Hacker News: mustaphah

New comment by mustaphah in "Claude Code sends your email address to websites"

mustaphah — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 23:18:57 +0000

It's crazy how easily people upvote stuff even when the source doesn't provide any evidence!

New comment by mustaphah in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (November 2026)"

mustaphah — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 21:35:18 +0000

Hi! I'm Mustapha. Software engineer with strong backend & infra/DevOps experience, looking for a backend or backend-leaning fullstack role. I have 9 YOE across enterprise, startup, and freelance roles; 3+ years working remotely on a globally distributed team.

I contributed 3+ years to Automattic (US) - the company behind WordPress. I've built and maintained time-sensitive, high-throughput services processing millions of ops daily. Earlier in my career, I led the technical side of a workflow automation project at Earthlink - a big local enterprise.

While I'm a technical guy by title, I've worked very closely with business - collaborating with customers and product owners to understand and translate their needs into systems.

---

Remote: yes

Location: Baghdad (UTC+3, CET+2)

Willing to relocate: yes

Technologies: Java (5y), TypeScript/Node (4y), Ruby/Rails (3y), Postgres/MySQL (8y), microservices & distributed systems (4y), decent frontend (JS/Dom, React, Tailwind, ...), REST & GraphQL APIs, RabbitMQ, Pub/Sub, Redis, Kubernetes/Docker, Ansible, Prometheus/Grafana.

Résumé/CV: https://hadid.dev/resume/

Website: https://hadid.dev

GitHub: https://github.com/mhadidg

Email: career+hn @ [my website domain]

Jev and the Return of AI/ML Engineering

mustaphah — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 13:48:51 +0000

Article URL: https://leehanchung.github.io/blogs/2026/09/20/jev-return-ai-ml-engineering/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49866629

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by mustaphah in "How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?"

mustaphah — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 22:04:30 +0000

I don't like Ed, but it seems that Luu spends far more attention documenting failed predictions than checking other predictions that might have been correct.

The Little Book of Reinforcement Learning

mustaphah — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 22:27:22 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/alxndrTL/little-book-rl/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48941104

Points: 213

# Comments: 26

Opportunity cost neglect (2009) [pdf]

mustaphah — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 13:24:55 +0000

Article URL: https://bear.warrington.ufl.edu/brenner/mar7588/Papers/frederick-jcr-2009.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48920516

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1931)

mustaphah — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 22:54:54 +0000

Article URL: https://fermatslibrary.com/s/economic-possibilities-for-our-grandchildren

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48900033

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

A field guide to Fable: finding your unknowns

mustaphah — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 10:04:52 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/trq212/status/2073100352921215386

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48784230

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by mustaphah in "Most arguments are about ego, not ideas"

mustaphah — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 15:24:21 +0000

Haidt, in his great book "The Righteous Mind," has been arguing that reasoning evolved not to discover truth but to win arguments. There's a lot of scientific research backing his idea.

Haidt's metaphor is the rider and the elephant: the elephant (intuition) leans, and the rider (reasoning) invents the justification afterward and then defends it like a lawyer, not a truth-seeker.

Intelligence doesn't fix this - it just makes people better at coming up with hard-to-defeat arguments; that explains why smart people disagree all the time.

Ten Takeaways from the AI Engineering Report 2026: The Acceleration Whiplash

mustaphah — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 22:05:27 +0000

Article URL: https://www.faros.ai/blog/ai-acceleration-whiplash-takeaways

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48712185

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

The cost YAGNI was never about

mustaphah — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 22:14:37 +0000

Article URL: https://newsletter.kentbeck.com/p/the-cost-yagni-was-never-about

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48702289

Points: 6

# Comments: 1

New comment by mustaphah in "I found 10k GitHub repositories distributing Trojan malware"

mustaphah — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 20:40:06 +0000

You can probably catch a big pie of those with simple heuristics to flag suspicious repos for expensive review (human- or AI-based). I did that with public account & repo data, and I believe they can do much more given the amount of private data they have access to.

I'm talking about 10s of repos flagged in a few hours. I don't think the volume would be that big for an expensive review.

New comment by mustaphah in "I found 10k GitHub repositories distributing Trojan malware"

mustaphah — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 19:08:51 +0000

Well, my trend detection logic rewards recent stars more than older ones [1]. Recency is an important factor for many custom and public tools that track GitHub trends. I think the bad guys intentionally recreate repos - I actually noticed that.

That being said, they do take action if you report the repo. So I'm guessing good users are doing the heavy lifting here with reporting. I don't believe GitHub is taking enough proactive measures, or maybe they do, but it's not working well, obviously.

https://hadid.dev/posts/github-trends/#growth-based-approach

New comment by mustaphah in "I found 10k GitHub repositories distributing Trojan malware"

mustaphah — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 17:58:44 +0000

This is just one flavour of abuse. GitHub does NOT give a shit about the scale of the malware problem.

I've seen so many forms of malware repos working on a GitHub trends newsletter [1], mostly about crypto, NFTs, KMS, and similar stuff.

In the first runs of the project, I was so surprised by tens of malware repos that looked like trending repos. A lot of them share some common traits that made filtering feasible:

- Made by a fresh GitHub user - many created in the past few days.

- The average creation date of Stargazers accounts is very close to the repo creation date. If you take the mean time diff, those bad repos get exposed.

I reported 10s of malware repos, but then I gave up as I felt GitHub was not really doing enough to fight back. I was like... these guys don't seem to care, why should I?

God knows how many people have been abused by these malware repos on GitHub.

---

[1] https://github.com/mhadidg/gh-trends

New comment by mustaphah in "Is Fable 5 Back?"

mustaphah — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 15:05:21 +0000

You want my email voluntarily for the whole purpose of telling me "Hey, Fable is back"?

Everyone would be screaming the moment that happens. No, Thanks!

Writing code vs. shipping code [pdf]

mustaphah — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 20:46:06 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35275/w35275.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48496179

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Trust Factory

mustaphah — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 13:51:58 +0000

Article URL: https://newsletter.kentbeck.com/p/trust-factory

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48490354

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

New comment by mustaphah in "I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA"

mustaphah — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 18:08:14 +0000

I finished The Lean Startup a few days ago, and I really felt the power of the ideas you've shared there coming from a heavily technical background; incredible work.

It's already been 14+ years since you wrote the book; I wonder if a second edition is something you have in mind, or at least on your consideration list

New comment by mustaphah in "Zig by Example"

mustaphah — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 16:43:42 +0000

You would probably be better off reading learnxinyminutes.com/zig/

New comment by mustaphah in "Aliens.gov"

mustaphah — Fri, 29 May 2026 19:40:53 +0000

I have a strong feeling the whole thing is distracting the people - the real question is, distracting from what?