I used to be indecisive, but now I'm not so sure.
San Francisco, CA
Joined February 2008
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Roman Stanek retweeted
Holy moly... this new paper finds that 88% of VC-backed founders receive zero exit value 🤪🤪🤪
The clearest explanation I've heard of the eMudhra security incident:
Instead of generating a random 256-bit number, they generated a random number between 0 and 256.
Spam is just like fashion:
A year ago, my inbox was full of AI SDR pitches.
Six months ago, it was “We can connect you with investors and buyers.”
Now it is mostly “A few of our partners are looking to license operational data from companies in your space.”
Spam might be the best indicator of where the AI hype cycle is headed.
Roman Stanek retweeted
Some stats on #php2shell. In the 10 hours before it was publicly announced, across the @Cloudflare network we saw thousands of attempts to exploit it. That jumped to tens of thousands in the 45 minutes post announcement, hundreds of thousands within 2 hours, and millions now.
Roman Stanek retweeted
Many years back, I made a statement that “HTTPS is dangerous” due to significant, and obvious, problems in the design of the Certificate Authority system.
The core point I made: A small, simple mistake with a Root Certificate Authority has massive impacts throughout the system, making it highly likely that there were untold numbers of “fake” certificates which were “trusted”.
It is a “security based on trust” system, where we are asked to blindly trust dozens upon dozens of Root Certificate Authority organizations (from countries around the world) to never make a single mistake (or implement any backdoors for any government they are beholden to).
It is, quite simply, a design that appears specifically made to be abused and manipulated.
I was told that I did not understand how CA’s work.
I was mocked and ridiculed.
Well… as a wise man once said…
Who’s laughing now, Wayne?!
In April of 2025, eMudhra (an Indian Certificate Authority), published 8 intermediate CA keys which were so weak that a small child could guess the numbers in a few seconds.
One of the private keys was, literally, 4.
Just… 4.
This massive problem was not made public until October 17th of this year, when it was discovered by an anonymous guy on the Internet who goes only by “Wayne” (like “Cher”…. but… “Wayne”).
What this means in practical terms: It has been trivially simple, for the last year and a half, to create fake “secure” HTTPS certificates. (One person even created a fake HTTPS certificate for a Google.com subdomain.)
It took Mozilla 3 days, after learning about this (from “Wayne”), before they updated their certificate list (which many open source projects — including curl and Python — rely upon).
As of this moment, many systems are still vulnerable (including macOS).
Roman Stanek retweeted
Churchill could have shortened WW2 by years if he had just “done a deal” with Hitler. George Washington could have done a deal to end the American Revolution. Zelenskyy is in good company.
Diamond earrings for $30. Lab-grown diamonds have the same crystal structure and chemical composition as mined diamonds. Their prices are collapsing, and the diamond cartel must be feeling the pain.
Couldn’t happen to nicer people.
Roman Stanek retweeted
Any startup that hires enough ex-Googlers ends up with an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Google infra
New on our Engineering blog: Creating in-house source control.
In May, we merged around 2,500 code changes per day. In September, we merged more than 30,000 per day. As a result, we became bottlenecked by developer infrastructure built for human (rather than agent) scale.
Here, we share how we built a new version control system—and fully migrated our monorepo from git—in five months: anthropic.com/engineering/re…
Roman Stanek retweeted
So many reactions to this so I have another one. In June this year Samel Chaudhary wrote an MIT sloan working paper that essentially said that in the last 10 years the net GAAP income generated by SaaS compnies was -$ 78 Billion after absorbing $350bn in paid in capital. Almost all of that went to Stock based compensation. SaaS companies mostly transferred value from public shareholders to employees through dilution.
Almost all of these companies are overstaffed. sometines by 3-4X. Bending spoons is just the invisible hand of the market arriving to repair the system. This will happen more and perhaps needs to happen. There are a lot of companies that are doing more than 100mn in ARR that can be run very successfully with <100 people and stay adaptable and deliver value to their customers.
Today we’re laying off a large part of the Airtable team.
This is not a reflection of their work but a reflection of our deep belief that small teams ship more and better.
For Airtable, better is about to look like:
- A new Core team shipping your top requests monthly (already 30+ shipped in 3 weeks)
- Upgraded Omni, Airtable Canvas, a stronger MCP, and BYO agents, coming soon
- New Performance and Infra teams focusing on speeding up bases and increasing limits on records, fields, and syncs
To everyone leaving: thank you. If you’re hiring, these are excellent people and worth a call.
Roman Stanek retweeted
If Russia laid down its arms, there would be peace. If Ukraine laid down its arms, there would be no Ukraine.
The fastest way to achieve peace is for Biden to stop pussyfooting around and give Ukraine the weapons it needs to take back its territory. Then Putin will negotiate.
One of my favorite ways to pass a long flight is to watch multi-hour lectures on WWII cryptography and cryptanalysis.
JN-25, the Imperial Japanese Navy’s main cipher, used a codebook of roughly 50,000 five-digit groups, further encrypted with five-digit additives. Even the starting points in the additive tables were encrypted using smaller additive tables.
The lecture spends 30 minutes explaining how to identify messages encrypted with overlapping additive sequences (depth).
Plus, these lectures move at an extremely slow pace. They literally teach me patience because the people who broke these codes (and teach cryptography) are a very special breed.
Roman Stanek retweeted
Kind of striking how persistent the decline in Trump's approval rating has been. There's been mean reversion around news events and economic data, but to a declining rather than steady baseline as in the 1st term.
Roman Stanek retweeted
"Super Intelligence" is to Artifical Intelligence as "Latinx" is to Latino or Hispanic.
Roman Stanek retweeted
Asked Codex to convert a online HTML book into Markdown. It tried, but the server blocked scripted downloads with HTTP 403.
I said, “Use my session in Chrome.”
It opened the website in Chrome, and I thought it would start walking through the website like I would, but it opened the developer tools console, injected some JavaScript into the webpage, and started an automatic download of all assets with a progress indicator in the developer console.
The final result was a single JSON file with the HTML content.
This is honestly a bit scary.
