Hacker News: bluehatbrit

New comment by bluehatbrit in "My Homelab Setup"

bluehatbrit — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 21:50:30 +0000

Could you elaborate on the issues with their S3 compatible storage? I've been considering it and haven't seen too many issues in my testing, beyond the lack of identity control.

New comment by bluehatbrit in "A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification"

bluehatbrit — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 23:08:48 +0000

Absolutely not, that would prevent profits to big political donors. Instead we should ban bash oneliners, or ID gate them. No loops or pipes (etc) unless you've handed over government issued ID.

1Password's new benchmark teaches AI agents how not to get scammed

bluehatbrit — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 14:34:37 +0000

Article URL: https://1password.com/blog/ai-agent-security-benchmark

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46989342

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by bluehatbrit in "Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?"

bluehatbrit — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 11:55:58 +0000

Google pay Mozilla hundreds of millions of dollars each year to place Google as the default browser. It's by far their biggest income stream. In 2023 it was reported as 75% of their revenue.

There's no world in which 75% of your revenue coming from Google doesn't influence what you do. Even if it's not the main driver of all decisions, pissing off Google is a huge risk for them.

New comment by bluehatbrit in "Warner Bros Begins Exclusive Deal Talks With Netflix"

bluehatbrit — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 07:58:26 +0000

Great for shareholders, terrible for consumers. This is what we get when we allow rampant consolidation and throw out the idea of regulated competition.

New comment by bluehatbrit in "10 years of writing a blog nobody reads"

bluehatbrit — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 07:41:04 +0000

At university in the UK it's almost always maximums rather than minimums. It's damn hard as well, you never get the word count you actually need to fully cover the subject and always end up desperately counting those last few as you trim it down. My university would cap your grade if you went over the count by a certain % as well.

I do think it made me better at writing though, and it certainly made me aware of how much people are actually willing to read.

New comment by bluehatbrit in "NixOS 25.11 released"

bluehatbrit — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 15:37:42 +0000

I've been on a similar journey this past month, although it sounds like mine went a little more successfully. I've managed to get a repo setup which contains a nix flake with nix-darwin configuration, and it also calls into some home-manager modules which I also use on a linux device as well. I do agree, the nix language isn't particularly to my taste either.

I know you're hoping to go from first principals but I'm happy to share the repo if you want (email in my profile).

Aside from that, what issues did you run into? I'm keen to know if I've just not gone deep enough and will soon hit something.

New comment by bluehatbrit in "Zed is our office"

bluehatbrit — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 18:51:25 +0000

This is what I'd like to see as well. These collaboration tools are really good, but I barely use them because they always assume that you and your team are using the same editor. Most of the time that's just not the case, so I've used them a handful of times but beyond that there's little opportunity.

It's probably not an issue the Zed team will experience as they're all naturally using their own editor. Hopefully it's on their radar though.

New comment by bluehatbrit in "Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure"

bluehatbrit — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 14:32:09 +0000

I live in a city in the UK and use the train to commute daily. Return travel on a peak train costs me £8.40 (arriving at work before 9am), and £6.50 if I go in after peak (arriving at work after 9am).

Every year without fail this goes up by a noticable amount, but the service is still unreliable. Looking back at my travel history, the train has either been late to arrive or late to get to my destination around 30% of the time. That delays can vary a lot as well between about 10mins (this morning for example) to 30 minutes on average.

But that's the average picture, the winters get so much worse for my route. There's a tunnel just before our station which frequently has water pouring through when it rains heavily which means no trains can run until it stops. Several times I've left my house with all the trains listed as running on-time and arrived at the station to be told by the (very nice) guard that he doesn't expect there to be any trains through until mid day.

They also get very crowded, at least on my route. They're meant to send a 3 carriage train but will frequently end up with only 2 carriages because they had a problem with one of them. This usually delays people boarding which means the resulting journey is around £8.40 for no seat and a 10-15 minute delay.

The UK rail sure isn't the worst in the world by any stretch. When a journey goes well it's seemless and I'm a big fan. But a lot of the time it feels like you're being bent over, especially when after several weeks of reduced services due to strikes you're suddenly met with a price hike of 5% with no improvement in the services reliability. All of that is just when you're talking about commuting as well. Any time I'm forced to head to London it's a miserable emptying of my wallet.

All of this is just my daily experience, but I'm so sick of this failed experiment. Each year it costs more, the service is just as unreliable, and the profits all leave the UK.

Maybe my expectations aren't reasonable, but it's something I'm effectively forced to use daily because of house prices.

New comment by bluehatbrit in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)"

bluehatbrit — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 14:01:44 +0000

Professionally, my team just made our big new launch of a feedback collection tool - https://www.sunbeam.cx/asklet. It tries to go just a little beyond the "give us a star rating" and collect some more detailed feedback without being too in-your-face or annoying.

In my spare time I've been working on a small service for making sure I remember friends and families birthdays. I think it's really important but with friends all having kids it's becoming more and more to keep track of in the calendar. I'm putting together a small web app which takes in the birthday and sends me a reminder a set amount of time away, with some suggestions for birthday gifts.

The suggestions right now are just ones that I've entered as I've come across ideas throughout the year for people. But I want to try and plug in known interests and see if I can do a better recommendation for myself. I'm hoping to keep it quite small as I don't want to take the spirit out of remembering people's birthdays, but I do want to be more consistent.

New comment by bluehatbrit in "Head in the Zed Cloud"

bluehatbrit — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 23:11:25 +0000

The attempts at collaborative tools in Zed was always far more interesting to me than the AI stuff. Don't get me wrong, their AI stuff is nice and works well for me, but it's hardly necessary in an editor with how good Claude Code and others are.

But the times I've used the collaboration tooling in Zed have been really excellent. It just sucks it's not getting much attention recently. In particular I'd really like to see some movement on something that works across multiple different editors on this front.

I'm glad to hear they're still thinking about these kind of features.

One Organization, Multiple Tailnets

bluehatbrit — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 14:40:19 +0000

Article URL: https://tailscale.com/blog/multiple-tailnets-alpha

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45747448

Points: 6

# Comments: 1

New comment by bluehatbrit in "You already have a Git server"

bluehatbrit — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 19:25:08 +0000

I really like forgejo, but the git hosting bit is really just one feature for me. Their ci/cd runners, package repos and such are all things I need and forgejo includes in one nice bundle.

If I was just using it for git hosting I'd probably go for something more light weight to be honest.

New comment by bluehatbrit in "Why I Chose Elixir Phoenix over Rails, Laravel, and Next.js"

bluehatbrit — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 16:53:36 +0000

The pace of new things coming to the ecosystem hasn't slowed at all, but it's happening beyond the language itself now.

Just look at projects like Nx, LiveBook, Explorer, Flame, and Nerves. All are making big steps forward and releasing new and interesting things.

As someone who uses the stack daily this is really wonderful. In the elixir world you just don't really have the problem where two tools don't work well together because they're built around very different versions of the language and runtime. I can pick up any elixir based tool and knowledge I can slot it into my tool chain or project and it'll just work.

To me this is even more exciting because it suggests a stable foundation, and makes it easy to adopt new developments. But I appreciate those projects aren't discussed as much on HN.

Elixir 1.9.0 Release

bluehatbrit — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 07:53:40 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/releases/tag/v1.19.0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45602609

Points: 7

# Comments: 2

New comment by bluehatbrit in "Indefinite Backpack Travel"

bluehatbrit — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 11:13:45 +0000

Yeah, I've come to realise that this is much more of a hobby for people than a genuine lifestyle.

I think YouTube has caused a big increase in this. One bag, EDC, Ultralight - the videos are all completely the same. "Here's a bunch of things I just bought, and here's a bunch of things I've used for a month and am throwing away". With YouTube they can get paid to do it though, and get to add a new dimension to their hobby which lets them connect with others.

As you say, all of this is fine. I certainly can't cast judgement either, I for sure have my own issues with over-consumption.

New comment by bluehatbrit in "Indefinite Backpack Travel"

bluehatbrit — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 20:44:37 +0000

I found this a bit odd, especially when the author mentioned they lose their apple watch a lot so buy an older one. It feels peculiar to buy such an objectively expensive high end item when you know you constantly lose it, and barely use any of it's features. To me that is continual overconsumption.

I can't pretend I don't have my own contradictions going on, so I'm not having a go at the author. But I did find it a little funny when reading it.

If You Let Your Kid Use Sora, You're a Bad Parent

bluehatbrit — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 10:41:53 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theindex.media/p/if-you-let-your-kid-use-sora-you-re-a-bad-parent

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45436232

Points: 15

# Comments: 0

New comment by bluehatbrit in "Zed's Pricing Has Changed: LLM Usage Is Now Token-Based"

bluehatbrit — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 16:49:42 +0000

Token based pricing generally makes a lot of sense for companies like Zed, but it sure does suck for forecasting spend.

Usage pricing on something like aws is pretty easy to figure out. You know what you're going to use, so you just do some simple arithmetic and you've got a pretty accurate idea. Even with serverless it's pretty easy. Tokens are so much harder, especially when using it in a development setting. It's so hard to have any reasonable forecast about how a team will use it, and how many tokens will be consumed.

I'm starting to track my usage with a bit of a breakdown in the hope that I'll find a somewhat reliable trend.

I suspect this is going to be one of the next big areas in cloud FinOps.

New comment by bluehatbrit in "Shopify, pulling strings at Ruby Central, forces Bundler and RubyGems takeover"

bluehatbrit — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 21:22:11 +0000

The hubris on display in this article is wild, even for DHH. As a Brit, he's got no idea what he's on about. The bit about "the boats" is just a complete misunderstanding of the facts.

If one is not from a country, has no family from that country, and has never lived there - one shouldn't have much of an opinion about what's going on there. To then assume those opinions could be even remotely correct is an arrogance of an astounding proportion.