Hacker News: cloudfudge

New comment by cloudfudge in "1Password wades into a right-wing mess after funding a Linux project"

cloudfudge — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 18:45:51 +0000

This is Hacker News. We're supposed to dislike DHH on technical grounds, such as "he made Ruby on Rails exist."

New comment by cloudfudge in "Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?"

cloudfudge — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 18:39:39 +0000

That's on me. I've been giving confident advice that doesn't hold up in practice.

New comment by cloudfudge in "Ask HN: Advice on Migrating from 1Password?"

cloudfudge — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 18:32:07 +0000

Deterministic password generator is the only way to go for me. I have my own that takes the site name, username, and a version number and SHA256 hashes it all with a passphrase, and runs the resulting bytes through a simple transformation that produces a strong password with a good character set. Optionally allows me to specify constraints on the password (e.g. which special chars, limited length) for sites with idiotic password rules. If you want to change a password, you incremement the version number. The whole thing is a simple command line dingus that barfs the password out to the clipboard and a note (including the username reminder) out to stdout. I even had claude port it to ios for me.

I've been using this technique for literally all my passwords for about 7 years now and it works great. The only downside is it doesn't help me in situations where I want to either share a password or receive a shared password from someone else.

The really beautiful thing is that you can reconstruct your important passwords completely from memory even after losing your whole config. This saved me recently when my laptop died. git clone / vim a config / remember your passphrase / done

New comment by cloudfudge in "Malicious Rust crate Arrayref runs a build-time payload"

cloudfudge — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 22:04:13 +0000

I think one thing that has made Go have better dependency hygiene is not merely having "batteries included" in the standard lib, but the early focus on having production-ready implementations of a lot of stuff in the standard lib, as opposed to minimum viable implementations. I used to get a long way with one or two dependencies that would barely fan out at all. It's been a while since I worked on a Go project, so I'm not sure if it's still that way.

New comment by cloudfudge in "Show HN: iPhone app takes simultaneous images from 2 lenses, fuses into 1 photo"

cloudfudge — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 20:36:08 +0000

I think there's money to be made with both, but there's more money to be made by not maintaining two separate models, so ads win.

New comment by cloudfudge in "Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints"

cloudfudge — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 21:47:51 +0000

I had a mixed incredible/horrible experience with Claude's AI support agent. First, I suspected there was a particular problem with the API access, and I articulated it and said, "can you give me a way to test this theory and prove that the problem is on your end? Python is acceptable" and it spit out a python test program that proved the problem was on their end. Then it turned a corner and spent 30 minutes insisting that it was going to connect me with a real person who could fix the problem for me before finally admitting that the whole thing was a boondoggle and it had no way to connect me with an actual person, but maybe I should come back to the chat in a day or two and see if anyone noticed and responded.

The real interesting thing was that early on in that 30 minutes, it gave me very clear instructions about how to get a live agent (including a quoted trigger phrase like "I would like to speak to a live agent" or something), which made me believe it was possible, which ultimately made me resist the slow realization that that was a complete fabrication. It was a very effective way to waste my time.

New comment by cloudfudge in "The iPhone Upgrade Program is being replaced by Apple Upgrade"

cloudfudge — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 21:34:31 +0000

12 mini is pretty old. I have considered going to a 13 mini, but I sort of hate the idea of spending money on a phone that is already well on the path to unsupported. Then again, the compact options for grapheneos are limited to old stuff too. Sigh.

New comment by cloudfudge in "The iPhone Upgrade Program is being replaced by Apple Upgrade"

cloudfudge — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 22:50:33 +0000

For that matter, why would you pay $1200 for a phone?

New comment by cloudfudge in "The iPhone Upgrade Program is being replaced by Apple Upgrade"

cloudfudge — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 22:47:31 +0000

It's not a great option. My "old" phone that I use to install junk apps (e.g. I buy some hardware that requires an app to set up) and which mostly sits in a drawer is a 2nd gen iphone SE, and it's getting to the point where I'm going to be forced to replace it, because the OS hasn't been upgraded in a while (it errors) and some apps won't install on it now.

New comment by cloudfudge in "The iPhone Upgrade Program is being replaced by Apple Upgrade"

cloudfudge — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 22:41:59 +0000

Yes please. I can't really believe it but I'm researching android phones because I will not upgrade to something larger than my 3rd gen iPhone SE.

New comment by cloudfudge in "The iPhone Upgrade Program is being replaced by Apple Upgrade"

cloudfudge — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 22:36:47 +0000

Note that they already do this if you buy a mac on an Apple Card, and they even go so far as to link your AppleID that you may have had for decades. I bought a new mac last year and signed up for the 0% Apple Card financing and if I'd have known about this little bit of leverage they use, I would have created a brand new AppleID to partition it off.

New comment by cloudfudge in "Exploiting Volvo/Eicher's fleet platform to gain control over all users/vehicles"

cloudfudge — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 21:13:24 +0000

It's possible they were trying to do something like remote start, which (at least in my bmw) does use the godawful bmw online service. In the retelling, this might have expanded to "couldn't start the car."

New comment by cloudfudge in "A native graphical shell for SSH"

cloudfudge — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 19:29:42 +0000

This reminds me of an idea that I build a PoC of many years ago (maybe 2013 if I recall) that I always felt was the nugget of a useful idea. You would SSH into a server and processes on the other end would emit data which was then displayed in a webapp that was served from a localhost port, with a local backend that consumed the data. So for example a short-lived web-based remote 'top'. I did it as part of a company-internal hackathon and thought it was really cool, but nobody else was impressed with it. It was a very half-baked idea, and this looks like a fully-baked version of it. I'll check it out.

New comment by cloudfudge in "DSpark: Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference [pdf]"

cloudfudge — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 16:17:25 +0000

I don't think it's very common to believe the Chinese people are bad guys. It's the government and its control of the people that's the problem. And no, I don't think the US is immune to that sort of problem either.

New comment by cloudfudge in "I used sound waves to make espresso"

cloudfudge — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:56:56 +0000

A mocha is an espresso drink. A latte is an espresso drink. A cappuccino is an espresso drink. An espresso is an espresso drink. Some espresso drinks have milk in them and some don't. Anyone offended by the question, "did the espresso drinks have milk in them?" is just looking for something to be offended by, as seems to often be the case with people who fly off the handle over the topics of coffee, pasta, and pizza.

New comment by cloudfudge in "Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless"

cloudfudge — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 05:32:44 +0000

You not bending over and opening your wallet is, frankly, a red flag. /s

New comment by cloudfudge in "Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless"

cloudfudge — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 21:25:58 +0000

Some sites that block "+" in email addresses are actually just doing it out of incompetence. My credit union, for example, will actually accept an address with a "+" in it, but nothing will work because some broken bit of web 1.0 plumbing along the way converted it to a space (it shows up that way on my profile page). I wouldn't be surprised to see " " on my printed bank statements.

New comment by cloudfudge in "Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless"

cloudfudge — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 21:18:54 +0000

There's nothing "fake" about the email. It's just an alias made specifically for each recipient.

New comment by cloudfudge in "I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer"

cloudfudge — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 07:01:42 +0000

I think "he's almost certainly a better programmer than me" is a double form of humility: first, he's assuming that Fabrice Bellard is a better programmer than him based on the evidence and reputation, but he's also admitting that he doesn't have direct knowledge of this. Hence "almost certainly."

New comment by cloudfudge in "Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?"

cloudfudge — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 20:39:46 +0000

I just poked around in your reference and every county I looked at in california is near all-time highs (higher than or equal to 2022) except for the northern nowheresville counties.