Hacker News: washbasin

New comment by washbasin in "Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio"

washbasin — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 22:41:40 +0000

In addition to Jeff's comments in this thread, I am guessing all of his purchased gear is capital expense for an LLC he runs for his youtube channel. That makes it deductible from personal tax. (again, all guesses, but a common pattern in the US)

New comment by washbasin in "A better way to tie your gym shorts. (Or any drawstring) [video]"

washbasin — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 14:31:10 +0000

Tying a bowline is one of my fidgets. Also famously has a part in Jaws (1975), though not mentioned by name. ("Hey! I got it!")

New comment by washbasin in "A better way to tie gym shorts (or any drawstring) [video]"

washbasin — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 14:28:26 +0000

Just by the headline I suspected this was first class amateur. So many great videos. That being said, use cord locks, not knots. You can often shorten the drawstring, and you will never lose one end into the waist.

New comment by washbasin in "Reducing tick density along recreational trails in Ottawa, Canada"

washbasin — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 16:44:32 +0000

Through a combination of two of my hobbies, I learned that pyrethroids are toxic to aquatic animals. Glad to see that they used "locations [that] were situated away from waterbodies". Pyrethroids are very powerful tools for insect control (and non-toxic to humans) but any place where you have runoff or ground seepage is going to be a problem. Aren't those places the ones most likely for ticks to thrive -- areas near bodies of water where animals like deer come to drink?

So hot take: this would only be useful in places where there are not a lot of ticks?

(PS: Permethrin-sprayed clothing is very effective.)

New comment by washbasin in "The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs"

washbasin — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 22:12:51 +0000

Very thankful for Reader Mode.

Scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll.

Just no.

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

washbasin — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 19:36:37 +0000

This is an old post-compromise trick used when an attacker needs to download a payload or make a network connection and curl, wget and nc are all not available.

New comment by washbasin in "Show HN: Atlasphere – Live Infrastructure Diagrams"

washbasin — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 01:10:06 +0000

Yes I realized after reading the response that we would control the permissions. What may not be obvious is many organizations have gatekeepers that don't understand IAM and would just not permit this at all.

On the technical side, you are probably underestimating the access you need to accurately gather the information the tool needs. For example, last time I reviewed the AWS-Managed ReadOnly role it does not allow you to read some important things like Managed Prefix Lists.

I completely understand you need a starting point and you picked a good one. Anxious to see how this proceeds. Best of luck.

New comment by washbasin in "Show HN: Atlasphere – Live Infrastructure Diagrams"

washbasin — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:41:20 +0000

Thanks for this. Another tool in the box is always welcome. We desperately need more competitors in this arena. Please take this as loving feedback. We need more of this! This use case is very dear to my heart. I have tracked over a dozen products that claim to do what Atlasphere is offering to do, and they all seem to fall short.

The most common issues are:

- They rely on https://github.com/mingrammer/diagrams which has simply not gotten any attention for a long time. It's too out-of-date to be useful, and any issue with rendering gets a response to "go use graphviz instead"

- When pointing these tools to anything moderately complicated, they implode or create non-nonsensical diagrams. Think: VPC Peering, VPC Security Groups, multi-account resources.

- They get the cloud resources OK, but neglect primitives like routing and policies that are just as important.

Just looking at the examples on the website: Claude Code can do this natively. Just a consideration.

I will also echo what others have said: allowing another account access to ours is a non-starter, even if Read-Only. It needs to use a security principal we have complete control over.

I can't tell from the project page what IAM permissions are in your "Read-only IAM role". That's something I would also need to know, regardless of how it is deployed.

I can tell from this post and the site that this is a labor of love, and I hope you keep up the good work. Like I said, this is an area where we need more, better tools. I want projects like this to succeed.

PS: Awesome name

New comment by washbasin in "Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection"

washbasin — Fri, 29 May 2026 00:01:24 +0000

I don't understand this style decision in web page design.

I don't want to read content like a receipt from the grocery store.

I instantly go to Reader Mode in my browser when I see pages like this. Is this because of phones? Why can't it adapt? My 42" monitor wants to know.

New comment by washbasin in "CVE-2026-31431: Copy Fail vs. rootless containers"

washbasin — Tue, 05 May 2026 04:00:21 +0000

Please post a tl;dr at the top or even in the subject. Many of us are scrambling to patch/reboot our **.

New comment by washbasin in "Show HN: Made a little Artemis II tracker"

washbasin — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:28:14 +0000

This is cool! NASA uses Imperial units (well, unless the it's the Mars Climate Orbiter). Can we get a version that follows the units they are using with their public feeds?

New comment by washbasin in "Show HN: Revise – An AI Editor for Documents"

washbasin — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 14:51:46 +0000

Er, is right click disabled on this page? Certainly seems to be in any browser I pick. If so, why?

New comment by washbasin in "Stop using grey text (2025)"

washbasin — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 16:01:34 +0000

This page isn't a long block of text. Look at what Reader View does to pages. It doesn't ADD gutters and margins, it shrinks them.

New comment by washbasin in "Stop using grey text (2025)"

washbasin — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 05:08:41 +0000

I created a ycombinator account after years of resisting, just to respond to this post. Stop creating web pages with huge-ass gutters/margins.

If you are concerned about design you would realize your page looks ridiculous and borderline illegible on modern screens (that are not phones). Text color is an issue, but layout is worse.