Hacker News: tomwheeler

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.

New comment by tomwheeler in "Google I/O"

tomwheeler — Tue, 19 May 2026 19:00:43 +0000

Yeah, when I was a kid you had to go to the AT&T store to get a phone.

New comment by tomwheeler in "Google I/O"

tomwheeler — Tue, 19 May 2026 18:58:58 +0000

I'd enjoy someone copying Steve Wozniak even more.

New comment by tomwheeler in "Haiku OS runs on M1 Macs now"

tomwheeler — Mon, 18 May 2026 19:01:23 +0000

Seems to be a duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48183579

New comment by tomwheeler in "Cloudflare "issue" blocking legitimate access from humans for days"

tomwheeler — Mon, 11 May 2026 22:18:18 +0000

Seems like the status quo to me. I'm a human and they block my legitimate access on multiple sites a day. I hate that they've inserted themselves as the unwanted guardians of the web, but I'm also stunned at how absolutely bad they are at it.

When I see one of their roadblocks pop up, I now just click the back button. Life is too short to spend it jumping through the stupid obstacles they've set up and fortunately there are plenty of great sites that don't use them.

New comment by tomwheeler in "Why most product tours get skipped"

tomwheeler — Wed, 06 May 2026 04:16:42 +0000

The leftmost icon on my browser toolbar is the "kill sticky" bookmarklet (https://github.com/t-mart/kill-sticky). I grew tired of sites hiding the dismiss buttons or omitting them entirely, so anytime something pops up on the page, I instinctively click that. Works on the vast majority of sites.

New comment by tomwheeler in "Why most product tours get skipped"

tomwheeler — Wed, 06 May 2026 04:12:48 +0000

If only there was AFM to read these days.