ylere

Joined 11 years ago

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132
Member since
Aug 3
Co-Founder and CTO at Wingback

Previously co-founder 1aim Member of the Good Technology Collective

contact: yann<?>leretaille.com

kismet: 7e8a2b83cb4599e5d7c264ac4e78e72ae2bd9fe5b007e1835172c57210c5df48

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Recent submissions

Comment · 7 months ago
Indeed, and that's through the API. If you use Claude Chat/Code and even if you then turn off web search, it still has access to some of its tools (for doing calculations, running small code snippets etc.) and that environment contains chardets code 4 times:

  /home/claude/.cache/uv/archive-v0/nZCy52fMCgTsNaLySn0xf/chardet
  /home/claude/.cache/uv/wheels-v6/pypi/chardet
  /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/pip/_vendor/chardet
  /usr/local/lib/python3.12/dist-packages/chardet 
It's not surprising that they were able to create a new, working version of chardet this quickly. It seems the author just told Claude Code to "do a clean room implementation" and to make sure the code looks different from the original chardet (named several times in the prompt) without considering the training set and the tendency for LLMs to "cheat".
Comment · 7 months ago
Comment · 2 years ago
Correction (can't edit the post anymore): As another commenter pointed out, the rocket can carry 3.4M kg of fuel, not 34M kg.
Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 2 years ago
I think as long as "feature flag entitlements" are seen as distinctly different from what engineers usually use feature flags for (small incremental changes of individual components, testing, roll-outs, A/B testing) they can work well. An entitlement should have a clear link to a customer-facing feature, which are conceptually much larger blocks of functionality. One difficulty with this approach is that you still have to take into account a lot of billing-related aspects, e.g., handling customers in arrears, overage charges if they go over a certain limit, having different pricing models for the same feature, or resetting/carrying over usage counters on plan changes/upgrades - this can add a lot of complexity over time!

That's why we decided to offer separate feature entitlements that are tightly coupled to the billing chain and metering as part of Wingback (disclaimer: I'm the CTO). In the end, depending on your plan complexity and how much you have already invested in feature flags, I think both approaches can work well. Having some kind of feature gating in place for your customers will also make your life a lot easier for provisioning customer accounts and being able to offer custom packages.

Comment · 2 years ago
My experience has been that there are typically two types of engineers: those who have worked on billing systems before and those who haven't.

I think a lot of the issues arise from the difference between payments and billing [0]. When just starting out and signing up your first customers, you primarily care about collecting a few (recurring) payments - and it's really easy to set that up with Stripe (or even just manually invoicing your first customers).

However, over time, more billing requirements gradually sneak in, such as more complex entitlements, multiple plans, grandfathering, and eventually enterprise/high touch sales customers (where the money is!) who need custom billing cycles, terms, and entitlement provisioning. Since billing is never a technical focus, numerous additions and small hacks accumulate over time, taking engineering resources away from the actual product. Eventually, this turns into an unmanageable mess that can significantly slow down the sales process or limit what you can sell.

The complexity of billing is riddled with hidden pitfalls and edge cases, and it has become even more complex now that most plans include many different limits and usage-based components and that most SaaS companies sell globally. Many later-stage companies have teams of 15+ engineers working solely on billing. I fully agree with the author that, unless it's at the core of your product, no organization should build a billing system themselves (Disclaimer: I'm the CTO of Wingback, a SaaS Billing Platform).

[0] https://www.wingback.com/blog/saas-payment-vs-saas-billing

Comment · 2 years ago
Been using them on the paid plan for a 1yr+ and apart from working great and reliably I've been really appreciating how no-nonse and to the point their communication has been. Never realized it's also OSS, thank you for pointing that out!

Really easy to set up too, just make sure to also set up DKIM/SPF/DMARC to make sure the forwarded emails don't go to spam.

Comment · 2 years ago
It seems to be a fork of VirtualBox under the same dual license as the original project.
Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 2 years ago
> If you know a site has a 4-words policy, the xkcd pw has very low entropy, but if you use this strategy on a "any pw goes" site, a bruteforcer would have to test all lengths upto 25 chars before finding yours (sort of).

How so? Iirc, the entropy calculations assume that the attacked is aware passphrases are used. The eff-long word list often used for xkcd-style passphrases has 7776 words. So on average it would take 7776^4/2 attempts to guess one (randomly generated) 4-word passphrase, comparable to a truly random 8-9 character password with special chars. As the comic points out, people tend to be pretty bad at remembering random sequences of characters and therefore often often use combinations of common words and apply non-random substitutions and patterns, resulting in much lower entropy for those passwords.

Of course, everyone should use a password manager in the first place, but for cases where people don't or they need to reliably remember it (master passwords and critical ones), xkcd-style passphrases are a good and secure option.

Comment · 2 years ago
Have the guides been updates yet? I created my first one but it wasn't obvious whether things like pkgrel should be increased as part of the MR (I assumed not) and in what format to submit them/which information to include in general.
Comment · 2 years ago
+1 Can confirm that thanks to gromit I got my account in under 10 minutes a few days ago!

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