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lnsp

503 karma · joined June 9, 2017

portfolio: espe.tech github: github.com/lnsp

currently interested in databases, distributed systems, infrastructure

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lnsp··on Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell
Valar: https://valar.dev

It's kinda like a private SaaS platform. I just run it for me and a couple of friends right now and just hosting a ton of little fun side projects on it.

e.g. https://tim-efa.valar.app which brings Munich's public transport schedule to your terminal (try it with curl, looks way better)

It supports all kinds of things like bring-your-own-domain, e.g. I run my portfolio page https://espe.tech on top of it. It is partly open-source (actually only the CLI for now) but I plan to fully open-source it in the future after cleaning up the code a bit and improving testing and stuff :)

lnsp··on Cloudflare Calls
As far as I understood it: the premise of added security is based on the fact that the other WebRTC peers only see Cloudflare's IP instead of your own. Also nobody knows who you are exactly talking to except Cloudflare. I would still expect that the media channels itself still remain encrypted when even when multiplexed by Cloudflare's network.

edit, yes it's encrypted:

> Finally, all video and audio traffic that passes through Cloudflare Calls is encrypted by default. Calls leverages existing Cloudflare products including Argo to route the video and audio content in a secure and efficient manner.

lnsp··on The Great Cloudwall
Cloudflare provides an immense value for small sites. Doing DDoS protection with specialized firewall hardware was one of the most expensive things you could do, so it wasn't really affordable for lots of people. They win by solving a problem. I believe that the issue of Cloudflare as a man-in-the-middle is a smaller issue for people running websites than the damage done by potential attacks.
lnsp··on Range joins in DuckDB
Great to see new features being implemented. I'm using DuckDB for a thesis project and integrating it into my own Python CLI/web tool has been super easy -- I especially love the direct integration with DataFrames, it makes things really seamless.
lnsp··on Ask HN: How many computers you got?
I got a

- main desktop PC (AMD Ryzen 5950X, 64GB, 2TB SSD) I use for basically everything when I'm doing stuff at home (dual boot Linux/Windows)

- a recent 2021 14" MacBook Pro (which replaced an older 2016 MBP) for university

- a 4th-gen iPad Air with Pencil (mostly note-taking and occasional media consumption)

- my previous desktop PC (Intel 3770k, ~12TB storage) stuffed full of storage, just a place where I can throw data I don't immediately need anymore

- a Raspberry Pi 4 with a 512GB SSD attached, running some home services like DNS

So 5 in total not counting my phone.

lnsp··on I'm all-in on server-side SQLite
> Litestream has a new home at Fly.io, but it is and always will be an open-source project. My plan for the next several years is to keep making it more useful, no matter where your application runs, and see just how far we can take the SQLite model of how databases can work.

As far as I understood it, Fly.io hired the person working on Litestream and pays them to keep working on Litestream.

lnsp··on Cloudflare R2 Pricing
I guess in the long term the product will at least pay for itself, in the short term it will just be a marketing campaign and gives people a good reason to switch from their Amazon stack in case they don't depend on things like EC2-S3 transfers. When comparing to Backblaze B2 [1], Cloudflare's storage cost is 3x but you don't pay for egress as a tradeoff (compared to 0.01$/GB for Backblaze).

[1] https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html

lnsp··on Coders at Work (2009)
I discovered this book today and have been reading it all afternoon. The interviews with Brad Fitzpatrick and Peter Norvig are very entertaining (and informative)!
lnsp··on On 2022-04-05, the default branch will be renamed from “master” to “main”
Isn't this solved by a large scale find-and-replace for existing scripts? Sure, the changes can be inconvenient but it's not like a major API change or something. They've also been printing out warning messages since December 29th according to the issue, so I'd expect that people would have updated their pipelines by now.
lnsp··on Your old Let's Encrypt certificate may slow your Go app down
TLDR: Your Let's Encrypt certificate may have an RSA private key. Go's TLS implementation is far better optimized for ECDSA keys. Switching from RSA to ECDSA saves about 95% of CPU cycles due to the better implementation.
lnsp··on Tell HN: GitHub is down (Update: Back online now)
According to GH Status (https://www.githubstatus.com/), everything is fine. Gotta love functional status pages.

edit: Nevermind, they just reported "degraded performance" for GitHub Actions, Issues, and Pull Requests.

lnsp··on MIT 6.S081 – Operating System Engineering
I came across this course after going through the 6.824 from RTM last year and enjoying the hands on approach a lot! Teaching using the xv6 OS (https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2012/xv6.html) is super valuable. I do not consider myself an expert in operating systems or C, but digging through the xv6 source code is quite fun, the code is easily readable and very newby friendly.
lnsp··on Nvidia Quietly Prepares to Abandon Takeover of Arm
Isn't the Tech Titan comparison graph misleading? I mean sure, TSMC has a higher market capitalization than Nvidia, however TSMC only does manufacturing of chips but doesn't design them AFAIK. I mean sure, you could call them a chipmaker, but in that case I wouldn't call Nvidia one because they use TSMC/Samsung services to actually "make chips".
lnsp··on Austria's data protection authority has found that Google Analytics is illegal
You can control locality for some parts of Cloudflare's offering [1], so I guess if you want to comply with the privacy shield stuff, you would have to ensure that the data is stored on a server within a EU country.

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-the-cloudflare-data-...

lnsp··on In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm (2014) [pdf]
Martin Kleppmann (known for the Building Data-Intensive Applications book) gave a lecture on Raft a year ago [0], it remains my absolute favorite explanation of the algorithm.

[0] https://youtu.be/uXEYuDwm7e4

lnsp··on It appears that private keys for generating EU Covid Certificates have leaked
Doesn't have to be retired professionals. There have been cases in Germany where employees of pharmacies fake these certificates [0]. The link talks about hundreds of faked certificates from a single pharmacy.

[0] https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/hunderte-digitale-impfp... (German)

lnsp··on Is it time to rewrite the Operating System in Rust? (2018) [video]
It's around 0:56:12, AFAIK kernel dev has relatively strict guidelines regarding memory management. Cantrill also says that he considers the borrow checker less important if you only write code for a system that does not interact with other libraries, however as soon as you interact with others, things get messy on who owns what and when stuff should be free'd. Since the kernel is a sense a sealed system (ignoring kernel modules), the memory argument probably isn't that important anyway.

I totally agree regarding race conditions though, however I don't think Rust does anything to solve this.

lnsp··on Is it time to rewrite the Operating System in Rust? (2018) [video]
I highly recommend to take the time. First, I find Bryan's presentation style very engaging and fun to watch. The short recap on language history is also quite fun. I also would not consider myself to be part of any Rust hype, but the language has sparked my interest once again.

My TLDR: Rust is a great systems language, however in-kernel C code in itself is very safe, its the ecosystem (drivers, firmware etc) around it that could benefit greatly from being rewritten in a safer language.

lnsp··on Hyundai Nexo sets new world record 887.5 km travelled on single tank of hydrogen
To make a fuel cell work, you need an external oxygen supply for the chemical reaction. A cleaner oxygen supply with fewer particles make the fuel cell work longer, therefore Hyundai added an air filter which filters out fine particles before passing it on to the fuel cell.

(I'm not an expert, but this is how I understood the process.)

lnsp··on The ClickHouse Community
I'm quite sure Cloudflare uses ClickHouse for their web analytics stuff (see https://blog.cloudflare.com/http-analytics-for-6m-requests-p...).
lnsp··on Software Infrastructure 2.0: A Wishlist
I am currently working on a project attempting to achieve something like this called Valar (https://valar.dev). It's still quite experimental and in private beta, but feel free to take a look and put yourself on the waiting list. I'm targeting small, private projects so it's not really suited for full-on production workloads yet.

The core of it is a serverless system that shrinks workload quotas while running them (similar to the Google Autopilot system). This way you don't have to rewrite your entire codebase into lambdas and the end user can save a lot of costs by only specifying a resource cap (but probably using a lot less, therefore paying less).

lnsp··on netaddr.IP: a new IP address type for Go
Love the redirect from inet.af to the POSIX socket spec, nice easter egg :)
lnsp··on Launch HN: Segments.ai (YC W21) – Build better datasets for image segmentation
Agree, but at least their name is descriptive. A bit more originality would have done a lot of good here though.
lnsp··on The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
I came across this yesterday and found it quite interesting - especially Appendix A on why an advertisement-funded search engine would be biased against the user.
lnsp··on Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing
A lot of people have adopted the Elastic stack over the years, I guess Amazon just wanted their share.
lnsp··on Google outage – resolved
Seems like some core service crashed since all of these sites are unavailable. However, google.com seems to be fine.
lnsp··on Apple Preps Next Mac Chips with Aim to Outclass Highest-End PCs
The article seems to be poorly informed.

> Those graphics chips would be several times faster than the current graphics modules Apple uses from Nvidia and AMD in its Intel-powered hardware.

I don't even remember the last Apple hardware with Nvidia graphics.

> Advanced Micro Devices Inc., which has been gaining market share at Intel’s expense, offers standard desktop parts with as many as 16 cores, with some of its high-end chips for gaming PCs going as high as 64 cores.

Threadripper is NOT a CPU for gaming.

> Company tests faster performing processors than Intel’s best.

Well if I'm correct AMD currently sits on top of the CPU ranking (and Intel 11th gen doesn't seem to be changing that as far as the leaks go), so AMD is the one to beat.

> Apple Preps Next Mac Chips With Aim to Outclass Highest-End PCs

Weird conclusion to draw considering the statements above. I would expect the performance to be on-par with the high end chips, but with lower energy consumption. The article seems to imply that it will outperform 280W+ CPUs.

lnsp··on The Tech Stack of a One-Man SaaS
This seems like a pretty big stack for a single person to administrate - how much time do you spend on doing operations vs development?
lnsp··on Show HN: Raycast (YC W20) – Spotlight for Developers
This looks really cool! Do you want to focus on developer productivity tools only or expand to other applications as well?
lnsp··on India’s engineers have thrived in the tech industry. So has its caste system
There was a pretty good NPR podcast about the same topic if somebody is curious to dive deeper.

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/21/915299467/how-to-be-an-anti-c...

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