Hacker News: theodorejb

New comment by theodorejb in "Radical Study Suggests Life on Earth Arose Twice"

theodorejb — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 12:21:20 +0000

Design has tradeoffs, and when these are considered I doubt you'd want to trade your eyes for another organism's. The human eye is a marvel of engineering, and even today the best digital cameras we design can't capture even close to the dynamic range our eyes can see (12-15 stops vs. 20-24 stops simultaneously). After adjusting to the dark, the human eye can perceive a single photon striking the retina.

New comment by theodorejb in "Radical Study Suggests Life on Earth Arose Twice"

theodorejb — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 12:02:15 +0000

> Life didn't spring up fully formed, it developed in stages.

Have these stages been observed, or are they merely a speculative story? No one has ever demonstrated life arising from non-life (a violation of the Law of Biogenesis).

What is semantically incoherent about my perspective that life was clearly designed?

New comment by theodorejb in "Radical Study Suggests Life on Earth Arose Twice"

theodorejb — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 05:11:16 +0000

We know that intricate machines are designed by smart people; they don't just happen by luck. The idea that living things, which are far more intricately organized at every level than any machine we have made, could have arisen by some unknown series of chance steps is a fairy tale. It has never been observed, and even in the most controlled of environments it cannot be replicated. To me it's far more reasonable to conclude that life was designed by a super intelligent Creator. Just as a piano implies a piano maker (even if we haven't seen them), life implies an original Life-giver.

New comment by theodorejb in "Show HN: Elevators"

theodorejb — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 13:38:50 +0000

The worst situation I've encountered is after a large conference when everyone is leaving the hotel at once. An elevator quickly fills up on the way down, but then wastes time stopping at every subsequent floor with a call, even though no one else can fit inside. At each floor the elevator stops, the doors open, the waiting people see it's already packed, the doors close, and this repeats on the next 15 floors before finally reaching the bottom where everyone gets off. If the algorithm could know an elevator is completely full and only stop at its destination floors rather than every floor along the way with a call, it would be far more efficient.

New comment by theodorejb in "Astrophysicists Puzzle over Webb’s New Universe"

theodorejb — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 21:18:05 +0000

The Big Bang is an almost infinitely malleable story, contorted to comport with almost anything we observe. But how is this useful? The predictions of this theory continually fail. The farther we look, the more we see stars, galaxies, black holes, and other structures that shouldn't exist according to this model.

What if the universe doesn't have a naturalistic origin, but was created by God? How much greater would our understanding of the world be if more scientists focused on studying present phenomena rather than trying to fit stories about the past with observed data?

New comment by theodorejb in "Astrophysicists Puzzle over Webb’s New Universe"

theodorejb — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 13:54:38 +0000

Instead of questioning whether the Big Bang assumption is true, astrophysicists prefer to perform endless "gymnastics" to try to make the mounting contrary data fit their theory about how the universe began.

New comment by theodorejb in "Ask HN: So what happened to Facebook "localhost" tracking?"

theodorejb — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:14:05 +0000

Only if the union is against the unethical request. In some cases the union may be for it, which makes it even harder to push back.

New comment by theodorejb in "Ask HN: So what happened to Facebook "localhost" tracking?"

theodorejb — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:04:25 +0000

You don't need to join a union to push back against unethical feature requests.

New comment by theodorejb in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)"

theodorejb — Mon, 11 May 2026 02:26:05 +0000

I've been building PHP Handlebars, a spec-compliant implementation of Handlebars in pure PHP:

https://github.com/devtheorem/php-handlebars

I've also been developing Cropt, a zero-dependency JavaScript image cropper which works great for cropping and scaling profile images before upload:

https://devtheorem.github.io/cropt/

MySQL 9.7.0 LTS

theodorejb — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 10:26:45 +0000

Article URL: https://blogs.oracle.com/mysql/mysql-9-7-0-lts-is-now-available-expanded-community-capabilities-and-dynamic-data-masking-for-enterprise

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47861505

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by theodorejb in "PHP 8.6 Closure Optimizations"

theodorejb — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:28:13 +0000

This can be done with curl_multi_exec(), or with $client->getAsync() in Guzzle.

https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.curl-multi-exec.php

https://docs.guzzlephp.org/en/stable/quickstart.html#concurr...

The Operational Cost of Vacuuming in PostgreSQL

theodorejb — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 12:57:44 +0000

Article URL: https://mariadb.org/the-real-operational-cost-of-vacuuming-in-postgresql/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47334984

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by theodorejb in "Does that use a lot of energy?"

theodorejb — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:28:55 +0000

In my petrol-powered Prius I average 52 MPG, so at the current price of gas ($2.60/gallon) I pay $0.50 to drive 10 miles - less than the listed cost to drive an electric car the same distance.

New comment by theodorejb in "The rise of eyes began with just one"

theodorejb — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 04:55:46 +0000

How would the photosensitivity and wiring to muscles come about at the same time?

New comment by theodorejb in "The rise of eyes began with just one"

theodorejb — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 02:36:00 +0000

What benefit is an eye unless there is also the capability of processing and using the information? How would both evolve simultaneously?

New Era of MySQL Community Engagement

theodorejb — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 18:07:44 +0000

Article URL: https://blogs.oracle.com/mysql/new-era-of-mysql-community-engagement

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46992572

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by theodorejb in "Reverse engineering a $1B Legal AI tool exposed 100k+ confidential files"

theodorejb — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 01:41:19 +0000

According to the timeline it took more than a week just for Filevine to respond saying they would review and fix the vulnerability. It was 24 days after initial disclosure when he confirmed the fix was in place.

New comment by theodorejb in "Shai-Hulud Returns: Over 300 NPM Packages Infected"

theodorejb — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 03:41:26 +0000

My guess would be so they don't have to embed an IP address or hostname in the malware to send secrets to, which could then be blocked or taken down.

New comment by theodorejb in "Shai-Hulud Returns: Over 300 NPM Packages Infected"

theodorejb — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 21:42:06 +0000

Someone could be tricked into giving their npm credentials to the attacker (e.g. via a phishing email), and then the attacker publishes new versions of their packages with the malicious diff. Then when the infected packages are installed, npm runs the malicious preinstall script which harvests secrets from the new machine, and if these include an npm token the worm can see which packages it has access to publish, and infect them too to continue spreading.

KeePassXC 2.7.11 Released

theodorejb — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 03:03:03 +0000

Article URL: https://keepassxc.org/blog/2025-11-23-2.7.11-released/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46029901

Points: 4

# Comments: 0