Hacker News: patrickdavey

New comment by patrickdavey in "I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots"

patrickdavey — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 01:02:01 +0000

I'm sure this is a basic question I should already understand, but, what is actually in it for the bot farm? They spend your money (annoying), but, does Google actually pay them somehow? I don't get what they are "farming"

New comment by patrickdavey in "How to Start a Ruby Meetup"

patrickdavey — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 19:31:18 +0000

I've been helping to run a meetup in Christchurch, New Zealand: https://christchurch.ruby.nz/ for about 10 years (maybe longer, I've lost track!). I _completed_ agree with the article that the best thing you can do to avoid burnout is to organise it with someone else (or better still, two or more others like we do).

The other thing which really worked for us: We were getting fed up trying to badger people to help give talks etc (or just doing it ourselves). Completely exhausting. Ended up saying to the community: "this is your meetup, we just help run it. If we don't get 11 speakers for the year we're going to shut it down". We asked in January, got 11 speakers for the year (Dec is social), and we've been doing it like that ever since. Works an absolute treat. You do need to be prepared for no one to step up, in which case, it's sad, but, shut it down. You're not the community, the community is the community!

New comment by patrickdavey in "Show HN: Got sick of ads, so I made my own logic puzzle site"

patrickdavey — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 22:58:34 +0000

Yeah, this collection is _awesome_. I'm currently enjoying the Towers (just do it on 5x5 simple, and find it quite relaxing!).

New comment by patrickdavey in "Hetzner Price Adjustment"

patrickdavey — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 09:22:26 +0000

I haven't looked into it thoroughly yet, but, at some point it'll be worth looking at getting a static IP address and using Cloudflare tunnels to serve toyish projects from your home netwerk. Just need to work out how to firewall it properly from the rest of the home network.

A Fake Bug Report Hijacks Your AI Coding Agent – and Nothing Catches It

patrickdavey — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 18:50:54 +0000

Article URL: https://tenetsecurity.ai/blog/agentjacking-coding-agents-with-fake-sentry-errors/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48507994

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Anthropic calls for global pause in AI development before humans lose control

patrickdavey — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 01:23:41 +0000

Article URL: https://siliconangle.com/2026/06/04/anthropic-calls-global-pause-ai-development-humans-lose-control/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406873

Points: 5

# Comments: 4

New comment by patrickdavey in "Retro-Tech Parenting"

patrickdavey — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 21:08:12 +0000

Can you point to an article on how to do this? This sounds _amazing_

New comment by patrickdavey in "Taking a walk may lead to more creativity than sitting, study finds (2014)"

patrickdavey — Tue, 26 May 2026 05:54:11 +0000

So you have an article you can point to?

New comment by patrickdavey in "Sleep research led to a new sleep apnea drug"

patrickdavey — Sat, 23 May 2026 22:22:48 +0000

Yip interesting, you're the second person in a week who has suggested the magnesium. I frankly never trust these suggestions of supplements (having tried some before), but, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12412596/ at least suggested it was a modest improvement. I'm going to give it a try at least.

New comment by patrickdavey in "Sleep research led to a new sleep apnea drug"

patrickdavey — Sat, 23 May 2026 00:58:01 +0000

I've tried a CPAP machine for 6 weeks and felt no different and gave up. I think I was a 6 on the scale. I wish it had worked though!

Currently I've just given up and embracing feeling relatively tired all the time. I've tried side sleeping devices (woody knows backpack) mandibular advancement splints etc.

So hard to tell (I find anyway) to get to a definitive answer

New comment by patrickdavey in "AI didn't kill your junior pipeline. You did"

patrickdavey — Fri, 22 May 2026 23:22:41 +0000

This article really captures what I'm feeling about the entire AI jobs landscape. What the heck happens when we don't have juniors for years?

There's gonna be trouble ahead (unless you truly believe AI will be able to completely replace all programming of course)

New comment by patrickdavey in "I’ve banned query strings"

patrickdavey — Sun, 10 May 2026 03:26:34 +0000

"It’s my website: I can do what I want with it. "

Right on! It's so liberating having your own wee corner of the internet.

New comment by patrickdavey in "An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below"

patrickdavey — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 02:12:55 +0000

What a bad situation, and I genuinely feel for them. I do think they blamed a lot of other people and I think a section on what lessons they have learned themselves might be a good idea/look.

At minimum you want to have off site backups, preferably readonly (like an S3 bucket or whatever). And test the restore process.

I hope they get it sorted, what a mess.

New comment by patrickdavey in "1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History"

patrickdavey — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 05:19:40 +0000

If you're lucky enough to have a job. Which you probably won't in a Great Depression II

New comment by patrickdavey in "Untapped Way to Learn a Codebase: Build a Visualizer"

patrickdavey — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 07:48:28 +0000

I'm about to start a new role. What have you found most effective in using it to learn a new code base? Just asking questions about "what is this class doing" ? drawing architecture diagrams?

New comment by patrickdavey in "An Update on Heroku"

patrickdavey — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 18:00:49 +0000

Any write up on this?

New comment by patrickdavey in "An Update on Heroku"

patrickdavey — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 01:29:07 +0000

Kamal is basically self hosting though right? So you have to take care of keeping the underlying os patched etc. With heroku you only needed to think about git push.. ?

New comment by patrickdavey in "Show HN: Kings vs. Knight"

patrickdavey — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 03:49:32 +0000

May well have bugs as I just finished it (and really it should be baked into the UI so you can easily reverse)... however... here is the reverse play:

https://minichessgames.com/#/play/kings-vs-knight

Hope your daughter likes it.

New comment by patrickdavey in "Qwen3-TTS family is now open sourced: Voice design, clone, and generation"

patrickdavey — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 02:29:59 +0000

But this is different? Wholesale copying of copyrighted works and packaging it up and allowing it to be generated. It's not remotely reasonable

New comment by patrickdavey in "Show HN: Kings vs. Knight"

patrickdavey — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 18:11:40 +0000

Yup, I'm going to build out the reverse play when I find time in the next few weeks hopefully! I'll try to remember to comment here :)

Quite probably you did just run up against a bug in it! I'd have to see the position though.

Great question on the maximal theoretical length. Being pedantic I'd imagine infinite if I just move a knight back and forth and you move a king back and forth. (Though I disallow repeat moves for interests sake)