Hacker News: jamesfinlayson

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "Fakecloud: Local AWS cloud emulator for integration tests"

jamesfinlayson — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 06:52:41 +0000

Interesting - I've only ever used it for unit tests and the only issue I had was (unsurprisingly) restoring from a back-up not being supported.

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "WordPress: Unauthenticated path traversal leading to conditional RCE"

jamesfinlayson — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 06:36:34 +0000

Yep I see this at work pretty regularly - a SpringBoot log file full of requests for all sorts of things (mostly WordPress but I think some IIS as well).

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "SAML: A fractal of bad design"

jamesfinlayson — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 06:03:09 +0000

Yeah I wanted to use alg none for some unit tests once (it was easier than setting up the next lowest tier security option) but whichever Java library I was using had completely disabled it. I could see it had been supported at some point but it had been updated so that it couldn't be enabled at all.

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran"

jamesfinlayson — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 01:40:03 +0000

Yeah same with AWS - they say they can't see my custom KMS key but... this stuff all lives on their servers, not on my servers. AWS definitely have the ability to see my KMS keys and decrypt my data but I assume that they won't unless a judge tells them to.

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran"

jamesfinlayson — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 01:35:41 +0000

Yeah agreed - any ephemeral stuff I need is generally in DynamoDB - S3 (and database) are for permanent storage.

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "Salesforce Global Outage"

jamesfinlayson — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 01:24:11 +0000

> I remember Cisco before iOS used to have hundreds of branches for their router, one branch for each major customer that was demanding specific features. It was unmanageable

Ouch. I heard of a company in my home town (small B2B service provider) doing something similar - they paid well but I didn't think it was worth it.

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea"

jamesfinlayson — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 06:20:35 +0000

I know someone who worked there maybe 10 years ago in an embassy, and it was wild in a very bad way.

- they had a meeting with some locals and the locals discussed the need for retaliation for something, and their plan was to rape someone's daughter

- a kid bought a mini packet of chips on credit from a general store, the debt wasn't repaid and the end result was the general store getting burned down

- a fellow employee forgot to lock their car doors (everyone gets told to do this) and was car-jacked, but he got his car back because the car-jacker couldn't drive a manual car

- the embassy had high fences and security, but just in case, each house within the embassy compound had a central panic room in case the outer wall is breached

It's sad because I know of people who worked there in the 1970s (for Australians it was close to home but a bit of extra money because it was overseas) and it was apparently fine back then, but lawlessness has well and truly taken over.

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence"

jamesfinlayson — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 03:58:52 +0000

And on the flip-side, if it's an exec at another company getting tarred and feathered by the media for their incompetence, it means they probably won't end up at my company in six months' time and do the same thing.

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "What do Visa and Mastercard do? An intro to card networks"

jamesfinlayson — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 02:02:34 +0000

> My bank does not charge for deposits or change; this would be insane and I've never encountered this in the US.

Some smaller banks in Australia do but the big ones all have cash and coin ATMs which are free for account holders.

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch"

jamesfinlayson — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 01:42:52 +0000

On a Mac I have no idea what, if anything F5 does in Chrome. Refresh is the much more annoying Cmd+r.

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "How I advertise malicious software on Google Ads"

jamesfinlayson — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 01:08:51 +0000

CGNAT'ed IP address? I get occasional CloudFlare blocks at home from some hobby-related websites I visit maybe once a week, and I know that no one else in my house is doing anything to hit rate limits.

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "Getting phpBB 1.4.4 working in Docker"

jamesfinlayson — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 03:54:00 +0000

Yeah a few years ago I got a bug report from someone in the business about getting a weird error when trying to update some text. Turns out they were trying to add (*) as a disclaimer at the end of something and Akamai was just giving a blank 403 because it looked to much like SQL.

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "Getting phpBB 1.4.4 working in Docker"

jamesfinlayson — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 03:52:15 +0000

Not sure - Akamai seem to roll out defenses against most new attacks, and Akamai isn't a new company so presumably they've been doing it for a while? Never dug too deeply into the WAF settings so maybe it's possible to turn them on or off.

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?"

jamesfinlayson — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 04:01:17 +0000

Yeah it was a Texas Instruments calculator for me too.

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "Startup Anti-Patterns"

jamesfinlayson — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 23:12:04 +0000

This was all on-prem stuff. But it was taken to ridiculous extremes. I've worked on something that was a knot of message queues but there was one email service.

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "Startup Anti-Patterns"

jamesfinlayson — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 03:48:01 +0000

Been there before - I worked at a company where some geniuses thought that microservices would solve all of our scaling issues. We ended up with four microservices just to send an email (one to template, one to send, one to persist to database and one other which I can't remember now).

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "Leak of Internal Valve Data"

jamesfinlayson — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 03:40:31 +0000

Maybe from a decommissioned content server? Some of this stuff was publicly available up until 2013 (people were frantically downloading old builds of stuff in the lead-up to the Steam2 shutdown in 2013).

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "12TB Steam leak reveals unseen Half-Life 2: Episode 3 builds"

jamesfinlayson — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 03:39:14 +0000

Yeah I read elsewhere that there was some unseen stuff in other pre-release builds of games in this dump, but no Episode Three itself.

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird"

jamesfinlayson — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 03:54:01 +0000

Yes I remember a friend doing university marking for a beginners programming course years ago and some student had managed to swap True and False making their assignment very wonky.

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID"

jamesfinlayson — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 01:07:17 +0000

Yeah I switched to Windows 11 recently and was a little annoyed by that - Notepad was always a place to paste formatted junk to get the plaintext - I don't need anything persisted.