Hacker News: dfcowell

New comment by dfcowell in "Show HN: Ismcpdead.com – Live dashboard tracking MCP adoption and sentiment"

dfcowell — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 22:46:00 +0000

This is solved by the agent having its own identity and credentials. Why would you share your login and identity with your AI agent?

Access control and permissions should be handled on the backend by enforcing IAM on well-defined principals, not with MCP middleware. Claude can already bypass MCP and call APIs or use CLIs if it runs into blockers using MCP, so it’s not an effective point to implement the control.

New comment by dfcowell in "A guide to home row mods"

dfcowell — Sun, 03 Dec 2023 23:37:16 +0000

I’ve solved this by keeping my laptop keyboard uncustomized, while using Colemak-dh and home row mods on my desktop split keyboard.

I’m proficient enough that I can work on anyone else’s machine well, and I have the comfort and speed benefits on my main workstation.

New comment by dfcowell in "Debunking the Myth of "Anonymous" Data"

dfcowell — Sat, 11 Nov 2023 22:57:27 +0000

If your scale is large enough and you don’t care about identifying individuals, synthetic data does this fairly effectively.

New comment by dfcowell in "LabelContactRelationYoungerCousinMothersSiblingsDaughterOrFathersSistersDaughter"

dfcowell — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 07:25:17 +0000

Vietnamese also has it.

New comment by dfcowell in "iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus"

dfcowell — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 02:48:59 +0000

The spec requires negotiation between the devices to deliver any nontrivial amount of power. A data connection is necessary to enable charging.

New comment by dfcowell in "Throwing away 10 months of work after 2 months on the job"

dfcowell — Sat, 19 Aug 2023 14:13:08 +0000

Author here. I agonized over the dates in the post when I was writing it. It’s correct to the best of my knowledge, but details fade with time.

I’m glad you had an easier time than we did!

New comment by dfcowell in "Throwing away 10 months of work after 2 months on the job"

dfcowell — Sat, 19 Aug 2023 14:09:17 +0000

Author here. At the time, Angular relied a lot on the AOT compiler and tree shaking to keep bundle sizes down. No idea if this is still the case.

If we built the app with the stable branch the bundle size was orders of magnitude smaller: less than 200kb. Still a bit of a chonker, but more reasonable than the ridiculousness the experimental SSR branch spat out.

New comment by dfcowell in "Throwing away 10 months of work after 2 months on the job"

dfcowell — Sat, 19 Aug 2023 13:57:17 +0000

Author here. That’s the takeaway I was going for.

It could have been any technology. The silver bullet is choosing the right tool for the job.

I don’t have an attachment to any particular tech. At the time React was what I knew, and I was coming off the back of building a server side rendered React site when I joined this company. I had a team of JavaScript-focused engineers to work with.

New comment by dfcowell in "Throwing away 10 months of work after 2 months on the job"

dfcowell — Sat, 19 Aug 2023 13:49:41 +0000

Author here. It’s actually my Dad!

New comment by dfcowell in "Throwing away 10 months of work after 2 months on the job"

dfcowell — Sat, 19 Aug 2023 13:49:00 +0000

Author here. It was a gamble, but I was fighting against a very strong sunk cost fallacy in leadership at the company at the time, and there was a general lack of trust in the entire technical team. I *would not* recommend this approach as a typical way of doing business, and maybe I didn’t do a good enough job at communicating that in the post. This is the only time in my career I’ve delivered this kind of ultimatum.

Everything about this particular situation was exceptional. I focused on the decision to do a rewrite in the post because I thought it was the more interesting part of the story. In hindsight I might have gotten that wrong.

New comment by dfcowell in "Throwing away 10 months of work after 2 months on the job"

dfcowell — Sat, 19 Aug 2023 13:37:33 +0000

Author here. This was a key element of our success. The team knew exactly what they had to build, because they had already built it once.

We wouldn’t have been able to hit such an aggressive deadline under different circumstances.

New comment by dfcowell in "The day I locked everyone out of the company intranet"

dfcowell — Sat, 15 Jul 2023 11:26:16 +0000

This was 13 years ago in a small business with no significant investment. No “cheap money” was involved, just the realities of a small business with chronic NIH syndrome.

New comment by dfcowell in "The day I locked everyone out of the company intranet"

dfcowell — Sat, 15 Jul 2023 08:14:08 +0000

Ha, no, that was a far more mundane issue. The CMS I'm using requires double opt-in to subscribe, meaning you need to enter your email address and click the confirmation link.

It also apparently requires double email configuration, meaning it has two places where you can configure your mailer. I had only set it up in one place, meaning the confirmations never got sent.

Bit of a facepalm moment.

The day I locked everyone out of the company intranet

dfcowell — Sat, 15 Jul 2023 06:53:25 +0000

Article URL: https://www.dancowell.com/balls-the-day-i-locked-ev/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36734266

Points: 175

# Comments: 125

New comment by dfcowell in "It Took Me a Decade to Find the Perfect Personal Website Stack – Ghost+Fathom"

dfcowell — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 18:52:59 +0000

1Gbit symmetrical. That’s the standard residential connection in my part of Japan.

In theory I could get up to double that with a different ISP, but my router doesn’t handle those kind of speeds.

New comment by dfcowell in "GPT Might Be an Information Virus"

dfcowell — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 08:53:56 +0000

I’m reminded of PGP signing parties where people built a web of trust via key signing.

There may be a resurgence of this kind of thing as people use social heuristics to decide if any given creator is likely to be producing generative content or not.

New comment by dfcowell in "It Took Me a Decade to Find the Perfect Personal Website Stack – Ghost+Fathom"

dfcowell — Sun, 09 Jul 2023 23:18:15 +0000

Ghost is ridiculously good out of the box. Part of that comes from the opinionated stack it demands - support for only one database server, very specific and minimal config options.

I self-host Ghost and Plausible Analytics (along with several other services,) on an Unraid box at home, fronted by Cloudflare, and it holds up well to load. Costs next to nothing, too, since it inherits hand-me-down parts from my main desktop PC.

New comment by dfcowell in "Software engineers hate code"

dfcowell — Sat, 08 Jul 2023 14:14:39 +0000

This is a really good addition, and something I wish I’d thought to cover. I’ve added a link back to this HN thread to the post so that people who find it from other sources can benefit from your perspective!

New comment by dfcowell in "Software engineers hate code"

dfcowell — Sat, 08 Jul 2023 14:11:47 +0000

This is a really great point, and it’s awesome when a team strikes the right balance. In my experience these engineers tend to be rarer than the group I talk about in this post, but when you find them they’re worth their weight in gold!

Software engineers hate code

dfcowell — Sat, 08 Jul 2023 09:28:12 +0000

Article URL: https://www.dancowell.com/software-engineers-hate-code/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36642796

Points: 369

# Comments: 220