Then why do you have so many car chases? That seems like an odd problem. There must be a reason.
I have only been to Germany once, but my assessment was that we have a very different population here.
Readit Newsripberge commented on LAPD helicopter tracker with real-time operating costs lapdhelicoptertracker.com... · Posted by u/polalavik
ripberge commented on LAPD helicopter tracker with real-time operating costs lapdhelicoptertracker.com... · Posted by u/polalavik
As someone who lives in central LA and has them circle my neighborhood frequently, actually shaking my house, I think this is awesome.
These needs should be filled by drones. Way less noisy, dangerous and expensive.
ripberge commented on Building a high-performance ticketing system with TigerBeetle renerocks.ai/blog/2025-11... · Posted by u/jorangreef
Does that mean that there is some smoke and mirrors when, eg Taylor Swift, says they sold out the concert in minutes? Or are the mega acts truly that high demand?
You can get the seats into "baskets" (reserved) in minutes. In my experience they will not sell out for some time as they usually keep dropping back into inventory. "Sold Out" is a matter of opinion. There are usually lots of single seats left sometimes for weeks or months. The promoter decides when to label the event as "sold out".
ripberge commented on Building a high-performance ticketing system with TigerBeetle renerocks.ai/blog/2025-11... · Posted by u/jorangreef
Having built a ticketing system that sold some Oasis level concerts there's a few misconceptions here:
Selling an event out takes a long time to do frequently because tickets are VERY frequently not purchased--they're just reserved and then they fall back into open seating. This is done by true fans, but also frequently by bots run by professional brokers or amateur resellers. And Cloudflare and every other state of the art bot detection platform doesn't detect them. Hell, some of the bots are built on Cloudflare workers themselves in my experience...
So whatever velocity you achieve in the lab--in the real world you'll do a fraction of it when it comes to actual purchases. That depends upon the event really. Events that fly under the radar may get you a higher actual conversion rate.
Also, an act like Oasis is going to have a lot of reserved seating. Running through algorithms to find contiguous seats is going to be tougher than this example and it's difficult to parallelize if you're truly giving the next person in the queue the actual best seats remaining.
There are many other business rules that accrue after years of features to win Oasis like business unfortunately that will result in more DB calls and add contention.
ripberge commented on OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google theverge.com/openai/70599... · Posted by u/rcchen
IMO other than the Microsoft IP issue, I think the biggest thing that has shifted since this acquisition was first in the works is Claude Code has absolutely exploded. Forking an IDE and all the expense that comes with that feels like a waste of effort, considering the number of free/open source CLI agentic tools that are out there.
Let's review the current state of things:
- Terminal CLI agents are several orders of magnitude less $$$ to develop than forking an entire IDE.
- CC is dead simple to onboard (use whatever IDE you're using now, with a simple extension for some UX improvements).
- Anthropic is free to aggressively undercut their own API margins (and middlemen like Cursor) in exchange for more predictable subscription revenue + training data access.
What does Cursor/Windsurf offer over VS Code + CC?
- Tab completion model (Cursor's remaining moat)
- Some UI niceties like "add selection to chat", and etc.
Personally I think this is a harbinger of where things are going. Cursor was fastest to $900M ARR and IMO will be fastest back down again.
Forking an IDE is not expensive if it's the core product of a company with a $900M ARR.
I doubt MS has ever made $900M off of VS Code.
ripberge commented on How Cloudflare blocked a monumental 7.3 Tbps DDoS attack blog.cloudflare.com/defen... · Posted by u/methuselah_in
Huh, I got attacked from 170 countries last year (HTTP) and Cloudflare's autonomous detection (machine learning powered) rules did almost nothing. It was millions of the same requests over and over and the only thing that we could do to stop it was manually put in rules to block routes. Not only that, some of the attacking traffic came from within Cloudflare workers or it was at least going through their WARP client (those details are now fuzzy). Was a pretty miserable failure to perform on their part.
ripberge commented on Why housing shortages cause homelessness worksinprogress.co/issue/... · Posted by u/apsec112
Here's a recent statistic from San Francisco:
"City officials said that 40% of the unhoused population surveyed in San Francisco came from another California city or even from out of state, increasing from 28% in 2019." Source: https://www.ktvu.com/news/tickets-outside-san-francisco-requ...
This guy's article would lead you to believe that number is closer to 8%.
A problem with this whole discussion is that "homeless" means people that are sleeping at friends' houses etc, but to the average citizen when they're complaining about quality of life issues caused by the homeless they are referring to the subset of homeless people that are "unsheltered".
I don't believe these papers/studies, etc. that continue to purport the plague of the unsheltered is caused by the cost of housing. All I have to do is walk down the streets in Los Angeles and it's very obvious the vast, vast majority of the unsheltered here have a substance abuse problem. Another smaller minority have serious mental illness and some seem to be just anti-social who want to live outside the bounds of society.
The reason these people are not living with relatives isn't "explained by the inability of the family and friends of potentially homeless people to afford extra living space." It's because they have burned through all ties with friends and family as a result of their drug use.
The unsheltered go where they can do their drugs unbothered and even get a lot of free services. Los Angeles LAHSA (the department tasked with tackling homelessness) budget has ballooned from $75 million in 2016 to a whopping $875 million in 2024. Anyone with a pair of eyeballs can see how all that spend has actually made the unsheltered problem worse based on our existing policies and likely is just attracting a lot more drug addicts.
ripberge commented on Stack Analyser: detect technologies used inside a repo github.com/specfy/stack-a... · Posted by u/h1fra
I could see this being valuable for sales people
Funny enough just today I asked ChatGPT a tax question, which it very confidently gave me the wrong answer for.
For those curious, the question was: is interest earned in Canadian RRSP accounts considered taxable income in California for state tax.
What do you believe was incorrect? I asked Chat GPT 3.5 and 4 this question verbatim, seems they both gave the correct answer: it is taxable income. 4 was very thorough. 3.5 not so much.
ripberge commented on Meaningful exits for founders (2016) medium.com/strong-words/m... · Posted by u/freediver
TLDR: dilution is a thing and investor incentives are not always aligned with founder, when it comes to early exit opportunities.
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But...
I don't think there are really a lot of opportunities to exit at $38m in the early stages of a startup, even if your valuation says it is possible on paper. There just isn't much of a market for companies at that stage of growth.
Imo, the more likely scenario is for a startup to either 1. fail to raise and run out of money, or 2. Become self-sustaining, but never successful enough to achieve a meaningful exit for the founders or investors, basically a "zombie" company that may never exit.
In the second case, it is the investors that get screwed, as the founder has made a nice lifestyle business out of their investment. I think most investors realize this is one of the outcomes though, so "screwed" is probably too harsh of a term to use to describe it.
I think there are a lot more potential buyers of $38M companies than $380M companies, particularly if the burn rate is low. There are a lot of exits in this range in the B2B software space to private equity types of co's that are rolling up companies in a particular vertical.