Alacart (u/Alacart) - Readit News

Alacart commented on How I Choose What to Work On (2023) tynan.com/workonwhat/... · Posted by u/freemh

yfw · 5 months ago

> I would rather be poor than make a lot of money doing something I hate.

I too would love to have that choice. But my wife and kids might disagree

Alacart · 5 months ago

It's also entirely possible, maybe even likely, for people to get burnt out doing something they love because we don't set the natural boundaries we would with something we're strictly doing pragmatically.

I still think it's the best way to live, but the saying "do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life" really is double edged.

Alacart commented on Ask HN: What are you working on (September 2024)? · Posted by u/david927

Alacart · a year ago

https://approximated.app - reliably automating custom domains and their SSL certs at scale. For SaaS, marketplaces, platforms, outbound services, etc. who have a lot of customers that want to connect their own domains.

Currently working on:

- Further improving the embeddable DNS widget (to help/automate users updating their DNS records) that launched last month

- Rolling out the new hybrid self hosted version that allows traffic and certs to only go through your servers, while getting the full benefit of the cloud version

- Tinkering with some AI ideas for improving the existing WAF features (tricky, but potentially powerful)

- Making Edge Sequences (pattern matching and rules applied at the edge) more flexible and powerful with more composable options and ways to match requests

Recently hit a milestone of over a million domains served!

Alacart commented on When To Do What You Love paulgraham.com/when.html... · Posted by u/underdeserver

hypertexthero · a year ago

And this interview at Slashdot:

> Please, don’t spend your late teens or early twenties in front of your computer at a startup. If you’re a young person, I think the very best thing you could do is get together with a group of friends and commit to a one year experiment in which the substantial part of your life will be focused on discovery and not be dedicated to wage work – however that looks for you. Get an instrument, learn three chords, and go on tour; find a derelict boat and cross an ocean; hitchhike to Alaska; build a fleet of dirigibles; construct a UAV that will engage with the emerging local police UAVs; whatever – but make it count.

— Moxie Marlinspike https://interviews.slashdot.org/story/11/12/19/179256/moxie-...

Alacart · a year ago

While I agree that would be great for many people, how are 99% of young people supposed to survive during this time? How do they pay their rent, buy groceries, and pay for these explorations without wage work?

Alacart commented on Accident Forgiveness fly.io/blog/accident-forg... · Posted by u/piperswe

tptacek · a year ago

We talk about warnings in the post. We'll do that at some point. The hard part about caps is what to do when someone hits them.

If there was a way to make caps work for our core customers, we'd do it. We're open to ideas. A theme of our work this past month and these next several months is extracting maximal value from ANFWWAONW, our new billing system. The thing you have to remember though is that our belief about our core customer is that they are averse to nothing more fiercely than service disruption.

We're not in principle opposed to caps. We just don't have a product story for them that we're comfortable with. Keeping you from spending more money than you wanted to is an explicit product goal of ours (again: see post); we're just very wary of trading availability off against that goal.

Alacart · a year ago

Configurable warnings as webhooks would be pretty cool. Then I can automate whatever needs to happen on my side.

I already automate apps, machines, etc with the machines API and GraphQL, so my big worries in this area are:

- Woops, some bad logic deployed too many machines (sounds like this policy helps) - Some kind of mistake or attack that just explodes bandwidth usage suddenly

Alacart commented on Ask HN: What non-AI products are you working on? · Posted by u/jackedEngineer

Alacart · a year ago

https://approximated.app - reliably automating custom domains and their SSL certs at scale. For SaaS, marketplaces, platforms, outbound services, etc. who have a lot of domains to manage.

Coming up on a million domains served, it's been a fun ride!

Alacart commented on Fly Postgres, Managed by Supabase supabase.com/blog/postgre... · Posted by u/samwillis

tptacek · 2 years ago

Oh, wow, I forgot that this (database ingress filtering) was a big motivator for the engineering project we were considering for giving apps persistent outbound IP addresses, a project I loathe and now have another arrow in my quiver with which to shoot it down.

I stand alone athwart all efforts to introduce dynamic routing protocols here.

(I could still lose this argument if there are comparably important use cases).

Alacart · 2 years ago

Why do you loathe it? Coming from someone who kind of wants it.

Alacart commented on Validating Data in Elixir: Using Ecto and NimbleOptions blog.appsignal.com/2023/1... · Posted by u/amalinovic

CodeCompost · 2 years ago

The only place I hear about Elixir is here on HN.

Alacart · 2 years ago

I built approximated.app on elixir, proxying 300k+ domains. It's a great ecosystem, I've never seen anything else handle really hard problems so well in my 15 years as a developer.

Concurrency? Trivial.

Reliability? Unbelievable. (YouTube Sasa Juric's "Soul of Elixir" talk)

Clustering/horizontal scaling? Built in, even across networks.

Web framework? Competitive with the best (I'd argue better, with liveview but YMMV).

AI/ML? Amazing support and tooling.

Embedded/IoT? Incredible support with the nerves project.

There's only 2 places where I feel it falls down a bit:

1) brittle dev tooling in ElixirLS that trips up new and experienced devs alike. Soon to get better though as competing LSPs are in the works.

2) no official release-as-binary tooling yet. Things are way better in the last few years for releases, and you're probably containerizing anyways, but I am jealous of e.g. Go's single file binaries.

Alacart commented on We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets twitter.com/Cruise/status... · Posted by u/ra7

stickfigure · 2 years ago

Most people don't live in urban centers. Unless you plan on dismantling the suburbs, we're stuck with cars of one form or another.

Taxis, driverless or otherwise, are "public transport".

Alacart · 2 years ago

I guess it depends on how you define urban (are suburbs still urban?). I think you're kind of right in that currently suburbs are terrible to live in without a car. But if there was magically a huge shift to much better public transport - would that still be the case?

Most of the world is more urban than not: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/urban-vs-rural-majority

Alacart commented on Pixel 8 Pro store.google.com/product/... · Posted by u/alphabetting

andrewstuart2 · 2 years ago

I'm really glad to see both the partnership with iFixit and the 7 years of support. Because everything else seems mostly meh to me, and while I'm upgrading this year from a Pixel 6 Pro, the continued diminished returns make it seem likely that 2-3 years from now I won't have as much reason to.

Alacart · 2 years ago

My experience with my own pixel 7 pro and a pixel 5 has been that these devices are an order of magnitude lower in build quality than Samsung or iPhones. I really, really wanted to be happy with them but they've been a never ending source of frustration.

My pixel 5 just stopped turning on one day about 2 years in, and my pixel 7 pro had the volume and power buttons fall out about 3 weeks in (not due to a drop, after googling it's apparently a very widely seen issue).

The service with iFixit was unhelpful, they told me "We keep seeing this and Google says this is wear and tear. We can't submit it for a warranty repair, and if we try we end up eating the cost". After finally complaining on twitter I was contacted by some support person who said to give iFixit this email and they would fix it. They still refused, and after a few more rounds of interactions like that I eventually bought some replacement buttons on Amazon, popped them in, and put a case that covers them on it. I'm fully expecting this to randomly die some time before 2 years is up.

Combine that with Google's extremely strong tendency to abandon everything, promises like these seem well, worthless.

Meanwhile my daughter is using my wife's old iPhone from 8 years ago. My Samsung note 3 and my s8 still boot up and work just fine (though I cracked the screen on one about 5 years ago). It's just so obvious that these phones are very low priority to Google, while other companies base their business around their phones.

Alacart commented on Show HN: Open-Source Admin Panel for Supabase github.com/supaboard/app... · Posted by u/jonhainstock

Alacart · 2 years ago

Cool! I'm not a supabase user, but I imagine I could use this for any postgresql database. Is that true?