Hacker News: The_Fox

New comment by The_Fox in "Ordinary abundance"

The_Fox — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 19:22:42 +0000

I also used to be affected by node outages on a cable network, but now I have Starlink and as long as I can generate some power, I can be online. I wouldn't go back; you might consider it.

New comment by The_Fox in "Learning a few things about running SQLite"

The_Fox — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 20:20:32 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man%27s_switch

In this context it means upon a successful backup, update a timestamp somewhere. Some other system monitors the timestamp and if it ever becomes more than for example 1 day ago, it fires an alert.

The Coming Divide: AI-Native or Left Behind

The_Fox — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 16:31:22 +0000

Article URL: https://danielmiessler.com/blog/ai-native-divide

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48688588

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

AI enthusiasts in a race against time, AI skeptics in a race against entropy

The_Fox — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 21:14:04 +0000

Article URL: https://charity.wtf/2026/06/15/ai-demands-more-engineering-discipline-not-less-xpost/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48665719

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by The_Fox in "The Last Technical Interview"

The_Fox — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 22:22:52 +0000

I read that post back in the day and have remembered it ever since, and used it as a basis for the process at my current employment. Thank you!

(For those interested: https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/)

The AI Superstars Who Say a 'Vibe Slop' Crisis Is Coming

The_Fox — Fri, 22 May 2026 16:08:47 +0000

Article URL: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/vibe-coding-slop-ai-tools-e6a99394

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48237841

Points: 6

# Comments: 1

New comment by The_Fox in "Throwing AI-generated walls of text into conversations"

The_Fox — Thu, 21 May 2026 17:31:27 +0000

I view this use of AI as a type of denial of service attack. Alice sends Bob a wall of text (low effort) and Bob must parse it (high effort, yet probably no value received for the effort).

NASA wants to know how the launch industry's chic new rocket fuel explodes

The_Fox — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 12:35:41 +0000

Article URL: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/03/nasa-is-blowing-stuff-up-to-study-the-explosive-potential-of-methalox-rockets/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47466454

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

New comment by The_Fox in "British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time"

The_Fox — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 21:25:31 +0000

"Pacific time" is going to be so confusing though. Should have just called it Yukon Standard Time, since that's already a thing, at least informally. Cause that would not be confusing at all...

Yukon Time Zone

The_Fox — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 21:20:44 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukon_Time_Zone

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47224245

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by The_Fox in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (March 2026)"

The_Fox — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 17:41:23 +0000

  Location: Kelowna area, BC, Canada

  Remote: Yep

  Willing to relocate: Nope

  Technologies: Linux, Kubernetes, Helm, Docker, Terraform, SaltStack, PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, Nginx, Python, Django, apt packaging, iptables, VPNs, TCP congestion control algorithms (more than I ever wanted to know)

  Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/foxmatthew/

  Email: matt@tansen.ca

I seek contract platform engineering projects. I can help early stage startups set up infrastructure and CICD so founders can focus on PMF. And I can help established software companies with outdated infrastructure adopt modern tools and practices.

I have 15 years of experience in startup software development and DevOps across web apps, cloud, and Linux networking. 10 years of leadership in teams of up to 7 people. I have built infrastructure using Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Digital Ocean, and Linode.

Here are a sample of my accomplishments:

* Built a platform for hosting web apps using Kubernetes at a major cloud provider and taught engineers to operate and improve it. Introduced Terraform, Helm, and incident management processes. It operates in 4 regions and has about 250 total CPUs.

* Led a B2B SaaS company through their first SOC 2 Type II audit.

* Created an application CI/CD pipeline using Jenkins and Gitlab, resulting in a DORA performance score of 8.0 (above average in all scores according to dora.dev)

* Published and maintained the community Apt package for Helm, the Kubernetes package manager, which is downloaded more than 200,000 times per month.

* Created a system to control calls in Asterisk with AI-trained voice commands ("hey asterisk, dial extension 1") https://github.com/mattfox/asterisk-voice-control

New comment by The_Fox in "I baked a pie every day for a year"

The_Fox — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 21:43:37 +0000

It wasn't for no reason at all though. There were concerns about availability of yeast, which isn't used in sourdough. (Valid concerns or not, I have no idea.)

New comment by The_Fox in "AI makes you boring"

The_Fox — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 22:54:16 +0000

Yesterday my manager sent LLM-generated code that did a thing. Of course I didn't read it, I only read Claude's summary of it. Then I died a little inside.

It was especially unfortunate because to do its thing, the code required a third party's own personal user credentials including MFA, which is a complete non-starter in server-side code, but apparently the manager's LLM wasn't aware enough to know that.

New comment by The_Fox in "Painless Software Schedules (2000)"

The_Fox — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 20:19:41 +0000

Agreed- just a month ago I told my team to read https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev... and note how Spolsky knew the details of his application (weird date issues in Excel and VB). If you want to be a senior engineer, you need to know where are the odd edge cases in your app. I don't want to be the only one on the team who remembers that stuff.

New comment by The_Fox in "There is an AI code review bubble"

The_Fox — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 20:31:42 +0000

I installed CodeRabbit for our reviews in GitLab and am pretty happy with the results, especially considering the low price ($15/user/mo I think).

It regularly finds problems, including subtle but important problems that human reviewers struggle to find. And it can make pretty good suggestions for fixes.

It also regularly complains about things that are possible in theory but impossible in practice, so we've gotten used to just resolving those comments without any action. Maybe if we used types more effectively it would do that less.

We pay a lot more attention to what CodeRabbit says than what DeepSource said when use used it.

New comment by The_Fox in "What is the nicest thing a stranger has ever done for you?"

The_Fox — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 07:24:24 +0000

I was driving home with my family from a long trip having just bought a really cool camping trailer, a 1979 Airstream. Our vehicle died on the side of the road in a rural area. The owner of the property where we stopped was mowing his lawn and came over and asked if we needed help. When it became obvious our vehicle needed a tow, he used his own truck to bring the trailer onto his property. And he kept it there for a couple of weeks while the engine in our vehicle was replaced.

I'm really not sure what I would have done with the trailer if he hadn't offered to help. We were more than 600 km from home.

New comment by The_Fox in "Django: what’s new in 6.0"

The_Fox — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 22:28:07 +0000

I'm an avid HTMX user but never did I ever think "I'm using so many includes, I wish I didn't have to use include so much."

What I would like is a way to cut down the sprawl of urls and views.

New comment by The_Fox in "Doom crash after 2.5 years of real-world runtime confirmed on real hardware"

The_Fox — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 18:47:57 +0000

This is a great quote for the topic, but the quote is normally about a bridge that barely stands.

I'm chuckling at the thought of barely building something. (All in good fun, thank you.)

New comment by The_Fox in "Public static void main(String[] args) is dead"

The_Fox — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 05:44:21 +0000

I distinctly recall early in my first university programming courses the instructor saying something to the effect of "Just wait until you learn 'public static void main'". I think we had only used BlueJ until that point in the course.

Education report calling for ethical AI use contains over 15 fake sources

The_Fox — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 21:29:54 +0000

Article URL: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/09/education-report-calling-for-ethical-ai-use-contains-over-15-fake-sources/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45226988

Points: 6

# Comments: 1