Hacker News: dirkc

New comment by dirkc in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

dirkc — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:40:47 +0000

Guess I should have stated the questions as "what makes Astro worth while to try out?" :)

New comment by dirkc in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

dirkc — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 14:25:36 +0000

My go-to for spinning up a site has been Jekyll + Bootstrap with the occasional bit of React for well over 10 years now.

While it still does the job, I'm a little curious to explore more modern options, if for nothing else to understand the choices a more junior dev would face/make today.

I'm seriously considering giving Atro a go. Is it worth it?

New comment by dirkc in "Microsoft's open source tools were hacked to steal passwords of AI developers"

dirkc — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 18:40:15 +0000

> This is somehow deemed acceptable by everyone involved

By some, not all. It's been crazy from the start and it is still crazy to pipe a script to bash!

New comment by dirkc in "Claude Fable 5"

dirkc — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 18:32:43 +0000

This serves as a good reminder that relying on AI models is borrowing your tech from someone else. They can take it away or raise the prices arbitrarily.

If you rely on this as a core part of your business/profession, you will be at their mercy and subject to whatever whims or challenges they have.

New comment by dirkc in "Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?"

dirkc — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 21:35:47 +0000

I started to look at LLMs not as writing code, but rather as predicting what code it would expect someone to write given the context.

For some people that matches their expectation or they don't really have an expectation. While for other people it doesn't match their expectation.

New comment by dirkc in "Mouseless – keyboard-driven control of macOS/Linux/Windows"

dirkc — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 14:23:16 +0000

There is something to be said for the split mechanical keyboard in the demonstration video and the sound the switches make when 'moving the mouse'.

New comment by dirkc in "Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left"

dirkc — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 21:05:32 +0000

I get the blue squiggly underline with suggestions on how I can improve what I write. I bet if I open up two drafts it will happily suggest contradictory improvements on it's own suggestions.

I'm starting to develop a squiggly line blindness, so be it if grammar in my email suffers :)

New comment by dirkc in "Please don't spam people looking for employment. It's just cruel"

dirkc — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 14:27:29 +0000

I also got the Alya message.

In addition to all the creepiness, the email had a link to stripe to pay them $500? I wonder if the email is hiding a prompt injection somewhere to trick a bot into paying?

New comment by dirkc in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2026)"

dirkc — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 15:13:34 +0000

Location: South Africa

Remote: yes please :)

Willing to relocate: not at the moment

Technologies: Linux, Web, DevOps,

Résumé/CV: Not a CV, but https://www.thebacklog.net/projects/

Email: dirk@code27.co.za

I’ve been working as a full stack developer with a focus on education for more than 13 years. Increasingly my focus has shifted from just the technology towards the product. I believe that technology should empower people and create a healthy society that we all want to be a part off. This requires deliberate effort and attention to achieve and maintain. I'm looking to build a product I believe in, for profit, while learning new things and forming meaningful professional relationships.

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

dirkc — Thu, 21 May 2026 07:05:07 +0000

That was my first instinct, but thinking about it just a little it doesn't seem crazy, esp for GitHub.

How many folders do you have on your computer with some bits of code? It's probably not a terrible practice to add those folders to GitHub.

Across a big engineering company that can easily add up to way more than 3,800!

New comment by dirkc in "Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message"

dirkc — Mon, 11 May 2026 18:30:22 +0000

I recently had to do google takeout on an old google apps account. The account didn't have 2 factor auth and while enabling it I got stuck in a loop scanning the QR and getting a code via text message. I can't remember how I eventually broke out of the loop?

I wonder if there is a single engineer at Google who actually understands the whole registration/verification flow and all the edge cases?

New comment by dirkc in "An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs"

dirkc — Mon, 11 May 2026 07:24:09 +0000

Two things I'd add

1. software doesn't only have tech maintenance - there is also user support and it increases as software grows.

2. I'm not convinced maintenance costs scale linearly. And even if it scales linearly, you will eventually get to a point where maintenance takes up all your time.

New comment by dirkc in "Incident Report: CVE-2024-YIKES"

dirkc — Mon, 11 May 2026 06:55:58 +0000

I should have known when the first package was left-justify, but I read until karen before I realized it must be fiction

New comment by dirkc in "Indian matchbox labels as a visual archive"

dirkc — Thu, 07 May 2026 13:29:57 +0000

Play with that cookie consent bar at the bottom if you feel like you need to get your blood pumping!

New comment by dirkc in "Google Cloud fraud defense, the next evolution of reCAPTCHA"

dirkc — Thu, 07 May 2026 11:22:23 +0000

I was contemplating building a "Scan this QR to verify you're human" for April fools, but then got busy with other things. Wild to see this being built as part of Google reCAPTCHA. I guess we should at least be thankful that we don't have to get our retinas scanned!

New comment by dirkc in "Agents can now create Cloudflare accounts, buy domains, and deploy"

dirkc — Wed, 06 May 2026 06:35:24 +0000

A few months back I was building a product and wanted to add domains. My first choice would have been to use Cloudflare as the registrar, but they didn't support buying domains via the API.

I wonder if this means I can now also buy a domain via the API?

*update* - seems so, but with some limitations: https://developers.cloudflare.com/registrar/registrar-api/#b...

New comment by dirkc in "Discourse Is Not Going Closed Source"

dirkc — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 07:07:50 +0000

This rest of the article contrasts the with "I don’t think they’re acting in bad faith"

This bit stands out to me:

> You can’t take five years of community contributions, close the gate, and claim you’re grateful. I don’t think it works that way.

I think it's safe to say that Sam is not impressed with the the Cal.com decision and the way they framed it.

New comment by dirkc in "Sal Khan's AI revolution hasn't happened yet"

dirkc — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 06:53:56 +0000

I never thought about it that way, but that matches my experience with my own kid.

New comment by dirkc in "Show HN: Plain – The full-stack Python framework designed for humans and agents"

dirkc — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 08:26:36 +0000

Read the about page (https://plainframework.com/about/).

This Show HN post doesn't seem to be by the author and it's not presenting the project in a good way in my opinion. I also don't like the agent framing of the project home page, but after reading the about, I'm willing to tone down my criticism.

The framework seems like an interesting project to keep an eye on.

New comment by dirkc in "Show HN: Plain – The full-stack Python framework designed for humans and agents"

dirkc — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 07:56:23 +0000

I'm not very good at counting lines of code, but it seems like it's slightly less than Django. From a cursory glance the main difference I saw was that only postgres is supported, not necessarily a bad thing.