Hacker News: timwis

New comment by timwis in "So You Want to Define a Well-Known URI"

timwis — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 07:43:21 +0000

I agree. I was hoping for a few positive examples, but didn't see any. The only one I know of is the OIDC discovery endpoint.

New comment by timwis in "Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?"

timwis — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 05:47:31 +0000

Came here to say the same thing. How could the author possibly illustrate the point of the book without at least 4 case studies and a reference to prehistoric humans?

New comment by timwis in "TIL: You can make HTTP requests without curl using Bash /dev/TCP"

timwis — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 20:24:41 +0000

You could also use nsenter if curl is installed on the host, eg

docker inspect -f '{{.State.Pid}}' container-name

# let's imagine that outputs 814538

nsenter -t 814538 -n curl example.com

New comment by timwis in "SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B"

timwis — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 18:19:12 +0000

I've tried most of the tools out there but have used cursor most consistently. Sure, some of the UI quirks get in the way sometimes, but I've found its auto complete predictions to be unparalleled. More importantly, these days I mainly use its Ask mode, Plan mode, and Agent mode. I like that I can use Opus via subscription pricing without Claude Code's wild and buggy harness. And I find cursor's plan mode to perform better than Claude's, but that may just be my personal preferences. I know cursor stopped being the cool thing a few months back, but I genuinely feel most effective with it!

But I'll stop using it now, for the same reason I wouldn't buy a Tesla, or support that maniac in any other way. And I'm sad about that :(

New comment by timwis in "The Future of Email"

timwis — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 14:21:47 +0000

I read this article and was surprised when I reached the end because the whole thing felt like it was setting the stage for some announcement or new thing. But nothing came..? Forgive me if I'm being thick but what was the takeaway?

New comment by timwis in "A giant star may have destroyed itself in one of the rarest explosions"

timwis — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 17:56:04 +0000

Dark Forest theory, anyone?

New comment by timwis in "Siri AI"

timwis — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 18:43:41 +0000

For real this time...

New comment by timwis in "UK PM gives tech firms ultimatum to block explicit images on children's phones"

timwis — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 11:50:22 +0000

I think that only applies to the messages app

New comment by timwis in "OpenAI frontier models and Codex are now available on AWS"

timwis — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 18:18:50 +0000

We have some enterprise customers who require all data be processed in the UK or AU. We've been limited to using Azure OpenAI, which only has older models in those regions (eg 4o, 4.1-mini). I was hoping we'd see the newer models in those regions once they got to AWS, but it looks like the newer models are only available in the US at the moment :(

New comment by timwis in "Building durable workflows on Postgres"

timwis — Fri, 29 May 2026 11:46:59 +0000

Rails has several database-backed job backends, but the convention is always to make jobs do one thing, and ideally be very short-lived. This makes building workflows a bit contrived: we end up enqueuing the second job on the last line of the first one, enqueuing the third one on the last line of the second one, etc. The job backend treats these as independent jobs rather than showing them as a connected workflow, and you have to read through a bunch of job classes to wrap your head around the workflow at even a high level

Rails recently introduced a 'continuable' concept, allowing you to checkpoint and resume steps within a job, but it still feels like the convention is too keep jobs with a single responsibility, so it feels odd to use them for true workflows.

Has anyone else experienced this or found a solution to it?

New comment by timwis in "Claude Opus 4.8 coming today?"

timwis — Thu, 28 May 2026 16:48:09 +0000

I've just spotted Opus 4.8 in the list of models available on claude!

New comment by timwis in "Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust"

timwis — Sun, 17 May 2026 07:40:50 +0000

Different harness (pi), but this blog post may partially answer your question: https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/

New comment by timwis in "Postmortem: TanStack NPM supply-chain compromise"

timwis — Tue, 12 May 2026 17:34:33 +0000

Ooh, that's clever. Thanks for sharing.

New comment by timwis in "Postmortem: TanStack NPM supply-chain compromise"

timwis — Tue, 12 May 2026 09:51:36 +0000

That looks interesting, but unless I'm missing it, it still leaves you with things like ~/.aws/credentials in plaintext on disk, doesn't it?

New comment by timwis in "Postmortem: TanStack NPM supply-chain compromise"

timwis — Tue, 12 May 2026 07:38:26 +0000

Love that feeling when you read through a repo and think, "Wow, this looks cool," and go to star it, and see that you already have, and clearly forgot about it

Anyway, thanks for sharing. It doesn't look like it handles cli auth though (aws, npm, etc. all leave tokens sitting in your home directory). What do you use for those?

New comment by timwis in "Postmortem: TanStack NPM supply-chain compromise"

timwis — Tue, 12 May 2026 06:32:28 +0000

What do folks here do to avoid having plaintext credentials on disk? I try to use 1Password's plugins where I can. I find the SSH key (and got signing) experience flawless, but the cli experience (eg aws cli) pretty clunky - they often break, and they don't even have a gcp plugin last I checked.

New comment by timwis in "ClojureScript Gets Async/Await"

timwis — Fri, 08 May 2026 09:05:06 +0000

I wish an alternative to JS for the front end would catch on and be something more than obscure... I'd love to use something like clojurescript, but I struggle to imagine doing so for anything but a personal side project :/ Maybe this is easier to adopt if you're already a clojure shop for the backend?

New comment by timwis in "New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming"

timwis — Sat, 02 May 2026 08:20:28 +0000

I've had some incredible product ideas while asleep, down to very intricate technical detail. The problem has been that when I wake up, reality kicks in, and I realise that, say, even if I built that incredible messenger app for dogs, they still wouldn't be able to communicate with us.

New comment by timwis in "Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained"

timwis — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 11:21:10 +0000

Really sad to see this. I had only recently learnt about this project, and was really impressed by it. I was planning to set it up this weekend (via autobase). I've also been under the impression that it's likely to be what powers the backups in RDS, Cloud SQL, etc., but I may have misunderstood.

New comment by timwis in "Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner"

timwis — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 15:47:50 +0000

I wondered the same! FWIW I'm currently migrating from managed postgres to self-managed on hetzner with [autobase](https://autobase.tech/). Though of course for high availability it requires more than one server.