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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,839 posts.
Infrastructure & DevOps
Any year
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Rackspace cloud beats Amazon EC2, by a lot
After reading a report yesterday saying that Rackspace cloud servers were a better deal than Amazon's, I decided to check it out today.
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Talk write-up: How to build a PaaS for 1500 engineers
The technical and organisational decisions behind building a Kubernetes-based platform serving 1500 engineers across Adevinta’s marketplace portfolio.
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Snaps are an anti-pattern on Ubuntu
I congratulate the Linux Mint team for clearly taking a stand against snaps today by removing it from their repository, it was something m...
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Moving from OpenBSD to FreeBSD for firewalls
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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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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‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’
If, like me, you’re over 40 and work in IT, you’ll probably remember a time when everyone used Windows, and a small but growing proportion of people were wasting their lives compiling Linux in their spare time.
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How I Reduced My DB Server Load by 80%
Database load can be a silent performance killer. I’ve been optimizing the query performance of a web app I run designed to get people involved in open sourc...
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Project Bluefin: an immutable, developer-focused, Cloud-native Linux
Today we "relaunched" ublue-os/bluefin as projectbluefin.io. This is a beta until Spring 2024. Bluefin is a custom image of Fedora Silverblue by a bunch of cloud-native nerds. We want a reliable desktop experience that runs everything but we're too lazy to maintain anything. So we
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Blending complex systems made my latency 10x higher
Every time someone reports higher latency after migrating to Kubernetes, the root cause is an assumption that changed. This is one of those stories.
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Eliminating JavaScript cold starts on AWS Lambda
Porffor can run on Lambda now!
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Run More Stuff in Docker
In 2020, Docker is the best medium for distributing and running most developer-facing software . It’s widely accepted that Docker is great for building and deploying the artifacts for your enterprise web app, but this is less well known when it comes to things like developer tools. However, running tools in containers…
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Encryption at Rest: Whose Threat Model Is It Anyway?
Head’s up: This is a blog post about applied cryptography, with a focus on web and cloud applications that encrypt data at rest in a database or filesystem. While the lessons can be broadly a…
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An almost perfect rsync over SSH backup script
Creating backups is a basic necessity for anyone who stores data. With the help of a dedicated server, the Linux operating system and the rsync software, you can securely and efficiently retrieve data from any computer via an SSH connection and store it in a backup. It doesn’t matter if there is another Linux server…
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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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Building Permanent and Censorship-Resistant Blog with Ethereum ENS and IPFS
The internet nowadays is ephemeral. Layers upon layers of trusted 3rd parties are necessary to distribute content online. It requires ongoing maintenance and is susceptible to censorship or hostile takedowns. In this blog post, I describe the steps I took to host my blog in a trustless, permanent, and…
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Crawling a billion web pages in just over 24 hours, in 2025
For some reason, nobody's written about what it takes to crawl a big chunk of the web in a while: the last point of reference I saw was Michael Nielsen's post from 2012 .
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Setting Up an Ad-Blocking VPN with WireGuard and Pihole
This guide will walk you through the setup of a remote machine that will act as a personal VPN server at the cost of 3 to 5 USD per month. We will also configure it to act as a DNS resolver that will automatically block spam, tracking, advertising and malware domains on all of your connected devices.
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Solar Shed Summary: My Off Grid Office
A few months ago I moved to a few acres in the country, and needed somewhere to work - so I built myself a solar powered off grid office out of a Tuff-Shed Pro Studio! On one side, I’ve built a great desk corner with plenty of power and more than enough AC to keep me cool when it’s over 100F out.
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Intel Virtualisation: How VT-X, KVM and QEMU Work Together
VT-x is name of CPU virtualisation technology by Intel. KVM is component of Linux kernel which makes use of VT-x. And QEMU is a user-space application which allows users to create virtual machines.…
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Dear AWS, please let me be a cloud engineer again
I’m an AWS Serverless Hero, principal engineer at an AWS centric logistics company, and I build and maintain the AWS News Feed. It’s fair to say that I am very interested in everything AWS does. Bu…
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RSS is back as an underpinning to SlackOps
RSS is the API they couldn't kill. It's back stronger than ever as an underpinning of SlackOps in many organizations.
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From Kafka to ZeroMQ for real-time log aggregation
Software - shaken, not stirred
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Cache-Control: immutable
About one year ago our friends at Facebook brought an interesting issue to the IETF HTTP Working Group - a lot (20%!) of their transaction...