Hacker News: vforgione

New comment by vforgione in "Gen Z Is the First Generation Dumber Than Their Parents"

vforgione — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 14:48:19 +0000

Bravo! We’ve collectively cannibalized our ability to vault our children to new highs so we can continue to subsidize billionaires’ nihilistic destruction of our planet under the guise of freedom and economic progress.

New comment by vforgione in "DishwasherBench – Can Frontier Models Stack a Dishwasher?"

vforgione — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 13:05:49 +0000

> but you can make it hard for yourself to unload if you don’t sort the items correctly.

I learned a long time ago that the ability to recognize and exploit a structured system is the most emotionally satisfying thing in the world.

New comment by vforgione in "How Hacker News ranking works: scoring, controversy, and penalties (2013)"

vforgione — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 23:46:21 +0000

What led to that conclusion? Genuinely curious.

New comment by vforgione in "Ask HN: Which is better for backend? JavaScript or Python?"

vforgione — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 17:26:35 +0000

Use what you thinking is the best fit for the job.

I’ve been using Python as my workhorse for 15+ years. I recently made a backend for a chat bot using C#, and I have to admit that I liked a lot of it. I’ve also made some non-trivial things with Elixir and loved it.

New comment by vforgione in "Ask HN: Are people optimistic about the future?"

vforgione — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 21:41:31 +0000

I am not optimistic about the future. I am very worried about what kind of world my kids are inheriting. Their grandparents’ generation doesn’t seem to give a flying fuck so long as their standard of living continuously improves. My grandparents are spinning in their graves.

Anthropic digs in heels in dispute with Pentagon

vforgione — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 22:07:01 +0000

Article URL: https://www.reuters.com/world/anthropic-digs-heels-dispute-with-pentagon-source-says-2026-02-24/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47143931

Points: 47

# Comments: 2

New comment by vforgione in "Large study finds link between cannabis use in teens and psychosis later"

vforgione — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 17:30:17 +0000

When I read this article the other day I had the exact same thought. Is this simply correlation, or is it causation? Is teenage usage an indicator of a possible underlying condition that hasn’t fully manifest? Is it an early form of self medication?

New comment by vforgione in "A first look at Django's new background tasks"

vforgione — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 00:03:55 +0000

I’ve been using the django-tasks library in production for about a year. The database backend and simple interface have been great. It definitely isn’t intended to replace all of celery, but for a simple task queue that doesn’t require additional infrastructure it works quite well.

New comment by vforgione in "Shape typing in Python"

vforgione — Sat, 13 Apr 2024 14:46:27 +0000

While I don’t disagree, there are a number of additional stub libraries you can install that provide typing for libraries that don’t already have them. I personally find [django-types](https://pypi.org/project/django-types/) to be really well constructed and useful.

New comment by vforgione in "Databricks acquires serverless Postgres vendor bit.io"

vforgione — Tue, 30 May 2023 23:54:50 +0000

Fabric may eat some of the descriptive analytics portion of Databricks’ lunch, but for core data engineering workflows there is nothing in the Fabric—or Synapse or Power BI—ecosystem that comes close.

There are other fatal flaws to the Spark implementation in Synapse that I think carried over to Fabric. Worst one is the clunkiness/inability to run multiple notebooks concurrently on a cluster.

Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

vforgione — Tue, 16 May 2023 11:06:54 +0000

Article URL: https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-chief-goes-before-us-congress-propose-licenses-building-ai-2023-05-16/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35960125

Points: 914

# Comments: 1214

Ask HN: Backup and Restore Plans

vforgione — Thu, 31 Jan 2019 15:49:22 +0000

We've been debating at work what level of backing up is safe, and at what point is it overkill.

We run our own hardware and use VMWare to logically slice and dice that up. Our software runs in containers on vanilla CentOS VMs. The containers are orchestrated with k8s. Our databases use full replication with hot stand-bys and we take full dumps twice daily. Really nothing fancy or complicated.

I am under the impression that maintaining our normal code, docker configs, k8s configs, ansible playbooks (to setup the docker and k8s daemons and insert ssh keys, etc) in git repos, and routine database snap shots is enough. However I have a coworker advocating for full VM snap shots as well to aid in recoveries.

Are VM snap shots overkill, or am I being too reliant on, and idealistic about, our ability to maintain good automation?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19045558

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by vforgione in "Ask HN: Why can’t I block all incoming calls that aren’t in my contact list?"

vforgione — Wed, 30 Jan 2019 02:02:33 +0000

On iOS there’s an app called Exchange Blocker that does exactly this.

New comment by vforgione in "Firefox 65.0 released"

vforgione — Tue, 29 Jan 2019 15:15:43 +0000

I was so excited when Quantum was released. I used it exclusively and was happy with the performance.

Then Mozilla started back dooring ads and other promos and broke my trust.

I’ve since gone back to Chrome. At least there Google has the decency to make it obvious you’re being tracked, and with the new privacy controls I (hopefully correctly) feel like I can exercise some control.

Mozilla really needs to get right with their users.

Try Naming Anger to Tame It

vforgione — Mon, 28 Jan 2019 23:06:12 +0000

Article URL: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/01/28/688180879/got-anger-try-naming-it-to-tame-it

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19021967

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by vforgione in "Tell HN: Merry Christmas"

vforgione — Tue, 25 Dec 2018 13:24:11 +0000

Buon Natale!

New comment by vforgione in "Array of Things Releases APIs for Chicago Data"

vforgione — Tue, 06 Nov 2018 14:26:58 +0000

The Array of Things is an experimental urban sensing project. Over the last few years we've been working on developing the hardware and software and this past year we've ramped up our data accessibility applications.

We've recently pushed a first release API into production -- https://api.arrayofthings.org/api/ . The project itself is still experimental and the API hasn't been fully battle tested yet.

I am the lead engineer for the software side of the project, I'd love for some feedback on this.

Array of Things Releases APIs for Chicago Data

vforgione — Tue, 06 Nov 2018 14:26:43 +0000

Article URL: https://medium.com/array-of-things/array-of-things-releases-apis-for-chicago-data-enabling-applications-9bfdbe477df3

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18391217

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by vforgione in "Ask HN: Is TDD still a thing in 2018?"

vforgione — Wed, 22 Aug 2018 12:03:38 +0000

I find it useful for new projects. It allows me to define acceptance of core functionality and features.

For established projects, not so much. This is especially true for people new to the project as they typically don’t yet know the full system and it may push them to recreate some functionality that already exists.

New comment by vforgione in "No Joke: The Onion Faces Layoffs by Univision, Says Report"

vforgione — Mon, 09 Jul 2018 15:48:18 +0000

I was a developer there, not a writer, but this kind of mentality was so basic to the entire company. It reinforces a great deal of humility -- not just in your work but as a person.