Hacker News: tomwheeler

New comment by tomwheeler in "I sent Google proof of a bot farm. They called it "normal user behavior.""

tomwheeler — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 17:49:10 +0000

And yet they trap me in endless captchas because I use Firefox with an adblocker.

New comment by tomwheeler in "Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera. Its Data Shows How the System Works"

tomwheeler — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 15:50:27 +0000

This happened in a St. Louis suburb recently.

New comment by tomwheeler in "The Citizen Developer"

tomwheeler — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 22:21:30 +0000

Or, in the words of Morris Day, "It takes more than a hat to call yourself a chef."

More people have the capability now, but not necessarily the experience or understanding.

New comment by tomwheeler in "The oldest bar in every state"

tomwheeler — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 01:17:04 +0000

Moreover still, there are still communities in Alaska that have (locally mandated) prohibition.

In fact, there is a pending Supreme Court case related to this in which a pilot's airplane was confiscated when his passengers were discovered with beer in one of those places: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jouppi_v._Alaska

New comment by tomwheeler in "Publishing Schematics Before “Open Source” Was a Word"

tomwheeler — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 01:39:32 +0000

My parents bought a relatively inexpensive television in 1987 and it came with complete schematics, printed out as an addendum to the user manual. I was more excited about those than the TV itself because I had just learned to read schematics from one of the Forrest Mims books at Radio Shack a few months earlier. This was in the US and I am pretty sure it was made by Emerson.

New comment by tomwheeler in "Online Friends Are Real Friends"

tomwheeler — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 18:02:08 +0000

This is really beautiful. It's wisdom that seems so clear at my current stage of life, but wasn't obvious to me at age 15 or even 25.

New comment by tomwheeler in "Online Friends Are Real Friends"

tomwheeler — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 23:26:59 +0000

I once read about a father who told his daughter, "real friends are people who care how your life ends up." I think that's a pretty good definition to go by.

New comment by tomwheeler in "Atlassian Rovo Exfiltrates Data, Bypassing Controls"

tomwheeler — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 23:24:20 +0000

At the risk of sounding like the hipster who liked your favorite band first, I didn't trust Atlassian long before the last 18 months. Much like Microsoft Word, I think JIRA peaked about a decade after launch and since then it's mostly been unnecessary UI changes and features I either don't care about or actively do not want.

P.S. I protest their software's revisionist autocorrection to Jira. It was JIRA when I started using it and forevermore it shall be.

New comment by tomwheeler in "Hooray for the Sockets Interface"

tomwheeler — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 12:34:49 +0000

Don't forget Trumpet Winsock [1]. I worked for an ISP at the time that provided it on a floppy disk (along with a newsreader, FTP client, telnet client, and web browser). Although I doubt many customers paid for it, Trumpet Winsock was shareware and very widely used on Windows 3.x.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trumpet_Winsock

New comment by tomwheeler in "It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history"

tomwheeler — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 13:19:29 +0000

[flagged]

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

tomwheeler — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 18:40:37 +0000

Hi, Temporal employee here. Just want to confirm that Temporal Cloud can and does handle this scale, well beyond it, in fact.

As our CEO and co-founder Samar Abbas stated in the keynote at this year's Replay conference (https://youtu.be/BxEB7Y2U9oU?t=532), Temporal Cloud is currently handling 35 billion workflows per day. If you assume that each Workflow averages 10 actions, that translates to more than 10 trillion actions per month.

Later in that keynote, a VP from OpenAI talks about the scale at which they are using Temporal Cloud. That'll give you a sense of the volume for a single customer (obviously a very large one).

New comment by tomwheeler in "Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation"

tomwheeler — Thu, 28 May 2026 20:31:31 +0000

After those are used up, it moves to Devanagari, Hangul, Katakana, Hiragana, and then Kanji.

New comment by tomwheeler in "Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation"

tomwheeler — Thu, 28 May 2026 18:49:03 +0000

I can't speak for the specific case of Stripe, but it's fairly common for private companies to have a "tender offer" in which employees have the opportunity to sell some portion of their equity. This is often done in conjunction with a new investment round.

New comment by tomwheeler in "Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation"

tomwheeler — Thu, 28 May 2026 18:39:55 +0000

It's semantics, but the latest raise might have been a follow-on to Series M, not a new round (to be clear, I know nothing about their finances, just speaking from experience at another company).

New comment by tomwheeler in "Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation"

tomwheeler — Thu, 28 May 2026 18:38:09 +0000

Effectively infinite. Databricks is a good example. They're still private after 13 years and closed a Series L round last year. Stripe is similar.

Having been through an IPO before, it was good for employee liquidity, but bad for the culture and long-term success of the company.

New comment by tomwheeler in "Google has seriously leaned into AI enshittification lately"

tomwheeler — Tue, 26 May 2026 18:51:53 +0000

As evidence, search for "How do I disable the 'beautify this slide' widget that keeps appearing in Google Slides?" The top results are a bunch of pages in support.google.com in which the weary support person says "You can't disable this" and closes the thread.

Here's one such example: https://support.google.com/docs/thread/416641585/how-to-hide...

New comment by tomwheeler in "Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore"

tomwheeler — Tue, 26 May 2026 18:46:19 +0000

> the volumes of The Art of Computer Programming

I'd speculate that the number of people who own these outnumber the people who have actually read them by a pretty wide margin.

New comment by tomwheeler in "Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore"

tomwheeler — Tue, 26 May 2026 18:43:10 +0000

Aside from any downward trend attributable to LLMs, technical book sales were always lower than most people would have imagined.

I've known a few authors who published with O'Reilly and other major publishers and most told me that they made less than minimum wage in the end. There were other benefits, such as increased name recognition and credibility that let them charge more as consultants, but the direct proceeds from writing a technical book seldom paid off even two decades ago.

New comment by tomwheeler in "Why Japanese companies do so many different things"

tomwheeler — Fri, 22 May 2026 18:08:34 +0000

I can confirm this is true for Acura. I owned an Acura Legend and the same car was sold in Japan (well, the right-hand drive version) as the Honda Legend. I had seen pictures of them online in the 90s, but happened to see a Honda Legend in person when I was in Tokyo some years later.

New comment by tomwheeler in "Dumb ways for an open source project to die"

tomwheeler — Tue, 19 May 2026 20:19:27 +0000

One that doesn't seem to be listed is "overconfident fork" in which someone forks an existing project out of anger or hubris, but that fork never gains critical mass and eventually withers away.

The opposite is what happened with OpenSSH, Jenkins, and LibreOffice, in which the original project (SSH, Hudson, and OpenOffice) had the hubris but was quickly forgotten when the community moved on.