Hacker News: williebeek

New comment by williebeek in "Resist "AI""

williebeek — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:33:43 +0000

"I do not use any of the programming “AIs”"

There is your problem. You're making a case against technology that you don't understand. You haven't fixed esoteric bugs using AI or created whole new applications with AI. You haven't seen AI building new functionality in minutes instead of days of manual labor, at even better code quality.

Replace the word "AI" with Television/radio/internet/railways and you see how ridiculous this blog is.

New comment by williebeek in "Stop making swap partitions—use swap files instead"

williebeek — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 09:49:17 +0000

Remember when distros used complicated partition setups, one for /root, one for /var one for /home, a swap partition etc. Was always a bad choice because one of them would be at 99% while others would linger below 10%

For swap, the best advice is to disable swap on your desktop, unless <8GB RAM. Really, I've never needed it and you probably won't either.

New comment by williebeek in "How Fairphone built the Fairphone Gen 6+"

williebeek — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 21:02:55 +0000

Was really happy with my FP3 until it died: "sudden death". No power, nothing. According to their own forum, it's a very common problem after a while. Of course there is no warranty and replacing the mainboard is not possible...

New comment by williebeek in "Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full"

williebeek — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 08:21:39 +0000

Because with lossless compression you can save a lot of storage space without losing any quality. You are thinking about lossy compression.

New comment by williebeek in "Shopify replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations–and it scaled"

williebeek — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 14:16:59 +0000

There are many good reasons to use NoSQL instead of a "full SQL database". OTOH I can relate to your experience, I remember colleagues switching to MongoDB because they couldn't get good performance on the (MS) SQL database. They didn't know enough about proper (multi-column) indexes, use proper isolation levels, etc.

New comment by williebeek in "Fast Software, the Best Software (2019)"

williebeek — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 13:47:22 +0000

I will read this entire article tomorrow while I wait for the Cursor UI and Visual Studio to finish loading.

New comment by williebeek in "AUR packages compromised with Infostealer and Rootkit"

williebeek — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 12:48:29 +0000

I remember installing an emulator (Mednafen) on Arch Linux about a decade ago. The program failed to run because it was linked against a library my system didn't have. Turns out, the maintainer built the software on his own system and it used a library he had on his system but was not listed in the dependencies.

It is an officially maintained package and I always assumed these were built on a dedicated build server instead of some a random volunteer/home computer. Don't know if Arch still builds the same way but this event scared me enough to switch distros.

New comment by williebeek in "Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?"

williebeek — Fri, 29 May 2026 12:38:29 +0000

My previous employer fired all front-end developers a few years ago, we went back from tons of frameworks (Vue/jQuery/Ruby/Nextjs) to simple HTML and CSS. Turns out dedicated front-end developers aren't really needed, at least not where I was employed.

New comment by williebeek in "Age Assurance on the Internet: Identity, Privacy, and the Limits of Verification"

williebeek — Sun, 17 May 2026 17:18:06 +0000

AI slop

New comment by williebeek in "Automating Hermitage to see how transactions differ in MySQL and MariaDB"

williebeek — Sun, 03 May 2026 15:14:31 +0000

Yeah, not subscribing to a website just to read an article probably written by an AI

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