Hacker News: fontain

New comment by fontain in "Someone at BrowserStack is leaking users' email addresses"

fontain — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 14:57:43 +0000

For a little more color for people unfamiliar with modern sales/marketing:

1. A user signs up to BrowserStack

2. BrowserStack (automatically) upload the submitted user’s information to Apollo

3. Apollo “enrich” the user’s details using information they already have about the person, e.g: company revenue, LinkedIn profile

4. Sales reps at BrowserStack use the enriched information to identify leads, bucket for marketing etc.

Apollo’s customer data sharing adds any information BrowserStack send to Apollo to the person’s profile with Apollo, accessible to all Apollo customers.

For example, any other Apollo customer can search something like “email addresses for decision makers at Example, Inc.” and get back a list including your email address (if you told BrowserStack you are a decision maker at Example, Inc.)

Every single marketing team is doing all of this, the only reason it was obvious in this case is that the OP used a unique email address for BrowserStack. If you sign up for any business product online, you surely have a profile in Apollo filled with details about you gathered from around the web (and details you submitted).

edit: https://www.apollo.io/privacy-policy/remove opt out link but Apollo are just one of many companies offering this service

New comment by fontain in "Ask HN: How do you handle clients who don't pay on time?"

fontain — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 15:31:00 +0000

Not even, it’s the classic LLM SaaS spam that is swamping Reddit. The goal of the spam is to get a bunch of people on a credible website talking about a problem and then the OP will return to post a link to their product. Suddenly, all the powerful HN link juice flows from HN to their product. Every single entrepreneurial subreddit is covered in this garbage, so much so, there’s definitely some sort of e-book or course teaching people to do it.

Perhaps @dang can save us from this.

New comment by fontain in "Delve removed from Y Combinator"

fontain — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 05:54:57 +0000

YC has no problem with morally questionable behavior, many YC startups do things that are just as shady. YC is, ultimately, not responsible for what these startups choose to do. Delve’s problem is that they betrayed so many other YC companies in the process. An important value of being in YC is access to a ready-made customer base. The licensing issue is nothing compared to their fake audits but it is an affront to the YC community, hence, kicked from the community.

I’m sure if Delve has only engaged in fraudulent audits or had only resold another YC company’s product, they would have been allowed to stay, the problem is all of that combined pissed off enough other YC companies.

New comment by fontain in "A.I. Helped One Man (and His Brother) Build a $1.8B Company"

fontain — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 12:35:27 +0000

The opposite of an “A.I” company, he is reselling the services of another filled with humans. A great, profitable business, sure, a notable success, yes, but a 2-man billion dollar company made possible by A.I? No. Businesses like this have existed for decades and are vulnerable to their service providers stealing the business out from under them.

New comment by fontain in "New laws to make it easier to cancel subscriptions and get refunds"

fontain — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 10:37:28 +0000

You can in Europe, e.g: https://wise.com/help/articles/1CoZht05rHDEJcycXU2RMh/what-a...

New comment by fontain in "A dot a day keeps the clutter away"

fontain — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 23:12:32 +0000

Determine the cost of owning the ice cream maker per year. For some people, owning something costs nothing and in fact provides value, they find comfort in owning things, used or not. For some people, owning things is a burden, a drain, and owning something unused is painful.

An ice cream maker costs maybe $200? How would you feel if you disposed of the ice cream maker and then a week later realized you wanted it?

If you want to soften the blow, don’t throw things away: give them away to someone who will use them.

I hate owning things, owning an ice cream maker that I never use would weigh on me and I would much rather spend $200 on a new ice cream maker every 5 years (that I give away after a month) than have an unused ice cream maker for 5 years.

New comment by fontain in "GitHub's Historic Uptime"

fontain — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 19:52:20 +0000

GitHub is 100x the size today with 100x the product surface area. Pre-Microsoft GitHub was just a git host. Now, whether GitHub should have become what it is today is a fair question but to say “GitHub” is less stable today vs. 10 years ago ignores the significant changes. Also, much of these incidents are limited to products that are unreliable by nature, e.g: CoPilot depends on OpenAI and OpenAI has outages. The entire LLM API industry expects some requests to fail.

GitHub’s reliability could stand to be improved but without narrowing down to products these sort of comparisons are meaningless.

New comment by fontain in "GitHub's Historic Uptime"

fontain — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 19:46:38 +0000

An aggregate number like that doesn’t seem to be a reasonable measure. Should OpenAI models being unavailable in CoPilot because OpenAI has an outage be considered GitHub “downtime”?

New comment by fontain in "GitHub Monaspace Case Study"

fontain — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 15:44:02 +0000

“Texture healing works by finding each pair of adjacent characters where one wants more space, and one has too much. Narrow characters are swapped for ones that cede some of their whitespace, and wider characters are swapped for ones that extend to the very edge of their box. This swapping is powered by an OpenType feature called “contextual alternates,” which is widely supported by both operating systems and browser engines.

Contextual alternates are normally used for certain scripts, like Arabic, where the shape of each glyph depends on the surrounding glyphs. And they are also used for cursive handwriting fonts where the stroke of the “pen” might have different connection points across letters. Texture healing is a novel application of this technology to code.”