Hacker News: danielheath

New comment by danielheath in "Looking Forward to Postgres 19: It's About Time"

danielheath — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 09:53:52 +0000

Thanks!

New comment by danielheath in "Looking Forward to Postgres 19: It's About Time"

danielheath — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 22:12:59 +0000

How tied is the implementation to time specifically?

Can it apply to other types (eg geometries) which can be subdivided?

New comment by danielheath in "PgDog is funded and coming to a database near you"

danielheath — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 14:31:22 +0000

Given that they implement connection pooling and sharding, I'm going to say "not at all".

You _could_ make that ACID, but it's not going to be faster than a single machine.

New comment by danielheath in "Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL"

danielheath — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 11:45:10 +0000

Usually after you solve the POW challenge, sites let you make a lot of requests before asking you to complete another.

New comment by danielheath in "Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL"

danielheath — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 08:54:01 +0000

I hate that sort of thing - when I rolled my own proof-of-work bot protection (providers wanted $$$$), I set it up so that

A) you'd have to open >200 tabs, and B) if any tab solves the proof-of-work, any that are still waiting to do so reload in the background.

New comment by danielheath in "Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL"

danielheath — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 03:31:37 +0000

Or fastly, or akamai, or bunny, or any number of other providers.

Cloudflare are merely the cheapest of the bunch.

New comment by danielheath in "Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL"

danielheath — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 01:24:13 +0000

It's circumstantial evidence, but Occam's Razor also applies.

It's not a hostile DOS in the traditional sense (I've mitigated a few of those) - no "pay us to make it stop", no pattern to the requests other than "fetch every unique URL a few times".

It wasn't happening until financial incentives to gather large datasets for AI training appeared.

Bad actors (using residential proxies & claiming to be a real browser) mostly showed up after folk started blocking ones that identified themselves as AI scrapers.

It's obvious to blame AI training because there's a shortage of better explanations. Who else would be paying for these (expensive) residential botnets, only to use them to (eg) web-scrape wikipedia (which offers free downloads of its content in a structured format)?

The simplest explanation of the technical behavior is "a bot coded to follow every link it sees & save the results", and the simplest explanation of the motive to run such a bot is "to train a large language model".

New comment by danielheath in "Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL"

danielheath — Sun, 31 May 2026 22:09:02 +0000

They showed up when the AI money did. The evidence is circumstantial, but… some of them are remarkably well engineered (from a “how difficult is it to identify this traffic” perspective, in a way that never existed before (I have been running a quite sizeable site for 8 years, over 200k registered users, and you don’t need to register to use 99% of it).

New comment by danielheath in "SimCity 3k in 4k (2025)"

danielheath — Thu, 28 May 2026 23:54:10 +0000

I more meant "I had 200m in the bank and accidentally spent 170m of it to start constructing a police HQ".

If you bulldoze a building when it's only 2% of the way through being constructed, you should probably be able to get 98% of the resources spent back - whether housing demand, money, whatever you spent.

Possibly 100% back until you hit 5%, just to allow for those mis-clicks.

New comment by danielheath in "SimCity 3k in 4k (2025)"

danielheath — Thu, 28 May 2026 03:11:23 +0000

Spent a bit of time with it.

Biggest peeve so far: It's very easy to build the 'premium' version of a building (eg police HQ instead of police station) and utterly annihilate your city budget - with no ability to cancel / undo.

"Click on the correct-looking-but-actually-wrong button functionally ends your game" is... not great.

Other than that, I'm really enjoying it.

New comment by danielheath in "GitHub confirms breach of 3,800 repos via malicious VSCode extension"

danielheath — Wed, 20 May 2026 23:58:51 +0000

One has 1:2 fanout, the other has 1:50 fanout.

New comment by danielheath in "Tar Files Created on macOS Display Errors When Extracting on Linux (2024)"

danielheath — Mon, 04 May 2026 00:32:23 +0000

Yes, we should be.

My computer should run programs when I tell it to run them.

Don’t blunt _every_ tool just to make them harder to cut yourself on.

New comment by danielheath in "ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips"

danielheath — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 12:04:56 +0000

I mean, it’s been tried; a reading of relevant historical texts would give you lots of ammunition to support either argument.

New comment by danielheath in "Three constraints before I build anything"

danielheath — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 01:51:17 +0000

The product is automation; the tech is llms

New comment by danielheath in "The buns in McDonald's Japan's burger photos are all slightly askew"

danielheath — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 23:56:58 +0000

It feels snappy _compared with most sites_.

That's the point!

It feels _very_ sluggish if I try it after spending some time using a windows 98 VM, or a library catalog from 1990.

New comment by danielheath in "The Orange Pi 6 Plus"

danielheath — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 05:29:18 +0000

Every time there's a new discussion of some arm board, I compare the price / features / power use with the geekom n100 SBC I picked up awhile back.

As far as I can tell, the OrangePi 6 remains distinctly uncompetitive with SBCs based on low-end intel chips.

- Orange pi consumes much more power (despite being an arm CPU) - A bit faster on some benchmarks, a bit slower on others - Intel SBC is about 60% the price, and comes with case + storage - Intel SBC runs mainline linux and everything has working drivers

New comment by danielheath in "Set the Line Before It's Crossed"

danielheath — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:13:45 +0000

The negative/positive distinction is (you must _perform_ this act by ) vs (you must _refrain from_ this act ).

Additionally, an ultimatum comes with a deadline; a boundary is indefinite (until stated otherwise).

In a sexual relationship context, that distinction could be better illustrated by:

"Don't touch me like that again without asking first, or I will break up with you"

"If you don't have sex with me by the end of the week, I'll break up with you".

An ultimatum is, to most people, inherently damaging to psychological safety. A boundary is not automatically better - it can be unreasonable, unhealthy, or incompatible with the other persons needs - but unlike an ultimatum, it's not _inherently_ harmful to the relationship.

New comment by danielheath in "Wit, unker, Git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy"

danielheath — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 23:40:33 +0000

I get what you’re saying, but Chaucer was not in _my_ lifetime.

New comment by danielheath in "Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era"

danielheath — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 01:24:43 +0000

Is this code multithreaded? X could indeed be null, in that case.

New comment by danielheath in "Book review: There Is No Antimemetics Division"

danielheath — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 23:24:45 +0000

“Valuable humans in transit”, maybe?

The “Ancillary” series, for sure.