offers very poor performance per $ compared to linode in my experience. Linode don't have a $5/month option but if you pay $10/month or more you will get a lot better performance at Linode
spellboots··on “Anthem was the target of a very sophisticated external cyber attack”
> any crypto we use today will be trivially cracked by a cell phone 20 years from now.

This is completely false for correctly implemented crypto unless mobile phones of the future are made of something other than matter and occupy something other than space. It could also be that fundamental understandings of math and physics are incorrect. But the idea that just because of improved technology we'll be able to crack today's crypto is ludicrous

http://i.imgur.com/CzyO1yv.jpg

spellboots··on F.C.C. Is Expected to Propose Regulating the Internet as a Utility
> When is the last time your water pipe had a virus?

"From 2005-2006, 20% of US outbreaks of virus and bacteria in water were caused by old, dirty pipes"

http://www.premierwatermn.com/water-quality/water-contaminan...

spellboots··on Replace CoffeeScript with ES6
Is that a major concern? In practice, it's unlikely any serious use of ES6 will run in a browser without a build step due to concatenation, minification etc
spellboots··on What Will the World Speak in 2115?
Relevant talk: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
spellboots··on Show HN: Bravo to Zero – the quickest way to get back to Inbox Zero
Definitely a missing feature, I will add this at some point. It shouldn't be too hard as it will be very similar to archiving.
spellboots··on Show HN: Bravo to Zero – the quickest way to get back to Inbox Zero
This is my entry for the 2014 Rails Rumble, built in 48 hours.

You may be understandably reluctant to hand over access to your email to a third party, so if you think it looks useful but don't want to do that I've released the code [1] so you can run it locally or deploy your own instance to heroku.

Hopefully it's also interesting as a hectic but full stack example of a Rails and Ember app that does something useful. Figuring out how to get the google apis wired up was quite painful so hopefully it will be useful if you're interested in playing around with the new Gmail apis without bashing your head against a wall too much!

If you like it you can vote for it in the rails rumble by logging in with heroku or twitter [2] [1] https://github.com/railsrumble/r14-team-94 [2] http://railsrumble.com/entries/94-bravo-to-zero

spellboots··on Copywrong
35mm photos are very high resolution - between 87 and 175 megapixels according to http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/film-resolution.htm
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