Hacker News: TkTech

New comment by TkTech in "I don't want my search engine to think for me"

TkTech — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 02:26:42 +0000

No, those search engines will simply stop being used by people that care. Google's "AI results" have already wrongly accused people of being sex offenders and make up gibberish constantly. They are a blight and a scourge. There are already many lawsuits against the garbage it invents.

The "quality" of your prompt is irrelevant when you're feeding it to something that just imagines things.

New comment by TkTech in "Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL"

TkTech — Sun, 31 May 2026 23:25:13 +0000

Webalayzer! I'm not sure there were really any other options at the time other than writing your own. Parsed the apache logs and gave you pretty detailed results and you could see the usage (in kb, which tells you how long ago this was!) broken down by date and IP.

Once you added a redirect rule for the IP to apache you'd just check your log and see the IP that was hitting you every couple of minutes poofed for a good few hours.

New comment by TkTech in "Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL"

TkTech — Sun, 31 May 2026 20:25:05 +0000

I used to just start giving any IP downloading way too much a redirect to multi-tb NASA images. This was a long time ago but it was surprisingly how many would follow redirects and never time out. Wouldn't see a request again for hours and then its right back to downloading a new part of the sky.

Those images also used to crash all the early GUI irc and chat clients that showed inline images without size checks...

New comment by TkTech in "Building durable workflows on Postgres"

TkTech — Thu, 28 May 2026 20:34:17 +0000

sorentwo is the author of Oban. He's not using CockroachDB, he's supporting it as a valid Oban target.

New comment by TkTech in "Just Use Postgres for Durable Workflows"

TkTech — Thu, 28 May 2026 20:30:46 +0000

pg_timescale can take you pretty far for metrics and would be Good Enough for almost all users. Totally agree on raw, high-volume logs though.

New comment by TkTech in "Building durable workflows on Postgres"

TkTech — Thu, 28 May 2026 20:17:04 +0000

In pg19 https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit... will land, which significantly improves NOTIFY performance. Right now LISTEN/NOTIFY doesn't scale to very busy instances because a `NOTIFY` within a transaction takes a global lock.

New comment by TkTech in "Exit IP VPN servers mitigation rollout"

TkTech — Mon, 25 May 2026 18:56:23 +0000

No, not usually. Few ISPs are willing to risk blacklisting.

Just like scrapers (and a lot of VPNs are quietly using their custom VPN clients to sell your own IP [and data] to scrapers) it's mostly a "don't ask don't tell" situation for IP sourcing. You use a multitude of IP providers and if a scandal happens you just say "We didn't know!" and move on to the next. Almost always grey-market, very rarely through legitimate providers.

New comment by TkTech in "Tell HN: Fiverr left customer files public and searchable"

TkTech — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 04:16:43 +0000

It's very unfortunate but a significant amount of the most damaging stuff in this is from the underprivileged and those with minimal means who were trying to find help they could afford. Non-profits trying to get website help, confidential reports for charities trying to get translations, children seeking therapy (fiverr has a therapy category!?) for some truly dark stuff.

Utterly inexcusable that this is still up after so many hours.

New comment by TkTech in "Tell HN: Fiverr left customer files public and searchable"

TkTech — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 03:35:29 +0000

Personally, this is the funniest one to me. It turns out Fiverr uses cloudinary for their internal documents as well. (Note: this one is not confidential and is public information)

https://fiverr-res.cloudinary.com/image/upload/f_pdf,q_auto/...

New comment by TkTech in "TikTok will not introduce end-to-end encryption, saying it makes users less safe"

TkTech — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 07:30:39 +0000

Which has never worked. Korea had a system to prevent kids from gaming after midnight for something like 15 years. All it did was make Korean kids very good at memorizing their parents ID.

New comment by TkTech in "Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS"

TkTech — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 16:27:04 +0000

Is this not just Windows LTSB/LTSC? Which has been a thing forever.

New comment by TkTech in "Oban, the job processing framework from Elixir, has come to Python"

TkTech — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 15:59:01 +0000

I kinda have my own https://github.com/tktech/chancy :P

New comment by TkTech in "Oban, the job processing framework from Elixir, has come to Python"

TkTech — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 19:31:15 +0000

> Support only options aren't going to cut it in our experience; but maybe that'll be different with Python.

That's totally fair, and I can only speak from the sidelines. I haven't had a chance to review the architecture - would it possibly make sense to swap from async as a free feature to the process pool, and make async a pro feature? This would help with adoption from other OSS projects, if that's a goal, as the transition from Celery would then be moving from a process pool to a process pool (for most users). The vast, vast majority of Python libraries are not async-friendly and most still rely on the GIL. On the other hand, Celery has absolutely no asyncio support at all, which sets the pro feature apart.

On the other hand, already released and as you said it's much harder to take a free feature and make it paid.

Thanks again for Oban - I used it for a project in Elixir and it was painless. Missing Oban was why I made Chancy in the first place.

New comment by TkTech in "Oban, the job processing framework from Elixir, has come to Python"

TkTech — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 18:55:01 +0000

A combination of LISTEN/NOTIFY for instantaneous reactivity, letting you get away with just periodic polling, and FOR UPDATE...SKIP LOCKED making it efficient and safe for parallel workers to grab tasks without co-ordination. It's actually covered in the article near the bottom there.

New comment by TkTech in "Oban, the job processing framework from Elixir, has come to Python"

TkTech — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 18:46:07 +0000

Celery + RabbitMQ is hard to beat in the Python ecosystem for scaling. But the vast, vast majority of projects don't need anywhere that kind of scale and instead just want basic features out of the box - unique tasks, rate limiting, asyncio, future scheduling that doesn't cause massive problems (they're scheduled in-memory on workers), etc. These things are incredibly annoying to implement over top of Celery.

New comment by TkTech in "Oban, the job processing framework from Elixir, has come to Python"

TkTech — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 18:37:14 +0000

The Oban folks have done amazing, well-engineered work for years now - it's really the only option for Elixir. That said, I'm very confused at locking the process pool behind a pro subscription - this is basic functionality given CPython's architecture, not a nice-to-have.

For $135/month on Oban Pro, they advertise:

    All Open Source Features

    Multi-Process Execution

    Workflows

    Global and Rate Limiting

    Unique Jobs

    Bulk Operations

    Encrypted Source (30/90-day refresh)

    1 Application

    Dedicated Support

I'm going to toot my own horn here, because it's what I know, but take my 100% free Chancy for example - https://github.com/tktech/chancy. Out of the box the same workers can mix-and-match asyncio, processes, threads, and sub-interpreters. It supports workflows, rate limiting, unique jobs, bulk operations, transactional enqueuing, etc. Why not move these things to the OSS version to be competitive with existing options, and focus on dedicated support and more traditional "enterprise" features, which absolutely are worth $135/month (the Oban devs provide world-class support for issues). There are many more options available in the Python ecosystem than Elixir, so you're competing against Temporal, Trigger, Prefect, Dagster, Airflow, etc etc.

New comment by TkTech in "Improving the performance of WAT parser"

TkTech — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 12:36:36 +0000

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/

New comment by TkTech in "Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day memory loss"

TkTech — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 07:10:41 +0000

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.

New comment by TkTech in "Germany's Merz admits nuclear exit was strategic mistake"

TkTech — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 05:21:26 +0000

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.

New comment by TkTech in "We're committing $6.25B to give 25M children a financial head start"

TkTech — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 22:35:01 +0000

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