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Rafert

829 karma · joined May 10, 2013

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Rafert··on Show HN: I'm a 15 Year Old Wannabe Engineer, This Is a Cycloidal Gearbox I Built
It really depends on where you live and in some places that distinction does not matter. See for example https://www.canadianconsultingengineer.com/quebec-order-of-e...
Rafert··on Show HN: I'm a 15 Year Old Wannabe Engineer, This Is a Cycloidal Gearbox I Built
There are places (eg Canada) where engineer is a protected title like lawyer or doctor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_and_licensure_in_en...
Rafert··on Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion
And in case people are looking for an open source alternative, Fly.io's tokenizer is a credential-injecting proxy: https://fly.io/blog/tokenized-tokens/
Rafert··on Using proxies to hide secrets from Claude Code
The concept of a proxy injecting/removing sensitive data has been for much longer, e.g. VGS has a JS SDK and proxy to handle credit card data for you and keep you out of PCI scope.
Rafert··on ClickHouse acquires Langfuse
I'm surprised it's not mentioned yet, but this seems to compliment last year's acquisition of observability tool HyperDX[1] (part of ClickStack[2]) quite well. I'm in the market for a new o11y platform and it seems all vendors are working to add LLM observability one way or the other, if they haven't added it already.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44194082 2: https://clickhouse.com/use-cases/observability

Rafert··on The Netflix Simian Army (2011)
I know of https://github.com/Shopify/toxiproxy but it is not protocol aware, you might be able to add it yourself.
Rafert··on Shai-Hulud compromised a dev machine and raided GitHub org access: a post-mortem
> This is one of the frustrating realities of these attacks: once the malware runs, identifying the source becomes extremely difficult. The package doesn't announce itself. The pnpm install completes successfully. Everything looks normal.

Sounds like there’s no EDR running on the dev machines? You should have more to investigate if Sentinel One/CrowdStrike/etc were running.

Rafert··on Exploring PostgreSQL 18's new UUIDv7 support
> Using UUIDv7 is generally discouraged for security when the primary key is exposed to end users in external-facing applications or APIs.

I would not call this “generally discouraged” when APIs generally surface a created_at timestamp in their responses. A real life example are Stripe IDs which have similar properties (k-sorted) as UUIDv7: https://brandur.org/nanoglyphs/026-ids#ulids

Rafert··on TKey – Security for the New World
The counter can always be 0, which is what cloud synced passkeys are doing IIRC.
Rafert··on Blazer: Business intelligence made simple
We've used it for about a year - Blazer is okay if you need a quick SQL query console, but we found it lacking as a business intelligence tool. The support for graphs and dashboards is limited, for graphs it requires you to structure the query in an exact way as you can see in the Blazer readme. There is no customizability at all.

After some research on available alternatives that don't break the bank, we decided to deploy a self-hosted instance of Metabase[0]. This took only a few minutes to set up using their Docker image[1] and it has much better graphing capabilities and you can easily put a custom layout together for dashboards. Upgrading is similarly easy (just redeploy). Also easy to configure: additional data sources, hiding or changing the data type of a column, G Suite sign-in for our domain. It has 'models' as sources of truth to build other queries in - eg a single definition of an 'active user'.

In short, moving from Blazer to Metabase was a huge win for us. Highly recommend it if you need anything more than Blazer's table output.

[0]: https://github.com/metabase/metabase [1]: https://docs.render.com/deploy-metabase

Rafert··on UUID v7
> It would be quite unfortunate to end up with a UUID v7 in PostgreSQL that’s not quite the standardized one because the patch got merged too quickly.

The chances of that seem extremely low at this point. The contents of a version 7 UUID have not changed since work started on RFC 4122 bis in October 2022: https://author-tools.ietf.org/iddiff?url1=draft-ietf-uuidrev...

Rafert··on Show HN: Pigsty – Free RDS Alternative
Curious which DBs are "production ready" according to you, and how you define that exactly.
Rafert··on Shopify will be smaller by about 20% and Flexport will buy Shopify Logistics
I'm aware - but that's hardly their first foray into the space is what I'm trying to say. I guess 'abandoning expansion' can be read multiple ways :)
Rafert··on Shopify will be smaller by about 20% and Flexport will buy Shopify Logistics
Quickly? They acquired 6 River Systems and announced the Shopify Fulfillment Network back in 2019. The were some pivots along the way (using 3rd party vs building out own warehouses) but it seems to me they've been at it for some time.
Rafert··on Shopify will be smaller by about 20% and Flexport will buy Shopify Logistics
Things changed quite a bit since this quote from February 17:

> “There’s no cuts coming for us,” Harley Finkelstein told The Canadian Press. “We’re in a really good place.”

https://globalnews.ca/news/9494197/shopify-outlook-no-layoff...

Rafert··on Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails
Have you tried Tapioca (https://github.com/Shopify/tapioca) with Sorbet? Typing in general has ways to go sure, but I find this combination quite usable in my day to day.
Rafert··on Homebrew 4.0.0
Besides consent there is also the possibility of legitimate interest under the GDPR.
Rafert··on GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices
They were locked into long term leases anyway: https://storeys.com/shopify-the-well-toronto-office-space-su...
Rafert··on Ruby 3.2.0 is from another dimension
Agreed. The author is surprised by a major Ruby release on Christmas day (tradition for many years) and uses a lot of superlatives for no reason.
Rafert··on Ruby 3.2.0 is from another dimension
`Float(str, exception: false)` returns either float or nil.
Rafert··on We chose NanoIDs for PlanetScale’s API
ULID hits most of these, and can be converted to UUID for use with databases supporting this datatype (not a strong column): https://github.com/ulid/spec
Rafert··on An Overview Of Upcoming Ruby on Rails 7.1 Features Part 1
The Basecamp folks feel that web and mobile are the same target: https://turbo.hotwired.dev/handbook/native

Rails doesn't stop you from building a backend for your React and React Native frontends, for example just look at Shopify.

Rafert··on Almost monospaced: the perfect fonts for writing
Tab stops are called out in the footnotes:

> Never attempt to line up text by using spaces. The only exception is if you are using a monospaced font. But in word processing applications, there are appropriate tools available for lining up text, like tables[1] and tab stops[2].

[1]: https://practicaltypography.com/tables.html [2]: https://practicaltypography.com/tabs-and-tab-stops.html

Rafert··on Pstore: Ruby Built-In Hash Persistence
https://github.com/ruby/psych defaults to only loading permitted classes since 4.0 so that seems less of a concern now?
Rafert··on Uber investigating breach of its computer systems
WebAuthn does not mandate any kind of form factor[1], external tokens use CTAP for USB/Bluetooth/NFC, Apple FaceID/TouchID and Windows Hello using proprietary interfaces with the built-in hardware. Blink-based browsers ships with a virtual authenticator for debugging[2] and there are a few more[3].

Apple and Google already announced cloud syncing earlier this year, using "passkey" as a friendlier term for end-users. QR codes already allow for cross-ecosystem non-synced use cases, like using my personal Android phone to log in an account with my work Macbook. https://securitycryptographywhatever.buzzsprout.com/1822302/... is a good listen to catch up on the latest developments.

[1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/webauthn-2/#authenticator-model [2]: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/webauthn/ [3]: https://github.com/herrjemand/awesome-webauthn#software-auth...

Rafert··on Windows 11 x64 security hardening guide
Was curious about 7-zip too, TIL about "origin laundering": https://textslashplain.com/2016/04/04/downloads-and-the-mark...
Rafert··on The Zoom installer let a researcher hack his way to root access on macOS
With the Screen Capture API: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Screen_Capt...
Rafert··on The disproportionate influence of early tech decisions
People do switch clouds, but sure it's never trivial. https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2019/05/02/gitlab-journey-from... for example.
Rafert··on Show HN: Face IO – Facial Authentication for the Web
Exactly. Why should I use this if WebAuthn can do any kind of biometrics (or not!) available on the users platform for free?
Rafert··on FIDO Alliance
You don't need those either, perhaps https://github.com/herrjemand/awesome-webauthn is more to your liking than the website of a standards organization.
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