Hacker News: hopeless

New comment by hopeless in "Be Careful with GIDs in Rails"

hopeless — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 13:17:09 +0000

A bit of a bizarre post since to_sgid has existed forever to generate signed global ids. Global IDs are probably one the most powerful and underrated features of Rails but regular global ids are only supposed to be used internally (e.g. job params) and never sent to the client.

If there’s a gotcha it’s that _signed_ global ids are only signed, not encrypted, and very few people seem to know about the optimised method (globalid::Locator.locate_many) for loading a batch of global ids

New comment by hopeless in "Measuring the impact of AI on experienced open-source developer productivity"

hopeless — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 14:36:54 +0000

What if agentic coding results in _less_ dopamine than manual coding? Because honestly I think that's more likely and jives with my experience.

There's no flow state to be achieved with AI tools (at the moment)

New comment by hopeless in "Ask HN: If Stripe turned Evil, how much damage could they do?"

hopeless — Sat, 31 Aug 2024 19:30:07 +0000

I think a better way question is how much damage they might inadvertently do without being evil

New comment by hopeless in "Show HN: 10x cheaper GitHub Actions on your AWS account"

hopeless — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 16:47:31 +0000

ah, I think it was prior to the caching actions so I'll see if I can try again today. Thanks

New comment by hopeless in "Show HN: 10x cheaper GitHub Actions on your AWS account"

hopeless — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 15:54:42 +0000

I'd love to see some more detailed write-up on how to switch to Warpbuild for different tech stacks. I tried a few months ago when the instructions were basically just to change the runs-on type but IIRC it failed with an error around setting up ruby (and caching it?) and there were no clear instructions on how to proceed.

New comment by hopeless in "AI Agents That Matter"

hopeless — Wed, 03 Jul 2024 19:04:38 +0000

I worked on agent-based systems >20 years ago, including large research projects and standardisation/interoperability work.

Ultimately, that effort failed but I don’t see any awareness of that considerable volume of work reflected in today’s use of the word “agent”. If nothing else, there was a lot of work on the use-cases and human factors.

It’s just a bit disheartening to know that so much work, by hundreds of researchers (at least), over 10+ years, has just slipped into irrelevance

New comment by hopeless in "Ask HN: Is Heroku's DNS Down?"

hopeless — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 15:51:31 +0000

yes (at least, that's my theory and experience too)

New comment by hopeless in "Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?"

hopeless — Tue, 04 Jul 2023 23:27:52 +0000

https://jamie.ideasasylum.com

Been blogging since ~2000 but archived most the old stuff. Just rebuilt it on Bridgetown, Tailwind, and Cloudflare Pages because I had some free time.

Best recent blog post is about my re-discovery of hobbies during sabbatical: https://jamie.ideasasylum.com/2023/07/02/hobbies

New comment by hopeless in "Show HN: Mkcert – Valid HTTPS certificates for localhost"

hopeless — Mon, 07 Jan 2019 12:20:58 +0000

I've been using https://www.tinycert.org/ for years which basically lets you create your own certificate authority and issue certs (which obviously aren't trusted by everyone but can be trusted by you/your team). It's ideal for generating SSL certs for ephemeral apps e.g. review apps on Heroku since it can all be done using an API

New comment by hopeless in "EU to recommend that member states abolish daylight saving time"

hopeless — Fri, 31 Aug 2018 15:32:46 +0000

yeah, I've had Americans say 6AM EST during the summer when it's EDT

New comment by hopeless in "Marketing Firm Exactis Leaked a Personal Info Database with 340M Records"

hopeless — Fri, 29 Jun 2018 09:53:40 +0000

A lot of people complained that GDPR was too onerous on small firms and that they should be exempt. According to LinkedIn https://ie.linkedin.com/company/exactis-llc Exactis has just 10 employees (obviously some error possible. Call it 15-20?)

Now do you think small firms can’t hold large quantities of damaging data?

New comment by hopeless in "Ireland's National Monuments Service Wreck Viewer"

hopeless — Mon, 18 Jun 2018 15:02:17 +0000

This would make a great AR app: standing at the clifftops, looking out at the empty seas, only to reveal the wrecks and stories lying underneath

New comment by hopeless in "Ireland's National Monuments Service Wreck Viewer"

hopeless — Mon, 18 Jun 2018 15:01:10 +0000

Probably the most famous wartime loss was the Lusitania off the Old Head of Kinsale. Its fame is partly that it was a Cunard ship like the Titanic, and partly because of the controversy around her cargo. Although it was a passenger liner, it was sunk by a German U-Boat because it was thought to be smuggling arms from the then-neutral US to England.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMS_Lusitania

New comment by hopeless in "Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning (2010)"

hopeless — Mon, 28 May 2018 19:54:42 +0000

Practice spotting someone drowning from real videos of public swimming pools: http://spotthedrowningchild.com/

It's good but not perfect since the lifeguard thankfully rescues them before they drown but it's still a good exercise. I can do this exercise fairly reliably but I'm not perfect either.

A few years ago I saved a man from drowning _but_ I very very nearly didn't: https://medium.com/@ideasasylum/i-saved-a-man-from-drowning-...

New comment by hopeless in "GDPR made searchable by Algolia"

hopeless — Thu, 03 May 2018 16:33:49 +0000

Particularly when the wrong flag is used. In this case, Gaelige is given the Scottish flag when it's actually the official language of Ireland in the EU. Scots and Irish Gaelige are not the same language. And Scotland is not an EU member (it's membership, sadly, is by virtue of the UK's membership)

New comment by hopeless in "Publishers Haven't Realized How Big a Deal GDPR Is"

hopeless — Sun, 08 Apr 2018 18:41:25 +0000

If you outside the EU, it really isn’t about “anyone coming after you”. Even within the EU the enforcement actions currently err of the side of a stern warning rather than fine (except in the most deliberate cases). Though that may change.

Either way, you shouldn’t be doing it out of fear. You should be complying for practical business reason

1. This is how you should be treating personal data. 2. In exchange for complying with GDPR, you get access to a market of >700m people. If you’re a service provider, it’s illegal for any EU business to be your customer without GDPR compliance.

New comment by hopeless in "Honesty is the new game changer"

hopeless — Thu, 01 Mar 2018 13:51:02 +0000

Love the domain name!

And some of the screenshots reveal an approach to hiring which is sorely lacking. At this stage, every single LinkedIn email and cold outreach email from a recruiter gets marked as spam.

Not a single one seems to understand that hiring should be treating people as… well, people with lives and desires. Not just a resource to plug into a hole; not a fool to be tricked into changing jobs so the recruiter can hit their targets.

Any innovation in this space is welcome and I hope there are enough "decent" companies to make it a successful business.

fwiw, part of the advantage of going freelance was side-stepping all the bullshit hiring assumptions.

New comment by hopeless in "The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday"

hopeless — Tue, 16 Jan 2018 16:53:12 +0000

yep, you're not the first to recommend it. I was hoping there were a few others in the same vein

New comment by hopeless in "The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday"

hopeless — Tue, 16 Jan 2018 16:51:56 +0000

oops, yeah, Crew Resource Management is what I meant — things like making sure a junior officer can question a senior officer when she sees a problem.

Crew Relationship Management is probably something else ;-)

New comment by hopeless in "The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday"

hopeless — Tue, 16 Jan 2018 16:10:20 +0000

There's a lot we can learn from aviation: accident retrospectives, checklists, master caution alarms, crew relationship management, human factors research, etc.

However, my knowledge of these things is a bit piecemeal and anecdotal. Does anyone know a good book on these things?