Hacker News: johtso

New comment by johtso in "Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android"

johtso — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 22:40:28 +0000

Yes this behaviour is infuriating, the surprise autocorrect! Can result in some really embarrassing messages being sent..

New comment by johtso in "List animals until failure"

johtso — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 10:51:12 +0000

This is the trouble with common names, the way to avoid ambiguity is to use the binomial name.

New comment by johtso in "Text-to-SQL is dead, long live text-to-SQL"

johtso — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 16:37:02 +0000

When you're having to work with someone else's godawful convoluted database schema you're sometimes really happy not to have to write the query yourself. Giving the LLM context with previously written queries can be quite effective.

The writing SQL experience is a product of both SQL's syntax, the structure of the database you're querying over and the complexity of your query.

When things get hairy, and you have a good number of representative queries already written that you can use as context, LLMs can be really nice tool.

Restate Cloud Is Open to Everyone – Build Durable Workflows and Agents Today

johtso — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 15:25:20 +0000

Article URL: https://www.restate.dev/blog/announcing-restate-cloud-public

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45504303

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by johtso in "Show HN: Pyscn – Python code quality analyzer for vibe coders"

johtso — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 16:35:32 +0000

This is fairly common with linting/test coverage tools

New comment by johtso in "Benefits of choosing email over messaging"

johtso — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 10:47:02 +0000

I've been having a bad time with email of late. It's been the method of communication between us and another company (a pretty creaky old product). I thought they were replying strangely and ignoring my questions "did they even read what I said!?". It turns out for whatever reason they hadn't been getting some of my emails.

Now I can't trust that anything has been received unless I get an acknowledgement, so I have to keep pestering for replies. Basically lost trust in the protocol because it's dependent on the the other person's mailserver behaving they way you expect it to.

New comment by johtso in "Parrot – type-safe SQL in Gleam, supports SQlite, PostgreSQL and MySQL"

johtso — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 10:40:00 +0000

sqlc always seemed like a really neat concept to me. I love the idea of being able to write my queries as raw SQL in separate files, would make everything so much more interoperable with other tools. Having your queries defined as strings inside some other programming language always struck me as not so awesome.

I'd love to see something like this for Typescript and Effect's SQL integration with schemas.

New comment by johtso in "Ask HN: Went to prison for 18 months, lost access to my GitHub. What can I do?"

johtso — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 17:57:38 +0000

Maybe, depending on where you are in the world, you could make some kind of GDPR request to get access to your data, even if you don't recover your account?

A year of improving Node.js compatibility in Cloudflare Workers

johtso — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 00:53:03 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.cloudflare.com/nodejs-workers-2025/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45381252

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by johtso in "Cloudflare Email Service: private beta"

johtso — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 16:01:04 +0000

Thanks for recommending mailpace, £7.50/month for 10,000 emails is very reasonable, _and_ they support idempotency! Definitely makes me consider switching to them..

New comment by johtso in "Cloudflare Email Service: private beta"

johtso — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 15:16:21 +0000

Please tell me this supports some kind of idempotency.. I fear it wont.

The kind of hoops I've had to jump through to achieve DIY idempotency with Postmark would make you cringe, a shared lock to avoid race conditions, and then using the API to check if an email with the unique id (manually added to the metadata when sending) has not already been sent before sending an email.

Being safe in the knowledge that an email with some unique key will only be delivered once regardless of bugs, processes dying mid task, network issues etc. just makes life so much simpler. The risk of sending duplicate emails or at worst spamming your users due to some more nefarious bug is something that you really want to guard against at as low a level as possible. Sure this might not be quite as consequential as duplicate charges through the Stripe API for example (Stripe have always seemed to lead the way with good API design in this regard).. doThing(data) is _not_ good enough for executing tasks over a network that are effectful, have a cost, and potentially risk your reputation if things go wrong. Idempotency keys should far more widely supported!

New comment by johtso in "Shai-Hulud malware attack: Tinycolor and over 40 NPM packages compromised"

johtso — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 21:53:32 +0000

Maybe one approach would be to pin all dependencies, and not use any new version of a package until it reaches a certain age. That would hopefully be enough time for any issues to be discovered?

New comment by johtso in "Age verification doesn’t work"

johtso — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 07:47:54 +0000

Do you not use an adblocker? I can't remember the last time I saw that kind of ad..

New comment by johtso in "Probability of typing a wrong Bitcoin address"

johtso — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 17:07:52 +0000

What about something like VisualHostKey but for the bitcoin address?

New comment by johtso in "End well, this won't: UK commissioner suggests govt stops kids from using VPNs"

johtso — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 14:51:39 +0000

Really? you can just download an app on your phone (like ProtonVPN) and it just works, where's the faff?

New comment by johtso in "Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library"

johtso — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 08:45:12 +0000

All 7ishTB of images are also available on the internet archive, Flickr was a collaboration that allowed browsing them in a vaguely user friendly way. I guess serving over 5 million images isn't trivial and it made sense as a way to help with discovery.

https://archive.org/details/bookimages

New comment by johtso in "Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library"

johtso — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 14:40:12 +0000

Yes, the dezoomify extension will get you individual pages, quite neat seeing the image getting put together client-side in a canvas.. shame it's even necessary though.

New comment by johtso in "Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library"

johtso — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 13:52:44 +0000

Pinned comment on their Youtube video 6 years ago "There is no option to download them. We will let you know if one day that will come!"

New comment by johtso in "Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library"

johtso — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 11:41:25 +0000

Hermetically open? Where's the download link?

It really frustrates me that fantastic projects like this end up only being made available via some "online catalogue" with tiled zooming and no option to download.

Just stick it on the internet archive, and then voila, the data is actually open, everything gets automatically OCRed, and then we can do fun transformative things like the Internet Archive Book Images project..

https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/

https://ia804508.us.archive.org/21/items/vrr-texts-imageryof...

New comment by johtso in "Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library"

johtso — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 11:27:01 +0000

AI? All you need is a 200 line perl script :)

https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/

https://ia804508.us.archive.org/21/items/vrr-texts-imageryof...

https://preo.ube.fr/textesetcontextes/index.php?id=5025