Hacker News: icameron

New comment by icameron in "Antiquated HTML Snippets and Artefacts"

icameron — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 16:37:51 +0000

Conditional comments are still part of HTML email templates. Though soon will be dead I hope. Thanks "classic" Outlook!

New comment by icameron in "Show HN: I built self-hosted deployment automation tool for Windows and IIS"

icameron — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:52:50 +0000

Do any web servers have meaningful updates? It’s pretty standard stuff. IIS can do quite a bit of the same things. It’s common in my industry. We set up URL rewrites, reverse proxys, asp.net, even node.js or python (flask) based apps using WSGI. Separate app pools for everything all on the same server sometimes. It’s never been a bottleneck because it’s pretty streamlined code. Haven't had any security issues with the web server ever. It’s nice there is a GUI but when you start looking at the configuration (xml based) a lot of the directives are familiar if you’re used to nginx.conf or httpd and with htaccess (web.config) in site directories.

New comment by icameron in "Stowaway – Take the window seat on any plane or satellite overhead"

icameron — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 03:12:31 +0000

Not OP but the API limits are for the earth imagery tiles which cost paid credits from Google. Not the flight info.

New comment by icameron in "LLMs reward expertise"

icameron — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 22:27:23 +0000

The event could be when fair pricing comes from the model providers. We're still at the cash burning stage. When the economy crashes a little and departments start monitoring their spending, and the prices for inference are 10x what they are, there will be less tolerance for employees to substitute constant AI usage for understanding.

New comment by icameron in "Company Will Add Phone, AirPod, and Smartwatch Trackers to ALPRs"

icameron — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 21:59:55 +0000

I was in the space 10 years ago with a product. Primarily Bluetooth, later BLE and WiFi. At that time most consumer devices were constantly discoverable. About 3-5% of traffic would have a disoverable MAC. These days not so many. iPhones never are discoverable unless you are in pairing mode. BLE broadcasts beacons much more consistently and generates a lot of data to filter, but they also change MACs.

Most WiFi chipsets use hardware based MAC layer, so promiscuous monitoring / sniffing is not possible on virtually every embedded module. There were a few chipsets, known as SoftMAC where linux drivers did the MAC layer, in which you could truly sniff the air for all traffic and capture a whole lot of MAC addresses. That was much more useful, but requires more CPU and specific older hardware. If you have a permanent power source like in a ALPR that isn't as much of a concern. I don't know of any companies that really did this though. Almost all our competitors used solutions that only supported the usual device discovery, which relies on BT being discoverable, or AP mode WiFi in order to track a MAC address. It's really easy to market though, it sounds great on paper. In practice the results are less than stellar and with time got even worse as vendors stopped being discoverable by default, and handsets started using used dynamic MAC addresses

New comment by icameron in "The seed oil panic is hurting my cardiac patients"

icameron — Sun, 24 May 2026 15:27:49 +0000

You didn’t miss much there was a paywall after the 3rd paragraph.

New comment by icameron in "The Biochemical Beauty of Retatrutide: How GLP-1s Work"

icameron — Thu, 14 May 2026 21:50:42 +0000

Does it alter you mind more than just your appetite for healthy food like you said? Is there a buzz or general mood lift as well?

New comment by icameron in "Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers"

icameron — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 06:23:33 +0000

I was thinking about your last point about why we honor veterans. In the US it’s not really the case that without them we’d be captured or killed. All our conflicts in the last several generations have been us invading or fighting in foreign lands against forces that were not attacking us. All our modern military personnel are willfully employed and well compensated and given lifetime benefits for that.

New comment by icameron in "Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident"

icameron — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:34:14 +0000

It’s tacky. Here’s my kid sitting on a bar.

New comment by icameron in "Show HN: GrobPaint: Somewhere Between MS Paint and Paint.net"

icameron — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 04:15:29 +0000

It lists Magic Wand under Features [1] https://github.com/groverburger/grobpaint/blob/e249c7553f4c8...

New comment by icameron in "Hazardous substances found in all headphones tested by ToxFREE project"

icameron — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:31:00 +0000

I can’t stop myself from chewing on the little rubber cups that come in the ends of earbuds. I guess the slightly sweet synthetic taste is BPAs.

New comment by icameron in "Ten years of deploying to production"

icameron — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 17:34:57 +0000

Yes yes. You’re right. I am saying at some places devs don’t own production- there’s an IT/Ops/non-dev person in the loop. Especially common if you’re a consultant in non-tech industries

New comment by icameron in "Ten years of deploying to production"

icameron — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 17:13:53 +0000

I completely agree. I really worded this poorly. I was trying to say it’s great to have CI/CD to production. There are places I’ve worked who don’t have it due to their bureaucracy/regulation/security. Not because we don’t know how it set it up

New comment by icameron in "Ten years of deploying to production"

icameron — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 08:07:32 +0000

That’s a tough policy to only update prod biweekly! It would be super frustrating if you had a bug crawl out and not be allowed to patch it for 2 weeks. This post really expresses the frustration of working in a bureaucratic environment where developers don’t have full access to change production.

That being said CI/CD is a luxury for coders at lean startups, but there’s still a lot of jobs where you have to work with some DevOps Team to deploy your code to prod. Organizations past a certain size have more hoops to jump through, for reasons.

Of course as a dev it’s ideal to have full access!

New comment by icameron in "Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)"

icameron — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 17:47:25 +0000

Sturgeon. Maybe lamprey (I've never tried it)

New comment by icameron in "OpenAI should build Slack"

icameron — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 21:38:46 +0000

My org went all in on Teams over 6 years ago. Removed all PBX systems and desk phones. Pulled out Cisco phones from 20 offices. Ported all numbers to MS. By all accounts it was unremarkable to the end users, and when WFH mandates started it was seamless. Definitely a lot less IT support for configuring and troubleshooting a phone system too. There is far less downtime because Teams will ring through to your cell phone if the office internet is down or your laptop is off. That was not possible when the Cisco routers and CallManager in the office were running the DIDs and local extensions

New comment by icameron in "Show HN: Wikipedia as a doomscrollable social media feed"

icameron — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 05:00:41 +0000

Page crashed after downloading and extracting. On safari iPhone that’s a few years old, latest iOS. I was really interested in trying / why I waited Ed: tried again it crashed at 66% loading (after 100% loading)

New comment by icameron in "Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle"

icameron — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:44:36 +0000

Sure, if there is increasing or evolving utility being offered. But it’s also fair to charge for upgrades in that case.

New comment by icameron in "There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape"

icameron — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 03:50:29 +0000

Running a web server off a disposable vape: https://bogdanthegeek.github.io/blog/projects/vapeserver/

New comment by icameron in "ICE's Tool to Monitor Phones in Neighborhoods"

icameron — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 17:31:58 +0000

When I first heard the advice to ditch your phone when you go a protest, I thought maybe that's a little extreme. But it's a real threat. We already knew post Snowden there is an extensive big brother apparatus. We saw post 911 that all rights can be taken away in the name of counter-terrorism. Now with a government that's operating outside the law and labeling peaceful protesters as terrorists, I don't think we can rely on telcos to protect our identity. The mass surveillance will fingerprint a device, and the telco will know your name so it's not at all an extreme precaution to ditch your phone.