Hacker News: paulmooreparks

New comment by paulmooreparks in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)"

paulmooreparks — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 06:31:28 +0000

Thanks! The file sharing is part of the base, FOSS Tela. It uses WebDAV rather than FUSE. The tela client runs a local WebDAV server that proxies file operations through the WireGuard tunnel to the agent on the remote machine. You can mount it as a network drive (Windows maps it as a drive letter, Linux/macOS mount it as a directory) or access it via TelaVisor or the tela CLI. It can be configured as read-only or read-write. Certain file extensions can be banned from upload or rename.

I went with WebDAV because it works on all three platforms without a kernel module or extra driver. For my use case (browsing files, grabbing configs, etc.) it works well enough.

Bi-directional sync is an interesting idea. Right now the sharing is one-directional (the agent exposes a directory, the client mounts it), but I could see adding something like that as a layer on top.

New comment by paulmooreparks in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)"

paulmooreparks — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 05:25:58 +0000

I'm building Tela (https://github.com/paulmooreparks/tela), a self-hosted relay that tunnels TCP services through encrypted WireGuard connections. The key difference from Tailscale and similar tools is that it requires no TUN adapter, no root access, and no admin privileges on either end. It runs entirely in userspace.

My initial motivation was wanting to RDP and SSH into my home workstation from a locked-down corporate laptop when I travel. I couldn't install Tailscale on the laptop, and I didn't want to pay for a cloud VM just to do SSH port forwarding. Now I use it to tie together half a dozen machines, both locally and on Hetzner & Linode. I can SSH and RDP into remote machines, host a git repo on one machine and access it from the others, and (optionally) share files across all of them on a local mount.

You run a hub (telahubd), register machines with a lightweight agent (telad), and connect from anywhere with the client (tela). All three are single Go binaries with no external dependencies. The hub never sees your traffic. It just relays opaque WireGuard ciphertext.

All binaries run on Windows, Linux, and macOS. There is also a desktop GUI app, TelaVisor, that wraps the client and enables remote management of hubs and agents.

It's Apache 2.0-license and pre-1.0 release, but I'm polishing it for a stable 1.0 release in the next month or so.

I'm also working on an enterprise-grade management portal that works with Tela, https://awansaya.net/

New comment by paulmooreparks in "Ask HN: What are you building that's not AI related?"

paulmooreparks — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 02:26:21 +0000

No, it doesn't create an L3 like Tailscale. A client (a machine running the tela CLI) connects to an agent (a machine running telad) via a hub (a machine running telahubd), but once they connect they negotiate a P2P route if they can. That's all managed by Wireguard an gVisor. The remote service is forwarded to a port on localhost, so SSH to a VM somewhere else would just be ssh to, say, localhost:10022. I'm investigating a local DNS so that users can instead type `ssh paul@dev-vm` instead of `ssh -p 10022 paul@localhost`.

New comment by paulmooreparks in "Ask HN: What are you building that's not AI related?"

paulmooreparks — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 02:50:11 +0000

Thanks! Yes, Tela already does UDP hole-punching. I made Tela because I wasn't allowed to install Tailscale on my new corporate laptop, and no other available solution seemed to tick the right boxes. It started as a simple way to RDP to my home workstation, but then I realised that if I could do that, I could finally pull my ad-hoc home cloud into one tool. The hub model is very much by design, for organisational purposes. The hole-punching feature gives me the P2P speed (and even STUN, if available). An upcoming version will allow hub-to-hub topologies.

It should have occurred to me that tela is also Spanish, since about every third word I hear in a Tagalog sentence seems to be of Spanish origin.

New comment by paulmooreparks in "Ask HN: What are you building that's not AI related?"

paulmooreparks — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 09:12:22 +0000

I'm building my own cloud (I actually typed claude instead of cloud there... wow). There's no IaaS or PaaS; it's much simpler. I wanted my own way of connecting to machines and the TCP services on those machines without having to install Tailscale (not allowed on a locked-down corporate PC) or pay for Azure or AWS or GCP or even Hetzner or Linode. I've got 10gbps fibre and a huge workstation at home, and I've got lots of laptops and VMs and other outboard stuff that I want to work in concert with that workstation, so I started building something I call Tela (Filipino for fabric; I was sitting in Ninoy Aquino International Airport waiting for a flight when I had the idea, and it's implemented as a network fabric).

https://github.com/paulmooreparks/tela

New comment by paulmooreparks in "A dot a day keeps the clutter away"

paulmooreparks — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 01:40:13 +0000

Nice system. I think I'd cut out a bit of adhesive whiteboard material and draw dots on that, but that has its own downsides.

Little systems like this are so useful. For example, I have a similar system for clothes hanging in my closet. Shirts hang on the left side of the bar, trousers on the right. Empty hangers go into the middle. Clean clothes are always placed into the middle on the appropriate side. Whenever I pull something out to wear, I choose from the ends, not the middle.

This does two things: First, I'm cycling my clothes a little more fairly instead of wearing the same stuff over and over (the DS&A nerds among you would call this an LRU cache, I guess). Second, clothes that I don't like so much or just don't use, for whatever reason, get pushed to the ends, and every year I pull out the stuff that's been stuck at the ends for a while and donate it to charity, without a moment's thought.

New comment by paulmooreparks in "Car Seats as Contraception"

paulmooreparks — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 06:26:20 +0000

Interesting moral discussion: An estimated 8000 fewer births in 2017 attributed to a law that saved an estimated 57 lives in the same year.

New comment by paulmooreparks in "Kagi Translate now supports LinkedIn Speak as an output language"

paulmooreparks — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 10:20:49 +0000

Input:

> Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.

Output:

> Unlocking the power of synergy: Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.

> It’s all about leveraging local ecosystems to drive impactful results. When we talk about buffalo from Buffalo who intimidate other buffalo from Buffalo, we’re really talking about the competitive landscape of modern leadership.

> Are you intimidating your peers, or are you empowering them to scale? Let’s disrupt the status quo together. #Leadership #BuffaloMindset #Synergy #Networking #GrowthHacking

Not too shabby. Weird that it just repeated it in the first paragraph but then understood it in the second one.

New comment by paulmooreparks in "Every layer of review makes you 10x slower"

paulmooreparks — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 04:38:37 +0000

Exactly. Even if I hammer the erstwhile reviewer with Teams/Slack messages to get it moved to the top of the queue and finished before the 5 hours are up, then all the other reviews get pushed down. It averages out, and the review market corrects.

New comment by paulmooreparks in "C++26: The Oxford Variadic Comma"

paulmooreparks — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:22:26 +0000

Note to the author of TFA: The moment I get a sign-up modal on any site, I close the tab and move on.

How did MS-DOS decide on two seconds to keep the floppy disk cache valid?

paulmooreparks — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 11:06:06 +0000

Article URL: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190924-00/?p=102915

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47230775

Points: 16

# Comments: 0

New comment by paulmooreparks in "Antarctica sits above Earth's strongest 'gravity hole' – how it got that way"

paulmooreparks — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 13:14:33 +0000

> in fact, no one knows what gravity is

Albert Einstein has entered the chat

New comment by paulmooreparks in "New Nick Bostrom Paper: Optimal Timing for Superintelligence [pdf]"

paulmooreparks — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 06:15:37 +0000

There is no "should" in the relevant section. It's making a mathematical model of the risks and benefits.

> Now consider a choice between never launching superintelligence or launching it immediately, where the latter carries an % risk of immediate universal death. Developing superintelligence increases our life expectancy if and only if:

> [equation I can't seem to copy]

> In other words, under these conservative assumptions, developing superintelligence increases our remaining life expectancy provided that the probability of AI-induced annihilation is below 97%.

The Next Train to Bracknell

paulmooreparks — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 12:46:16 +0000

Article URL: https://parkscomputing.com/next-train-to-bracknell

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46988138

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by paulmooreparks in "I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed"

paulmooreparks — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 16:03:04 +0000

I'm 55 and I started at age 13 on a TI-99/4A, then progressed through Commodore 64, Amiga 2000, an Amiga XT Sidecar, then a real XT, and on and on. DOS, Windows, Unix, the first Linux. I ran a tiny BBS and felt so excited when I heard the modem singing from someone dialing in. The first time I "logged into the Internet" was to a Linux prompt. Gopher was still a bigger thing than the nascent World-Wide Web.

The author is right. The magic has faded. It's sad. I'm still excited about what's possible, but it'll never create that same sense of awe, that knowledge that you can own the entire system from the power coming from the wall to the pixels on your screen.

How Many Years of Pizza Do You Have?

paulmooreparks — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 10:40:33 +0000

Article URL: https://parkscomputing.com/page/how-many-years-of-pizza

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46957879

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by paulmooreparks in "Child prodigies rarely become elite performers"

paulmooreparks — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 06:21:53 +0000

The saying isn't "The only way..." but "The best way...". Of course one may improve with all the things you mention, and it's a tongue-in-cheek statement anyway, but there's a grain of truth to it. I saw it quoted by one of the greatest teachers in golf, Harvey Penick.

New comment by paulmooreparks in "Child prodigies rarely become elite performers"

paulmooreparks — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 05:43:34 +0000

There's a saying about golf that probably applies to chess: The best way to improve is to go back in time and learn it at an earlier age.

New comment by paulmooreparks in "A macOS app that blurs your screen when you slouch"

paulmooreparks — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:20:46 +0000

Exactly what I came here to say. I've been programming for 40 years, 35 professionally, and I didn't find my ergonomic, no-pain, no-RSI happy place until I stopped following advice to sit up straight. I set my chair with just enough resistance, set the head rest where it puts my eyeline directly on my monitors, which are set considerably higher than average and about a metre from my head. I can work for hours like this now, with no pain.

I could never use an app like this. Maybe I should write one that blurs the screen when I don't slouch.

New comment by paulmooreparks in "I'm 34. Here's 34 things I wish I knew at 21"

paulmooreparks — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 12:54:20 +0000

I can honestly say that this happened to me, but the feeling did leave me. It required a massive change of lifestyle and the habits that went with it.