Hacker News: mattbee

New comment by mattbee in "Incident Report: Railway Blocked by Google Cloud [resolved]"

mattbee — Wed, 20 May 2026 06:54:41 +0000

The risk of an "upstream cloud provider" is not something you need to tolerate in your supplier of internet infrastructure!

New comment by mattbee in "Congress Wants You to Pay $130 a Year Just to Drive an Electric Car"

mattbee — Tue, 19 May 2026 18:27:44 +0000

Yep you can look up a car's MOT status publicly, including their mileage history at each inspection. I wonder if they'll send a bill from that report, or expect garages to act as tax collectors.

Though currently you don't need an MOT until a vehicle is 3 years old, so they'll to add something there.

New comment by mattbee in "Congress Wants You to Pay $130 a Year Just to Drive an Electric Car"

mattbee — Tue, 19 May 2026 16:22:08 +0000

Sounds like a bargain. In the UK we'll be paying £0.03 per mile from April 2028.

New comment by mattbee in "Driver accused of DUI tracks missing laptop to Illinois State trooper's house"

mattbee — Mon, 11 May 2026 16:29:40 +0000

This is very cynical, why would you not thank the Wallet Inspector

New comment by mattbee in "Distributing Mac software is increasing my cortisol levels"

mattbee — Sat, 09 May 2026 23:26:38 +0000

Microsoft say it's no longer true that EV certificates get special treatment:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/package-and-d...

The only option to avoid a SmartScreen prompt from day 1 on Windows is to distribute through Microsoft Store, end of story.

If you sign it yourself, via Azure or your own $200/year cert, you will get a SmartScreen prompt initially, but the prompt will stop appearing once the file hash has sufficient download history. There is no exact threshold, but it can take several weeks and hundreds of clean installs from a wide audience.

This is from https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/package-and-d...

New comment by mattbee in "I Do Not Recommend Bitwarden"

mattbee — Sat, 02 May 2026 20:40:06 +0000

Er yeah same. I can believe it's a PITA to self-host because why would they care to make it easy. It's open source, good luck.

$10/year seems pretty fair to avoid all that.

The clients are fine, could be smoother, but I've internalised the quirks by now.

New comment by mattbee in "Show HN: I've built a nice home server OS"

mattbee — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:39:11 +0000

This OS doesn't says it's maintenance-free! But it skips a whole load of maintenance you'd need to think about with a traditional base system, because 1) there's almost nothing there, and 2) the upgrade to that base is easy, you just reboot and restart your containers.

Obviously the software you run needs upgrades, but (again, but a layer down) it's based on Docker and probably someone else is maintaining it. So you pull that new container, restart and the OS is just making sure your data lands in the same place with the new container.

If you're happy with all your software running from Docker this seems like a step up from a Debian or Redhat, and it has a lot less bureaucracy than something like CoreOS.

Whether it's _usable_ I'm not sure (especially around storage management) but it's a really clear pitch.

New comment by mattbee in "I am building a cloud"

mattbee — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 10:19:52 +0000

The internet of 20 years ago was awash with info for running dedicated servers, fragmented and badly-written in places but it was all there. I can absolutely believe LLMs would enable more people to find that knowledge more easily.

New comment by mattbee in "I am building a cloud"

mattbee — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 10:12:15 +0000

I founded a hosting company 25 years ago when User-Mode Linux was the hot new virtualisation tech. We aspired to just replicate the dedicated server experience because that was obviously how you deploy services with the most flexibility, and UML made it so cheap! Through the 2010s I (extremely wrongly) assumed that being metered on each little part of their stack was not something most developers would choose, for the sake of a little convenience.

Does a regular 20-something software engineer still know how to turn some eBay servers & routers into a platform for hosting a high-traffic web application? Because that is still a thing you can do! (I've done it last year to make a 50PiB+ data store). I'm genuinely curious how popular it is for medium-to-big projects.

And Hetzner gives you almost all of that economic upside while taking away much of the physical hassle! Why are they not kings of the hosting world, rather than turning over a modest €367M (2021).

I find it hard to believe that the knowledge to manage a bunch of dedicated servers is that arcane that people wouldn't choose it for this kind of gigantic saving.

New comment by mattbee in "FSF trying to contact Google about spammer sending 10k+ mails from Gmail account"

mattbee — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 18:09:42 +0000

There was a time before Google when various mailing lists of grumpy sysadmins in key institutions could decide the fate of a new mail sender, internet-wide. But yes that "internet community" is small fry now, and can only cut off their own noses if they don't like Google's mail policies.

Before Google, AOL were the previous big-beast mail host, and they did provide some tools to help diagnose why you couldn't get through to their users. It still felt like there was more of a balance of power towards the grumpy sysadmins.

New comment by mattbee in "Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?"

mattbee — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 21:34:22 +0000

Or just switch your browser to Reader Mode and it's free.

New comment by mattbee in "Claude Code Found a Linux Vulnerability Hidden for 23 Years"

mattbee — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 09:44:42 +0000

I have seen it start on a sentence, get lost and finish it with something like "Scratch that, actually it's fine."

And if it's not giving me a reason I can understand for a bug, I'm not listening to it! Mostly it is showing me I've mixed up two parameters, forgotten to initialise something, or referenced a variable from a thread that I shouldn't have.

The immediate feedback means the bug usually gets a better-quality fix than it would if I had got fatigued hunting it down! So variables get renamed to make sure I can't get them mixed up, a function gets broken out. It puts me in the mind of "well make sure this idiot can't make that mistake again!"

New comment by mattbee in "Author of "Careless People" banned from saying anything negative about Meta"

mattbee — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 18:26:54 +0000

The law (OK, well, British law) does recognise that many terms can be Unfair especially when one of the parties is an individual, and especially when it relates to employment. They can nullify them on that basis.

New comment by mattbee in "Claude Code Found a Linux Vulnerability Hidden for 23 Years"

mattbee — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 12:35:21 +0000

Pasting a big batch of new code and asking Claude "what have I forgotten? Where are the bugs?" is a very persuasive on-ramp for developers new to AI. It spots threading & distributed system bugs that would have taken hours to uncover before, and where there isn't any other easy tooling.

I bet there's loads of cryptocurrency implementations being pored over right now - actual money on the table.

New comment by mattbee in "Warranty Void If Regenerated"

mattbee — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 09:53:51 +0000

Absolutely the opposite here, after reading a few paragraphs I was a bit bored. Then I saw the length of the piece, noticed the AI imagery, quit, came here. I read your comment and it makes sense. I'm not reading a story that somebody couldn't be bothered to write.

New comment by mattbee in "Stop Sloppypasta"

mattbee — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:41:53 +0000

"I'm sorry to ask, but have you forwarded me unedited output from an LLM? I'd rather hear what you think!"

New comment by mattbee in "MacBook Neo"

mattbee — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 21:12:20 +0000

I had internalised that it was Windows Defender hooking every file operation and checking it against a blacklist? I've had it forced off for years.

New comment by mattbee in "Rise of the Triforce"

mattbee — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 11:22:32 +0000

Right?? There is a working original After Burner in an arcade in Leeds - on free play and just open to kids of all ages. Sooo many places where it could trap a finger, and it moves pretty violently.

New comment by mattbee in "Privilege is bad grammar"

mattbee — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 19:18:03 +0000

New comment by mattbee in "Show HN: I spent 3 years reverse-engineering a 40 yo stock market sim from 1986"

mattbee — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 15:06:50 +0000

Congratulations Ben! The game sounds like a dangerous cult that I want no part of. But I've also done game ports recently and was curious - how much of the old codebase did you need to understand (and change!) in order to port it? And how much could you just wrap up / virtualise, and start building on top?