Hacker News: chucky_z

New comment by chucky_z in "This year’s insane timeline of hacks"

chucky_z — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 19:18:18 +0000

The more I use AI and my workplace buys into it, the more I’m doing person to person work in a security context.

New comment by chucky_z in "Leanstral: Open-source agent for trustworthy coding and formal proof engineering"

chucky_z — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 22:18:23 +0000

I use mistral-medium-3.1 for a lot of random daily tasks, along with the vibe cli. I'd state from my personal opinion that mistral is my preferred 'model vendor' by far at this point. They're extremely consistent between releases while each of them just feels better. I also have a strong personal preference to the output.

I actively use gemini-3.1-pro-preview, claude-4.6-opus-high, and gpt-5.3-codex as well. I prefer them all for different reasons, however I usually _start_ with mistral if it's an option.

New comment by chucky_z in "Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support"

chucky_z — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 19:52:23 +0000

I understand where you’re coming from but early systemd with both ubuntu and centos was a fucking mess. It’s good now but goddamn it was painful and the hate is 100% justified.

New comment by chucky_z in "Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring"

chucky_z — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 19:25:14 +0000

All shoe sizes should only be small, medium, and large. He really did have a lot of very ridiculous ideas. He also had a lot of extremely good ideas and incredible understanding of socioeconomic conditions.

His book “United We Stand” with modern context is quite amazing considering it came out in the early 90s.

New comment by chucky_z in "Meta is using the Linux scheduler designed for Valve's Steam Deck on its servers"

chucky_z — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 17:57:13 +0000

This isn’t explicitly called out in any of the other comments in my opinion so I’ll state this. Valve as a company is incredibly focused internally on its business. Its business is games, game hardware, and game delivery. For anything outside of that purview instead of trying to build a huge internal team they contract out. I’m genuinely curious why other companies don’t do this style more often because it seems incredibly cost effective. They hire top level contractors to do top tier work on hyper specific areas and everyone benefits. I think this kind of work is why Valve gets a free pass to do some real heinous shit (all the gambling stuff) and maintain incredible good will. They’re a true “take the good with the bad” kind of company. I certainly don’t condone all the bad they’ve put out, and I also have to recognize all the good they’ve done at the same time.

Back to the root point. Small company focused on core business competencies, extremely effective at contracting non-core business functions. I wish more businesses functioned this way.

New comment by chucky_z in "Floss Before Brushing"

chucky_z — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 17:35:42 +0000

There are 'best to brush' timelines around eating/drinking. Usually you want to either:

- Brush no less than 15m before eating

- Do not brush until 45m+ after eating

I don't fully understand the science, as I'm not a dentist, but it's something related to the way that things stick to/are absorbed by enamel and dentin.

I believe water is the exception here, you can drink water and then immediately brush. You should not brush and then immediately drink water though. You want the toothpaste to stick around and form a barrier.

New comment by chucky_z in "Corrosion"

chucky_z — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 20:36:05 +0000

From my literal conversation I'm having right now, 'try to run one big cluster to capture everything' is our active state. I've brought up federation a bunch of times and it's fallen on deaf ears. :)

We are probably past the size of the entirety of fly.io for reference, and maintenance is very painful. It works because we are doing really strange things with Consul (batch txn cross-cluster updates of static entries) on really, really big servers (4gbps+ filesystems, 1tb memory, 100s of big and fast cores, etc).

New comment by chucky_z in "Corrosion"

chucky_z — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 18:51:33 +0000

Back of napkin math I’ve done previously, it breaks down around 2 million members with Hashicorps defaults. The defaults are quite aggressive though and if you can tolerate seconds of latency (called out in the article) you could reach billions without a lot of trouble.

New comment by chucky_z in "Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?"

chucky_z — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 17:11:14 +0000

systemd-fleet, by the original CoreOS folks. https://github.com/coreos/fleet

I used this when it was brand new for a bit and it was so incredibly smooth and worked so well. It solved the problem of controlling systemd units remotely so well. I'm pretty sure the only reason it never actually took off was kubernetes and coreos's acquisition, however it actively solves the 'other half' of the k8s problem which is managing the state of the host itself.

New comment by chucky_z in "RediShell: Critical remote code execution vulnerability in Redis"

chucky_z — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 20:06:50 +0000

I believe the context is that the CVE is that this bypasses the sandbox entirely; so in this specific case this is a real, full-blown RCE. Your comment makes it seem at a glance that you're saying it's a DOS at worse.

New comment by chucky_z in "Show HN: Kekkai – a simple, fast file integrity monitoring tool in Go"

chucky_z — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 23:05:28 +0000

The CEO would've found it very easy to remove the blocker in that case (me). This is the life of small tech businesses. Also, they were modifying configuration files (php-fpm configurations iirc) and not code.

FIM is very useful for catching things like folks mucking about with users/groups because you typically watch things like /etc/shadow and /etc/passwd, or new directories created under /home, or contents of /var/spool/mail to find out if you're suddenly spamming everyone.

New comment by chucky_z in "Show HN: Kekkai – a simple, fast file integrity monitoring tool in Go"

chucky_z — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 18:54:16 +0000

I've used FIM in the past to catch a CEO modifying files in real-time at a small business so I could ping him and ask him to kindly stop. It's not just about BS _processes_. :D

New comment by chucky_z in "Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy"

chucky_z — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 04:15:34 +0000

One was pipped because they were placed on a moonshot, told how amazing their work was, gave internal talks on it, then the moonshot was defunded... so they got pipped over their lack of business impact. Instead of, y'know, being placed on a normal team, like where they came from only a year or so before.

New comment by chucky_z in "What if we treated Postgres like SQLite?"

chucky_z — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 17:27:40 +0000

If it's more than even like 10GB this is going to take _awhile_.

I love the pg_* commands but they ain't exactly the speediest things around.

New comment by chucky_z in "Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy"

chucky_z — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 16:40:38 +0000

As someone who's lived in the bay for a bit over 10 years now, when I first moved here Google was very much that company that you think they were. Now, they are not. Every single friend (and it was >50% when I moved here!) has since left Google in the bay area. There is one left at Google entirely, and they're only remaining due to physical location (near family outside the US). I have watched my friends get brutally and relentlessly pipped over the tiniest bullshit reasons. This is all entirely 2nd hand so my perspective is very skewed, but even my friends from Facebook/Netflix/Apple weren't treated that way.

New comment by chucky_z in "Show HN: Zedis – A Redis clone I'm writing in Zig"

chucky_z — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 00:16:52 +0000

spell out 'development' with hammer emojis. bring ascii art back as emoji art.

(i actually do this in slack messages and folks find it funny and annoying, but more funny)

New comment by chucky_z in "TuneD is a system tuning service for Linux"

chucky_z — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 16:24:25 +0000

I did the reverse, I needed something to keep CPUs pegged at 100% power all the time, and for some reason the boxes I was using at the time kept going 'no no it's ok I need to save power,' but that lead to really inconsistent performance. Tuned, in that environment, 'just worked' after I wrote a custom profile.

There was another issue I was able to fix with it in AWS, but I legitimately can't recall what it is.

New comment by chucky_z in "Intel's "Clearwater Forest" Xeon 7 E-Core CPU Will Be a Beast"

chucky_z — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 16:17:24 +0000

Incredibly good. A lot of main GPU board partners are making LLM-focused boards. There was a few previews on Gamers Nexus from... Computex I think? I wanna say lots of memory, dual GPU boards that looked very well built for local LLM usage.

New comment by chucky_z in "TuneD is a system tuning service for Linux"

chucky_z — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 23:52:40 +0000

I've used `tuned` a lot. It's really extremely good for personal machines/workstations, and really okay for servers. In my case I'm almost 50/50 with it in professional cases, where 50% of the time I had a real good time with it, and 50% of the time I turned it off and used startup scripts (like cloud-init per-boot and whatnot).

Overall, I'd say give it a shot as it can be really powerful and I do actually like it. Don't be afraid to go 'no, I know how to do this better, myself' and turn it off though.

New comment by chucky_z in "About Containers and VMs"

chucky_z — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 02:08:09 +0000

lxc is used really frequently in the home space (jellyfin/plex for instance). A lot of Proxmox use cases as well which is growing in popularity extremely rapidly.