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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 138 posts.
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The Ubuntu 26.04 Rust sudo is not compatible with standard sudo
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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WTF Ubuntu?
In case you missed it: CVE-2026-98432 is a critical (CVSS 9.8) bug in the Linux kernel's TCP code. It's been there since 2016, so virtually every Linux server on the planet has it, and it can be hit remotely. Anthropic says it built a working exploit that gets root on a server. A total takeover.
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Bidirectional charging during grid outages
David asked a great question on my solar battery system post: why buy a small battery just for emergencies when electric cars have a large battery you can also use for other things? [1] This would be great, and seems like the obvious way for it to work: when the grid goes down the panels can charge the car when it's…
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Docker is weird
I decided to make my own container runtime for fun, and even though I’m still early on, I’ve learned that Docker is weird . Here’s some weird things I learned about Docker.
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NixOS is making me less afraid
Something funny happened a little while ago: I read about FreshRSS, and it sounded nice, so I installed it on a server and started using it . That would not have happened a year ago, but then again, a year ago I didn’t have any NixOS servers.
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Agentic Monitoring
Agents are structurally well suited to monitoring production systems.
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If you don't run your own LLM proxy, how do you know whats going on?
I think the title captures the idea fully but I'll dig into it because this ain't Twitter. You're working an idea, a piece of code, or a multibillion a year SaaS app which is probably saving the world. Maybe you're automating the cloning process of grabbing
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RFC8950: Announce IPv4 with an IPv6 next-hop
This post covers how RFC8950 gives the ability to route IPv4 over IPv6 BGP sessions with IPv6 next-hops
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What I self-host
I’ve always had a foot in the self-hosting world, long before it was called that. My freshman year of university, I ran a website from a Linux box underneath my bed. There was some downtime when my roommate got tired of the fan noise and turned it off. For several years I ran MythTV , then XBMC (later known as Kodi).
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Unikernels were hard. key word: were
Justin Cormack, who worked on MirageOS back in the day, called me at the pub to talk about why unikernels are coming back. The friction that made them hard is gone, the operating system is design debt, and if you care about security you should seriously consider them.
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WSL3 Performance is about 5-60% faster than WSL2 depending on the workload
With the release of the WSL 3.x stack, Microsoft bumped the default virtualization runtime and advanced the shipped guest kernel from the 6.6 LTS branch up to 6.18. WSL upgrades often claim generalized performance gains, but marketing bullet points rarely translate directly to developer workloads. To see what actually…
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Self-hosted HTTP tunnels with SSH and Nginx
No extra software to install: OpenSSH remote forwarding and nginx's secure_link module give you a shareable HTTPS URL with an expiring token.
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All I wanted was a custom domain email
Student, entrepeneur, researcher
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Don't couple your Go code to GitHub
The technical musings of Iain Cambridge.
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Backups Aren't Simple
Starting from a wiped family photo drive, a walk through everything a real backup needs: snapshots, rotation, deduplication, offsite copies and tested restores.
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Can we stop with the uptime percentages?
I was reading Jason Gorman’s article “The Wall Confronting Reliable Coding Agent Autonomy” and he says: the journey from 90% to 99% reliability is just as hard…
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Alternatives to MinIO for single-node local S3
In late 2025 the company behind MinIO decided to abandon it to pursue other commercial interests. As well as upsetting a bunch of folk, it also put the cat amongst the pigeons of many software demos that relied on MinIO to emulate S3 storage locally, not to mention build pipelines that used it for validating S3…
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Dropping eBPF CPU Cost by About 90% with Memoization (Not AI Gen)
My brother and I spent a lot of time designing our eBPF security agent to be really fast from the ground up, but recently we discovered we could make it much faster using memoization! A couple of weeks ago, I profiled the eBPF code and found that the most expensive part of the protection isn’t actually enforcing a…
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AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
AI-assisted incident response can lower MTTR while leaving engineers less prepared for the complex incidents automation cannot solve.
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It takes 5 cloud services to hear my doorbell
It all started in the winter of 2024. There was a burglary in our apartment building and we decided we needed to invest in our home’s security. The …
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I used AWS cognito for a startup. I wouldn't do it again
I let AWS Cognito gaslight me for three weeks so you don't have to. Here's the unfiltered autopsy.
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Launching Route 53 Files
Four decades ago, when the Berkeley Internet Name Domain Server launched, it stored DNS records in "zone files". You could edit these files in vi , but BIND had to be told to reload them before your changes took effect. Later, other DNS servers came along, like Daniel Bernstein's tinydns, which served records directly…
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Run OpenBSD on DigitalOcean for $4/month
My homepage now runs on OpenBSD with httpd(8) and Let's Encrypt via acme-client(1) . I previously hosted it on GitHub Pages and then eventually moved to Cloudflare Pages because both options were free and easy. Free and easy is cool, and I understand that writing software full-time leaves us wanting absolutely nothing…
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OTel isn’t going well
For years now one of the most reliable complaints I hear when I try to drag a team off their vendor specific SDK and onto OpenTelemetry is some variation of: "why does it seem like this isn't done yet?" Vendor SDKs for observability are, to put it charitably, idiot-
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Fairphone 6 and PostmarketOS working main camera
Today i bring the working main camera! Building on the work nondescriptpointer did on the wide lens camera i have written the driver for the main camera and now its working alongside auto focus and color correction. The color correction still a work in progress, but you can…
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My server is a phone now
rooting a CMF Phone 1 to run my personal infrastructure at home.
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I'm switching my phone from Android to Linux
Since Android is becoming increasingly more locked down and slopped, I'm jumping ship.
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The development pipeline is a production system
Various thoughts on programming and technology.