Hacker News: almost

New comment by almost in "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"

almost — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 08:39:26 +0000

Also what I got. Then I tried changing "wash" to "repair" and "car wash" to "garage" and it's back to walking.

New comment by almost in "An Update on Heroku"

almost — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 06:15:45 +0000

For me Northflank have filled this spot. Though by the time I switched I was already using Docker so can't speak directly to their Heroku Buildpack support.

New comment by almost in "An Update on Heroku"

almost — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 06:12:56 +0000

I've been incredibly happy with Northflank since moving over a few years ago after Heroku got unreliable. Felt like an upgrade from Heroku and the support and reliability have been great.

New comment by almost in "Databases in 2025: A Year in Review"

almost — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 17:03:13 +0000

The reason you heard that was probably because they were talking about a more specific circumstance. For example SQLite is often used as a database during development in Django projects but not usually in production (there are exceptions of course!). So you may have read when setting up Django, or a similar thing, that the SQLite option wasn't meant for production because usually you'd use a database like Postgres for that. Absolutely doesn't mean that SQLite isn't used in production, it's just used for different things.

Petlibro: Pet Feeder Is Feeding Data to Anyone Who Asks

almost — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 07:37:00 +0000

Article URL: https://bobdahacker.com/blog/petlibro

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46409212

Points: 7

# Comments: 1

New comment by almost in "Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship"

almost — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 22:57:47 +0000

From my experience though I often do make logical errors in my code but not in my tests and I do frequently catch errors because of this. I think thats a fairly normal experience with writing automated tests.

Would having someone else write the tests catch more logical errors? Very possibly, I haven't tried it but that sounds reasonable. It also does seem like that (and the other things it implies) would be a pretty extreme change in the speed of development. I can see it being worth it in some situations but honestly I don't see it as something practical for many types of projects.

What I don't understand is saying "well we can't do the really extremely hard version so let's not do the fairly easy version" which is how I took you original comment.

New comment by almost in "Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship"

almost — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 19:19:06 +0000

This sounds very "the perfect is the enemy of good". Tests don't need to be perfect, they don't need to be written by different people (!!!), they don't need to cover 100% of the code. As long as they're not flakey (tests which fail randomly really can he worse than nothing) it really helps in development and maintenence to have some tests. It's really nice when the (frequent) mistakes I make show up on my machine or on the CI server rather than in production, and my (very imperfect, not 100% "done properly") tests account for a lot of those catches.

Obviously pragmatism is always important and no advice applies to 100% of features/projects/people/companies. Sometimes the test is more trouble to write than it's worth and TDD never worked for me with the exception of specific types of work (good when writing parsers I find!).

New comment by almost in "Brimstone: ES2025 JavaScript engine written in Rust"

almost — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 19:55:46 +0000

When it's a library it's fairly important what it's written (or at least written for)

New comment by almost in "React vs. Backbone in 2025"

almost — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 11:32:08 +0000

For something this simple that doesn't need to grow or interact with the rest of the system why would you need Backbone or React? And why would you expect any version to be shorter as it's mostly just the HTML and the data.

I remember writing Backbone applications with lots of deeply nested components. Trying to keep all the state in sync and reacting to events. It certainly wasn't simple and straightforward.

This just feels like a very silly article.

Tell HN: Stripe seems to have suspended human customer support

almost — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 14:32:12 +0000

While trying to get in touch with Stripe today for a standard support enquiry (turning on a feature on my account) I found that the support button leads only to an AI Assistant. It is possible to still get to the "Support Center" but there's no way to create a ticket. So it seems like Stripe have completely replaced human support with an LLM that can only repeat back the public documentation to you.

It does still say in various places on the Stripe website that "All Stripe customers receive 24x7 phone, email, and chat help" but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore

I'm sure a lot of people here rely on Stripe so I thought this was worth a post! Has anyone else has any luck getting in touch with Stripe recently?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45473585

Points: 23

# Comments: 3

New comment by almost in "What would you do with 52 hours a week of discretionary time? (2023)"

almost — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 06:31:19 +0000

Wasting time is absolutely glorious. Don't let anyone tell you that you can't or shouldn't.

Or as Kurt Vonnegut put it "I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you any different"

(That being said if Tik Tok is making you sad delete that shit right away. Wasting time is glorious but feeling depressed sucks.)

New comment by almost in "Classic 8×8-pixel B&W Mac patterns"

almost — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 20:36:23 +0000

Nostalgic! Who needs a colar display or even a monochrome display when you've got a high res (for the time) black and white screen :)

New comment by almost in "We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes"

almost — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 06:49:47 +0000

360 degrees in a circle predates Plato by quite a lot (2000 years I think!). It comes from the Summarians more than 4000 years ago. They used a method of counting on fingers that goes up to 12 on one hand and 60 using both hands, so their numbering system was based on 60. 360 is 6 * 60 and also roughly how many days in a year.

Later societies inherited that from them along with 60 minutes in and hour.

New comment by almost in "Show HN: AgentGuard – Auto-kill AI agents before they burn through your budget"

almost — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 06:48:16 +0000

So it monkey-patches a set of common http libraries and then detects calls to AI APIs? Not obvious which APIs it would detect or in what situations it would miss them. Seems kind of dangeorus to rely on something like that. You install it and it might be doing nothing, You only find out after somethings gone wrong.

If I was using something like this I think I'd rather have it wrap the AI API clients. Then it can throw an error if it doesn't recongise the client library I'm using. This way it'll just silently fail to monitor if what I'm using isn't in its supported list (whatever that is!)

I do think the idea is good though, just needs to be obvious how it will work when used and how/when it will fail.

New comment by almost in "Show HN: Job Compass – AI agents that help you find jobs, not replace you"

almost — Sat, 14 Jun 2025 21:58:34 +0000

I haven't, but it sounds honestly really bad. Sounds like it sucks for everyone right now. I just think your product will make it worse, probably only very slightly worse but still worse.

New comment by almost in "Show HN: Job Compass – AI agents that help you find jobs, not replace you"

almost — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 17:02:22 +0000

Surely this now means now hiring managers (and people your code incorrectly identifies as hiring managers) now get spammed with loads of bullshit generated messages. Which obviously they'll ignore. But now you've made their jobs a bit harder by breaking a previously (maybe) working communication channel.

So you've put a effort in to build a product just to make the world slightly worse on net. Not hugely worse, but still it doesn't seem like the best way you could have spent your time.

New comment by almost in "Mistral Code"

almost — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 19:06:44 +0000

Yes, but how likely were you to spend tens of thousands of dollars or more on software?

New comment by almost in "The Practical Guide to Scaling Django"

almost — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 23:19:35 +0000

This sort of article seems perfectly poised to be useless to beginners (no context, doesn't tell you how to use the things) and experts (no nuance, just listing basic features) alike. Who is it for? Why does it exist? Why is it posted here?

New comment by almost in "CIL: C Intermediate Language"

almost — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 09:49:13 +0000

There are a finite number of names, and an even smaller number of good names. But apparently an infinite number of hacker news posters who comment on every new project to complain that the name has been used before for something else.

And even the fact that this is a fork of an earlier project and the name comes from that doesn't stop it!

(I'm aware I have chosen a very weird thing to be getting annoyed at over my breakfast crumpets this morning)

New comment by almost in "What’s new with Robinhood, our in-house load balancing service"

almost — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 10:31:38 +0000

Weird that a gambling app would take thename of a popular character from legend!

Or maybe not, try actually naming something sometime and you'll see. It's not easy to come up with something that fits all the requirements AND has never been used before.

And it's not like anyone is ever going to get confused and accidentally try and use Dropbox's internal load balancer to buy options on a stock or something. Or try and make a gambling app the star of their next hit movie for that matter.