News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

psanford

Re:Passkeys Are Not a Trap on Thursday October 15, 2026 @12:16PM (#50105872)
I don't ever see that
Re:Passkeys Are Not a Trap on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @11:27AM (#50089137)
There is nothing about passkeys that requires biometrics. Synced passkeys on android will work with your screen unlock code if you do not have biometrics enabled. Same with passkeys stored in a password manager. Same with hardware passkeys that do not support biometrics.
Re:Cloudflare K2: serverless event streams on Thursday October 01, 2026 @12:20PM (#49923705)
Object store is quickly becoming the new core data substrate. Lets build kafka, but on s3. Lets build github, but on s3. It feels like we going to see more and more "object-store first" systems in the next few years.

I am excited about this future. Give me stateless servers and a storage bucket over having to manage systems with disks any day.

I do wonder if we will see an expansion of the s3 api to support more of these use cases. S3 added a janky file append operation to their new express-one-zone bucket type, and limited to 10k total file append operations. I wonder what else we will get in the next few years.

Re:Signing TLS handshakes inside a TPM on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:38AM (#49594709)
I wish the author provided some latency numbers for this. One issue with tpms is that they are slow relative to performing the same operation on a modern CPU.
Re:Show HN: A local MitM proxy to control TLS fingerprints on Tuesday August 18, 2026 @10:50AM (#49346478)
There are a bunch of these tools out there. I like curl-impersonate[0] as a quick way to make curl fingerprint as chrome or firefox. There's also CylceTLS[1] for a more programmatic approach.

[0]: https://github.com/lwthiker/curl-impersonate

[1]: https://github.com/Danny-Dasilva/CycleTLS

I agree, pocket-tts is quite good. It is also very easy to make new voices from small sample files with pocket-tts.
Re:I Fired Google on Tuesday June 16, 2026 @11:02AM (#48556374)
I got rid of my Alexa devices after they would not shut up. "Alexa what is the weather for today?" "The weather for today will be ... By the way, did you know that you can set alarms? Just say ..."

I do not care about whatever stupid feature you want to build engagement around. Do what I asked you to do and then shut up.

And don't get me started on the Alexa Show that had the audacity to display ads.

Re:SQLite is all you need for durable workflows on Friday May 29, 2026 @08:46PM (#48331209)
I wrote a library[0] to let you concurrently update a sqlite db in s3 safely. It uses the little known sqlite sessions extension plus s3 compare-and-swap on a small metadata file to make this work reasonably efficiently and safely. I have been enjoying it for a bunch of small projects where I want a lambda function to have a db for state but I don't want to pay for a full database instance.

[0]: https://github.com/psanford/s3db

Re:I returned to AWS, and was reminded why I left on Sunday May 10, 2026 @10:50AM (#48084453)
I do not trust a free-tier VPS with my data.
Re:I returned to AWS, and was reminded why I left on Sunday May 10, 2026 @10:49AM (#48084449)
I have also used lambda at scale in professional environments. I would not use a lambda for a webserver at scale, but having an s3 object trigger processing via a lambda function is a really nice flow.
Re:I returned to AWS, and was reminded why I left on Sunday May 10, 2026 @10:31AM (#48084296)
> If you're using AWS Lambda then you have to work to keep convincing yourself this is better than your own web servers. Keep convincing yourself that using AWS Lambda is not a horrible mistake.

lol ok. I have ~50 lambdas running in my personal aws account. Some of them are webservers running behind an api gateway or using a lambda function url to expose them to the internet. Some are running on a schedule, some are triggered from s3 events. The cost to run these for me is less than the cost of the cheapest vps (my total requests per month stay under the free tier limit). There is also zero maintenance I need to do for these functions (ok, this year I did have to find-replace al2 to al.2023 in my terraform config). I don't have to worry about making sure the os is patched for the latest vulnerabilities. And I don't have to worry about the specific hardware my code is running on at any time. Doing maintenance for old projects sucks. It is great to have servers I deployed years ago continue to chug along without me needing to think about it.

Now, all of my lambdas are written in Go and I suspect if I was using one of the manged runtime libraries I would find the language upgrades to be quite annoying. Go also helps quite a lot with cold start times.

Then again maybe I have just drank the koolaid. In my quest to use lambdas for as much as I can as cheaply as I can, I made a library[0] to use sqlite on top of s3 (not just readonly). It uses the sqlite session extension plus s3 compare-and-swap to allow you to write updates safely to s3, even if you have concurrent writers.

[0]: https://github.com/psanford/s3db

Re:OpenAI Should Build Slack on Sunday February 15, 2026 @10:38AM (#47024521)
The API is free. The statement in the article is not about corporate friction
Re:OpenAI Should Build Slack on Saturday February 14, 2026 @04:33PM (#47018611)
> Developers routinely complain about Slack’s API costs and permissions

What? What API costs is the op talking about?

Re:Using an Engineering Notebook on Thursday February 12, 2026 @01:53PM (#46993282)
Most of what I write in my journal I don't want to need to remember (that is why I am writing it down). I also don't know what will be important or not important later, so I want it all to be searchable.
Re:Using an Engineering Notebook on Thursday February 12, 2026 @11:08AM (#46990544)
This "it has to be handwritten" stuff is nonsense. Do that if you enjoy it, but also you should acknowledge the downsides to it.

I started keeping a work journal a few years ago and it has changed how I work for the better. It is just a text file.

The main value of it is that I can search it! When I'm figuring something out for the first time, and I have a lot of trail and error, I write down what I did. And then I might not touch that thing again for 6 months. When I come back to it, it is unlikely that I will remember what I did exactly but because it is written down and searchable I can quickly recover my old state.

I like this so much I also started a personal work journal for my home lab. It really is useful for me. But its primary value is that I can search it.

Re:Why E cores make Apple silicon fast on Sunday February 08, 2026 @10:25AM (#46935067)
I'm curious how asahi linux manages scheduling across e cores and p cores. Has anyone done experiments with this?

Edit: It looks like there was some discussion about this on the Asahi blog 2 years ago[0].

[0]: https://asahilinux.org/2024/01/fedora-asahi-new/

Re:Code and Let Live on Saturday January 10, 2026 @02:41PM (#46569208)
To follow up on this a bit, something that I really want is a way to build and launch apps from an llm really easily. I am imagining and environment with a database, object storage, and a publicly reachable webserver. I think this could be that with OIDC auth to an s3 bucket and litestream.

I was previously thinking about doing the same thing on my homeserver with tailscale to expose the web interface publicly and tailscale oidc auth to an s3 bucket for object storage.

Re:Code and Let Live on Saturday January 10, 2026 @02:35PM (#46569153)
Playing around with this for a small amount of time, it is very neat but also there are a bunch of things that are unclear / undocumented (I assume the documentation is coming so I'm not faulting them for it not being there yet).

Some things that are unclear:

- How should I auth to github? sprite console doesn't use ssh (afaik) so I guess not agent forwarding?

- What on machine api's are available? Can I use the fly oidc provider[1]? There's a /.sprite/api.sock but curl'ing /v1/tokens/oidc gets a 404.

- How much is it going to cost me? I know there is pricing but its hard to figure out what actual usage would be like. Also I don't see any usage info in the webui right now.

[1]: https://fly.io/blog/oidc-cloud-roles/

Re:Code and Let Live on Saturday January 10, 2026 @10:46AM (#46566656)
What is the criteria for a sprite being "idle"? Is it no network activity or is it cpu based?
Re:Problems with D-Bus on the Linux desktop on Tuesday December 16, 2025 @09:38PM (#46297595)
Those are not extensions. Not can you use them to talk to dbus.
Re:Problems with D-Bus on the Linux desktop on Monday December 15, 2025 @09:32PM (#46284040)
What browser extensions? Why would I want websites to integrate with gnome or kde? What does that even mean?
Re:Litestream VFS on Thursday December 11, 2025 @02:39PM (#46236138)
Oh hey this is using my go sqlite vfs module[0]. I love it when I find out some code I wrote is useful to others!

[0]: https://github.com/psanford/sqlite3vfs

This is great!

I have been using Quickwit as a low cost search engine on Lambda. It works very well for my relatively small and infrequently updated dataset.

Unfortunately Quickwit devs have decided to not support the Lambda deployment mode going forward so eventually I'll need another option.

Re:What Killed Perl? on Wednesday November 19, 2025 @03:25PM (#45984650)
The thing that killed perl was python. The reason that python won is because it was Google's blessed scripting language.
I had an M2 air running asahi that I loved and had similar worries. I ended up buying a maxed out refurbished M2 which I expect will last me a few more years.
Re:1Password CLI Vulnerability on Sunday October 05, 2025 @07:49AM (#45480828)
Yes. It is a nice report that does not engage with 1password's security model at all. 1password specifically says that they do not think it is feasible to defend against locally executing malware.
Re:SSH3: Faster and rich secure shell using HTTP/3 on Saturday September 27, 2025 @11:48AM (#45396774)
I do hate the name ssh3. I was glad to see this at the top of the repo:

> SSH3 is probably going to change its name. It is still the SSH Connection Protocol (RFC4254) running on top of HTTP/3 Extended connect, but the required changes are heavy and too distant from the philosophy of popular SSH implementations to be considered for integration. The specification draft has already been renamed ("Remote Terminals over HTTP/3"), but we need some time to come up with a nice permanent name.

Re:Passkeys and Modern Authentication on Tuesday September 02, 2025 @02:08PM (#45106857)
I assume you were using Authy desktop for TOTP? You don't need a smartphone for storing TOTP seeds or generating TOTP codes.
Re:Mosh (Mobile Shell) on Thursday August 28, 2025 @12:12PM (#45053954)
I found the "lets pretend like there is no input latency" thing to be more distracting than useful. As soon as something does not work as expected the illusion is broken. It made me more grumpy than not having it on in the first place.
You can run x86 steam games on asahi easily now. muvm makes it quite easy to run x86 binaries fairly transparently on arm.

Older »