Hacker News: psandor

New comment by psandor in "LastPass notifies users of yet another data breach"

psandor — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 12:16:08 +0000

“ the priority of sales and profits has resulted in the sacrifice of the main quality measure of their main and only product”

What do you mean exactly here What do you think LastPass could have done to prevent this specific issue?

New comment by psandor in "GPT‑5.4 Mini and Nano"

psandor — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 06:31:41 +0000

“every single direction change I suggest, codex is all: "that's a great idea, and we should totally go that [very different] direction", try as I might to get it to act like more of a peer.“

That’s not the model, that’s a personality setting you can change in the codex config file.

Set it to Pragmatic, and ask it (not command it) about your new direction in planning mode.

It will tell you if your idea is not good for the given project. It’s an excellent peer.

New comment by psandor in "Pi for Excel: AI sidebar add-in for Excel"

psandor — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 04:11:03 +0000

Do you plan supporting the web version of Excel?

I’m a heavy Excel user and would love to try this, but I’m on Linux, so I can use only the online version of Excel.

New comment by psandor in "Ex-GitHub CEO launches a new developer platform for AI agents"

psandor — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 06:35:32 +0000

If they had wanted a moat for this part of their offering, they wouldn’t have open-sourced it.

This is not their offering, this is a tool to raise interest.

New comment by psandor in "Show HN: I scraped 3B Goodreads reviews to train a better recommendation model"

psandor — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 16:28:39 +0000

You are right.

At the same time, everything you ever posted online has already been scraped by hundreds (maybe thousands) of entities and distributed/sold to countless other entities. The only difference is that OP shared his project here.

New comment by psandor in "Claude Code vs. Codex: I built a sentiment dashboard from Reddit comments"

psandor — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 04:46:02 +0000

It was true until GPT-5. That model hugely improved Codex, so it being comparable with CC is a recent thing.

New comment by psandor in "Crypto investor charged with kidnapping and torturing"

psandor — Sun, 25 May 2025 04:22:49 +0000

Of course there's an XKCD about this: https://xkcd.com/538/

New comment by psandor in "How we used GPT-4o for image detection with 350 similar illustrations"

psandor — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 16:39:52 +0000

and that NASA did not spend millions on this. https://www.reuters.com/article/fact-check/nasa-did-not-spen...

New comment by psandor in "How we used GPT-4o for image detection with 350 similar illustrations"

psandor — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 16:38:32 +0000

This is completely offtopic, but I would bet it was a government-funded museum. A reasonable institution would have worked with you to find an acceptable compromise, something much easier to implement with a small sacrifice of aesthetics.

Anyway, great work, and thank you for taking the time to share it!

New comment by psandor in "Silicon Valley's best kept secret: Founder liquidity"

psandor — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 18:25:34 +0000

"mostly profit someone else who did nothing but write you a check"

There is quite a bit of work involved in reaching the point where you write a check for a Series A round. Also, the better VCs spend significant time with their portfolio companies.

New comment by psandor in "DKIM, SPF, SpamAssassin Email Validator"

psandor — Fri, 10 May 2024 12:52:47 +0000

https://www.learndmarc.com/ is very similar but it's a bit easier to read and interpret.

New comment by psandor in "Ask HN: How to manage phones and PCs for elderly parents?"

psandor — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 06:09:53 +0000

Strange that I had to scroll down this far for this answer. Creating a normal, non-admin user for them will greatly limit the damage they can do as they won't be able to make system-wide changes. I also disabled installing extensions in Edge.

New comment by psandor in "Back up your Bitwarden vault in a future-proof and secure way"

psandor — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 13:50:30 +0000

You should never store unencrypted secrets, like this export file, on an unencrypted disk. Not even temporarily. Instead, create a small encrypted drive on a pendrive or as a file with LUKS or Veracrypt, mount it, and save the file _directly_ there.

New comment by psandor in "Microsoft begins “Extinguish” phase of dealing with Open Source"

psandor — Sat, 09 Jul 2022 17:17:46 +0000

Not sure about GPL, but this is one of the very few (2-4) restrictions of a BSD license:

"Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission."

New comment by psandor in "Microsoft begins “Extinguish” phase of dealing with Open Source"

psandor — Sat, 09 Jul 2022 17:15:05 +0000

An average Store user will definitely benefit from not having to sort through dozens of spyware-laden clones of VLC

New comment by psandor in "Ask HN: Teach a 5-year-old math and science over the summer?"

psandor — Mon, 09 May 2022 14:04:56 +0000

Prodigy Game: Perfectly suitable for a 5 year old with a parent there helping. They learn math while playing a fun RPG game.

New comment by psandor in "I fell in love with low-JS"

psandor — Thu, 05 May 2022 14:55:44 +0000

This is exactly how most web applications were written 15 years ago. Server side rendering with PHP, ASP, JSP, and then Javascript for the interactive bits.

New comment by psandor in "The Itanic Has Sunk"

psandor — Fri, 30 Jul 2021 10:19:50 +0000

DEC was part of HP at that point, so it was the HP leadership that made the decision to ditch Alpha.

New comment by psandor in "The Law of Net Design Costs"

psandor — Tue, 13 Jul 2021 14:14:29 +0000

Both options have risks, in 90% of the cases, the risk you pointed out is smaller then the risk from the lost opportunity cost (working on something not relevant for the service), insecure implementation, sub-optimal UI, etc.

New comment by psandor in "The Law of Net Design Costs"

psandor — Tue, 13 Jul 2021 09:50:00 +0000

The example he uses isn't the best though. Unless your product is about identity or have other special circumstances, you should absolutely not implement your own login system. It's a lot more complicated than what the article suggest: security, _proper_ hashing, forgot your password, change password, change email, password strength, MFA, privacy, compliance, social logins are just a few things/flows coming to my mind that are standards today. Implementing these instead of focusing on the relevant features of the application is very rarely the right decision.