Hacker News: zrail

New comment by zrail in "Solar and batteries can power the world"

zrail — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 16:45:56 +0000

Would you be willing to quantify what "mild" means to you, maybe in terms of a USDA zone? There are maps for both US and Europe:

https://planthardiness.ars.usda.gov/pages/map-downloads

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:USDA_hardiness_zones...

New comment by zrail in "ESP32-S31: Dual-Core RISC-V SoC with Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.4, and Advanced HMI"

zrail — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 11:53:04 +0000

You already can with nRF52 boards. Presumably they'll add ESP32 support soon too.

https://esphome.io/components/zigbee/

New comment by zrail in "I traced my traffic through a home Tailscale exit node"

zrail — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 23:42:37 +0000

The headscale API is very different than the Tailscale API so if you're automating setting up clients it's not quite drop in. Once a client is up, though, from what I've heard it's seamless.

New comment by zrail in "I traced my traffic through a home Tailscale exit node"

zrail — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 23:40:46 +0000

I think this is mostly a Wireguard thing and not specifically a Tailscale thing. Wireguard does what they call "cryptokey routing" where if you prove you possess a key that the other peer knows, you get the traffic (subject to firewall, allowed IPs list, etc etc). Wireguard stores the most recent address:port that it heard from a particular cryptokey on, but it natively lets peers roam, as long as only one roams at a time.

New comment by zrail in "How to turn anything into a router"

zrail — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 23:44:38 +0000

From what I can tell you're pretty much right. A linux bridge cannot possibly be as efficient or speedy as a dedicated switch asic. OpenWRT has support for a few different hardware switch kernel APIs, but you can't exactly buy one of those on a PCIe card and I've never seen one of those N100-class boards with one instead of a set of i226 ethernet controllers taking most of the PCIe lanes.

Mikrotik sells the CCR2004-1G-2XS-PCIe, which is a fascinating device:

https://mikrotik.com/product/ccr2004_1g_2xs_pcie

It is a full Mikrotik router stripped down to just a board and hung off a PCIe interface. Iirc by default it exposes a virtual gigabit interface to the host and otherwise acts exactly like a CCR2004 running RouterOS.

Doesn't really buy you anything vs a RB5009 unless you can use the pair of 25Gbps ports, but it sure is neat.

New comment by zrail in "Order Granting Preliminary Injunction – Anthropic vs. U.S. Department of War [pdf]"

zrail — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 01:31:32 +0000

(not a lawyer) I _think_ this is a result of Trump v CASA, where the Supreme Court determined that preliminary injunctions and TROs without a bond of some sort (which until then were fairly common) were invalid and unenforceable.

New comment by zrail in "I'm OK being left behind, thanks"

zrail — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 16:27:13 +0000

It's baffling, to be honest. I'm at a fintech that is currently pushing very hard at this, but in the same breath talking about how we're not a pure software play. I just don't understand where they're coming from.

New comment by zrail in "Show HN: Axe – A 12MB binary that replaces your AI framework"

zrail — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 15:13:48 +0000

Looks pretty interesting!

Tiny note: there's a typo in your repo description.

New comment by zrail in "Show HN: Axe – A 12MB binary that replaces your AI framework"

zrail — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 15:07:10 +0000

It's a Show HN. That's the point.

New comment by zrail in "Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state"

zrail — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 15:24:23 +0000

Yes.

New comment by zrail in "I'm not worried about AI job loss"

zrail — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 00:02:02 +0000

(Citation needed)

New comment by zrail in "I'm not worried about AI job loss"

zrail — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 23:55:23 +0000

One could make the argument that the modern Republican Party has in fact largely been shaped by this pushback.

New comment by zrail in "We mourn our craft"

zrail — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 20:19:21 +0000

Except that's not really true, because the work expands to fill the time allotted. Now we can build more boring applications with fewer people.

New comment by zrail in "The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat"

zrail — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 14:17:33 +0000

Maybe for some. I've worked from home for 15 years and a huge thing that I've learned is that I have to have a hard physical boundary. My work laptop stays at my desk unless I'm on call and actively fighting a fire. When I want to use my desk for non-work things the work laptop gets put away.

New comment by zrail in "IPv6 is not insecure because it lacks a NAT"

zrail — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:32:55 +0000

Maybe! CGNAT isn't free, of course, you need pretty beefy machines to handle ISP numbers of clients. So, is the capex for the machines, engineering time to set them up, and opex for keeping them running more or less than they'd make back from leasing their net blocks? Hard to say.

New comment by zrail in "IPv6 is not insecure because it lacks a NAT"

zrail — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:06:44 +0000

It might be more fair to say that most American residential ISPs don't have to do that because they have access to giant legacy IPv4 allocations. Comcast alone has 65 million IPv4 addresses, for example (including a /8, /9, and /10 and several /11s).

New comment by zrail in "IPv6 is not insecure because it lacks a NAT"

zrail — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 11:34:20 +0000

Out of curiosity how did you discover this?

New comment by zrail in "Design and Implementation of Sprites"

zrail — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 18:46:58 +0000

Could you explain more about how this helps and how one might use a different runtime image on Sprites?

New comment by zrail in "CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun"

zrail — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 01:34:47 +0000

Generac 26kW Guardian, natural gas fueled, connected to a pair of automatic transfer switches. We have two electric meters due to having a ground source heat pump on its own meter.

New comment by zrail in "CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun"

zrail — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 01:10:25 +0000

My spouse and I work at home and after the first couple multi-day power outages we invested in good UPSs and a whole house standby generator. Now when the power goes out it's down for at most 30 seconds.

This also makes self-hosting more viable, since our availability is constrained by internet provider rather than power.