> If you’re a programmer, you might think that the fiddliness of programming is a special feature of programming, but really it’s that everything is fiddly, but you only notice the fiddliness when you’re new, and in programming you do new things more often.
I think I'm drawn to programming because the fiddliness is tractable, and fixable.
In which other domain can I:
* introspect the relevant processes/state, step by step
* snapshot/undo
* fix niggles, once and for all, and for everyone; and get their fixes too
* probe and test my inputs and outputs, checking for quality. Get notified if a part changes in a way that breaks me.
And the only tool I need is a commodity general purpose PC.
When I try woodwork, or even electronics, I'm struck by much friction is in even simple tasks: tools, parts, lead time, safety, space, physical effort, cost, ...
In the spirit of the article, what detail in the decision making of layoffs might you be missing?
I expect there's a lot of detail that I'm unaware of relating to running a company (planning; risk; legal; ...) that might make a decision foolish to me, but make sense if given more context.
I do some FOSS work with bootloaders and would love a cheap setup where I could leave boards running and have remote access to their UART/SPI/power.
Occasionally I need to be able to get physical access to it too.
I use esp32 for the remote UART/SPI, but don't really have a good setup for keeping a few projects tidy, and with the ability to move it from its remote location (a bookshelf) to my desk for physical access.
Does anyone know of any cheap and dense way to store these projects/boards?
> imo it's just free market at play here which happens to provide value to the companies more than the consumers
It's not clear that there is large value, to consumers as a whole, to physical media or DRM-free media.
I am aware of the benefits, but the few cases of "losing your licence" are a rounding error, unimportant to many, and maybe even better than their success at durably storing their own physical media or DRM-free digital media.
I exclusively (?) buy games from GOG. It's important to me. I wish it were the norm, but I just don't think it's actually important to others. Perhaps we might imagine some dystopian future where a temporary licence was the only option, but ultimately media providers face competition from other leisure activities. They are incentivised to make it less onerous, and in practice today, it is!
What's the risk, and does that change by moving to an alternative?
Companies deal with leaked secrets a lot. A company already using a password manager is ahead of the game.
Suppose they move to a competitor. That's a migration and training that someone has to drive. What do they gain? Another company that can also have exploits? Or they self-host, and now have to fund that, and still potentially get exploits?
Ultimately, this likely isn't that big of a deal for a company.
And they have to weigh it up against all the other things that they can be doing.
I raised the comparison to distinguish between authoritative and recursive resolvers, since the parent's question was ambiguous: "So is this just a dns service?".
To be fair, a large fraction of Hetzner's costs will be RAM/SSD prices (since that is what they are selling), and they're in a competitive market, and known to have competitive pricing.
Bunny CDN of course runs on RAM/SSD but their costs are also developing and operating services on top. Their costs are comparatively less impacted by the RAM/SSD issue.
Hetzner might not have raised prices so suddenly if they had similar services.
Indeed, Hetzner DNS has been free for a long time.
Its an authoritative DNS service, so it can host your domains.
Compare with a recursive resolver, like 8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1, which you can use to resolve domains.
What's nice about Bunny DNS is that they have authoritative nameservers ~everywhere, so resolving is quick everywhere.
But I think in practice this isn't that useful, since if a domain is moderately used, its DNS records will be cached ~everywhere in anycasted recursive resolvers.
The author's tone when they discuss the cost of the project is self-deprecating. They know it would have been simpler to just buy one.
But also, the author has given the community a great gift, both directly (the blog post and the project!) and indirectly (the idea: what else can be implemented in similar ways).
I agree going to the worst-case is a weak technique, and this is what the OP does:
> "Age verification" means that everyone who does anything online will have to submit to fine-grained tracking and recording of all their online activities.
> Since business is going exceptionally well, we have the luxury of conducting layoffs from a position of strength rather than necessity. Wall Street generally prefers companies that produce the same revenue with fewer employees, so we are removing 10% of the employees and setting the expectation that the remaining 90% will figure it out.
I don't consider myself to be pro-business, but... how is this controversial?
There's a lot of investment in AI for its potential.
An AI editor company might never make 60B itself, but it might help another AI company grow faster (relative to its competitors, who might also want to buy the AI editor company).
What else can an AI giant do with all that money?
Build in-house: they do, and there's only so fast they can hire/build.
Save? Yes, still do, but if they save it all, and let competitors buy Cursor, they lose.
Invest in other fields? Sure, but if they lose the AI race, that's all they'll be left with.
Tesla's IPO is a bet that if Musk has the right opportunity, he will do well. So he's given a big bucket of money, and needs a team that can deliver. So he buys Cursor.
The winners are Cursor. The losers are whoever is funding the AI companies that get outcompeted.
(Full disclosure: I don't know anything about Cursor, nor much about Tesla or its IPO.)
Yes, and the MX check is pretty simple to implement.
But it is still lots more complicated than copying some imperfect email address regex, and for many sites, it's unlikely to even be worth spending much more effort than that.
Realistically, many sites can defacto choose to accept email addresses of few patterns. If a user's email address happens to be rejected, then they are either a non-technical user who quickly learns that they need a more commonly accepted email address, or a techie, who keeps a backup email address for these cases, and rightfully holds a grudge.
Most sites just aren't going to care enough to do anything more complex, for annoyed techies.
See also, IPv6 support.
And yes, I get annoyed if a site doesn't accept my domain-under-a-less-common-tld, or doesn't support IPv6. :)
> If you can catch 50% of user errors with some complex regex, but the other 50% such errors are uncaught, is that of any benefit during sofware design? No, because you still have to solve that problem, probably with email validation by code. You have reduced your workload by 0%, you just split it into 2 parts (unnecessarily).
In your example, the benefit is that users recover from the error 50% of the time at the time of registration, so it doesn't interrupt their workflow. Further, the fallback case (of contacting support, or enacting email validation, if a site chooses to implement) will see a dropoff in successful onboarding.
I also seek political commentary, but not here. That isn't HNs strength.
> Where have the hardcore nerds gone?
I'd guess they avoid posts they predict to be overwhelmingly political.
Why do the political posters post? They want to influence, of course! And HN is open. So posts that can be made political, will be.