Hacker News: film42

New comment by film42 in "Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber"

film42 — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 18:37:30 +0000

I guess it might be relative, but switching from VertexAI endpoint to OpenRouter was like 2-3x faster for us.

New comment by film42 in "Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber"

film42 — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 16:36:14 +0000

It depends on how you're querying Gemini models. OpenRouter is the fastest by far. I'm guessing they bought the dedicated pipe from Google. Gemini via VertexAI and consumer API has pretty bad latency.

New comment by film42 in "Gemini-3.5-Transcribe"

film42 — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 21:16:01 +0000

Curious if this suffers from the same hallucination problems as Chirp or not. For example, if you pass chirp some audio with noise or even no audio, it will barf text at you like "I don't know. I don't know. I don't know." until a request timeout fires after like 10 minutes. It's... really bad. For this reason, we've moved back to Whisper for timestamp accuracy and then Gemini Flash for transcription correction.

New comment by film42 in "The August 17 outage"

film42 — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 22:21:31 +0000

This. I own a small company with 5 people. I pay Github $250/m. I'm sorry but the narrative of, "look at this burden we have, it's hard to take care of all of this code!" is pretty insulting when I'm paying $50 per person per month to host code and run CI pipelines. If they do not want my money, I'll find a company who does.

New comment by film42 in "OpenRouter is joining Stripe"

film42 — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 18:27:43 +0000

Or rather, Stripe will find a way to make me pay for it as a Stripe and OpenRouter customer.

New comment by film42 in "Gemini 3.7 Flash"

film42 — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 18:43:42 +0000

What you're not seeing are the subsidized Google Cloud startup credits, which includes Gemini. If you're in that program, you choose Gemini because it's essentially "free" and consistent.

New comment by film42 in "Stripe Radar no longer free, migrates free tier to paid plan"

film42 — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 16:25:27 +0000

Completely agree. Seems like a weird decision by Stripe. Opt-out or automatically pay more is not good.

New comment by film42 in "Updates to Radar for LPMs and Billing coverage and pricing (October 2026)"

film42 — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 15:35:57 +0000

> The version of Radar you've been using is closest to Standard, and you've been receiving it for free. Starting today, you'll receive a free trial of Radar Standard, which now includes broad protection across all payment methods, along with fraud analytics. After the trial ends on January 22, 2027, you'll automatically continue on Radar Standard and be charged $0.05 per screened transaction.

More accurately, the bundled version of Radar is no longer free, and you're being opted in to the paid base tier. Lame.

Stripe Radar no longer free, migrates free tier to paid plan

film42 — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 15:33:42 +0000

Article URL: https://support.stripe.com/questions/updates-to-radar-for-lpms-and-billing-coverage-and-pricing-(october-2026)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49111448

Points: 3

# Comments: 4

New comment by film42 in "Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests"

film42 — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:14:33 +0000

The postmaster is effectively your supervisor. It could see the child segfault and abort the whole DB, but that would be deferring supervision to your init system. Not ideal.

New comment by film42 in "Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests"

film42 — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 03:32:14 +0000

You are correct! TIL, and thank you. Connection processes get a SIGQUIT, shared buffers cleared, and WAL replayed, but postmaster stays alive. It's effectively an online restart.

New comment by film42 in "Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests"

film42 — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 03:17:21 +0000

A million users? Hell, I'd bet 99.999% of live postgres databases in existence serve less than 5 users on average. Even among products that actually make a profit, I bet 99.9% of them serve less than 100 customers a day. We hooligans on hacker news manage the 0.1% of databases, and in my newfound consulting life, I'm hoping to never support one of those again.

New comment by film42 in "Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests"

film42 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 21:43:31 +0000

A thread per connection is a almost always the correct decision for performance, but by choosing a process per connection, postgres is able to let you load whatever sketchy extensions you want. Worst case you crash the process, not the database. It would be nice if you could strike a balance so a segfaul in the extension only crashes a small percentage of connections, not the whole thing.

New comment by film42 in "Elastic lays off 7% of employees"

film42 — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 23:01:36 +0000

I've seen companies put a percentage of the team on a PIP as a "this is not a layoff but we do need to cut costs" situation. Hopefully Elastic is just being honest about it?

New comment by film42 in "Anthropic apologizes for invisible Claude Fable guardrails"

film42 — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:53:56 +0000

I'm surprised they didn't do this the first time around. Like, a user says they forgot their password and you tell them they don't actually have an account, that's an information disclosure vulnerability. Not automatically falling back to Opus just lets the "attacker" know they are bumping against the guardrails and they need to try a different strategy.

It's Anthropic's product and they can do what they want, but my concern is what happens if Fable's product team decides that they can route 25% of traffic to Opus, bill it as Fable, and max their KPIs. That just doesn't sit right.

To be honest about software

film42 — Sat, 16 May 2026 15:46:57 +0000

Article URL: https://film42.substack.com/p/to-be-honest-about-software

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48161209

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by film42 in "Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained"

film42 — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:28:40 +0000

Acquisitions change priorities and layoffs put the squeeze on people. AI is for sure in the mix there, but open source decay is a result of no room in budgets for anything but maximizing revenue.

New comment by film42 in "Claude Opus 4.7 Model Card"

film42 — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 16:22:39 +0000

To be honest, I think it's just a more honest score of what Opus 4.6 actually was. Once contexts get sufficiently large, Opus develops pretty bad short term memory loss.

New comment by film42 in "LaGuardia pilots raised safety alarms months before deadly runway crash"

film42 — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 18:02:20 +0000

I hope it comes down to the NTSB recommending more controllers (or better conditions for controllers) to avoid task saturation, not just more process. It's incredible what a single controller is capable of doing, but for major areas like NYC, it's not enough.

New comment by film42 in "North Korean's 100k fake IT workers net $500M a year for Kim"

film42 — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 16:59:15 +0000

Camera cuts to a tech bro at his desk with 3 jobs and 5 instances of Claude Code running:

> I had [the Register] explain to me three times what [Kim] got arrested for because it sounds an awful lot like what I do here every day.