Hacker News: Meekro

New comment by Meekro in "PHP 8.6 Closure Optimizations"

Meekro — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 19:20:06 +0000

It's true that the lack of multithreading in PHP has been a persistent pain. I love PHP and I've done PHP-centric projects for 20 years, but I end up falling back to Go when it's time to write a background worker that will handle lots of tasks in parallel. I really wish my PHP apps could include native components that process background tasks in parallel.

On the other hand, Javascript's parallelization is one of the hardest-to-understand things I've ever seen: in order to really grasp the async/await model, you have to know the whole story of callback hell and how modern Javascript papers over it while carefully preserving backwards compatibility.

New comment by Meekro in "PHP 8.6 Closure Optimizations"

Meekro — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 19:09:42 +0000

There are advantages to the lack of application state, though. Memory leaks and similar bugs became largely irrelevant, for instance. Regarding performance, a simple LAMP stack on a dedicated machine can easily give you <250ms pageloads for many web apps. If that's not fast enough, or you're averaging dozens or hundreds of requests per second, you're probably big enough that you can use parallelization or more exotic architectures to speed things up.

New comment by Meekro in "Cloudflare Email Service"

Meekro — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 16:35:37 +0000

You mentioned a 12-agent setup with IMAP that you might consider migrating into this platform. Could you tell me more about the overall goal of the project? I'm curious because this whole "email+agent" thing that the article talks about strikes me as kind of strange, and I'm curious what the non-spam use cases are.

New comment by Meekro in "Cloudflare Email Service"

Meekro — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 16:19:23 +0000

I would note that Cloudflare has been doing better-- the SBL listings page mentioned in that article[1] shows only 47 active complaints, down from 1201 when the article was written 2 years ago. Many of those complaints are stale, too: I spot-checked a few (referencing the domains fireplacecoffee.com and expansionus.com) and the domains are expired and not being hosted by anyone.

[1] https://check.spamhaus.org/sbl/listings/cloudflare.com/

New comment by Meekro in "Cloudflare Email Service"

Meekro — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 16:03:26 +0000

Thomas can probably speak to this better, but as someone who has participated in other Cloudflare betas: there's usually a button or a form and you can request access.

New comment by Meekro in "Cloudflare Email Service"

Meekro — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:59:59 +0000

Thanks for the clarification! Sounds like some developers, including your beta users, are experimenting with new ideas (which includes plugging agents into different workflows to see what happens), while old farts like myself bemoan AI getting plugged into everything and every app sprouting "Ask AI" buttons that they never asked for or wanted.

I can definitely understand some of the ire-- people are probably imagining how they'll try to contact Verizon and will get back a totally unhelpful email from ChatGPT when all they wanted was to talk to a real human for 5 minutes. Your blog post about hooking up agents to email probably speaks to that fear.

New comment by Meekro in "Cloudflare Email Service"

Meekro — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:38:20 +0000

I also kind of rolled my eyes at the blog post and its obsessive focus on "agents" -- definitely feels like a solution looking for a problem. But the email-sending product being promoted is probably ok, right? They just happened to write a lot of words observing that ChatGPT can, in fact, call sendmail() through their platform (if you give it access) -- a fact that shouldn't surprise anyone.

New comment by Meekro in "Cloudflare Email Service"

Meekro — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:32:22 +0000

My experience has been the opposite of what you're saying: AWS SES (one of AWS's flagship products, and probably the biggest email sender in the world) is a pretty responsible anti-spam citizen. Spamhaus even wrote this article[1] praising SES's anti-spam efforts. From the article: "Amazon SES has a long-standing relationship with Spamhaus, working closely to prevent suspicious IPs and domains from impacting their network." Though I'm sure that new incidents come up daily, Spamhaus themselves seem to disagree with the notion that SES's IP blocks have "poor reputations."

[1] https://www.spamhaus.org/resource-hub/service-providers/how-...

New comment by Meekro in "Cloudflare Email Service"

Meekro — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:09:53 +0000

I'm not sure why this announcement has generated so much irritation in the comments-- Cloudflare has been transitioning from "DDoS protection" to "AWS competitor" for many years now, and this is just their alternative to AWS SES.

It's an email sender that you can access through an API, or directly through Workers. For those who haven't been keeping up over the years, Workers is their product for running code on Cloudflare's platform directly (an AWS Lambda competitor, more or less) and they've been trying to make it the centerpiece of an ecosystem where you deploy your code to their platform and get access to a variety of tools: databases, storage, streaming, AI, and now email sending. All of this is stuff that AWS has had for years, but some people like Cloudflare more (I certainly do).

One thing that surprised me is the price-- Cloudflare's cloud offerings are usually much cheaper, and I've saved plenty of money by migrating from AWS S3 to Cloudflare's R2. This new offering is 3x the AWS price, though. Weird. Anyway, most small companies don't send enough email for it to matter.

But getting back to the consensus in the comments here: I'm not sure why people think that they'll be worse about policing spam than AWS SES, Azure Email, etc.

New comment by Meekro in "AWS engineer reports PostgreSQL perf halved by Linux 7.0, fix may not be easy"

Meekro — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 01:28:43 +0000

> Nobody sensible runs the latest kernel

From the article: "Linux 7.0 stable is due out in about two weeks. This is also the kernel version powering Ubuntu 26.04 LTS to be released later in April."

Unfortunately, lots of people will be running it in less than a month. At the moment, it'll take a kernel patch (not a sysctl) to undo this-- hopefully something changes.

New comment by Meekro in "Tell HN: Chrome says "suspicious download" when trying to download yt-dlp"

Meekro — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 18:45:06 +0000

I tried to reproduce this on their download page for the latest release[1]. Only the windows exe gets the warning, the other releases (macos, linux, etc) all download just fine. That makes me think it's an automated system that messed up, not an attempt at anticompetitive behavior.

[1] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases/tag/2026.03.17

New comment by Meekro in "Elevator Saga: The elevator programming game (2015)"

Meekro — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 14:01:14 +0000

I thought it was fun to search for a solution that can beat every level (eventually found one!) As far as I know, no LLM can do this on its own, which tells us something about the kind of problems they’re weak at.

New comment by Meekro in "We Will Not Be Divided"

Meekro — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 08:04:01 +0000

There seem to be two separate lines of thought in this conversation: first, that the AI tech isn't smart enough for us to trust it with autonomously killing people. Second, even if it was smart enough, maybe such weapons are immoral to produce?

The first line of thought is probably true, but could change in the next 5 years-- so maybe we should be preparing for that?

The second line of thought is something for democracies to argue about. It's interesting that so many people in this thread want to take this power away from democratic governments, and give it to a handful of billionaire tech executives.

New comment by Meekro in "We Will Not Be Divided"

Meekro — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 08:00:16 +0000

It sounds like the "supply chain risk" designation is just about anyone who works with the DoD not using them, so their code doesn't accidentally make it into any final products through some sub-sub-subcontractor. Since they've made it clear that they don't want to be a defense contractor (and accept the moral problems that go with it), the DoD is just making sure they don't inadvertently become one.

New comment by Meekro in "We Will Not Be Divided"

Meekro — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 07:57:04 +0000

I'd encourage you to look up the Defense Production Act. Its powers are probably broad enough that the President could unilaterally force Anthropic to do this whether or not it wants to. It's the same logic that would allow him to force an auto manufacturer to produce tanks. And the law doesn't care whether we are in a crisis or not. It's enough that he determine (on his own) that this action is "necessary or appropriate to promote the national defense."

However, it looks like Trump isn't going to go that route-- they're just going to add Anthropic to a no-buy list, and use a different AI provider.

New comment by Meekro in "We Will Not Be Divided"

Meekro — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 02:30:40 +0000

I think you're right, this isn't about a specific request but about defense contractors not getting to draw moral red lines. Palmer Luckey's statement on X/Twitter reflects the same idea: https://x.com/PalmerLuckey/status/2027500334999081294

The thinking seems to be that you can't have every defense contractor coming in with their own, separate set of red lines that they can adjudicate themselves and enforce unilaterally. Imagine if every missile, ship, plane, gun, and defense software builder had their own set of moral red lines and their own remote kill switch for different parts of your defense infrastructure. Palmer would prefer that the President wield these powers through his Constitutional role as commander-in-chief.

New comment by Meekro in "We Will Not Be Divided"

Meekro — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 02:06:16 +0000

I've gathered that the dispute is over Anthropic's two red lines: mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. Is there any information (or rumors even) about what the specific request was? I can't believe the government would be escalating this hard over "we might want to do autonomous weapons in the vague, distant future" without a concrete, immediate request that Anthropic was denying.

Even if there was a desire for autonomous weapons (beyond what Anduril is already developing), I would think it would go through a standard defense procurement procedure, and the AI would be one of many components that a contractor would then try to build. It would have nothing to do with the existing contract between Anthropic and the Dept of War.

What, then, is this really about?

New comment by Meekro in "Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies"

Meekro — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 08:28:55 +0000

This priest agrees with you, and has expressed concerns about mediocre homilies that don't speak to the concerns of the particular community: https://youtu.be/pgZXCPCATmc?si=FM4uj2owYBVK_8Mh

New comment by Meekro in "Mark Zuckerberg to testify in landmark social media trial"

Meekro — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 10:33:20 +0000

Banning something just for kids is an easy win for any politician, since that's one of the few groups that can't punish you in the next election. For that reason alone, I assume we'll get some law within 5-15 years mandating that Facebook ban kids. I assume the kids will trivially bypass it the block, or switch to foreign social media, and we'll go back to business as usual.

New comment by Meekro in "Mark Zuckerberg to testify in landmark social media trial"

Meekro — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 10:30:15 +0000

Right-- at which point, companies like Facebook will (hopefully) have to obey the law. But we're not there yet. Currently, people are moralizing at Zuck for not voluntarily killing his own products because they're "obviously harmful."