Hacker News: ferngodfather

New comment by ferngodfather in "Never Give Them Your Face"

ferngodfather — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 16:10:54 +0000

I had the exact same experience. Never used Facebook. Wanted to create a page for a product. Suspended. Did the face scan. Now they have my face and I'm still suspended. Absolute joke. Zuckerberg can go suck a fat one.

New comment by ferngodfather in "Dumb ways for an open source project to die"

ferngodfather — Tue, 19 May 2026 23:18:32 +0000

So much this. Everyone has their own idea of that the project should do and it's hard to explain that whilst that implementation is great for their specific use case, it's pretty shit for everyone else.

AI has just made this so much worse.

New comment by ferngodfather in "AI is making me dumb"

ferngodfather — Thu, 14 May 2026 19:26:16 +0000

> My brain is melting because I can barely keep up with learning how to figure out if I'm even doing what I'm trying to do.

This is not a good thing. You should understand what your code does. Writing code nobody can understand is not a flex.

New comment by ferngodfather in "Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent"

ferngodfather — Tue, 05 May 2026 20:36:51 +0000

Except spellcheck is a reasonably foreseeable part of a word processor. An AI model isn't really a common component of a typical web browser.

New comment by ferngodfather in "Mike: open-source legal AI"

ferngodfather — Sat, 02 May 2026 10:21:08 +0000

And those staff mostly use Westlaw :)

New comment by ferngodfather in "If I could make my own GitHub"

ferngodfather — Sat, 02 May 2026 10:16:33 +0000

There is also "this code is functionally fine but I absolutely hate it"

New comment by ferngodfather in "For Linux kernel vulnerabilities, there is no heads-up to distributions"

ferngodfather — Fri, 01 May 2026 11:36:02 +0000

> and you fully understand the requirements that contacting “linux-distros” will impose on you

Imposing requirements on the reporter? No.

New comment by ferngodfather in "Scraping 241 UK council planning portals – 2.6M decisions so far"

ferngodfather — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 18:09:54 +0000

Fair play!

New comment by ferngodfather in "Scraping 241 UK council planning portals – 2.6M decisions so far"

ferngodfather — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 07:58:50 +0000

Your terms:

> You may not use automated tools to scrape, copy, or bulk-download data from our service.

Pot kettle, huh.

New comment by ferngodfather in "You don't want long-lived keys"

ferngodfather — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 07:41:23 +0000

But then you just move the security issue elsewhere with more to secure. Now we have to think about securing the automation system, too.

This is the same argument I routinely have with client id/secret and username/password for SMTP. We're not really solving any major problem here, we're just pretending it's more secure because we're calling it a secret instead of a password.

New comment by ferngodfather in "I am building a cloud"

ferngodfather — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 08:15:32 +0000

Cloud providers have put a lot of time and effort into making you believe every web app needs 99.9999% availability. Making you pay for auto scaled compute, load balancers, shared storage, HA databases, etc, etc.

All of this just adds so much extra complexity. If I'm running Amazon.com then sure, but your average app is just fine on a single VM.

New comment by ferngodfather in "Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people"

ferngodfather — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 07:45:42 +0000

What I say: I want a pay rise.

What management hears: We want more pizza parties.

New comment by ferngodfather in "We have a 99% email reputation, but Gmail disagrees"

ferngodfather — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 06:16:36 +0000

"Someone viewed your profile" with a blurred photo of them.

So you know exactly who it is, but you won't just tell me in the email? I have to open the app/site so you can tick your engagement box for the day?

So glad I'm off that shit hole. It's just full of pompous picks anyway.

New comment by ferngodfather in "We have a 99% email reputation, but Gmail disagrees"

ferngodfather — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 06:13:55 +0000

> If I get a single email after I've unsubscribed I go back in my inbox and mark every single email I ever received as spam.

Fuck me, that is brutal and could absolutely ruin your SES complaint rate - even with the suppression filter on, as the emails are already in your inbox.

New comment by ferngodfather in "The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode"

ferngodfather — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 05:31:14 +0000

"Here's what AI came up with and it mostly worked the one time I tested it. Might need improving".

No. I don't want to test and pick through your shitty LLM generated code. If I wanted the entire code base to be junk, it'd say so in the readme.

New comment by ferngodfather in "Take better notes, by hand"

ferngodfather — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 20:46:52 +0000

I was in the same position as you when I started my law degree!

My solution was:

- Take notes on paper

- Scan with Genius Scan (free) or similar

- Upload to Microsoft Document Intelligence on Azure to get character recognition and a PDF output (standard OCR sucks for handwriting; also free for up to like 50 docs a month)

- Tidy up the text and store in Mediawiki long-term (you can also upload a copy of the OCR enabled PDF) (FOSS)

- File paper notes

- Throw paper notes once module is complete

New comment by ferngodfather in "Bored of eating your own dogfood? Try smelling your own farts"

ferngodfather — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 16:10:12 +0000

So you always hold your nose?

New comment by ferngodfather in "LotusNotes"

ferngodfather — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 13:07:00 +0000

Yep... Movie maker, Clippy, MSN Music, Encarta, Office accounting, Money, Response Point, hell TECHNET.

New comment by ferngodfather in "Ask HN: Maintainers, do LLM-only users often clutter your issues/PRs?"

ferngodfather — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 19:21:57 +0000

We have just stopped accepting PRs entirely for now. It's been utterly exhausting. We never got many PRs beforehand anyway so the uptick in entirely LLM written PRs was very noticeable.

We do continue to argue with LLM-submitted security disclosures. If these aren't an issue I just instant-close because debating with an LLM what is and isn't an issue is fucking painful.

New comment by ferngodfather in "Wikipedia deprecates Archive.today, starts removing archive links"

ferngodfather — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 21:19:22 +0000

Why wouldn't Wikipedia just capture and host this themselves? Surely it makes more sense to DIY than to rely on a third party.