Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 321 posts.
I recently migrated my self-hosted services from a VPS (virtual private server) at a remote data center to a physical server at home. This change was motivated by wanting to be in control of the hardware and network where said services run, while trying to keep things as simple as possible. What follows is a…
Published: 20-11-2025 22:34 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
Welcome to Waqas' blog
LLM Observability breaks in wild today as new libraries like OpenInference don't adhere to OpenTelemetry standards leading to silos and suboptimal performance for users who want to tie LLM observability with rest of their observability stack
I wrote earlier about my dream of developing “single-handedly” on an iPhone. Then, I wrote some more about it . The dream still lives strongly! I am now coding single-handedly in any language on my iPhone SE model 2022. But although i still like pythonista I am now using a combination of three great apps that allow me…
Moving electricity around the world has huge financial and environmental benefits. Unfortunately, current power transmission systems are both lossy and expensive to build. This post explores an alternative design for cables to make undersea power transmission substantially cheaper.
This post describes how we successfully migrated our serverless offering from AWS US-East to OVHCloud North America, reducing our monthly spend from...
Microservices work best as a polytree with clear dependencies and no cycles. Learn how this structure reduces complexity and makes systems easier to scale and maintain.
With OpenSSL, it’s pretty easy to generate a simple self-signed TLS certificate . Just run the following command:
Introducing UDA, the knowledge-graph-based architecture that translates conceptual domain models into consistent schemas and data…
Binary Security found the undocumented APIs for Azure API Connections. In this post we examine the inner workings of the Connections allowing us to escalate privileges and read secrets in backend resources for services ranging from Key Vaults, Storage Blobs, Defender ATP, to Enterprise Jira and SalesForce servers.
I went on a little low-level Nix adventure yesterday and early this morning because of this excellent blog post. In it, Farid builds up the simplest possible Nix derivation—making a file that has the contents “hello world”. Here’s what I like about it:
Terraform state is a distributed systems problem masquerading as file storage. Graph state fixes the bottlenecks.
Fast, Declarative, Reproducible, and Composable Developer Environments using Nix.
How we solved request logging at scale by moving from MariaDB to ClickHouse, Kafka, and Vector after our deprecated database engine couldn't keep up with billions of monthly requests.
In Ukraine suicide drones strike critical infrastructure regularly. Some outages are caused directly by the attacks - destroyed power plants, substations, transformers, power lines, some are scheduled in advance - power grid wasn’t designed to work while some of its power plants and transformers are destroyed and are…
DAVIS, California – November 18, 2025 – The Connectivity Standards Alliance (Alliance) announced today the release of Zigbee 4.0 and Suzi, the new brand for Zigbee’s Sub-GHz feature…
High-performance object storage exists, but the economics make it unusable at scale. FractalBits breaks out of the high-performance trap.
Putting FreeBSD’s “power to serve” motto to the test. On Thanksgiving morning, I woke up to one of my web services being unavailable. All HTTP requests failed with a “503 Service unavailable” error. I logged into the console, saw a simplistic “Runtime version: Error” message, and was not able to diagnose the problem…
Discusses the problem of Gmail takeouts as a single giant file and provides detailed background on the gmail-mbox-codec app that allows efficient incremental backups of said file.
How Databricks uses client-side load balancing to improve gRPC traffic, reduce tail latency, and handle ingress with real-time service discovery.
Burstable VMs run on a fraction of CPU and burst to a higher level of CPU usage to support occasional usage spikes. To implement them, we leveraged Control Groups v2 (cgroups v2), a Linux kernel feature that helps manage resource usage. We thought our open-source implementation of burstable VMs might be interesting…
Frustrated with AWS's complexity and cost risks, I switched to NearlyFreeSpeech for its prepaid model, ensuring financial control while keeping hosting simple and flexible.
What Observability 2.0 means in practice, how wide events replace siloed metrics/logs/traces, and why GreptimeDB is purpose-built as the database foundation.
We benchmarked OpenTelemetry overhead in a high-load Go app against eBPF-based instrumentation to see where tracing adds real cost.
See how AWS Lambda arm64 stacks up against x86_64 in real-world benchmarks across CPU, memory, and I/O workloads using Node.js, Python, and Rust.
Update, 2025-04-16: I wrote a follow-up post after about a month of usage, and you can read that here. Given some recent, uh, instability in US politics, and given that everyone likes an underdog, I’ve been looking at European alternatives to my current hosting situation, which is Cloudflare. After looking through…
Don't pick random subnets to avoid IP address conflicts on foreign networks, use VRFs!
