Hacker News: bradfitz

New comment by bradfitz in "Old and new apps, via modern coding agents"

bradfitz — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 18:18:05 +0000

This post inspired me to have Claude port my 30 year old high school German Java applet game to Javascript, complete with a faked git history:

https://github.com/bradfitz/koffer#der-verloren-koffe

Play online at https://bradfitz.github.io/koffer/js/

So neat seeing ~30 year old code come back alive.

New comment by bradfitz in "We scaled PgBouncer to 4x throughput"

bradfitz — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 03:32:41 +0000

Yeah, I remember writing epoll libraries for Perl (https://metacpan.org/pod/Sys::Syscall, first out 2005-08-01) doing raw system calls because libc on the distros of the time (at least Debian) didn't have epoll support yet.

So in 2005 I didn't expect Postgres to do super well here, but it's 21 years later and we're still pgbouncin'. It's just kinda sad.

New comment by bradfitz in "We scaled PgBouncer to 4x throughput"

bradfitz — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:50:11 +0000

In other words, it's still super heavy if it's forking a process per connection.

I find it ridiculous that PgBouncer even needs to exist. Postgres should be doing this.

New comment by bradfitz in "We scaled PgBouncer to 4x throughput"

bradfitz — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 20:41:59 +0000

I'm 46 now. I remember being shocked at Postgres's heavy connection model when I was 23.

I gather things haven't improved since?

New comment by bradfitz in "Hunting a 16-year-old SQLite WAL bug with TLA+"

bradfitz — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 02:46:07 +0000

We found it at Tailscale and bought an enterprise support contract from SQLite to debug it for us. Worth every penny.

We should probably blog about it.

New comment by bradfitz in "Fox to buy Roku"

bradfitz — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 18:33:02 +0000

2008? I had the Roku HD1000 [1]. :)

My email search:

"Welcome to the "Roku-tech" mailing list" ... "Tue, Dec 2, 2003, 10:48 AM"

Not sure how I ended up on the mailing list a month before their product was released. There must've been buzz about it for a few months before release.

[1] https://photos.app.goo.gl/bMGBqm4mTmfUNJG39

New comment by bradfitz in "Understanding Singleflight in Go"

bradfitz — Tue, 19 May 2026 00:52:28 +0000

I wrote that library originally for dl.google.com: https://go.dev/talks/2013/oscon-dl.slide#1

I then open sourced it in Jan 2013 in what was then named Camlistore (now Perkeep) in https://github.com/perkeep/perkeep/commit/6f9f0bdda9c9c1f147... d

And later I put it in https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/golang/groupcache/singleflight (groupcache was written for dl.google.com)

And a private copy in Go's net package in Jun 2013: https://github.com/golang/go/commit/61d3b2db6292581fc07a3767...

It later moved to golang.org/x/net, and later to the Go standard library (well, internal: https://pkg.go.dev/internal/singleflight)

We now even have a copy with generics in Tailscale's tree at https://pkg.go.dev/tailscale.com/util/singleflight

So many variants of that code :)

New comment by bradfitz in "Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)"

bradfitz — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 15:30:46 +0000

IIRC, that's only for Linux guests that can nest. macOS can only one level deep. That is: you can't have a macOS guest (running on the Apple hardware host) make its own macOS guest.

New comment by bradfitz in "Americans are destroying Flock surveillance cameras"

bradfitz — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 19:54:13 +0000

Oh no.

New comment by bradfitz in "Windows Notepad App Remote Code Execution Vulnerability"

bradfitz — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 14:21:50 +0000

I can’t tell you how relieving it is to hear somebody else complain about this. This has been my pet peeve for ages.

New comment by bradfitz in "Show HN: A 45x45 Connections Puzzle To Commemorate 2025=45*45"

bradfitz — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 01:03:45 +0000

Well, this has sucked up a couple days of my free time so far... :)

New comment by bradfitz in "OpenSCAD is kinda neat"

bradfitz — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 18:29:45 +0000

I find myself using OpenSCAD regularly to 3D print little things for the house. (Most recently: hooks to attach Christmas lights to our roof deck's glass walls)

And when something gets too trick, ChatGPT is amazing at writing in it. Often it nails the whole design in the first try, like https://bsky.app/profile/bradfitz.com/post/3maelwomyw22n to mask off certain Raspberry Pi pins to make reassembly of projects easier later.

New comment by bradfitz in "History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts"

bradfitz — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 01:14:34 +0000

I seem to recall reading that as a kid too, but I can't find it now. I keep finding references to "Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective" about a Civil War sword being fake (instead of a Great War one), but with the same plot I'd remembered.

New comment by bradfitz in "Go-boot: bare metal Go UEFI boot manager"

bradfitz — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 21:21:34 +0000

I've been idly following this stuff on & off for years, but I never saw proving a point "instead of using Rust" as one of the motivations of the project. Was that ever stated anywhere?

New comment by bradfitz in "Texas is suing all of the big TV makers for spying on what you watch"

bradfitz — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 21:00:31 +0000

Until they start using Sidewalk/LPWAN type things automatically instead of your home WiFi.

New comment by bradfitz in "GPT-5.2"

bradfitz — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 20:50:15 +0000

I had to go look that up! I assume that's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power ? (Not a janitor, but "a low grade Technician"?)

New comment by bradfitz in "Booting Linux in QEMU and Writing PID 1 in Go to Illustrate Kernel as Program"

bradfitz — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 17:46:21 +0000

Related, I gave a 6 minute lightning talk about writing tests in Go that use the test binary itself as the PID 1 under an emulated Linux in QEMU:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1rAAyOTCsB8GLbMgI0CAb...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69Zy77O-BUM

New comment by bradfitz in "DNS LOC Record (2014)"

bradfitz — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 17:32:18 +0000

How many of those additional 1,643 were a result of your 2014 blog post? :)

New comment by bradfitz in "AirPods libreated from Apple's ecosystem"

bradfitz — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 01:27:48 +0000

I assume it's intentional, playing on "libre" (as in libre software, not just gratis software)

New comment by bradfitz in "Perkeep – Personal storage system for life"

bradfitz — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 17:02:56 +0000

I'm a co-author of tsidp, btw. You don't need tsidp with a Tailscale-native app: you already know the identity of the peer. tsidp is useful for bridging from Tailscale auth to something that's unaware of Tailscale.