So the Tailscale team were using a single text file as a database (as you do) and it worked great… until it didn’t.

Even with fast NVMe drives and splitting the database into two halves (important data vs. ephemeral data that we could lose on a tmpfs), things got slower and slower. We knew the day would come. The file reached a peak size of 150MB and we were writing it as quickly as the disk I/O would let us. Ain’t that just peachy?

So, migrate to MySQL or PostgreSQL, right? Maybe SQLite?

Nope, Crawshaw had other ideas.

I won’t ruin the surprise and tell you what they went with, but I will say it’s a widely deployed system amongst cloud natives…

David Hamp-Gonsalves created a really cool use for your old Kindle:

Second hand Kindles are waiting in drawers for someone to repurpose them into something great. Boasting large e-ink screens, wifi connectivity and ARM processors they are an amazing hacking platform.

In my case I created an information panel summarizing my day such as my calendar, surf and weather forecast, garbage schedule, school closures, etc. My favorite part is that any extra space is filled with a random Pokémon sprite which my kids(not me) like to come check in on.

Built with Rust plus some serverless backend data collection bits.

tmpsms is a command line utility written in POSIX sh that allows you to get a temporary phone number and receive SMSes. It uses Upmasked temporary SMS service in order to receive the messages. This is a very useful tool for those who use are testing applications during bug bounty hunting or just need some privacy and don’t wan’t to use your personal phone number.

I don’t know when I’d ever use this, but I love that it’s POSIX compliant and depends on just a few other CLI tools (curl, jq, and fzf).

JuiceFS is an open-source POSIX file system built on top of Redis and object storage (e.g. Amazon S3), designed and optimized for cloud native environment. By using the widely adopted Redis and S3 as the persistent storage, JuiceFS serves as a stateless middleware to enable many applications to share data easily.

What would happen if browsers came pre-installed with Node.js, an IDE, and a simple runtime environment?

…there’s been a kind of revolution around coding. “Javascript everywhere” (i.e. node.js) has really become the default web-development paradigm. Javascript is alluring - partly because every computer has a javascript GUI and runtime - the browser! You can code in javascript on your computer using a text editor and a browser - without ever touching the command line!

But, what if a full-fledged dev environment for JavaScript was just as ubiquitous as the runtime in the browser?

“Naming things is hard.” So say we all.

I talk often about the importance of a good name, and the relative difficulty of landing on that good name. If you find yourself particularly challenged by this process, then you definitely want to check out this naming cheat sheet.

About 18 months ago I started a project which had to develop directly against containerd with a full Linux system.

This presented a problem which I’d not really encountered before - Docker and Kubernetes on my Mac were no longer enough, I needed a full Linux environment, and so did the community.

This is how it went and what we learned along the way.

What are typosquatting attacks and how do they impact open source developers? If you’re a JavaScript developer then you should understand them and be conscious that you aren’t mistakenly installing a package such as electron-native-notify - because hey, that’s a malicious package!

Terence Eden on 2FA:

Use 2FA to prevent attackers masquerading as you. And use a password manager to prevent fake sites masquerading as real sites.

Penetration testing is when you (or someone you authorize) run a security assessment of a computer system by trying to break in to it.

In this repo, Carlos Polop (who is a pentester and cyber security researcher) shares his methodology for pentesting. This is just one piece of a larger collection of Carlos’ HackTricks book.

Abhishek Chaudhary:

Websites are like a canvas. You have complete freedom to design them the way you want. But unlike a painting, not all people will view your site the way you want. This article discusses how Responsive Web Design (RWD) evolved.

Container security is often overlooked topic, as people assume that containers are secure by default - which is not true. One of the ways to secure container workloads in Docker and Kubernetes is to leverage seccomp profiles and this advanced feature of container runtimes is explained and shown in this article.

Lars wrote a Changelog Post introducing the PETAL stack last week. Now he’s back with something a little more actionable, for those intrigued by the proposition.

Chip Huyen:

While looking for these MLOps tools, I discovered some interesting points about the MLOps landscape:

1. Increasing focus on deployment
2. The Bay Area is still the epicenter of machine learning, but not the only hub
3. MLOps infrastructures in the US and China are diverging
4. More interests in machine learning production from academia

If MLOps is new to you, Practical AI did a deep dive on the topic that will help you sort it out. Or if you’d prefer a shallow dive… just watch this.

The Deno team shared a recap of 2020 and plans for 2021.

With API stabilizations, several large infrastructure refactors, the 1.0 release, and shipping the single most requested feature, 2020 brought a lot of action to the Deno project.

Please fill out the Deno survey to help guide our development in 2021.

Drupal creator Dries Buytaert with lots of reason to celebrate:

On January 15, 2001, exactly 20 years ago, I released Drupal 1.0.0 into the world. I was a 22 years old, and just finished college. At the time, I had no idea that Drupal would someday power 1 in 35 websites, and impact so many people globally.

Quite the accomplishment. Congrats to Dries and the entire Drupal community!

In this post, he also shares why he’s still working on the project and details 3 birthday wishes for Drupal:

1. Never stop evolving
2. Continue our growing focus on ease-of-use
3. Economic systems to sustain and scale Open Source

Those sound like noble wishes to me. 💯

I’m testing out these styles for Hacker News using PageExtender for Safari (because I use Safari). But, I tweaked a few of the styles with the following ruleset changes.

#hnmain td {
  background-color: #101820
}
.title {
  font-size: 1rem
}
a:link {
  color: #efefef
}
.comhead {
  padding: .75rem 0 0.75rem 0
}