Hacker News: ceuk

New comment by ceuk in "We've built an open-source feature flag server for 11 years"

ceuk — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 18:38:28 +0000

Posthog is absolutely awesome. Its free tier is insanely generous - 91% of its users don't pay anything or something.

We use it at a startup I'm involved in (~5k MAU) and we have never paid a penny which I am constantly surprised by since it's such a backbone for us.

New comment by ceuk in "Deus Ex"

ceuk — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 17:52:46 +0000

I picked it up a few months ago for the first time but I've not found the enthusiasm to keep going. Think I was around half way maybe. Does it get better? It's the sort of game I really like on paper but it just feels a bit shallow tbh. Plus I don't find jump scares relaxing after a long day at work. Feels like I'm missing something

New comment by ceuk in "Claude Code sends your email address to websites"

ceuk — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 03:00:41 +0000

I use a masked email for Git too. Always have. Last 5 years or so it's just been the GitHub provided mask e.g. +@users.noreply.github.com

New comment by ceuk in "Just a little AI resistance, as a treat"

ceuk — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 14:43:44 +0000

I'm glad there are people doing this, especially when it comes to comms. I feel like we have a brief window as we decide culturally what we consider rude: sending people LLM-generated prose without a clear provenance/masquerading as human-written or calling this behaviour out.

I hope society settles on the former as the faux pas.

As an aside, I had a near identical experience trying to report a technical issue to ocado minus the nice human follow-up. I hadn't heard of the author of this post before this, but I like him :)

New comment by ceuk in "Fair Use Benefits Everyone"

ceuk — Sat, 31 Oct 2026 00:15:51 +0000

I'm not sure what I find more morally repugnant to be honest. The largest wholesale theft of human labour ever seen, or the company that has made billions from this heinous act disingenuously and cynically trying to claim it as in any way "fair" (whilst simultaneously crying foul about distillation)

New comment by ceuk in "One Must Fall 2097 Remastered"

ceuk — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 14:43:11 +0000

Where did we get these games as kids? I was around 6-7 when I played this on our PC. I don't think my dad was installing them, and we didn't have internet obviously.

The only game I actually remember us buying prior to around the windows 98 era was "Cool World" which my dad let me choose at Woolworths (UK)*

But aside from that I remember sooo many DOS games. Some random ones: Wacky wheels, Paperboy, OMF, Pushover, Doom, Heretic, Contraption Zack, Warcraft, Might and Magic, D generation. One called abyss.exe? What was that?

How did I get all these games (and so many more??) some of them were demos, but not all I don't think.

*Probably not suitable for a ~5 year old in hindsight

New comment by ceuk in "What’s getting pwned right now"

ceuk — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 15:10:33 +0000

Yeah I had to paste it first to check it was safe

New comment by ceuk in "What’s getting pwned right now"

ceuk — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 14:32:27 +0000

That "copy instructions got agents" thing is a really great idea. I just used it :)

New comment by ceuk in "Someone behind the software"

ceuk — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 18:37:12 +0000

I've been saying this exact thing about food for years. It applies equally as well to software though

New comment by ceuk in "Dots"

ceuk — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 17:57:24 +0000

Incredibly advanced technology but I bet it still won't let me integrate with more than one Gmail account at the same time..

New comment by ceuk in "Pirating the Pirates"

ceuk — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 07:53:19 +0000

As someone who is also into but maybe not other , it's really great to sometimes delve into the deep world of for an hour or so to broaden ones perspective and get a general feel for what other people choose to spend their consciousness budget on.

Definitely one of the better sides of the information age is how easy this is now.

New comment by ceuk in "Tin: full-text search for Postgres"

ceuk — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 18:23:26 +0000

I don't completely disagree with your hypotheses but it feels like the hard part of his TIN stuff isn't BM25 (which has been around for donkeys years) it's all the hardcore storage engine work around it. And is an LLM particularly good at e.g. segment merging under a thousand updates a second? I've had a few situations where I've been told "we've hit the perf floor" by Claude only to have persisted myself and shaved substantial amounts off still.

More damning for the theory might be that I think paradedb's pg_search predates the agentic coding by a few years?

New comment by ceuk in "AI Coding Agent Skills for Real Engineers"

ceuk — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 07:56:46 +0000

The second skill has this before/after example:

> BEFORE: "There's a problem when a lesson inside a section of a course is made 'real' (i.e. given a spot in the file system)"

> AFTER: "There's a problem with the materialization cascade"

It claims the second is easier reading. Is it just me, or does anyone else prefer the first?

New comment by ceuk in "London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces"

ceuk — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 12:39:02 +0000

I don't want want you reported (or even to follow the rules for their own sake) I suggested you go read/consider the guidelines as they are a good write-up on internet etiquette in general.

Engaging in a positive way on the internet requires more from us than blindly posting every arbitrary thing that pops into our heads and I think it's right to hold each-other to account. Sorry if that seems sanctimonious

New comment by ceuk in "London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces"

ceuk — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 11:21:45 +0000

Yeah bit dearer but it's only ~£55 a month and feels like money well spent. They're an awesome company

New comment by ceuk in "London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces"

ceuk — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 08:03:13 +0000

What does this comment actually contribute? Please go read the guidelines [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

New comment by ceuk in "London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces"

ceuk — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 07:57:48 +0000

> Your ISP proactively shares your web history with the state.

How so? I'm with AAISP and I'd be very surprised if they were doing this. What are you referring to here?

New comment by ceuk in "Let's all meet up in the Y2K"

ceuk — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 05:49:58 +0000

Really enjoyed this

You're about 12 years older than me so the post was simultaneously nostalgic and a great insight into what work in our industry was like in the decade before I really got properly started professionally

Thanks for sharing and happy 50th for his year

New comment by ceuk in "OpenAI and Anthropic unite against open-weight AI risks to their bottom line"

ceuk — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 15:33:22 +0000

I think about this a lot as someone living in the north of England (in a nice town and quite well off) maybe ignorance is bliss but I just don't know how life could get much better, but then I guess some Japanese person living a prosperous life in a nice community might feel the same about where they live (and might not rate the type of life I lead) so I guess it's subjective..

As I said I think idly about this a lot because when you feel like you've found a sort of eudaimonia you want to share it. But whilst personally, I feel like I won life's lottery being in the place and time I am, but that doesn't mean it's the one true way.

Wherever people are, I hope it's the right place for them personally

New comment by ceuk in "Atomic Physics in Pure Anglo-Saxon"

ceuk — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 11:30:34 +0000

This is so great and such a great example of the sociolinguistic prestige given to certain types of words in English.

It's so funny how all this is doing is naming things in almost exactly the same manner we did name them but using germanic words instead of latin or french words and yet words like "stuff" feel so plain whilst "matter" feels much more erudite.

It's 2026 and we still have this incredibly strong bias which probably originally arose when the roman empire carved europe into civilised and uncivilised parts. A bias which has been reinforced by medieval scholars, the normans and various others until it's part of the bones of english. Latin = clever, Germanic = plain/direct.

Justice for Anglish!