Hacker News: perbu

New comment by perbu in "Shipping a laptop to a refugee camp in Uganda"

perbu — Sat, 23 May 2026 06:57:30 +0000

I worked on an OSS project and we had a volunteer working from Tobago. His computer wasn't working properly so we sent him a new one.

It got smashed by customs. Literally.

New comment by perbu in "Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter"

perbu — Sun, 17 May 2026 14:11:38 +0000

For me, the appeal of local compute is first and foremost confidentiality and having the possibility to run my 200K documents through an LLM just to see what happen without having to consider the cost.

New comment by perbu in "Does Postgres Scale?"

perbu — Fri, 01 May 2026 06:50:41 +0000

This post conflates scalability and performance. PostgreSQL is fast on smallish systems, but try adding more CPU cores and you'll see performance gains will not be linear at all. Modern server can ship with 256 or more cores and a single instance of PostgreSQL will struggle to take advantage of these.

4-8 cores is no problem at all, though.

New comment by perbu in "An Update on GitHub Availability"

perbu — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 13:36:42 +0000

fwiw, I've had good luck scaling git, specially doing clones, in the HTTP layer, using Varnish. this was CI bringing Github Enterprise to it's knees.

New comment by perbu in "Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnight"

perbu — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 11:50:59 +0000

We had a SCSI zip-drive at our uni and it was a brilliant way to drag megabytes of content home. Even though I had amazing internet (2Mbit shared by 100+ ppl), the zip drive would still be a good way of getting stuff home.

Then I got to experience the click of death and the internet connection was bumped to 100Mbit and I didn't need to replace my zip drive.

New comment by perbu in "Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner"

perbu — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 14:12:35 +0000

You have to deal with a lot more stuff. You have to order/pay for a server (capex), mount it somewhere, wire up lights-out-mgmt and recovery and do a few more tasks that the provider has already done.

Then, say if the motherboard gives up, you have to do quite a bit of work to get it replaced, you might be down for hours or maybe days.

For a single server I don't think it makes sense. For 8 servers, maybe. Depends on the opportunity cost.

New comment by perbu in "Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic coding power, now open to all"

perbu — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 16:50:53 +0000

MoE is excellent for the unified memory inference hardware like DGX Sparc, Apple Studio, etc. Large memory size means you can have quite a few B's and the smaller experts keeps those tokens flowing fast.

New comment by perbu in "Vinyl Cache and Varnish Cache"

perbu — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 07:35:46 +0000

https://github.com/varnish/varnish/issues/33

It should be fixed fairly quick.

New comment by perbu in "Vinyl Cache and Varnish Cache"

perbu — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 07:04:52 +0000

We've been pushing 1.5Tbps with TLS in lab settings. I've yet to see any other HTTP product being able to saturate these kind of networking. There is lots to be said about threading, but it is able to push a lot bandwidth.

And yes, I think the ergonomics are bad. Having varnish lose visibility into the transport means ACLs are gone, JA3 and similar are gone and the opportunity to defend from DoS are much more limited.

Crypto used to be expensive in 2010. It is no longer that expensive. All the serialization, on the other hand, that is expensive and latency is adding up.

Every single HTTP server in use out there has TLS support. The users expectation is that the HTTP server can deal with TLS.

New comment by perbu in "Vinyl Cache and Varnish Cache"

perbu — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 06:14:29 +0000

we're not at all a huge company. we're 80 people with a lot on our plates trying to juggle this on top of everything else.

but I truly appreciate the feedback. I'll reach our to the team working on this and see if I can make this a bit clearer.

New comment by perbu in "Google removes "Doki Doki Literature Club" from Google Play"

perbu — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 06:12:02 +0000

I feel like this is captures the point very well. Google removing this software, means that for 99% of the users on the platform, the choice to play this gets taken away from user.

New comment by perbu in "Vinyl Cache and Varnish Cache"

perbu — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 18:52:17 +0000

Varnish Software released hitch to facilitate TLS for varnish-cache.

Now that Varnish has been renamed, Varnish Software will keep what has been referred to as a downstream version or a fork, which has TLS built in, basically taking the TLS support from Varnish Enterprise.

This makes Hitch a moot point. So, I assume it'll receive security updates, but not much more.

Wrt. separation of concerns. Varnish with in-core TLS can push terabits per second (synthetic load, but still). Sure, for my blog, that isn't gonna matter, but having a single component to run/update is still valuable.

In particular using hitch/haproxy/nginx for backend is cumbersome.

TLS is a primary concern on the internet today.

New comment by perbu in "Vinyl Cache and Varnish Cache"

perbu — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 16:30:41 +0000

fwiw; Varnish Software still maintains and supports hitch, but we can't say we see a bright future for it. Both the ergonomics and the performance of not being integrated into Varnish are pretty bad. It was the crutch we leaned as it was the best thing we could make available.

I would recommend migrating off within a year or two.

New comment by perbu in "Vinyl Cache and Varnish Cache"

perbu — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 08:03:22 +0000

in my experience this has a lot more moving parts than it should.

New comment by perbu in "Midnight Captain – A midnight commander inspired file manager"

perbu — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 06:45:20 +0000

wow. there are actually no tests here.

New comment by perbu in "Midnight Captain – A midnight commander inspired file manager"

perbu — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 06:43:49 +0000

I think it is interesting that these pieces of software are now being inspired by Midnight Commander and are being built by people who never worked with or experiences the original, Norton Commander.

New comment by perbu in "Vinyl Cache and Varnish Cache"

perbu — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 06:17:20 +0000

the whole point of varnish software keeping a public version of "vinyl cache" as "varnish cache" with TLS is to give people a way to access a FOSS version with native TLS.

I think TLS is table-stakes now, and has been for the last 10 years, at least.

New comment by perbu in "OpenClaw is a security nightmare dressed up as a daydream"

perbu — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 07:10:24 +0000

The problem is that the the LLM can't distinguish between data and instruction so there is just so much the harness can do.

New comment by perbu in "Can I run AI locally?"

perbu — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 21:41:48 +0000

Prompt injection is a problem if your agent has access to anything.

The local models are quite weak here.

New comment by perbu in "Anthropic Cowork feature creates 10GB VM bundle on macOS without warning"

perbu — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 16:40:31 +0000

Yes. This is my experience as well. The software quality is generally horrible. It surely has improved a lot over the last couple of months, but it is still pretty horrible.

It is quite normal for me to have to force-close Claude Desktop.