Hacker News: mightyham

New comment by mightyham in "I traced my traffic through a home Tailscale exit node"

mightyham — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:29:29 +0000

I have a phone and laptop; those are my only two "mobile" devices that I might ever use to access my home network remotely. I set them up once, it took a few minutes, and I won't have to do it again unless I replace one of them.

I can completely understand using Tailscale for enterprise networks, but it seems very overengineered for my personal VPN needs.

New comment by mightyham in "I traced my traffic through a home Tailscale exit node"

mightyham — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 23:46:54 +0000

Genuinely curious: is Tailscale actually providing any values to this use case beyond what you get from a raw Wiregaurd exit node with port forwarding instead of Tailscale's NAT traversal? I've never used Tailscale, but I have a Wiregaurd setup on my home server for the same purpose as described in the article, and I've never had any issues with it.

Edit: Noticed some sibling comments asking effectively the same thing as me. I've been meaning to write a blog post covering the basic networking knowledge needed to DIY with just Wiregaurd. My impression is that many people don't realize just how easy it is or don't have the requisite background information.

New comment by mightyham in "JavaScript-heavy approaches are not compatible with long-term performance goals"

mightyham — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 13:30:32 +0000

I've worked on large React and Solid codebases and don't agree at all. You can make a mess of either one if you don't follow good practices. Also dynamic dependency management is not just a nice to have, it's actually critical to why Solid's reactive system is more performant. Take a simple example of a useMemo/createMemo which contains conditional logic based on a reactive variable, in one branch a calculation is done that references a lot of reactive state while the other branch doesn't. In React, the callback will constantly be re-executed when the state changes even if it is not being actively used in the calculation, while this is not the case in Solid because dependencies are tracked at runtime.

New comment by mightyham in "Faster Than Dijkstra?"

mightyham — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 16:08:51 +0000

> I struggle to see the point. The paper in question doesn't claim to be practically faster...

I struggle to see the point of your comment. The blog post in question does not say that the paper in question claims to be faster in practice. It simply is examining if the new algorithm has any application in network routing; what is wrong with that?

New comment by mightyham in "Matrix messaging gaining ground in government IT"

mightyham — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 13:49:17 +0000

I publish a Firefox plugin and needed help a few years ago. Not to get too far down that rabbit hole, but they suddenly blocked my plugin because they couldn't build my source code, even though the issue with their build environment was pretty obvious. Anyways, I had to use their Matrix support channel and they recommended Element. I was immensely frustrated with how buggy the experience was, and it turned me off from ever trying it again.

New comment by mightyham in "25 Years of Wikipedia"

mightyham — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 13:05:26 +0000

Your comments are shallow because you just continue to assert the idea are bad with no reasoning. You also clearly don't know your protestant history: Martin Luther did basically just whine about the Pope. He was thoroughly a reformer that wanted to see the Catholic church changed; he did not condone "Lutheranism" as a separatist movement.

New comment by mightyham in "25 Years of Wikipedia"

mightyham — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 23:06:59 +0000

> Because they have all been tried before and had the opposite affect.

Did you even read the document? Claiming that Wikipedia has implemented all of these suggestions in the past is just plainly false. If you disagree with the documents contents, why don't you provide a substantive argument instead of just belittling efforts at changing the status quo?

New comment by mightyham in "25 Years of Wikipedia"

mightyham — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 21:03:31 +0000

I don't understand how you could read the nine theses essays and think they are anything but reasonable. Even if you disagree with his politics, the results of his suggestions would almost certainly make Wikipedia more pluralistic, welcoming and neutral.

New comment by mightyham in "I spent a week without IPv4 (2023)"

mightyham — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 18:09:06 +0000

Typically firewalls will record the src and dst header values of outbound IP packets then temporarily allows inbound IP packets that have those values flipped.

New comment by mightyham in "I spent a week without IPv4 (2023)"

mightyham — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 17:53:25 +0000

I already am aware of how NAT traversal works. Linking a generic article explaining it is not a meaningful response.

Also NAT is a pretty simple abstraction, it's literally a single table.

New comment by mightyham in "I spent a week without IPv4 (2023)"

mightyham — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 13:39:39 +0000

> it just has to be established from the local side

This is exactly the problem. Unless you expect users to manually share their IPs with every other user in a given lobby through an external service, you would need to make a central peer discovery and connection coordination mechanism which ends up looking pretty similar to classic NAT traversal.

New comment by mightyham in "I spent a week without IPv4 (2023)"

mightyham — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 13:29:00 +0000

You're just asserting that without explination. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but afiak the only difference in NAT hole-punching is that clients don't know their public port mapping ahead of time. This actually doesn't make a huge difference to the process because in practice, you still want a central rendezvous server for automated peer IP discovery. The alternative being that each peer shares their IP with every other peer "offline", as in manually through an external service like IRC or discord, which is a horrible user experience.

New comment by mightyham in "I spent a week without IPv4 (2023)"

mightyham — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 21:39:56 +0000

> Peer-to-peer communications such as gaming usually have to deal with NAT traversal, but with IPv6 this is no longer an issue, especially for multiple gamers using the same connection

You know the list of "benefits" is thin when the second item is entirely theoretical. Even though IPv6 doesn't have to do NAT traversal, it still has to punch through your router's firewall which is effectively the same problem. Most ISP provided home routers simply block all incoming IPv6 traffic unless there is outbound traffic first, and provide little to no support for custom IPv6 rules.

Even if that were not an issue, my bet is that there are close to zero popular games that actually use true peer to peer networking.

New comment by mightyham in "I spent a week without IPv4 (2023)"

mightyham — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 21:04:54 +0000

For consumer traffic, your probably right. In data centers, cloud computing, and various enterprise networking solutions, IPv4 is still king. I'm sure IPv6 would work fine in all these use cases, but as long as many large tech companies are not exhausting the CIDR ranges they own (or can opt for using private ranges) there is no impetus to rework existing network infrastructure.

New comment by mightyham in "Peter Thiel's Apocalyptic Worldview Is a Dangerous Fantasy"

mightyham — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 17:28:36 +0000

> such that they almost meld into Stalin or Mao

Stalin was an ideological authoritarian that executed political rivals and used lethal force, price controls, and other governmental tools to control the economy and the general working population. The idea that Sanders and Mambani advocate anything close to that is laughable.

The rhetoric on both the right and left that liken today's politics to extremism in the 20th century is a ridiculous anachronism that needs to be called out more often.

New comment by mightyham in "IQ differences of identical twins reared apart are influenced by education"

mightyham — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 21:49:15 +0000

How about the fact that the human mind and genetics are simply fascinating and interesting topics. I would imagine that people don't care as much about running and high school testing because they are fairly niche interests relative to abstract thinking in general, something that almost everyone spends much of their life doing.

New comment by mightyham in "Giving C a superpower: custom header file (safe_c.h)"

mightyham — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 13:52:12 +0000

I was also, in fact, referring to the bulk of legacy code bases that can't just be fully rewritten. Almost all good engineering is done incrementally, including the adoption of something like safe_c.h (I can hardly fathom the insanity of trying to migrate a million LOC+ of C to that library in a single go). I'm arguing that engineering effort would be better spent refactoring and rewriting the application in a fully safe language one small piece at a time.

New comment by mightyham in "Giving C a superpower: custom header file (safe_c.h)"

mightyham — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 13:14:31 +0000

Goofy platform specific cleanup and smart pointer macros published in a brand new library would almost certainly not fly in almost any "existing enormous C code base". Also the industry has had a "new optional ways to avoid specific footguns" for decades, it's called using a memory safe language with a C ffi.

New comment by mightyham in "What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)"

mightyham — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 04:05:22 +0000

I get you are probably being purposefully derisive to make a point by saying the name of the dark ages is because of our ignorance, but that's also just not correct. The general consensus of historians is that Europe suffered from widespread material simplification during the early middle ages, compared to classical antiquity. The name was coined by earlier historians, generally less concerned about mixing moral judgements with scholarship, that viewed the period as less enlightened than those surrounding it.

New comment by mightyham in "Peter Thiel sells off all Nvidia stock, stirring bubble fears"

mightyham — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 23:20:40 +0000

I agree that it's very difficult to fully understand what his real positions are, and interestingly I think he clearly wants that to be the case. Peter Thiel is interested in and has actually written extensively about Straussianism which is an intellectual movement obsessed with analyzing esoteric meanings in philosophical literature.