stephenr's comments

On: X is selling existing users' handles

[stephenr]

Or congratulate yourself on being divested long enough that they don't think you're coming back?

On: Cloud VM benchmarks 2026

[stephenr]

I mean, the context here is that a company stopped providing services after a bank cancelled a credit card they had been charging.

For all they know, your legitimate charges were the fraudulent charges that triggered the cancellation.

I cannot fathom why you keep using the term "expired" when that is a very different scenario to "cancelled by the issuing bank".

[justinclift → stephenr]

> For all they know, your legitimate charges were the fraudulent charges that triggered the cancellation.

Literally years of paying the bills. ;)

> I cannot fathom why you keep using the term "expired" when that is a very different scenario to "cancelled by the issuing bank".

That seems like a you problem. No worries, hope your day is going ok.

[stephenr → justinclift]

> That seems like a you problem.

I dunno man, it wasn't me having a breakdown in public because I forgot to update a biller after I cancelled my card.

On: Cloud VM benchmarks 2026

[stephenr]

For some reason parent is using the word "expired" when they really mean "cancelled by the issuing bank".

On: Cloud VM benchmarks 2026

[stephenr]

But any serious deployment of "cloud" infrastructure still needs management, you're just forcing the people doing it to use the small number of knobs the cloud provider makes available rather than giving them full access to the software itself.

[hvb2 → stephenr]

not sure what you mean by a serious deployment, but a lot of companies will be perfectly fine with, some compute, object storage and a managed rdbms.

Will that be more expensive than running it yourself? Absolutely. Does it allow teams to function and deliver independently, yes. As an org, you can prioritize cost or something else.

[stephenr → hvb2]

> a lot of companies will be perfectly fine with, some compute, object storage and a managed rdbms.

Right, and who or what causes those services to be provisioned, to be configured, etc.?

[hvb2 → stephenr]

Infrastructure as code tools like terraform etc? That's trivial compared to configuring a database for production use I would say.

You don't need to be DevOps to write that stuff, it's really simple.

[stephenr → hvb2]

And who is writing the terraform configs?

On: Whisker – Self hosted e-commerce cart, pure PHP, zero dependencies

[stephenr]

I am absolutely not the target market for this, however I have some comments from what I could look at quickly on a phone:

- a good chunk of data seems to be passed around in associative arrays; It would be much easier to understand, and enforce type safety if you use Model and/or DTO classes.

- you're storing currency amounts using decimals in the database which is fine, but using floats in the app code is a problem. Floating point maths is not precise. Either use integers (and convert to a float for display purposes) or use something like the BCMath extension.

- there seems to be huge swathes of inline styles in your views. This just sounds painful to manage/style/adjust over time.

- best practice is to have a subdirectory which is specified as the docroot and includes just the public assets (images, css, etc) and the front controller (index.php)

- your php code defaults to the currency symbol for Indian rupees but the stripe gateway at least defaults to USD.

On: A GitHub Issue Title Compromised 4k Developer Machines

[stephenr]

There is one pretty simple change developers can make to protect against "prompt injection" though.

On: A GitHub Issue Title Compromised 4k Developer Machines

[stephenr]

I doubt Microsoft policies allow a subsidiary of a subsidiary to do things which highlight the shortcomings of the middle subsidiary.

On: Converting dash cam videos into Panoramax images

[stephenr]

In theory machine vision could extract the coordinates overlayed in the frames of the video.

You're unlikely to get good data from all frames automatically due to the changing background but I'd have thought you could get enough good data to make it work.

On: Show HN: Settle It – turn "Pizza or Thai?" into a shareable poll

[stephenr]

This might well be cultural but if anyone I was considering eating a meal with, sent me a link to choose where I want to eat rather than just asking, I'd immediately lose any interest in eating with them.

[karlhills → stephenr]

that's fair, but you can use it for lots more than just dinner decisions! I used it last weekend to decide what movie to go see with some friends and their kids.

[stephenr → karlhills]

Essentially the same scenario, same response.

On: MacBook Neo

[stephenr]

Not necessarily - you just need a display that has USB-C input and supports USB-PD.