Hacker News Reader

codesparkleon To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI

It’s not so much that AI is replacing “tech writers”; with all due respect to the individuals in those roles, it was never a good title to identify as.

Technical writing is part of the job of software engineering. Just like “tester” or “DBA”, it was always going to go the way of the dodo.

If you’re a technical writer, now’s the time to reinvent yourself.

codesparkleon Anthropic Explicitly Blocking OpenCode

Previous related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46586766

codesparkleon Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions

counterpoint: yt-dlp

codesparkleon Post-mortem of Shai-Hulud attack on November 24th, 2025

What actually happened:

The workflow was configured in a way that allowed untrusted code from a branch controlled by the attacker to be executed in the context of a GitHub action workflow that had access to secrets.

codesparkleon Post-mortem of Shai-Hulud attack on November 24th, 2025

That’s not what happened at all

The attacker did not need to merge any PRs to exfiltrate the credentials

codesparkleon Consume Less, Create More

cool, there's a brew formula and trying to run it tells me exactly what to do:

  Error: no URLs configured. Please fill the file ~/.newsboat/urls with RSS feed URLs or import an OPML file.

thanks for the tip, giving it a go!

codesparkleon Consume Less, Create More

Nice! I have tried Mastodon but keep getting sucked back into Twitter, hence the 30 minute daily limit. Perhaps I should give RSS a go as well. Can you recommend a reader?

codesparkleon Big O Notation – Explained as easily as possible

A bad programmer solves their problems inefficiently and a really bad programmer doesn't even know why their solution is inefficient

To any beginners reading this: Solving problems inefficiently does not make you a bad programmer. Most of the time, an "inefficient" solution will be good enough, and optimising for performance comes at a cost.

So sit back, relax, and enjoy the journey.

codesparkleon Summary of the Amazon Kinesis Event in the Northern Virginia (US-East-1) Region

From the postmortem:

At 9:39 AM PST, we were able to confirm a root cause [...] the new capacity had caused all of the servers in the fleet to exceed the maximum number of threads allowed by an operating system configuration.

codesparkleon React Router v5

react-router depends on the ReactTraining/history package for browser navigation support.

On 10 June 2017, an mind-bogglingly ill-conceived pull request[1] was merged, which causes invalid URLs to be pushed to the browser history, breaking the back button and page refresh in many scenarios.

Ever since, users have practically been begging the maintainer to fix the bug[2] and implementing hacky workarounds[3].

In a twist of irony, the contributor who originally introduced the bug has:

a) switched their own competing router package to a different history implementation[4]

b) argued that fixing the bug (which was introduced in a patch release) would require a major version bump, implying it would be better to let it remain broken[5].

I concede that the software is open source, and nobody is entitled to make any demands of the maintainers. Nevertheless, I pity the countless end-users who are left wondering why the most basic functionality of their web browsers is broken.

[1]: https://github.com/ReactTraining/history/pull/465

[2]: https://github.com/ReactTraining/history/issues/505

[3]: https://github.com/elastic/kibana/pull/32365

[4]: https://github.com/pshrmn/curi/commit/e850bcd9297398653a79b9...

[5]: https://github.com/ReactTraining/history/pull/656

codesparkleon The meaning of trust in the age of Airbnb

This is incorrect. The host cannot see your review until they have left you a review and vice versa.