EGreg

If you’re an Ashkenazi orthodox Jew, it’s the opposite. Wearing suits every day is the norm. Along with a hat in some denominations.

(In 1930s it was also the norm for many men to do both.)

Plaintiffs seeking damages must show that owners knew or should have known about the dog’s patterns. Past complaints or vet records help build a strong case.

https://www.brandonjbroderick.com/new-york/dog-leash-laws-ne...

But I don’t like to just bitch. I like to build. So then I show the free and battle tested software I built lovingly over a decade, that solves exactly this, and that I use in my own companies, but also give away for free

https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

What more can I do? I’m just some guy in Brooklyn, who never got funded by VCs (except Balaji’s fund) but persisted for over a decade and published nearly everything as open source for the benefit of others who might know how to deploy it. I keep sharing better and better versions over the years.

What initially surprised me over the years is that the result when I share all this for free on HN is… I get downvoted by other HNers who vehemently hate someone “self promoting” a solution to this very problem. They donmt just “not care”, they care very much that others on HN should not be exposed to such free and open source solutions

Having faced the same problem (of people not running their own servers), I went ahead and built an all-in-one server that you can use to create binaries, copy them, manage public web files like in redbean, as well as php files to run inside the server, then distribute those too. Took me months of iteration with Claude. When I posted it on HN got… 3 upvotes.

Then it was resurrected and reposted by the mods, got 40 upvotes, lots of snark about me having dared to use AI to build it, and “TL;DR” comments, and then… the post resurrected and reposted by the HN moderators themselves was… flagged:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49749789

In the days since, I have improved the server a lot and v2 even lets regular PHP script kiddies build a Jack-Dorsey-style app on iOS and Android. Many people on HN will immediately have a reaction: “why PHP, it’s so old”. So I updated the github to answer that:

https://github.com/Qbix/webserver

Again, this is MIT licensed, and open source. On Reddit, the situation was even worse. Lots of upvotes at first, then anyone saying nice things about it got heavily downvoted and various trolls started posting snarky comments. Oh well, at least it attracted 150 stars and some people are actually forking it and using it.

But let’s be real, not everyone wants to run a webserver. That’s why we had “commodity hosting” in the past. But how to make it so that people can “just use” software they can trust, without anyone being able to tamper with it? In 2017, I got enamored with Blockchain for that reason. I saw tens ofnthousands of people running nodes, and letting normies “just post” transactions. I saw a way that high-calue transactions and balances could be protected. I launched Intercoin Inc, raised half a million dollars (and more since), built the software, deployed it on 7+ EVM blockchains, and made it freely accessibls:

https://intercoin.org/applications:

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1733567/000173356718...

Unlike most projects in 2018, we treated the fundraise like a security, and tried to do everything by the book. But, just sharing anything with the word “blockchain” in it should earn me the wrath and downvotes of a certain very active subset of HN. I feel like they almost see the word “blockchain” and insta downvote. Maybe these mechanisms are not even human? Who knows. It cost a lot of money to get right at the time, and released as free and open source. This is Hacker News. One would think they’d celebrate this, let others discover it and use it, even if they themselves don’t like web3. <— (there, I put that “keyword” in there, watch what happen to this comment now). But no.

But blockchain was expensive, slow, and couldn’t hold secrets. And that brings me to… my solution in 2026, which I spent over a year designing and building with AI:

https://safebots.ai/safebox.html

For now HN is split between AI fans and AI lamenters (I saw this arc in web3 too). So this should get a mixed reaction. Even though Safebox isn’t even only for AI. It’s a new security primitive, like blockchain itself was.

The key is this: normies don’t have to run it. You can run it, by cloning an EC2 instance, getting clients, and autonomously earning in safebux, which you can cash out on the… blockchains. Oh am I going to be downvoted now. There is nothing to configure, manage, etc. It is like running your own “commodity hosting”, except you never get to access client data, and you get paid through the decentralized system automatically, and clients get security, failover, etc.

There is much more to this, and soon you’ll hear more about it. But I expect to find - not just people “not caring” - but violent opposition from a very vocal and activist subset for some reason. I mean, I build it, refine it for a decade and give it away for free, for others to serve each other and make money. If you don’t want to, that’s fine, my company will run most of the servers (like Matt Mullenweg’s Wordpress.com did). Or you will be able to run some too, by just cloning an EC2 in your account on AWS, GCP, Azure, OCI, etc.

Once again, it’s not “most of the people out there”. Watch what happens right here on HN.

PS: Safebots + Safebox + Safebux is coming out in a couple months. Until then, I have released Safecloud for encrypted and decentralized storage, absolutely for free, and a alightly technical person can run a backend (Jet). And literally anyone can contribute storage and earn safebux by simply opening a tab and keeping it open. Or don’t earn safebux - the default is absolutely free, for everyone. Use it for some stakeholders or users of your own websites to contribute redundant storage. Or don’t. But at least maybe upvote to let others discover it? Anyway. Here are the links:

https://safebots.github.io/Safecloud/

Academic writeup: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.09870

And initial coverage by security magazines:

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2026/06/19/safecloud-browser...

Why couldn't these labs just train models on useful stuff and leave out the dangerous stuff?

I've been building https://github.com/Qbix since 2008 and let me tell ya, I took a lot of great ideas from Drupal, Kohana, Symfony, etc. But never Wordpress. It's just ... a mess. Wordpress just won by being first, basically. Kind of like Bitcoin.

PS: Years ago, I hired a guy in Pakistan to work with me on some Wordpress sites, for clients. I thought that the Divi theme and basic Wordpress would be secure. Every one of those sites got pwned, badly. Sure, maybe it was the plugins. But why take the chance? In 2026 it's way past time to not have to worry about basic security.

What do you think?

Furthermore, it's not just me associating LLMs with compilers. Linus Torvalds said this 2 months ago. I'm sure you'll find him to be tiresome too... you're much more knowledgeable than all of us: https://www.reddit.com/r/theprimeagen/comments/1ucitd0/linus...

Sorry no offense, but you're not very convincing, when you didn't even bother to look at the software or read the actual package documentation to any extent. You're pattern-matching in this case more than a low-weight LLM here.

So I now suspect your entire LLM-dar lol

Roadrunner, FrankenPHP and Swoole try to make it evented like Node, but require you to rewrite all your code to use their libraries. For everything from mysql to curl.

This lets you run your PHP unmodified, in 2 different ways:

1) with long persistent workers, clearing all statics and globals between requests

2) if that doesn’t work, eg because your functions have static variables inside etc. then you can use the fork mode, which can still handle 100x as many users as php-fpm due to the amount of RAM each of the workers takes up aa that’s the point!

I understand why… people are inundated with more content than ever. Even if it is a huge breakthrough, most won’t care and will just keep posting in a TL;DR way.

I hoped that many on HN would actually take this for a spin. It’s free and MIT-licensed. And if you serve any websites in PHP (as 70% of all websites are), you owe it to yourself to save money and serve more users on one machine. I mean, seriously, this lets you build a PHP app that serves 40,000 users on a $5/month machine. You’d raise your Series A before you need another machine LOL

This is an all-in one server. It even handles websockets with socket.io 5 compatibility! Yes, without it, people would additionally resort to Node for socket support and maybe Redis for message passing. One of the features is that this server finally handles it all. PHP for everything!

As far as the landing page — there are truly many features that this webserver enables. That’s why the website lists 9 categories and links to other pages. It also has expandable sections like “how can it be this fast?”

I do use LLMs in my toolchain, to generate text and code, and compilers to generate code, but I also cover it heavily with automated tests and also battle-test it in my own environments on actual workloads. I mean sheesh, I am literally sharing it so that you can download and run it yourself, and if you run into something obscure on your environment, report any issues and it’ll be fixed.

What happens is that I have the documentation and front facing websites also generated by LLMs. And many people commenting here didn’t even bother to click through and download the actual software or try it. If you did, you would have seen the tests, and example apps. You would have seen the graphicsl UX and dashboard the server itself enables. The fact that no one even mentioned it suggests to me that the people commenting are ones cutting corners. So me using more automation in addition to compiles and test suites isn’t the issue, if you are unwilling so much as to run it before opining publicly about it. Based solely on a README file.

In particular, this server allows people (like the entrepreneurs on HN) to handle 100x as many simultaneous users than current php-fpm, or be as safe as php-fpm while being as fast as Swoole, Roadrunner, FrankenPHP. Try it.

PS: the same thing happened here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49665345

The README is no longer than nginx documentation, though, or many manfiles of programs. The README explains all the features in one file, with results of actual benchmarks. I asked it to put emojis in there as well.

I use LLMs in my toolchain, same as I also use compilers. In fact, I use the LLMs to generate end-to-end test suites, and the test running is automated as well.

These examples include support for socket.io and rooms, which I highly doubt existed in the 90s. So the webserver can be used not just to serve HTTP requests to 40,000 simultaneous online users, but also have an entirely in-memory real-time chat server for 40,000 users (or anything more complex).

After over a decade of writing apps in PHP, I always wondered why we needed all that extra tooling around it just to serve websites. I suspected PHP alone could be faster. I didn’t realize how right I was.

This is an entire webserver and socket server written in pure PHP, meaning you can run web applications without nginx for serving files and websites, certbot for certificates, cron for periodic tasks, node for realtime sockets, etc. It comes out of the box with a user friendly dashboard and control panel, too. There are even standalone binaries you can download for Linux and MacOS that can contain your entire web application:

https://github.com/Qbix/webserver

Originally it was much faster than php-fpm, but now it is also faster than even the fastest PHP runtimes. And unlike those runtimes, it is able to run existing PHP apps without modification!

It’s not slop. It has been tested to be faster than every other PHP webserver. Here is HOW it can be this fast:

The vast majority of PHP apps make blocking I/O calls (to the database, files, network calls etc) While that happens, the thread is blocked.

FrankenPHP, Swoole, amphp and others take the “evented” approach which is much faster, but require all I/O calls to be rewritten to use their async libraries. But most existing PHP code would need a lot of work to be ported to async style, and even if it was, sometimes the async libraries don’t handle everything the mainstream ones do.

Qbix Webserver takes a different approach: it spawns hundreds, sometimes thousands of processes on Linux, Mac etc. When a process is blocked waiting on I/O, the rest of the application can handle thousands of concurrent users.

The reason this works is that that Qbix server allows apps to preload files and classes before it forks the worker processes. It can do this while being written in pure PHP.

While php-fpm can prefork workers, this causes each worker to take up a lot of memory, eg 40MB, duplicating all the bytecode from your entire framework and app. By contrast, Qbix Webserver is able to spawn workers that are around 140KB each for a typical Wordpress app. This is because pcntl_fork on Linux and MacOS only copies on write, so 4-16KB memory pages are only copied when you make a change to a variable. If all the variables are on one page (eg in one array) you can even have workers weighing 4-16KB total, allowing you to run TENS OF THOUSANDS of workers on a 4GB machine.

If you use composer install amphp, your code will use epoll instead, causing your app on Qbix Server to be even more efficient.

This is 2026. It would be great if your PHP was able to work with the latest socket.io and handle rooms and socket connections. Imagine a chat server that’s entirely in memory, and also able to handle 40,000 simultaneous users and connections.

Well, now you can. Qbix Webserver handles HTTP Requests, Websockets and rooms, even HTTP Push (for streaming AI tokens etc).

It also can manage your TLS certificates, run cron jobs, and more.

It supports headers like X-Accel-Redirect which lets you serve files with access control done by your app. (Though these aren’t as fast as nginx because PHP lacks support for sendfile, so if you want additional 2x boost in speed for protected static files, you should proxy these headers to NGINX. For public static files, just use a CDN.)

It even supports something new I invented, X-Cache-Tree allowing your code to cache parts of a webpage. Yes, that’s right — you are no longer required to render an entire page again if only a couple parts of it got invalidated. The X-Cache-Invalidate header can intelligently invalidate many pages at the same time!

Instead of hating on it, why not try it?

Visit github and grab the actual server. Launch it with PHP, and use the visual dashboard in your browser to manage your apps. Enjoy! It’s MIT licensed

A good framework can maybe cache some of this with the opcode cache, and apcu. Saving some milliseconds.

But regardless of all this, each worker process takes up a lot of memory (the entire framework, etc) which is often megabytes. By contrast, the Qbix webserver forks after you have loaded the classes. Being written in PHP actually gives it an advantage — the workers become much smaller and you can run 100x of them.

This accomplishes what no other PHP webserver has managed to do: give you the speed of Swoole / FrankenPHP while at the samw time let you run unmodified PHP scripts in a “shared-nothing” fork environment, maintaining the strict isolation PHP is known for, so there are no memory leaks or data leaks between requests.

Speaking of that, check out the “full-stack microservice” architecture that allows you to isolate your sensitive credentials / config from the main PHP process, preventing a host of attacks.