Hacker News: heipei

New comment by heipei in "AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it"

heipei — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 20:41:08 +0000

Local AI models are already more than capable enough writing code that surpasses the ability of any bad or even mediocre engineer. That is not something we need to worry about.

In a way, this is less of a cost issue than the fact that some/many engineers do not seem to be willing or able to host things themselves anymore and will happily outsource every part of their stack to managed services, be it CDN, hosting, databases, etc. I don't know why that's not more alarming than the LLMs.

New comment by heipei in "EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security"

heipei — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 17:50:53 +0000

Serious question: Who actually builds stuff on Cloudflare workers? I mean large software projects / services, and not just side projects where the ability to scale-to-zero is perhaps more important than the scale-to-infinity direction. I feel like Cloudflare keeps pushing workers with its full force yet I fail to see the appeal.

New comment by heipei in "GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash"

heipei — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 06:29:14 +0000

I just saw the headline fly by yesterday and thought that this was just another dumb bug in what is the slow decline of GitHub. To find out today that this was very much intentional is even worse.

New comment by heipei in "Fujifilm X RAW STUDIO webapp clone"

heipei — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 08:36:19 +0000

This is amazing, thank you for launching it. I know this webapp itself will make me more likely to look at raw photos on my Fuji once again.

New comment by heipei in "Fujifilm X RAW STUDIO webapp clone"

heipei — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 07:34:20 +0000

Like the native Fujifilm software, this does not do raw conversion itself. It uses the processor in the camera to do the conversion.

New comment by heipei in "Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'"

heipei — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 16:12:15 +0000

Fair enough, I just loaded some pages and some of them are even bigger than 2MB. But then again those static resources would be cached client-side. So unless you have 450 million unique visitors who only ever go to one URL on your site, you are looking at significantly less per pageview. I reloaded the frontpage with caching enabled and it was ~ 30kB of data transfer.

New comment by heipei in "Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'"

heipei — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 16:08:55 +0000

Yes, and I didn't mean to imply that a single VPS is all you needed. But I wanted to put things into perspective for the other posters who claimed that you couldn't possibly serve a site like this from a single machine, purely in terms of performance.

New comment by heipei in "Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'"

heipei — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 15:48:43 +0000

The post said 450 million pageviews, likely since November. If we make very generous assumptions and assume that each pageview is a megabyte (very generous based on my own experience scanning billions of websites), then that's 450TB total in traffic. If you really did 450TB per month in traffic, you would need slightly more than one gigabit line (and hence VPS), but not more than two. With Hetzner the traffic would cost you €450 or $535.

Did I get something wrong?

New comment by heipei in "When internal hostnames are leaked to the clown"

heipei — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 10:16:31 +0000

Yes, the wildcard cert, but not the actual hostname under that wildcard.

New comment by heipei in "Show HN: Ayder – HTTP-native durable event log written in C (curl as client)"

heipei — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 19:38:14 +0000

Thank you for sharing, this looks really cool. The simplicity of setting this up and operating it reminds me a lot of nsq which received a lot less publicity than it should have.

New comment by heipei in "Go ahead, self-host Postgres"

heipei — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 16:10:06 +0000

I still don't get how folks can hype Postgres with every second post on HN, yet there is no simple batteries-included way to run a HA Postgres cluster with automatic failover like you can do with MongoDB. I'm genuinely curious how people deal with this in production when they're self-hosting.

New comment by heipei in "Cloudflare was down"

heipei — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 09:32:12 +0000

The client is supposed to monitor availability themselves, that is how these contracts work.

New comment by heipei in "Ghostty is now non-profit"

heipei — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 21:41:30 +0000

I'd rather he'd still be working on Nomad to be honest, but Ghostty is a good consolation prize ;)

New comment by heipei in "GPU Hot: Dashboard for monitoring NVIDIA GPUs on remote servers"

heipei — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 13:42:39 +0000

Obligatory reminder that "GPU utilisation" as a percentage is meaningless metric and does not tell you how well your GPU is utilised.

Does not change the usefulness of this dashboard, just wanted to point it out.

New comment by heipei in "TernFS – An exabyte scale, multi-region distributed filesystem"

heipei — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 15:12:17 +0000

Yeah, that was the first thing I checked as well. Being suited for small / tiny files is a great property of the SeaweedFS system.

New comment by heipei in "Keeping SSH sessions alive with systemd-inhibit"

heipei — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 15:01:19 +0000

Sounds complicated. I just use autossh from the CLI and it reconnects if my laptop (or the remote machine) wakes up again.

New comment by heipei in "NPM debug and chalk packages compromised"

heipei — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 18:54:39 +0000

If you want to see what the phishing site (npmjs[.]help) looks like: https://urlscan.io/result/01992a3e-4f8c-72bb-90a9-c13826f2d8... - Was still up and running 2 hours ago.

New comment by heipei in "How we replaced Elasticsearch and MongoDB with Rust and RocksDB"

heipei — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 18:36:44 +0000

I agree, and I don't get where the claims that ES is hard to operate originate from. Yeah, if you allow arbitrary aggregations that exceed the heap space, or if you allow expensive queries that effectively iterate over everything you're gonna have a bad time. But apart from those, as long as you understand your data model, your searches and how data is indexed, ES is absolutely rock-solid, scales and performs like a beast. We run a 35-node cluster with ~ 240TB of disk, 4.5TB of RAM, and about 100TB of documents and are able to serve hundreds of queries. The whole thing does not require any maintenance apart from replacing nodes that failed from unrelated causes (hardware, hosting). Version upgrades are smooth as well.

The only bigger issue we had was when we initially added 10 nodes to double the initial capacity of the cluster. Performance tanked as a result, and it took us about half a day until we finally figured out that the new nodes were using dmraid (Linux RAID0) and as a result the block devices had a really high default read-ahead value (8192) compared to the existing nodes, which resulted in heavy read amplification. The ES manual specifically documents this, but since we hadn't run into this issue ourselves it took us a while to realise what was at fault.

New comment by heipei in "FoundationDB: From idea to Apple acquisition [video]"

heipei — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 11:43:53 +0000

ScyllaDB discontinued it's free and open source version, so I personally wouldn't build anything new on it.

New comment by heipei in "I wasted weeks hand optimizing assembly because I benchmarked on random data"

heipei — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 20:11:41 +0000

Counterpoint: I once wrote a paper on accelerating blockciphers (AES et al) using CUDA and while doing so I realised that most (if not all) previous academic work which had claimed incredible speedups had done so by benchmarking exclusively on zero-bytes. Since these blockciphers are implemenented using lookup tables this meant perfect cache hits on every block to be encrypted. Benchmarking on random data painted a very different, and in my opinion more realistic picture.