Hacker News Reader

TkTechon Improving the performance of WAT parser

Sure, here's a Rust/WASM procedural skybox generator I threw together the other day, and is much, much faster at 16k renders then Javascript. https://tkte.ch/night-sky/

TkTechon Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day memory loss

I might have missed it, but no mention of _where_ data is stored in the FAQ and seems critically reliant on Cloudflare.

In a changing world, what's the selling point for those outside of the USA? Why would our company pick this over self-hosting when our country is threatened with American annexation almost weekly? If I go with Zulip, mattermost, rocket.chat, matrix, etc I introduce maintenance overhead but I don't have to worry about unstable politics or a disliked tweet getting us sanctioned and banished from American-hosted services. The chat platform we use internally is critical business infrastructure and so we're required to ask these kinds of questions for business continuity.

TkTechon Germany's Merz admits nuclear exit was strategic mistake

Hard to understate just how expensive. Here in Montreal where ice storms kill and cause billions in damage, we still don't bury the main transmission lines. We been burying almost everything _in_ the city where having to repair millions of individual connections (again) would be impractical, but it's relatively simple to repair the limited major lines into the city.

From CBC:

> Current estimates are that it would cost five to 10 times more to distribute electricity to a big city via underground cables, and that not all of nature's problems would be alleviated even if that were done.

TkTechon We're committing $6.25B to give 25M children a financial head start

Can you explain what part of that is "communist nonsense"? Appropriate taxation (and leaving them with billions still even after that)? Or was it feeding hungry children you're against?

America had a tax rate of 91% on the obscenely wealthy for decades and around 70% until the 80s. Reducing this to historical lows has universally, by both bipartisan and nonpartisan[2] parties, been found to have been the primary driver of inequality[1].

At even an absurd 99% tax rate, applied equally instead of tiered, Michael Dell would have $1.5 billion dollars.

[1]: https://publicintegrity.org/inequality-poverty-opportunity/t... [2]: https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R42729.pdf

TkTechon We're committing $6.25B to give 25M children a financial head start

It's a tiny pittance of what would have been owed had they been taxed appropriately, and seems conveniently timed to bury the news of Dell (via Dell Federal Systems) funding ICE (it's completely erased it from the first page search results for "dell funds ice" in less than 24 hours).

This isn't badass, it's a disgrace. They've hoarded an incredible amount of wealth generated by others and returned a sliver of it. You've been so conditioned to accept this system that you're even grateful for the scraps.

If they gave $100 billion, they'd still have over $51 billion in the bank. That's roughly $7 million a day for every day he's been alive, or enough to feed every child in America for over a decade. Imagine the regional economic stimulus if instead of being hoarded for nearly half a century that money was paid out in salaries to those actually earning that money. _And_ they'd still have billions.

TkTechon A first look at Django's new background tasks

(I'm biased, I'm the author of Chancy)

One of the major complaints with Celery is observability. Databased-backed options like Procastinate and Chancy will never reach the potential peak throughput of Celery+RabbitMQ, but they're still sufficient to run millions upon millions of tasks per day even on a $14/month VPS. The tradeoff to this is excellent insight into what's going on - all state lives in the database, you can just query it. Both Procastinate and Chancy come with Django integrations, so you can even query it with the ORM.

For Chancy in particular, retries are a (very trivial) plugin (that's enabled by default) - https://github.com/TkTech/chancy/blob/main/chancy/plugins/re.... You can swap it out and add whatever complex retry strategies you'd like.

Chancy also comes with a "good enough" metrics plugin and a dashboard. Not suitable for an incredibly busy instance with tens of thousands of distinct types of jobs, but good enough for most projects. You can see the new UI and some example screenshots in the upcoming 0.26 release - https://github.com/TkTech/chancy/pull/58 (and that dashboard is for a production app running ~600k jobs a day on what's practically a toaster). The dashboard can be run standalone locally and pointing to any database as-needed, run inside a worker process, or embedded inside any existing asgi app.

TkTechon A first look at Django's new background tasks

If you like Procastinate, you might like my Chancy, which is also built on postgres but with a goal of the most common bells and whistles being included.

Rate limiting, global uniqueness, timeouts, memory limits, mix asyncio/processes/threads/sub-interpreters in the same worker, workflows, cron jobs, dashboard, metrics, django integrations, repriotization, triggers, pruning, Windows support, queue tagging (ex: run this queue on all machines running windows with a GPU, run this one on workers with py3.14 and this one on workers with py3.11) etc etc...

https://tkte.ch/chancy/ & https://github.com/tktech/chancy

The pending v0.26 includes stabilizing of the HTTP API, dashboard improvements, workflow performance improvements for workflows with thousands of steps and django-tasks integration.

TkTechon Rebecca Heineman – from homelessness to porting Doom (2022)

Germany most certainly covers treatment for aggressive adenocarcinoma, and it's covered at 100%. Germany is literally one of the best places in the world for all levels of oncology.

This isn't just with the hope of curing someone, even when you're terminal things like palliative chemotherapy are covered which can drastically ease your suffering.

TkTechon Rebecca Heineman – from homelessness to porting Doom (2022)

Is this supposed to be a rebuttal? It's inability to provide for its citizens while spending the most is proof that its model for health care is an utter, abject failure. That money is going to incredible private profits, not the citizens.

TkTechon Rebecca Heineman – from homelessness to porting Doom (2022)

I hate every part of this. The pain and suffering and the struggle for money that family had to go through because the richest country on Earth can't be bothered to provide for its citizens. Rebecca should not have had to use a damn gofundme to get health care while struggling with cancer. Her family should not have been forced to publicize her care in the desperate hope that strangers might help her live. Utterly inhuman.

RIP Rebecca.

TkTechon Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark

I don't really believe this to be an issue - Valve directly contracts CodeWeavers, they developed Proton together, and they've been pretty clear from recent hiring bursts that it was specifically to work on Proton. I have to imagine the income from Valve is exponentially higher than the relative niche of CrossOver. They're basically a subdivision of Valve now.

TkTechon Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark

I think part of this is just laptop vs desktop. Everyone I know has a macbook, not a soul I know has a mac desktop. Everyone has either a console or a separate "gaming" desktop.

TkTechon NASA pushes back after Kim Kardashian claims the 1969 moon landing was fake

You wish this timeline was Idiocracy. In that universe the president realized he didn't know best, freely admitted it, and recruited the smartest man alive. Even gave him credit for the problems they solved.

That would _never_ happen in this timelime. Imagine Trump thinking "Maybe I dont know anything about the weather, maybe I should ask an expert instead of suggesting nuking a hurricane."

TkTechon Claude Code on the web

API pricing rates probably. If I take a look at my current usage since it came out, it'd be about $12000 CAD if paid at API rates. Ridiculously easy to rack up absurd bills via the API, and I'm mostly just using it for code review. Someone using it heavily could easily, easily get way over 70k.

TkTechon Linus Learns Analog Circuits

He's wildly financially independent. He had early shares from red hat and geeknet, on top of millions from the linux foundation and corporate work. His net worth is in the tens of millions at least.

TkTechon Thoughts on Cloudflare

As recently as August 8th, I reported a phishing site targeting seniors into installing a pre-configured Atera client (who _also_ failed to respond in a reasonable time) by pretending to be an event invite. It was blatant and obvious phishing. This was the response:

---

Hello,

Cloudflare received your Phishing report regarding: ----

We are unable to process your report for the following reason(s):

We were unable to confirm phishing at the URL(s) provided.

Please be aware Cloudflare offers network service solutions including pass-through security services, a content distribution network (CDN) and registrar services. Due to the pass-through nature of our services, our IP addresses appear in WHOIS and DNS records for websites using Cloudflare. Cloudflare cannot remove material from the Internet that is hosted by others.

Please reply to this message, keeping the report identification number in the subject line intact, with the required information.

To respond to this issue, please reply to abusereply@cloudflare.com.

Thanks, The Cloudflare Team.

---

This is the typical response for me from Cloudflare - it took 2 more weeks before it was finally taken down. If I had to hazard a guess, your high volume of reports gets you into a very different support bucket than the occasional reporter.

TkTechon Thoughts on Cloudflare

I've reported blatant phishing attacks targeting seniors dozens of times to cloudflare (and so far it's always been cloudflare) and never once have they replied with anything except "we could not determine this was phishi g". They absolutely facilitate phishing through inaction.

TkTechon API, Claude.ai, and Console services impacted [resolved]

And on the flip side, the status page literally says:

> Importantly, we never intentionally degrade model quality as a result of demand or other factors, and the issues mentioned above stem from unrelated bugs.

TkTechon Zig Software Foundation 2025 Financial Report and Fundraiser

Been awhile since I employed anyone in America (that whole "we're going to annex you" thing) but if I had to hazard a guess, it's the company's portion of their FICA taxes? The company withholds the employee portion to remit to the IRS, then matches it dollar to dollar. If the company is structured so that Andrew is self-employed, it'd be SECA instead and you can count that portion as a business expense.

TkTechon MAID in Canada

Canadians who identify as religious are overwhelmingly Christian (53.5%)[1], with most of that being Catholic. The next most common religion is Islam at just 4% and Judaism is a paltry 0.9%. You're simply more likely to get anecdotes from the religion that is the vast majority.

In general, even the religious in Canada aren't very religious, so those who actively identify as it are likely to be _very_ religious. I have not a clue what religion any of our close friends are.

Canada becomes about 10% more agnostic/atheist every 10 years, which is a fun pattern[2].

[1] https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2021/dp-pd/pr... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreligion_in_Canada

TkTechon MAID in Canada

> Perhaps the now-suspended Veterans Affairs caseworker who...

They were immediately fired, referred to the RCMP for investigation, and a systematic review launched that found 4 incidents[1] - all by the same employee. There have been no further incidents reported since this happened. Since 2022.

> That's followed by an anecdote in which a Vancouver patient in a suicidal crisis claims a hospital clinician said there were no beds available, but that MAID would be a "more peaceful" option than suicide.

This was in 2023. It was covered a bunch at the time until it was revealed that it was a standard question asking if she had ever considered MAID before[2], since she had a history of depression and suicidal thoughts.

The Atlantic reporter you're referencing is themselves anti-MAID due to her religious convictions and wishes to remove choice from individuals. It is not an unbiased source of information. The MAID system is _routinely_ criticized from the religious base here in Canada for the last 9 years, and yet not even a hint of systematic abuse of the system has ever been found.

[1] https://www.veterans.gc.ca/en/about-vac/reports-policies-and... [2] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/arti...

TkTechon Thunderbird Pro August 2025 Update

I'd hope so, they kinda made it :)

TkTechon Electricity prices are climbing more than twice as fast as inflation

Just as a comparison, here in Montréal I pay $0.051USD/kWh and we're at 99.2% renewables. Large customers pay even less.

TkTechon Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games

Any coalition of banks can. Replacing Visa is a daunting task, but rolling out PoS support and the technical challenges are peanuts compared to actually getting banks onboard. Visa itself was started by a single bank, and Mastercard was started by a coalition of banks. They can do it again.

Interac[1] is Canada's debit system, originally created as a non-profit by our largest banks way back in '84, and these days is supported everywhere. The large banks are already used to bullying their way through political or bureaucratic challenges, and a single Canadian bank typically has trillion(s) in managed assets - they _can_ bully Visa.

Zelle[2] (2016) is a limited (etransfer only) clone for the American market, UPI (2016) in India, UnionPay (2002) in China, carte Bleue (1967) in France, etc etc. What's missing is cooperation between national systems like these, as well as lending as they typically only do debit instead of credit.

Any cooperation between these systems would likely get spun out as a separate entity, which would eventually just turn into a new Visa or Mastercard - but 3 choices is better than 2.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interac [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zelle [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface

TkTechon Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY does not scale

With that experience behind you, would you have feedback for Chancy[1]? It aims to be a batteries-included offering for postgres+python, aiming for hundreds of millions of jobs a day, not massive horizontal worker scaling.

It both polls (configurable per queue) and supports listen/notify simply to inform workers that it can wake up early to trigger polling, and this can be turned off globally with a notifications=false flag.

[1]: https://github.com/tktech/chancy

TkTechon 7-Zip for Windows can now use more than 64 CPU threads for compression

Yep. Half the world's finances still spin on CSVs and FTP (no, not SFTP, FTP) If your customers request a format, that's the format you're using.

TkTechon Ruby 3.4 frozen string literals: What Rails developers need to know

All strings in python are immutable, as an example.

TkTechon Long live Xorg, I mean Xlibre

I've been here for 13 years and I've never seen so many flagged throw-away accounts as I have in the series of threads discussing this fork. I was blissfully unaware of this niche corner of the conspiracy hive mind.

The README, their anti-vax rants, the "Make X great again!", the way they write... I'm getting Terry A. Davis (RIP) déjà vu.

TkTechon How to run cron jobs in Postgres without extra infrastructure

Gonna toss my own hat in the ring there for the python+postgres ecosystem :)

https://github.com/tktech/chancy

> As a rule of thumb, if you're processing less than 1000 jobs per day or your jobs are mostly lightweight operations (like sending emails or updating records), you can stick with this solution.

This seems... excessively low? Chancy is on the heavier side and happily does many millions of jobs per day. Postgres has no issue with such low throughput, even on resource constrained systems (think a $5 vps). Maybe they meant 1000 per second?

TkTechon Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)

https://tkte.ch/chancy/

https://github.com/tktech/chancy

Chancy is a postgres-backed task queue for Python that scratches a lot of the Celery itches. It's not meant for folks that need to run a million tasks a second, but for the majority of projects (many millions per day) it offers:

- Robust job support, including timeouts, memory limits, retries, global uniqueness, global rate limiting, scheduling (cron and "in 10 seconds"), priorities, etc...

- DAG based workflow plugin

- It's asyncio-first with support for threading, multiprocessing, asyncio, and sub-interpreter tasks so each job can use the optimal concurrency model. Workflows can mix tasks across multiple queues and concurrency models.

- Can be embedded inside your existing ASGI servers - great for things like development docker containers or containers deployed on say, unraid.

- Worker's handle scheduling (no need for `celery beat`) and have an optional built-in dashboard.

- 1 infrastructure dependency (postgres) and 1 required package (psycopg3) - with everything else isolated in optional plugins. - Dynamically re-assign queues to new workers based on tags, add, pause (with auto-resume), modify or destroy queues at any time.

- Highly observable - unlike Celery, you can just query your database when needed to see the entire system state

- Portable - Linux/Windows/OSX

- Permanently free and open-source without any "premium" or paid features.

- Django integration - ORM/models, admin, and django auth integration for the dashboard.

Chancy is a young tool, but is used in production environments with tens of thousands of users and billions of jobs run with great feedback from early users:

> ...thank you for this amazing library...

> hey, first thanks for such a great library! Chancy has worked incredibly well, and its modular design has made it a pleasure to use. Super lightweight but feature-full; it's a hard balance to strike.