Hacker News: Rafert

New comment by Rafert in "Show HN: I'm a 15 Year Old Wannabe Engineer, This Is a Cycloidal Gearbox I Built"

Rafert — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 16:29:34 +0000

It really depends on where you live and in some places that distinction does not matter. See for example https://www.canadianconsultingengineer.com/quebec-order-of-e...

New comment by Rafert in "Show HN: I'm a 15 Year Old Wannabe Engineer, This Is a Cycloidal Gearbox I Built"

Rafert — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 13:06:12 +0000

There are places (eg Canada) where engineer is a protected title like lawyer or doctor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_and_licensure_in_en...

New comment by Rafert in "Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion"

Rafert — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 15:11:53 +0000

And in case people are looking for an open source alternative, Fly.io's tokenizer is a credential-injecting proxy: https://fly.io/blog/tokenized-tokens/

New comment by Rafert in "Using proxies to hide secrets from Claude Code"

Rafert — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 15:18:39 +0000

The concept of a proxy injecting/removing sensitive data has been for much longer, e.g. VGS has a JS SDK and proxy to handle credit card data for you and keep you out of PCI scope.

New comment by Rafert in "ClickHouse acquires Langfuse"

Rafert — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 16:08:45 +0000

I'm surprised it's not mentioned yet, but this seems to compliment last year's acquisition of observability tool HyperDX[1] (part of ClickStack[2]) quite well. I'm in the market for a new o11y platform and it seems all vendors are working to add LLM observability one way or the other, if they haven't added it already.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44194082 2: https://clickhouse.com/use-cases/observability

New comment by Rafert in "The Netflix Simian Army (2011)"

Rafert — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 16:01:56 +0000

I know of https://github.com/Shopify/toxiproxy but it is not protocol aware, you might be able to add it yourself.

New comment by Rafert in "Shai-Hulud compromised a dev machine and raided GitHub org access: a post-mortem"

Rafert — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 17:59:00 +0000

> This is one of the frustrating realities of these attacks: once the malware runs, identifying the source becomes extremely difficult. The package doesn't announce itself. The pnpm install completes successfully. Everything looks normal.

Sounds like there’s no EDR running on the dev machines? You should have more to investigate if Sentinel One/CrowdStrike/etc were running.

New comment by Rafert in "Exploring PostgreSQL 18's new UUIDv7 support"

Rafert — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 12:28:15 +0000

> Using UUIDv7 is generally discouraged for security when the primary key is exposed to end users in external-facing applications or APIs.

I would not call this “generally discouraged” when APIs generally surface a created_at timestamp in their responses. A real life example are Stripe IDs which have similar properties (k-sorted) as UUIDv7: https://brandur.org/nanoglyphs/026-ids#ulids

New comment by Rafert in "TKey – Security for the New World"

Rafert — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 03:11:34 +0000

The counter can always be 0, which is what cloud synced passkeys are doing IIRC.

New comment by Rafert in "Blazer: Business intelligence made simple"

Rafert — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 18:41:25 +0000

We've used it for about a year - Blazer is okay if you need a quick SQL query console, but we found it lacking as a business intelligence tool. The support for graphs and dashboards is limited, for graphs it requires you to structure the query in an exact way as you can see in the Blazer readme. There is no customizability at all.

After some research on available alternatives that don't break the bank, we decided to deploy a self-hosted instance of Metabase[0]. This took only a few minutes to set up using their Docker image[1] and it has much better graphing capabilities and you can easily put a custom layout together for dashboards. Upgrading is similarly easy (just redeploy). Also easy to configure: additional data sources, hiding or changing the data type of a column, G Suite sign-in for our domain. It has 'models' as sources of truth to build other queries in - eg a single definition of an 'active user'.

In short, moving from Blazer to Metabase was a huge win for us. Highly recommend it if you need anything more than Blazer's table output.

[0]: https://github.com/metabase/metabase [1]: https://docs.render.com/deploy-metabase

New comment by Rafert in "UUID v7"

Rafert — Mon, 05 Feb 2024 14:57:15 +0000

> It would be quite unfortunate to end up with a UUID v7 in PostgreSQL that’s not quite the standardized one because the patch got merged too quickly.

The chances of that seem extremely low at this point. The contents of a version 7 UUID have not changed since work started on RFC 4122 bis in October 2022: https://author-tools.ietf.org/iddiff?url1=draft-ietf-uuidrev...

New comment by Rafert in "Show HN: Pigsty – Free RDS Alternative"

Rafert — Sun, 24 Sep 2023 14:52:11 +0000

Curious which DBs are "production ready" according to you, and how you define that exactly.

New comment by Rafert in "Shopify will be smaller by about 20% and Flexport will buy Shopify Logistics"

Rafert — Thu, 04 May 2023 13:26:26 +0000

I'm aware - but that's hardly their first foray into the space is what I'm trying to say. I guess 'abandoning expansion' can be read multiple ways :)

New comment by Rafert in "Shopify will be smaller by about 20% and Flexport will buy Shopify Logistics"

Rafert — Thu, 04 May 2023 13:03:18 +0000

Quickly? They acquired 6 River Systems and announced the Shopify Fulfillment Network back in 2019. The were some pivots along the way (using 3rd party vs building out own warehouses) but it seems to me they've been at it for some time.

New comment by Rafert in "Shopify will be smaller by about 20% and Flexport will buy Shopify Logistics"

Rafert — Thu, 04 May 2023 12:35:19 +0000

Things changed quite a bit since this quote from February 17:

> “There’s no cuts coming for us,” Harley Finkelstein told The Canadian Press. “We’re in a really good place.”

https://globalnews.ca/news/9494197/shopify-outlook-no-layoff...

New comment by Rafert in "Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails"

Rafert — Fri, 07 Apr 2023 22:48:35 +0000

Have you tried Tapioca (https://github.com/Shopify/tapioca) with Sorbet? Typing in general has ways to go sure, but I find this combination quite usable in my day to day.

New comment by Rafert in "Homebrew 4.0.0"

Rafert — Thu, 16 Feb 2023 12:10:25 +0000

Besides consent there is also the possibility of legitimate interest under the GDPR.

New comment by Rafert in "GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices"

Rafert — Thu, 09 Feb 2023 19:12:15 +0000

They were locked into long term leases anyway: https://storeys.com/shopify-the-well-toronto-office-space-su...

New comment by Rafert in "Ruby 3.2.0 is from another dimension"

Rafert — Wed, 04 Jan 2023 15:00:50 +0000

Agreed. The author is surprised by a major Ruby release on Christmas day (tradition for many years) and uses a lot of superlatives for no reason.

New comment by Rafert in "Ruby 3.2.0 is from another dimension"

Rafert — Wed, 04 Jan 2023 13:52:29 +0000

`Float(str, exception: false)` returns either float or nil.