Best of 2019

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2019. 83 posts.

Networking & Internet
2

Leaving Google Fi

I’m sharing the story of a bad situation I had ordering a new phone through Google Fi. It turned into a two month long ordeal where the service got worse and worse. At every turn the Google Fi team was presented with a chance to make things better and every time they blew it. I’m sharing this because I hope a long…

9

Sinkholed

On 26 Nov 2019 at 14:55 UTC, I logged into my server that hosts my website to perform a simple maintenance activity. Merely three minutes later, at 14:58 UTC, the domain name susam.in used to host this website was transferred to another registrant without any authorisation by me or without any notification sent to me…

15

Networking on AWS (2018)

Disclaimer: I’m not a network engineer and never have been - a tame network engineer has been consulted to ensure factual and terminological accuracy. The following is an in-exhaustive run down of everything I’ve learnt from building and using network infrastructure on Amazon Web Services. If you find you have no…

18

The “mail is hard” myth

TL;DR: - Mail is not hard: people keep repeating that because they read it, not because they tried it - Big Mailer Corps are quite happy with that myth, it keeps their userbase growing - Big Mailer Corps control a large percentage of the e-mail address space which is good for none of us - It's ok that people have…

26

The Nintendo Switch Switch

Yesterday I had the idea that it would be cool if I turned a Nintendo Switch (will be referred to as NX to avoid confusion as NX is the code name for the Nintendo Switch ) console into an actual network switch. I thought about it a bit and realized that it would be doable in hardware at least, since the NX docking…