Peter Bhat Harkins

Programmer by day, programmer by night.

Blog: https://push.cx Bootstrapping: https://recheck.dev

I run https://lobste.rs and stream office hours Mon+Thu: https://push.cx/stream

It's better to follow https://bsky.app/profile/push.cx - the bugs have pushed me away from reading Mastodon much.

Homepage: https://push.cx
Sweet home: Chicago
Pronouns: he/him
That guy who runs: https://lobste.rs

Public Key

npub1ewuararnl46vt0967cljycg578s8p8ck73p48nra5rj7kgd4vyysp9ktd2

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsvhww373el6ax9hja0v0ezvy20rcrsnut0gs6ne376pe0tyx6kzzgprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmntqy28wumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyv9kh2uewd9hsc7jw0r

Publishing to

relay.momostr.pink

relay.damus.io

offchain.pub

Author Public Key

npub1ewuararnl46vt0967cljycg578s8p8ck73p48nra5rj7kgd4vyysp9ktd2

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Last Notes

2025-12-29 02:51:01 GMT

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Does it look like this? https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07W81LNTD/ Someone just shared it with me, I'm curious if there's more options/brands.

2025-12-28 17:11:54 GMT

Has anyone seen something like a wall outlet with a USB port... AND the cable permanently attached? Asking for a household where everyone borrows charging cables to leave in the Phantom Zone, never to be seen again. I'm griping a little, but trying to help solve a real hassle.

2025-10-13 13:00:00 GMT

What languages have sandboxes or other features that you'd trust with untrusted code? There's Lua, and Java had applets, OCaml almost. Not many languages allow what's effectively embedding with controls on runtime, mem usage, importing, and disk/network access.

2025-09-14 17:45:34 GMT

A spammer promoting an AI coding tool spammed my repo. I reported the spam to GitHub. They kept the spam and, after hiding him for a couple weeks, restored the spammer. I can't resolve the problem because I can't ban the spammer. So now every page has this irritating banner forever. GitHub, wtf?
https://cdn.masto.host/rubysocial/media_attachments/files/115/203/894/946/596/835/original/a2f2efc0f53f2514.jpeg

2025-06-10 12:06:32 GMT

Lobsters is back up. Looks like unattended-upgrades bounced mariadb; it caught an io error (transient?) and didn't start. Downtime detector failed to alert. I just finished a db backup. Will investigate and take further remediation steps after coffee. https://lobste.rs/chat if you want to help puzzle it out

2025-05-22 13:41:58 GMT

I'll stream Lobsters office hours in about 20 minutes. Drop in any time with questions, or just to watch me maintain the site. There's more grid PRs from chamlis to review and probably merge, but I also want to split more functionality out to background jobs for failure isolation. https://push.cx/stream

2025-03-16 13:07:05 GMT

I'm very happy to remove the code from Lobsters for geoblocking the UK, and my thanks to everyone who contributed to making sense of it. I wrote up everything we learned about it and why the risk seems low enough now, hopefully it's useful to other communities: https://lobste.rs/c/xevn8a

2025-03-02 15:45:47 GMT

Has anyone used password breach lists to prevent account takeover? I think we've seen it for the first time on Lobsters. I feel out of my depth yoloing security controls and would appreciate advice: https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/issues/1478

2025-01-17 16:29:23 GMT

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This is not a situation where a technical change can provide a loophole. I think it would be a very bad mistake to assume the enforcers will clueless about computing.

2024-12-01 23:49:42 GMT

I have been informed by my spouse that having pecan pie and ice cream for breakfast, lunch, and dinner does not count as eating thanksgiving leftovers even if they are leftover from thanksgiving.

2024-11-30 19:28:46 GMT

@npub1qmq…2nm4 Thanks for your suggestion for blocking the Brave scam. I left a comment but - in the hopes that your strategy works for longer, I've removed your comment. https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/issues/761#issuecomment-2509149290
As an OS project, it's hard to deal with this kind of attack.

2024-11-12 20:50:17 GMT

For the first time in 5 years my personal browser profile has zero tabs open. (Please clap.)

2024-10-30 17:22:00 GMT

Indie makers: how do you track progress over months? I end most days feeling they were well-spent, but not really weeks or months. I guess I sort of want GitHub’s activity graph for my several projects to feel like I’m spending time well on priorities.

2024-10-21 18:57:38 GMT

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Maybe this is fiddly GitHub UI, but... how do potential volunteers know to invoke the bot? They can still write a "I'll do it" comment. I guess train maintainers to invoke the bot and remove the comment?

2024-10-17 12:50:23 GMT

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I've still been thinking about this, really, any kind of suggestion would be very welcome if you can spare the time. This morning I'm working on a PR for an older, mutli-step issue that's confused by a couple comments claiming it without taking action.

2024-10-16 14:17:19 GMT

I wish GitHub allowed me to enforce a policy that comments claiming an issue are deleted if a PR isn’t opened with a week. And any commenter posting any variation of “any updates on this” to feature requests would instantly fall through a trapdoor into the oubliette.

2024-09-06 17:44:59 GMT

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Sorry about that. Several users reported it and I banned the commenter.

2024-08-13 14:45:23 GMT

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I had a funny moment streaming yesterday where someone was blown away that my .vimrc is older than them. Old coders never die, we just become load-bearing infrastructure (and then die).

2024-08-12 17:20:22 GMT

In about 90 minutes, and continuing twice-weekly, I'm going to stream Lobsters office hours and development on Twitch. I hope to answer questions and generally just let folks look over my shoulder as I work on things: https://lobste.rs/s/zzprkr/weekly_lobsters_office_hours

2024-08-12 14:34:49 GMT

Talking to an LLM feels like talking to BigCo Tier 1 customer support. They’re tortured into obscene friendliness but too uninformed and disempowered for anything but the most obvious conversation path.