Hacker News: laz

New comment by laz in "Things Unix can do atomically (2010)"

laz — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 11:15:01 +0000

Sounds half baked. What context does this function run in? Is it an interpreted language or an executable that you provide?

Inotify is the way to shovel these events out of the kernel, then userspace process rules apply. It's maybe not elegant from your pov, but it's simple.

New comment by laz in "Prek: A better, faster, drop-in pre-commit replacement, engineered in Rust"

laz — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 22:57:10 +0000

git ls-files | entr pre-commit

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

laz — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 17:20:07 +0000

No. You sit on the call and wait to restore your service to your users. There’s bullshit toil in disabling scale in as the outage gets longer.

Eventually, AWS has a VP of something dial in to your call to apologize. They’re unprepared and offer no new information. The get handed to a side call for executive bullshit.

AWS comes back. Your support rep only vaguely knows what’s going on. Your system serves some errors but digs out.

Then you go to sleep.

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

laz — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 16:38:12 +0000

The worst SEV calls are the one where you twiddle your thumbs waiting for a support rep to drop a crumb of information about the provider outage.

You wake up. It's not your fault. You're helpless to solve it.

New comment by laz in "AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'"

laz — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 11:53:09 +0000

The Facebook "little red book" had a quote in it along these lines:

When you don't realize what you can't do, you can do some pretty cool stuff

New comment by laz in "VPN location claims don't match real traffic exits"

laz — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 14:15:59 +0000

Do Cloudflare's floating egress IPs probe in a way where you can easily geolocate them?

https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-servers-dont-own-ips-...

New comment by laz in "VPN location claims don't match real traffic exits"

laz — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 05:33:03 +0000

Google, Apple, and Meta (maybe others?) have the data to build a complete GeoIP dataset. None of them will share because there are only downsides to doing so.

When FB was rolling out ipv6 in 2012, well meaning engineers proposed releasing a v6 only GeoIP db (at the time, the public dbs were shit). Not surprisingly, it was shot down.

New comment by laz in "DNS Provider Quad9 Sees Piracy Blocking Orders as "Existential Threat""

laz — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 14:30:59 +0000

I see a single IP for all 3

While I'm here: Google uses edns0 client subnet to geo target your client IP.

Try a dig -t txt o-o.myaddr.l.google.com @8.8.8.8 vs the others to see the src IP of the packet sent to Google's DNS server, and any edns0 info that came along with it.

New comment by laz in "Understanding traffic"

laz — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 11:56:46 +0000

It depends on how long they're above the speed limit and you're below it.

If you want to win the race, max acceleration, max speed, max deceleration. Anything else is sub optimal.

New comment by laz in "Traefik's 10-year anniversary"

laz — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 15:13:47 +0000

Amusing that they don't mention xds at all.

How did they "win" when xds, envoy's config, is becoming the defacto interface to LBs? Sure, Gateway API is kinda xds by not, but it's envoy all the way down.

New comment by laz in "Meta antitrust trial kicks off in federal court"

laz — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 05:23:44 +0000

Onavo was the vpn app turned competitive intelligence tool

New comment by laz in "Wikipedia is struggling with voracious AI bot crawlers"

laz — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 14:43:25 +0000

10 years ago at Facebook we had a systems design interview question called "botnet crawl" where the set up that I'd give would be:

I'm an entrepreneur who is going to get rich selling printed copies of Wikipedia. I'll pay you to fetch the content for me to print. You get 1000 compromised machines to use. Crawl Wikipedia and give me the data. Go.

Some candidates would (rightfully) point out that the entirety is available as an archive, so for "interviewing purposes" we'd have to ignore that fact.

If it went well, you would pivot back and forth: OK, you wrote a distributed crawler. Wikipedia hires you you to block it. What do you do? This cat and mouse game goes on indefinitely.

New comment by laz in "Xerox to acquire Lexmark"

laz — Tue, 24 Dec 2024 13:49:17 +0000

I worked on the laser printers in the early 2000s when they transitioned to Linux for the OS. They were hiring Linux nerds and I fit the bill. It was a fun place for a while, but the IBM legacy was an albatross. I left for Google and didn't look back.

New comment by laz in "Silicon Valley Tea Party a.k.a. the great 1998 Linux revolt take II (1999)"

laz — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 11:03:33 +0000

Google was available at google.stanford.edu before they spun up the company.

I saw Sergei give a talk at my university in 96 or 97 and switched from Alta Vista.

New comment by laz in "Commonly used arm positions can overestimate blood pressure readings: study"

laz — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 15:51:11 +0000

Aktiia makes a continuous optical blood pressure monitor that is available in the EU. It's like wearing a fitbit, but for bp. You calibrate it with a pressure cuff once a month.

I'm pretty sure they're going through fda approval in the USA now.

New comment by laz in "1 bug, $50k in bounties, a Zendesk backdoor"

laz — Sun, 13 Oct 2024 10:31:08 +0000

You don't need full blown workspace, which costs money, you can set up "cloud identity free" and claim the domain.

When you're setting it up, you can choose what to do with any existing accounts that are part of your domain: kick them out or merge them in.

New comment by laz in ".INTERNAL is now reserved for private-use applications"

laz — Sat, 10 Aug 2024 06:10:57 +0000

Exactly what an NSA puppet account would say!

Don't believe the hype. Remember the smiley from "SSL added and removed here"

https://blog.encrypt.me/2013/11/05/ssl-added-and-removed-her...

New comment by laz in "Canonical's 'distroless' Linux images are a game-changer for enterprises"

laz — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 14:13:10 +0000

I'm using rules_distroless+rules_oci with bazel to build small Ubuntu based images. It takes some effort, but ends up being pretty nice.

New comment by laz in "I found a 1-click exploit in South Korea's biggest mobile chat app"

laz — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 19:57:50 +0000

Non-Koreans who live and work in South Korea pay South Korean taxes

New comment by laz in "I found a 1-click exploit in South Korea's biggest mobile chat app"

laz — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 19:54:34 +0000

Uber works in S Korea now.

It also accepts non-Korean credit cards, while most online apps in South Korea do not.