Hacker News: bmilleare

New comment by bmilleare in "Hackers activate automatic defrosting accross European supermarket fridges"

bmilleare — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 16:43:48 +0000

I remember having to do this every few hours 25 years ago when working at a store part-time as a student.

Having networked telemetry seems like a good idea, just not sure why they would need remote control too - that seems far more dangerous than necessary.

New comment by bmilleare in "Understanding gRPC, OpenAPI and REST and when to use them in API design (2020)"

bmilleare — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 17:13:47 +0000

I'm not sure why the article picks these 3 options as if that's it.

An RPC API can happily exist over plain old HTTP/1 (no protobuf required) and it also doesn't mention the primary benefit of RPC over REST/RESTish (IMO) - and that's the ability to stack multiple RPC calls into a single request.

New comment by bmilleare in "0-click deanonymization attack targeting Signal, Discord, other platforms"

bmilleare — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 10:39:30 +0000

De-anonymization would take monitoring over a period of time, but it could definitely work. Take this scenario for example: a person of interest is in the area of New York on Jan 1. On Jan 4 they travel to the UK. On Jan 7 they travel to Germany. On Jan 21 they travel back to the US.

The list of suspects would be fairly small when US officials cross-check individuals that travelled US-UK on Jan 4 and Germany-US on Jan 21.

New comment by bmilleare in "Ask HN: What's Your Morning Routine?"

bmilleare — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 16:11:09 +0000

For the previous 20 years I had no real routine other than wake>commute>work or wake>work if wfh, but over the last 2 years I've been more focused on my health. Every weekday I get up around 06:00 and am at the pool by 06:40. I swim 1500m then have a 15min sauna and 4min cold plunge. Normally I'm back at my desk by around 08:20. I drink 1L of water with electrolytes while at the pool and then have a light breakfast and espresso when I get home.

I'm in better shape than I was throughout my 30s, have more muscle, better posture and generally feel more energetic and alert through the day.

While at the pool I listen to Audible books (wearing Shokz), so get through a new book every couple of weeks also.

New comment by bmilleare in "Tell HN: Cloudflare verification is breaking the internet"

bmilleare — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 16:36:25 +0000

I also hit the CloudFlare verification merry-go-round several times per day using Ubuntu / Chrome.

New comment by bmilleare in "Decentral Bank fixes bug that let one user mint 10T USN for just $10"

bmilleare — Fri, 08 Jul 2022 11:27:55 +0000

Putting the central in decentral since '22.

New comment by bmilleare in "Event-driven access to my home after a run"

bmilleare — Thu, 10 Feb 2022 13:44:18 +0000

I had no idea this was a thing. How cold are we talking for this to be something that happens often?

New comment by bmilleare in "Event-driven access to my home after a run"

bmilleare — Thu, 10 Feb 2022 11:37:04 +0000

Automating such a narrow edge-case seems totally pointless. A much more likely scenario is that your battery dies while you're out, in which case you're still screwed.

A better tried-and-tested real world solution that covers all scenarios is a simple key safe.

New comment by bmilleare in "A routine gem update ended up creating $73k worth of subscriptions"

bmilleare — Sat, 08 Jan 2022 11:24:39 +0000

While the breaking change in a Mongoid minor release is particularly egregious, let's face it - the real failure here is lack of sufficient tests. I would be very surprised if this was the only place they used or() in their app so it should have made their test suite light up like a Christmas tree.

New comment by bmilleare in "Artist faked being a billionaire to photograph New York City’s best views"

bmilleare — Thu, 29 Apr 2021 12:33:30 +0000

It would be more interesting to see those numbers in square footage and not straight counts. I would expect the majority of the 'empty' homes are the £10M+ ones in Knightsbridge, Chelsea, Kensington etc.

New comment by bmilleare in "Wkhtmltopdf: Command line tools to render HTML into PDF"

bmilleare — Sat, 27 Mar 2021 13:27:05 +0000

We use wkhtmltopdf on AWS Lambda and have had zero issues in production for the last ~2 years. We're generating internal owned documents (invoices, letters, paged forms, etc) so I wouldn't necessarily trust it with untested input HTML but it really has been bulletproof for our use-case.

At some point we'll likely move to chrome/puppeteer but in most of our tests the templates required modifications to mimic the existing PDFs so it's something we've been putting off.

New comment by bmilleare in "Show HN: TidalWaves API – live, tokenized news metadata from around the world"

bmilleare — Wed, 21 Oct 2020 13:08:04 +0000

NZ is there if you make your browser viewport big enough.

New comment by bmilleare in "Ring Doorbell App Packed with Third-Party Trackers"

bmilleare — Tue, 28 Jan 2020 11:32:11 +0000

The benefit of something like Ring is that criminals will know what they are and that somebody has very likely just been alerted to their presence.

I speak from experience when I say they tend not to care about traditional 'dumb' cameras as, generally, nobody is going to be watching them until after the act.

New comment by bmilleare in "What every computer science major should know (2011)"

bmilleare — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 08:42:04 +0000

> 10) understand that “good enough” sometimes is all you need (still try to fix it later :) )

This is something most CS grads don't really grasp immediately, but in the real World business and time constraints normally trump perfection.

Technical debt is fine as long as it's fully understood and managed properly.

New comment by bmilleare in "Thieves boosting signal from key fobs inside homes to steal vehicles"

bmilleare — Thu, 06 Dec 2018 09:51:52 +0000

The bigger issue is insurance. If you have stuff stolen and there's no sign of forced entry (home or vehicle) then your insurance company will likely be asking questions about how exactly the thieves gained access.

New comment by bmilleare in "AWS Transfer for SFTP – Fully Managed SFTP Service for Amazon S3"

bmilleare — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 09:20:05 +0000

Exactly this. If sticker cost is your leading factor then these kinds of services can seem crazy, but when you factor in the real cost of self-hosting then it quickly becomes a no-brainer.

We're more interested in what happens when things break (and who's responsibility it is) than minor cost savings in calm waters.

New comment by bmilleare in "AWS Transfer for SFTP – Fully Managed SFTP Service for Amazon S3"

bmilleare — Mon, 26 Nov 2018 20:33:07 +0000

A tonne of our (enterprise-ey) customers had such trouble trying to integrate into our S3 flow that we started launching VPS for each that abstracted it away into simple SFTP upload/download, which they were used to.

Although this is much more expensive than Lightsail, the man hours saved will make it worthwhile.

New comment by bmilleare in "Show HN: Darebux: earn money doing dares [beta]"

bmilleare — Tue, 09 Oct 2018 12:30:17 +0000

Money laundering will likely be the main use case of this app.

New comment by bmilleare in "Ask HN: How much did you, as an employee, make when your startup exited?"

bmilleare — Sun, 23 Sep 2018 15:10:35 +0000

It's really interesting to see $100M+ exits that have resulted in trivial sums for founders and early employees after multiple rounds of dilution and/or VCs with preferred shares taking home the spoils.

I have always optimised for salary although I can see why a young engineer with no dependants might opt for the gamble of a big payday instead, likely without really understanding their true chances.

Too much industry focus is heaped on 'unicorns' when these kind of companies really are a drop in the ocean.

New comment by bmilleare in "Serverless, Inc. lands $10M Series A to build serverless dev platform"

bmilleare — Wed, 01 Aug 2018 09:11:19 +0000

As others have pointed out, connecting to RDS from Lambda is actually pretty trivial by having them run in the same VPC. We actually came up against an issue where our Lambda function needed access to RDS but also to the outside World which meant some extra hurdles to jump [1] but overall our experience with Lambda has been a positive one.

I don't think we'll be considering a fully serverless architecture anytime soon due to cold-start times, but it's awesome for anything outside of the user request/response loop or internal microservices where response time is perhaps not such of a problem.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/inter...