Hacker News: williebeek

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

williebeek — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 19:25:37 +0000

Store your Bitcoin private key in a password manager. Would you really give out your keyvault master password to them?

New comment by williebeek in "Why I left my tech job to work on chronic pain"

williebeek — Sat, 05 Jul 2025 13:35:47 +0000

Me too, really...

New comment by williebeek in "Trusting clients is probably a security flaw"

williebeek — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 13:04:29 +0000

I assumed there is always some technical documentation/app architecture and some mandatory (server side) security you have to follow, but reading this I'm being too optimistic.

New comment by williebeek in "Show HN: A Better Log Service"

williebeek — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 15:58:28 +0000

Thanks for the tip, I will check if inserting rows with Go is any faster. For reference, inserting a log takes three steps, first the log data is stored in a Redis Stream (memory), a number of logs are taken from the stream and saved to disk and finally inserted in batches in ClickHouse. I've created it so you can take the ClickHouse server offline without losing any data (it will be inserted later).

For reference, moving about 4k logs from memory to disk takes less than 0.1 second. This is a real log from one of the webservers:

Start new cron loop: 2024-12-18 08:11:16.397...stored 3818 rows in /var/www/txtlog/txtlog/tmp/txtlog.rows.2024-12-18_081116397_ES2gnY3fVc (0.0652 seconds).

Storing this data in ClickHouse takes a bit more than 0.1 second:

Start new cron loop: 2024-12-18 08:11:17.124...parsing file /var/www/txtlog/txtlog/tmp/txtlog.rows.2024-12-18_081116397_ES2gnY3fVc

* Inserting 3818 row(s) on database server 1...0.137 seconds (approx. 3021.15 KB).

* Removed /var/www/txtlog/txtlog/tmp/txtlog.rows.2024-12-18_081116397_ES2gnY3fVc

As for Docker, I'm too much of a Docker noob but I appreciate the suggestion.

New comment by williebeek in "Show HN: A Better Log Service"

williebeek — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 15:53:26 +0000

It uses both, MySQL for the metadata and ClickHouse for the logs. The selfhost page explains a bit more about the architecture.

edit: the connection to ClickHouse uses the MySQL driver, this is actually a very nice CH feature, you can connect to CH using the regular mysql or postgresql client tools. The PHP MySQL PDO driver works seamlessly. One catch, using advanced features like CH query timeouts requires a CTE function, check the model/txtlogrowdb.php file if you're interested.

Show HN: A Better Log Service

williebeek — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 14:34:52 +0000

Hello everyone, there are many log services available and this is my attempt at a better one.

Most online logging tools feature convoluted UIs, arbitrary mandatory fields, questionable AI/insights, complex pricing, etc. I hope my application fixes most of these issues. It also has some nice features, such as automatic Geo IP checks and public dashboards.

Although I've created lots of software, this is my first open source application (MIT license), the tutorial for selfhosting is hopefully sufficient! Most of my development career has been with C#, NodeJS and PHP. For this project I've used PHP (8.3) which is an absolute joy to work with. The architecture is very scalable, but I've only tested up to a few billion logs. The current version is used in production for a few months now. Hope you enjoy/fork it as you see fit!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42666139

Points: 153

# Comments: 91