Hacker News: simfree

New comment by simfree in "WireGuard for Windows Reaches v1.0"

simfree — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 05:29:30 +0000

Not really, I always have to choose an exit node for Tailscale to allow me internet access on Mac while connected to a Tailnet on cellular.

New comment by simfree in "Bring Your Agent to Teams"

simfree — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 02:55:51 +0000

PCMU and PCMA voice frames are 20ms or 40ms, and no one is running with no jitter buffer, so your 30ms number doesn't make sense.

Even circuit switched networks are not often below 30ms, to hit that you'd need to make a local phone call on a fully analog circuit.

New comment by simfree in "DigitalOcean Seeks $800M in Funding"

simfree — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 10:55:33 +0000

Scaleway is a huge abuse platform, the same IPs on their network continue day after day to blast out login and bruteforce attempts. Drop their ranges and suddenly your logs get a lot quieter with no user facing impacts.

New comment by simfree in "Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid"

simfree — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 19:57:26 +0000

Thank you for being honest and up front about your background. It is very meaningful that you do not try to hide it, and I feel it increases trust.

New comment by simfree in "Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid"

simfree — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 19:56:05 +0000

VoIP.ms is hard to port into and out of, I've repeatedly seen them drop part of the account number when transferring a number, then drag their feet for days thereafter on resubmitting the port.

Always ask for the Port Order Number (PON) so you can follow up with the other carrier to see what they received from VoIP.ms

New comment by simfree in "Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid"

simfree — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 19:53:42 +0000

Google Voice is requiring ID verification now, and porting your phone number out is difficult as they charge an unlock fee and you get to deal with Bandwidth.com's port out shenanigans as they are the real underlying carrier for Google Voice.

New comment by simfree in "Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid"

simfree — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 19:52:12 +0000

Which vendor did you choose to partner with to provide the mobile core (IMS and such)?

I've talked to a few tangentially and it seems like an interesting space.

New comment by simfree in "Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid"

simfree — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 19:48:04 +0000

What can be open sourced (GrapheneOS) already is, and the remainder is business logic that they have described for the MVNO that is likely carrier specific and tied to the oddball MVNO platform they are using.

Very hard to make the latter usable by anyone else IMO.

New comment by simfree in "Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid"

simfree — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 19:40:33 +0000

Mitigating SIP and TDM spoofing requires broad cooperation among every other Telecom provider. That doesn't exist today, you can't prevent people from spoofing your number.

New comment by simfree in "Japan Is What Late-Stage Capitalist Decline Looks Like"

simfree — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 10:52:22 +0000

There is a lot of money floating around major cities in the US. So many nonprofit entities are preserving some cultural niche thanks to their older patrons using their qualified minimum distribution to fund a long lasting endowment.

I feel like you see this less in other parts of the world where people don't have tens of thousands of dollars from their retirement savings that they have to take out each year, and they would rather give it tax free to their favorite nonprofit than take a haircut with taxes and then do nothing with the money

New comment by simfree in "OpenAI should build Slack"

simfree — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 21:18:13 +0000

Exactly, no on is truly overjoyed with Teams. As shovelware goes it is passable, but that is a low bar

New comment by simfree in "OpenAI should build Slack"

simfree — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 21:16:22 +0000

Teams is shovelware. Force bundled, with questionably reliable messaging, okay video calling (if your organization policies don't break it), and a fairly useless Phone System component that misbehaves often.

Great for organizations that believe these forms of communication should be an afterthought that has rough edges and inconsistent reliability.

The recent changes to end webhook support, kill Linux desktop support and do yet another rewrite are inane. Don't expect features you use today in Teams to work in 2 years...

New comment by simfree in "European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams"

simfree — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 20:27:39 +0000

Your storage is dying, any Electron based app will lose its database in this scenario.

New comment by simfree in "European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams"

simfree — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 20:26:24 +0000

If you start to have higher message volumes, Element Desktop handles syncing on first launch much more gracefully than Signal Desktop.

New comment by simfree in "France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc."

simfree — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 20:25:10 +0000

I made no such assertion, please do not put words in my mouth.

New comment by simfree in "European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams"

simfree — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 17:48:15 +0000

It works faster & better than Signal Desktop.

New comment by simfree in "France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc."

simfree — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 21:27:59 +0000

What was the last successful French software project in the Telecom or Conferencing space?

This project has been forced into the hands of 40k users, but likely due to a plethora of bugs and user experience issues they are picking a date far in the future for broad deployment.

Belledonne Communications has been actively breaking Linphone, conference calling broke back in August 2023 for example and remains broken to this day.

If we look to Québécoise in Canada, SFLPhone would crash after 2 dozen calls, and Jami (formerly GNU Ring) is still a beta quality product with some neat DHT concepts that I'd love to see work.

The French sphere has a software delivery and quality problem. The user rejection factor will remain high until they choose to fix the bugs that cause users to run away.

New comment by simfree in "Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?"

simfree — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 03:49:13 +0000

All large organizations are political. Some employees choose to ignore the office politics, but that choice might find their management not ensuring they survive the next round of layoffs.

New comment by simfree in "Microservices Killed Our Startup. Monoliths Would've Saved Us"

simfree — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 23:57:17 +0000

A simple modern Dotnet monolith with Postgres on a Linux server could deliver a much better end user experience, and it probably would take a lot less server resources than the current mess.

New comment by simfree in "Microservices Killed Our Startup. Monoliths Would've Saved Us"

simfree — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 23:55:12 +0000

Monoliths generally server side render. Server side rendering is fast, consistent and performant, the state of the client won't get into wonky territory since they are a button click away from getting current, known good state from the server.