Hacker News: nbevans

New comment by nbevans in "OfficeCLI: Office suite for AI agents to read and edit Microsoft Office files"

nbevans — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 06:50:35 +0000

The idea of Latex being used in business environments could be a meme

New comment by nbevans in "VPN ban update for UK households as government looks at 'age-gate'"

nbevans — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 19:05:53 +0000

That's already happening in the UK too.

Shortly after the Online Safety Act went into operation, there was politically charged/sensitive/opinionated content on X mysteriously disappearing for UK users but nobody else in the world.

New comment by nbevans in "Datasette Apps: Host custom HTML applications inside Datasette"

nbevans — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 09:39:46 +0000

Datasette pre-dates agentic AI

New comment by nbevans in "Stop Using JWTs"

nbevans — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 09:43:53 +0000

JWT inside of a cookie is fine. This gist is unnecessarily pedantic and seems oblivious to the fact that 99% of JWT impls are indeed just stuffing it inside a cookie.

But yes, short life times with frequent renewals is necessary; that's obvious though. And same applies to any other auth tech.

New comment by nbevans in "Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers"

nbevans — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 13:11:44 +0000

"I am a rockstar developer and this characterisation is unwarranted" -- thought bubble emoji

New comment by nbevans in "LLMCap – A proxy that hard-stops LLM API calls when you hit a dollar cap"

nbevans — Tue, 19 May 2026 09:42:02 +0000

This will fail product-market fit instantly. Nobody is paying $49/mo for a tiny script they can vibe and run locally.

New comment by nbevans in "We rewrote JSONata with AI in a day, saved $500k/year"

nbevans — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 09:11:26 +0000

The most baffling thing here is that they allowed a very very simple JSON expression language to become a 500k/year cost burden on their business

My god. But I am happy that they finally realised their error and put it right.

New comment by nbevans in "OpenCode – Open source AI coding agent"

nbevans — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 16:38:08 +0000

Codex is 15MB of memory per process. Just sayin'

New comment by nbevans in "RE#: how we built the fastest regex engine in F#"

nbevans — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 13:51:52 +0000

It uses far less tokens than C#, so watch this space...

New comment by nbevans in "Bunny Database"

nbevans — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 08:52:59 +0000

Why would you move from Cloudflare to this shady company?

New comment by nbevans in "The future of software engineering is SRE"

nbevans — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 07:40:49 +0000

Surely SRE is just a .md file like everything else? :upside-down-face:

New comment by nbevans in "ISO PDF spec is getting Brotli – ~20 % smaller documents with no quality loss"

nbevans — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 19:52:58 +0000

This is a really really bad idea. Don't break backwards compat. for 20% of gains. Internet connection speeds and storage capacities only go up. In a few years time, 20% of gains will seem crazy to have broken back-compat for.

New comment by nbevans in "'Bandersnatch': The Works That Inspired the 'Black Mirror' Interactive Feature (2019)"

nbevans — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 10:23:24 +0000

I see.

But surely Netflix could have setup 1 to 3 of the "best" variants of the Bandersnatch and let people watch those? Even a "directors cut" based on how the director chose the path, would suffice.

The content is entirely gone right now. Which is pretty tragic as it was excellent.

New comment by nbevans in "'Bandersnatch': The Works That Inspired the 'Black Mirror' Interactive Feature (2019)"

nbevans — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 09:04:53 +0000

I wanted to re-watch this on Netflix but it seems they removed it some time ago and have no plans to bring it back. It seems the interactivity features were obsoleted from their app platform as they were hard to support?

New comment by nbevans in "The "Debate Me Bro" Grift: How Trolls Weaponized the Marketplace of Ideas"

nbevans — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 19:22:23 +0000

Regardless of whether he was grifting or not, he still didn't deserve what happened to him. Nobody apart from serious criminals or warlords deserve that. He was neither.

Why not just embarrass him in a viral stunt. Nobody even tried to do that. They leaped all the way from 0 to 11 by shooting him dead.

New comment by nbevans in "LeetCode for System Design"

nbevans — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 07:26:08 +0000

Are you aware that other OAuth providers exist and that there is no reason to tie yourself directly to Google's provider?

New comment by nbevans in "ARIA, the UK's Bet to Build Scientific Revolutions"

nbevans — Sun, 22 Jun 2025 08:29:27 +0000

Have a read about the "Tube Alloys" project, too. Precursor and seed for the Manhattan Project.

New comment by nbevans in "The Barbican"

nbevans — Mon, 12 May 2025 20:34:48 +0000

6k is pretty typical for any premium apartments in London. That's actually pretty cheap for that location.

New comment by nbevans in "Firebase Studio"

nbevans — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 08:56:36 +0000

I love the Java code sample:

```

// It works, but we have no idea how to send an HTTP request in java.

// If you do, send us a nice example to support@errortexts.com.

// You just need to POST JSON with the keys `api_key` and optionally `message`.

```

That's brilliant. But it does make me wonder why the LLM couldn't have provided you a suitable Java code example?

New comment by nbevans in "You're protecting your data wrong – Introducing the Protected Query Pattern"

nbevans — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 15:30:01 +0000

``everything is a function`` <- ``everything is a function`` + 1