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a_t48

2,633 karma · joined March 19, 2015

Building the world's fastest container registry at clipper.dev
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a_t48··on I Built a Stereo Vision Board for Hardware Hackers
Can also help if you can remove IR filter + add an IR noise projector
a_t48··on Ask HN: How to deal with shipping AI-written code you don't understand?
I once lost out on 3 months severance and a laptop when I quit a place and they shuttered two and a half weeks later. There had been no direction from the top for over a month other than "ehh, do something useful". I was working remotely and slowly going crazy.
a_t48··on Why does mathmain need an encrypted loader?

  It uses the LICENSE file as a lock. Before anything else, it reads the package's own LICENSE file and looks for a line that has no business being in a licence:
_sigh_
a_t48··on Exfiltrate Your Weights
r2 storage is pretty cheap, all things considered
a_t48··on The Implications of Linguistic Illegibility for LLM Security
With all (a lot?) of this language, it's not that it's using new turns of phrases, it's that it will use the same rare but valid phrases over and over. Everybody has their own speaking patterns. But imagine if one person's idiosyncrasies were everywhere. That's what's happened here.
a_t48··on iPhone Duo
With my wife's folding Razor, there's a factory applied screen protector.
a_t48··on We could save petabytes of cache storage with Zstandard and Pingora
I've done similar things for large container images. My format allows for using FastCDC to chunk files, but there's a tradeoff between number of shared chunks and between number of HTTP requests. I keep it turned off by default.
a_t48··on We could save petabytes of cache storage with Zstandard and Pingora
It uses some form of keyframing. Not entirely free.
a_t48··on Launch HN: Hebbian Robotics (YC S26) – Build scalable robotics data pipelines
This is a strategy I’m taking as well. Build the tooling that can be integrated into anyone’s platform, over some all in one system that inevitably won’t check all the boxes.
a_t48··on Launch HN: Salem Robotics (YC S26) – Software for industrial inspection robots
It mostly sits underneath existing tooling. I replace the push/pull client (run `clipper pull` instead of `docker pull`, and optionally the BuildKit driver (to get build outputs natively in my format). That pull command ingests the image into your chosen runtime, meaning your docker/podman/k8s run commands remain the same. If you're interested I can set up a demo/call/coffee.
a_t48··on Launch HN: Salem Robotics (YC S26) – Software for industrial inspection robots
In some sense, yes.
a_t48··on Launch HN: Salem Robotics (YC S26) – Software for industrial inspection robots
Docker is built for web. The mental model is that the internet speed is relatively fast, the image is relatively small, and the device you're pulling onto is starting with essentially no data. All three of these assumptions are wrong for robotics:

  - I've had someone in the Docker discord tell me at length that my container shouldn't be bigger than 1GB, which is impossible the moment you pull in CUDA or any ML libraries.

  - Robots pull over 3G/Starlink/slow customer WiFi

  - Robots are edge devices! They have previous related images, they aren't pulling onto a fresh disk like on web.

It's super common to have a layer in your Dockerfile that has several GB worth of dependencies. If you touch one of the dependencies, it thrashes that layer and anything below it. To quote the CPO from a company I left "Anytime anyone looks at the container the wrong way its a 13g dl over a shit cell connection or starlink". It's extra shit because most of the data the robot is pulling, the robot already has in another layer!

Clipper solves this by breaking apart Docker layers and indexing the files within. When you pull an image it will reuse related files in images you already have on your device. This has other side benefits as well, like being able to mount layers as networked filesystems and much more easily being able to run P2P updates.

It's less that robotics needs a different container registry and more that robotics needs a better container transport, and I've built the infrastructure around it for my registry.

a_t48··on Launch HN: Salem Robotics (YC S26) – Software for industrial inspection robots
Congrats on the launch. I've been in the robotics industry for a decade now, I've seen that boundary lie at many different places. I'm not sure there's a clear cut answer.

Self plug: I'm the founder of Clipper, a container registry that has 10x faster pulls and 7x faster builds over DockerHub, targeted at robotics. I got tired of robotics deploys taking all day and fixed it myself. If you're interested in that or just want to talk shop, let's chat.

a_t48··on Octopus intelligence may be related to never-before-seen mutation
Ah yeah, I was thinking humans
a_t48··on Octopus intelligence may be related to never-before-seen mutation
This isn’t quite true, is it? A mutation that killed 5 years after childbirth would result in higher mortality rates for the child.
a_t48··on Picking berries is my meditation
I grew up in a valley half an hour south of Seattle that at one point was farmland. It was hard to find anything that didn't like the soil, so of course blackberries loved it. The entire back fence of the half acre or so lot was covered in blackberries that we'd have to hack back every year. As a result, we had some of the biggest best tasting blackberries I've ever had. Unfortunately, I wince every time I see a little tiny thing of blackberries at the farmers market for $7. I know there's economic reasons for it to be this way, but it sucks paying money for something I know grows out of the ground for free somewhere else.
a_t48··on Hyperspace
Struggling to find the effective difference between the two, other than it being Apple specific. Either way, neat - I can hopefully use this to provide faster layer unpacks on MacOS as well.
a_t48··on Hyperspace
This uses reflinks, right? I've been experimenting with using reflinks under Linux to speed up layer extraction for Docker, it's great.
a_t48··on Stacked PRs are now live on GitHub
I think the answer is - it depends! This is why we make good money. I don’t think there’s a hard and fast rule here to apply.
a_t48··on Stacked PRs are now live on GitHub
The PRs may be orthogonal but still be dependent. Feature X depends on improvement Y which also needs bugfix Z. You might go and implement X in a branch, tweaking the codebase as you go, but split the branch apart for review. You put X/Y/Z up, but X contains Y and Z, which means you can't request reviews for X without Y and Z merging, or else have a bunch of extra code that gets in the way.
a_t48··on I got into YC Startup School by hacking it
It's used for YC applications as an optional portion of the founders profile. I'm not sure how it's weighted.
a_t48··on I got into YC Startup School by hacking it
Against better judgement, I ran it on my repo. Poking at the "Ask anything about the report" bot, it penalizes me heavily for not having "positive tracked outcomes", as I don't report back to Claude what the outcome is. It wanted me to do this:

"At the end of research-heavy sessions, add a tiny closure note:

Decision: Use CacheMountStore with registry/local/GHA backends.

Why: GHA cannot expose the same content.Ingester path, local import has discovery issues, registry can resolve by tag.

Proof / current artifact: See files X, Y, Z. Subagent found A, B, C.

Next action: Implement interface in package N. Do not add new cache-mount flags yet. Use mode=cache-mount on existing cache flags."

There's no need for this, Claude is not my task tracker.

It also penalized me for:

    - Using Claude to introspect a codebase as throwaway work and ` not close with a crisp “acceptable / risky / copy this / avoid this” decision this session.`. No action was needed, it wasn't an actionable session!

    - Using Fable for code review. `Several BuildKit subagent sessions produced research reports, but the transcript does not show whether those findings became implementation choices.` Yes, Fable launches subagents to code review. Valid findings get turned into fixes or WONTFIX.

    - `The Cloudflare CI upload failure got narrowed well, especially after you supplied the exact timestamp and challenged the /v2 routing recommendation, but the session ended without a chosen next diagnostic owner or action this session.` There's no need to pick a next diagnostic owner when I'm a solo founder with no employees.
I'm choosing not to attach a report to my application. As a side note, nobody needs to see "my greatest crashout", it's embarrassing enough for me to see it for myself, much less show others.
a_t48··on I got into YC Startup School by hacking it
That question is still there, it lives in the founder profile.
a_t48··on The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn't doomed
That depends on the domain.
a_t48··on The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn't doomed
The common question I get asked about building my SaaS: "What's to stop customers from making their own?"

Sure, if you want to put an equal amount of time into what I've built, be on the hook for maintaining the infra, probably diverge from what will end up being a stable spec, go for it. It won't be as good, it won't be as fast, you will be fighting Claude at every corner just like I did to build the right thing. But consider this: people still pay for Dockerhub even though anyone can spin up any number of open source registries. SaaS is no where near doomed, people will always pay to not have distractions from their actual core business cases.

a_t48··on GhostLock, a stack-UAF that has existed in all Linux distributions for 15 years
You should put a note in Find a Cofounder not to do that as well. Huge turnoff for me, though I guess a great filter.
a_t48··on Almost Always Unsigned
I believe there's ways to configure clang to flag dangerous implicit casts as well.
a_t48··on 7x faster Docker builds with lazy layer pulling and cache-mount export
Hey HN. Clipper is an alternative container registry/pull client/BuildKit driver that can do operations an order of magnitude faster by ditching OCI’s tarball format. I’ve spent the past few months heads down on getting the build side of things fast.
a_t48··on Show HN: Updated my landing page with Fable (retro pixel style)
The text boxes on top aren't bad, but the background is a total turnoff, it's a big red flag to me. I'd ditch it, remove the fade-in effect that runs at like 10fps, and rewrite your text.
a_t48··on Podman v6.0.0
If any Podman engineers are here: does the new /libpod/local/artifacts/add endpoint let me ingest individual layers? I have an alternative pull client that's currently a little hamstrung on Podman compared to docker+containerd, due to having to convert the entire image to tarball to ingest rather than only new layers.
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