Hacker News: SOLAR_FIELDS

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)"

SOLAR_FIELDS — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 21:23:58 +0000

a bold attempt, how does it compare with https://github.com/nektos/act which has been the de-jure project in this space? Act has never been in my opinion super great, but it's also been several years since I've checked in to revisit the project.

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)"

SOLAR_FIELDS — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 20:54:02 +0000

Is this similar to Netmaker's offering? Platform wrapper around wireguard protocol?

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)"

SOLAR_FIELDS — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 19:19:59 +0000

Lot of people are building agent runtime platforms right now. Look at LiteLLM's play into the space, for example. It's the new hot space for innovation. IMO the main play here is going to be on the self hosted/provenance aspect, because every major provider is now branching into services now to try and entrap you into their hosted platform ecosystem with all of these integrations

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in "Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength"

SOLAR_FIELDS — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 19:30:01 +0000

I tried this in my house that has ancient copper telephone lines. I was trying to get some level of walled ethernet. I wanted to use the existing wires to pull new ethernet as is discussed here, sadly the builders had stapled them to the interior studs when they ran the telephone lines back in the 70's.

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in "The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded"

SOLAR_FIELDS — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 03:22:33 +0000

Meanwhile I’m over here with my 100 line flake.nix that installs system dependencies with direnv across hundreds of dev users and dozens of repositories wondering why everyone is all up in arms about boring and stable technology that solves a specific problem

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in ""It's unclear how Sopwith escaped to the general public.""

SOLAR_FIELDS — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 03:01:15 +0000

There’s just something so charming about this era of game design. I think SkiFree is a shit game by modern standards, but I absolutely love the design of some stick figure yeti inevitably coming and eating you no matter how good you think you are. It’s a philosophy thing at some point

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in "Claude Code: Starting August 14, auto mode will be the default permission mode"

SOLAR_FIELDS — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 02:50:29 +0000

Can’t defeat that, hard to observe data that you never receive.

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in "Claude Code: Starting August 14, auto mode will be the default permission mode"

SOLAR_FIELDS — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 01:26:17 +0000

Anything that happens on the client, you can capture. You can capture anything delivered to the client that isn’t exposed by downloading the Claude code binary, unpacking it, and patching the nodejs HTTP library fetch call to listen for all traffic, then analyze it and build your own tracing. Or you can MITM with a proxy for a bit more heavy handed approach. It sucks you don’t get it out of the box, but you could literally paste my comment into a Claude prompt and have the tracing you desire in probably less than 30 minutes

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in "Managing AI Coding Costs at Scale"

SOLAR_FIELDS — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 01:08:02 +0000

> if you have a 500k line codebase and even > 50% is written by agents, you are in a world of pain that won’t justify the costs longer term

A bold claim to make with little to no supporting evidence

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in "Oracle cut its Always Free ARM limits to 2 OCPU / 12GB, enforced Aug 18"

SOLAR_FIELDS — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 17:56:47 +0000

I did not try for long, but I was also never able to actually provision, this was a couple years ago when I tried, the only people I saw report success were using the scripted methodology to periodically attempt I mentioned in grandparent comment.

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in "Oracle cut its Always Free ARM limits to 2 OCPU / 12GB, enforced Aug 18"

SOLAR_FIELDS — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 17:54:17 +0000

I’ve been PAYG for several years now and have straight up idled the instances for months at a time and never been deprovisioned

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in "Oracle cut its Always Free ARM limits to 2 OCPU / 12GB, enforced Aug 18"

SOLAR_FIELDS — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 16:44:31 +0000

For what it's worth, I am a user of this and I'd like to clear up one thing that is not obvious here:

There are actually two tiers of Free here that Oracle offers.

Always Free - No credit card required, sign up. This is what the new limit applies to

PAYG - You give a credit card, but like AWS and GCP there is a "free" tier for people who are on pay as you go plans. From what I can tell, the PAYG subscribers are not subject to this lower limit, only Always Free users.

In other words, if you want the old provisioning limits for free you just have to put your credit card info in.

There are additional reasons that you would want to switch to PAYG - for instance, oracle will literally tear down your always free resources if you are idling them, they are watching CPU and memory and if they see them idled they will take them away. Also, even provisioning always free instances is a challenge - most people have to write bots that attempt on a regular basis, since they appear to only allow you to register when existing resources are freed up, either by the reaper referenced earlier or by someone deprovisioning their always free resources. Neither of these limitations apply on the PAYG tier

It's worth clearing up, because this amount of free resources is worth a nonzero amount of money, if you provisioned comparable resources on any of the tier 1 or tier 2 cloud's you would be paying well over $1k/year for what they are handing over for free. AWS + GCP free compute offerings are anemic in comparison. It's a significant amount of compute.

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in "Devtools must be open source"

SOLAR_FIELDS — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 21:07:06 +0000

As an end user, I don't mind if you're building a product with rapidly changing API's out in the open. I'll still use the product if it's useful and deal with the churn. What I DO care about is not having half of that project rug pulled 12 months down the line when your Series B folks decide that this particular money knob needs to be turned up.

So if you want to not piss off your users, that's the way to do it. Build a model where you can actually sustain the product, and no, giving it away on seed and series A round money then rug pulling that gift is not the way to achieve that.

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in "Why Book Corners won't sync contributions back to OpenStreetMap"

SOLAR_FIELDS — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 13:04:21 +0000

Okay, that’s slightly more reasonable it means if I’m going to be rolling stuff back into OSM in a new country I should at least have a quick chat and ensure what I’m doing abides by that country’s regulations etc like South Korea has some notorious law around data residency

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in "Why Book Corners won't sync contributions back to OpenStreetMap"

SOLAR_FIELDS — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 12:37:10 +0000

I get this perspective. But I also find the standards to be onerous. They were honestly fine until this one:

> Contact the relevant local communities affected by the contributions

Do I literally have to do new local community outreach every little town one of my bookcases shows up in? Ridiculous if so

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in "Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter"

SOLAR_FIELDS — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 11:05:15 +0000

Perhaps because encoding < but not > makes the code significantly more confusing and less readable.

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in "Kobuk the Destroyer – Tales from the Wild, Unseen World of Test Engineering"

SOLAR_FIELDS — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 02:52:26 +0000

SDET is one of those things that you can never justify, but if you allow it to happen and the SDET is good it pays itself off several hundred times over

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in "AI financial advice is surprisingly good, especially if you ask right questions"

SOLAR_FIELDS — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 23:26:12 +0000

If you’re a layman investor just dump all of your shit in index funds. Even if you’re smart and sophisticated, you’re still competing against the massive amount of fraudulent insider trading happening right now with zero enforcement and are trading at a disadvantage as a result

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

SOLAR_FIELDS — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 23:20:21 +0000

I think the situation is slightly more nuanced than that. When the easiest path by far is long lived keys, there is something to be said about the security posture of a solution where those are the default behavior, especially if they don’t actively discourage usage in documentation. For instance if you go to aws and try to create an iam user with access key/secret key they warn the shit out of you multiple times. They say things like “this is a bad idea” “we don’t recommend this” and “use this better solution instead”. I think if you’re providing an auth service like this you have some level of responsibility to guide people towards the less naive solution - part of what you’re selling in an auth offering is security, so if you default to garbage security, you don’t have a very good offering

New comment by SOLAR_FIELDS in "How much can you delegate to agents?"

SOLAR_FIELDS — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 04:52:25 +0000

Dealing with humans is way harder than dealing with a machine that is programmed to agree with you