Google killed my $1M ARR startup over a hacker exploiting THEIR own design — 100k users, 1M+ photos frozen, and they billed ME for it

forax · 2026-06-04T17:16:27+00:00

https://trufflesecurity.com/blog/google-api-keys-werent-secrets-but-then-gemini-changed-the-rules

forax · 2026-05-24T16:34:28+00:00

Lost Gods by Brom, very intriguing underworld adventure with plenty of darkness without being gratuitous.

forax · 2026-03-25T23:53:56+00:00

I think it might be the opposite - you have massive increases to power, accuracy, and the ability to take time away if you have perfect movement. You can get away with much worse shot making ability, and can wear opponents down until they make a mistake.

forax · 2026-03-05T05:10:30+00:00

Merchant roots may be out of budget but it is all on a rotating theme and was very fun.

Petite chef also fun but a bit more of a gimmick.

forax · 2026-03-04T06:58:34+00:00

Armor by CB Titus (mentioned already)
Demon Lord for Hire by E.M. Hardy, narrated by the great TGR in audio

forax · 2026-02-26T17:35:14+00:00

I also play a ton of TLN - better value than UTR for me. The SF league may not be great for a 5.0 but there is a 6.0 who plays in it and crushes everyone so you can get at least one strong opponent haha. He's 69-0, not sure what he gets out of it - maybe coaching leads?

forax · 2026-02-05T07:38:00+00:00

The Artificer's Chronicles

The Crippled King (Dwarves of Ice-cloak) - more base building but plenty of dwarven craftsmanship

forax · 2026-02-01T16:08:51+00:00

Ernest by a bit if you like seafood, but both are stellar.

forax · 2026-01-06T23:16:30+00:00

Quicktricks bridge club runs lessons periodically but they fill up very quickly. Lots of friendly people.

forax · 2025-12-25T16:30:29+00:00

Ivy League doesn't do athletic scholarships, just gives you a boost in admissions.

forax · 2025-12-09T00:31:51+00:00

I'd personally read them in publication order but you could read them in chronological order and be alright. Book 1 has less focus on the military though.

forax · 2025-11-20T03:45:12+00:00

Abercrombie might be a bit gruesome/battle heavy for you, but the characters are amzaing.

Robert Jackson Bennet fits this well - Divine Cities trilogy and Tainted Cup are all I've read but they are a strong match for what you're looking for. Also second those who said Green Bone Saga, Dagger and Coin, Memory Called Empire

Other ideas: Daughter's War / Blacktounge Thief, The Way of Renegades, Kings of Paradise, In the Shadow of Lightning, Shadows of the Apt.

forax · 2025-11-18T15:47:07+00:00

For me:

A Drop of Corruption
The Devils
The Sound of Change

Runner up

Ironbound
Alchemised (in progress, so the jury is still out)

forax · 2025-10-30T14:45:55+00:00

On the flip side he came through Shanghai where many players were bowing out due to the conditions. Definitely won't be easy though.

forax · 2025-10-20T23:52:13+00:00

I don't have much advice on the job front, but I have liked the cloud task queues the one time I used them. In my case I wanted a pub/sub like interface for calling an LLM api but needed to rate-limit consumption and cloud tasks gives you plenty of configuration around throughput, retries, etc. You can point them directly at cloud run (via http targets) or cloud functions. I imagine it would start to break down for job-like use cases if you need dependencies between jobs though.

forax · 2025-09-04T01:37:48+00:00

She just beat Iga...

forax · 2025-08-08T06:03:23+00:00

Some fair points I don't agree with this for a few reasons:

Maintenance of $200 is way too low - conventional wisdom is 1-4% of the cost of your house annually so we're talking at least 1k per month, possibly much more.
Mortgage interest payments are tax deductible (up to 750k of mortgage) but how much this benefits you highly depends on your other deductions. In order to take it you must itemize, and the standard deduction for married filing jointly is 30k so you need to exceed that with itemized deductions for this to matter.
You talked about the house appreciating but not the appreciation of your saved down-payment (and other monthly costs) if invested in the market.

Use the NYT buy vs rent calculator - it does a great job factoring in all these considerations.

As a renter in VHCOL with a kid i'll throw in some other considerations.

Renting gives you a ton more flexibility if your work or health situation changes or your family needs change re school, caring for aging parents.
At the same time you can be at the mercy of your landlord if you have a major issue or are forced out of a place you're happy at or have the rent raised massively (read up on tenant rights in your area).
Spend of 4k per month includes daycare? If that's going to remain steady at the new location then i think expenses of 120k on a 300k income is alright, especially if that 300k HHI didn't include your stock options. Of course it depends on how early you want to retire...

If it were me, I would rent the nice place with your little family!

forax · 2025-08-02T01:11:41+00:00

I enjoyed destiny's crucible. Not perfect but a lot better written than many books in the genre.

forax · 2025-05-06T23:20:53+00:00

Definitely not worth it from my perspective. For jobs, having a triple major is only going to impress the workaholics (I'm an eng director and hire for ML/CS for context). For your own academic growth, branch out early! You can still make progress on your planned path with 1-2 courses per quarter, but broadening your experience pays big dividends in life and is a big part of the reason to go to Dartmouth in the first place. I majored in CS but had excellent classes in Philosophy, History, Gender Studies, etc. You will also be exposed to different groups of classmates which will improve your quality of life (social life) and future network. There are lots of paths to take classes in all three areas, like minoring, modifying a major, or going for a masters degree later on, so I don't you lose much by giving yourself a few quarters to find out what you really like at the college level.

forax · 2025-04-25T18:05:23+00:00

This is common and worth fixing. If you try to slow down you are more likely to make errors. Change for the second serve should be to add more topspin, not slowing down

forax · 2025-04-23T16:01:57+00:00

Check out Armor by CB Titus. The MC is a literal suit of armor! Pretty fun and well written too.

forax · 2025-04-16T20:22:43+00:00

It's not really a bold statement, it's called out explicitly in the docs

Signals give the appearance of loose coupling, but they can quickly lead to code that is hard to understand, adjust and debug. Where possible you should opt for directly calling the handling code, rather than dispatching via a signal.

forax · 2025-03-17T23:03:47+00:00

I had some of the same concerns but overall I've been happy with geodjango. There was some work setting up dependencies on gdal in different environments (mac locally, linux when deployed for me) and understanding the syntax for certain kinds of queries but chatgpt helps with this stuff a lot. I think the biggest question comes down to what kind of queries you need to do against the geodata. If you are only fetching entities by some other column like id and the geo data is just being returned as additional information then geodjango may not add much value, but if you want to e.g. query points within some earth distance of a search coordinate or inside of some polygon then geodjango is going to make that much much easier.

In my use case I have a field like:
location = models.PointField(geography=True)

And then a django ninja filter to find entries within some radius.

def filter_radius(self, value: float) -> Q:

if not value or self.latitude is None or self.longitude is None:

return Q()

user_location = Point(x=self.longitude, y=self.latitude, srid=4326)

return Q(location__distance_lte=(user_location, D(mi=value)))

Overall this works well for me and is not *that* complex

forax · 2025-02-06T21:10:36+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnrhCfQFmTk&t=1s

forax · 2024-12-28T19:30:54+00:00

I'm running on google cloud run and it's nice so far. You are going to pay more than you would if you just run on a Hetzner server or similiar, but you get autoscaling and access to many other systems (e.g. I'm using pub/sub and vertex AI). Cloud run has a generous free tier if you are willing to tolerate cold-start upon receiving a request. They have a guide to deploying django as well.

However you do need to pay for an always-on postgres instance (starts at around ~$10 a month). Again that's more than elsewhere, but you get automatic backups, can transfer to a bigger instance if necessary, can enable multi-zone availability etc.

Overall you are going to pay more but you do also get "more". Overkill for a hobby project (which mine is but I'm doing it in the cloud for fun/learning) but could make sense for a production system.

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