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GauntletWizard

3,939 karma · joined April 20, 2010

Site Reliability Engineer

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/gauntletwizard; my proof: https://keybase.io/gauntletwizard/sigs/WLBbW433_lqvZr3EFcUj8sCaut00PcbdQ5dKfxC0TV4 ]

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GauntletWizard··on macOS 26 breaks custom DNS settings including .internal
The LLM presents a perverse incentive here - It is used for perceived efficiency gains, most of which would be consumed by the act of rewriting and redrafting. The alienness of the thoughts in the document is also non-condusive to this; Reading a long document about something you think you know but did not write is exhausting and mentally painful - This is why code review has such relatively poor results.

Quite frankly, while having an LLM draft and rewriting it would be okay, I do not believe it is reasonable to expect that to ever happen. It will be either like high school paper plagarism (Just change around some of the sentences and rephrase it bro), or it will simply not even get that much. It is unreasonable with what we know about human psychology to expect that "Human-Rewrites of LLM drafts", at the level that the human contributes something, are maintainable and scalable; Most people psychologically can't put in that effort.

GauntletWizard··on Okmain: How to pick an OK main colour of an image
I really like this approach. I worked on this problem (create a nice background for an image) for a couple weeks many years ago while organizing my desktop wallpaper collection, and never came up with a good answer. Unfortunately, I think that it's been "solved" in the tiktok era; an enlarged and blurred version of the image is used to fill the background space.

The blurred mirror is inoffensive to almost everyone, and yet it always strikes me as gauche. Easy to ignore and yet I feel that it adds a lot of useless visual noise.

GauntletWizard··on Israel Strikes Oil Facilities in Iran
The problem with being unfree and alive, is one day you suddenly aren't, and you know exactly why and yet still have no idea of the specifics.

The general trend of more freedom==greater lifespan and more healthy children is very clear, but muddying the waters is a favorite tactic of those who'd exploit the lack of freedom for their own benefit.

GauntletWizard··on The surprising whimsy of the Time Zone Database
Who cares if it works in places that won't play nice? They're digging their own grave if they don't publish, and only hurting themselves. The nice thing about massively distributed systems is that they can be as reliable as the people who depend on them need them to be, with the relevant authorities having the option to be as real or as clowny as they want to be.

That said, I would never respect the DNS TTL of such a scheme, for my own use cases. I'd query each of them once an hour, latch the last response forever, and delay propagation of a new response for a full week that it stayed stable before serving the new record.

GauntletWizard··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (March 2026)
SEEKING WORK | US | Remote OK

I am a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), Google Style, with experience at both large and small organizations. I can help you build a Platform Engineering practice from the very beginning. I'm looking to help small dev teams increase their velocity by implementing best-practices of Devops: CI/CD, Kubernetes Deployments, and effective Monitoring frameworks.

My resume: https://resume.gauntletwizard.net/ThomasHahnResume.pdf

My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-hahn-3344ba3/

My Github: https://github.com/GauntletWizard

GauntletWizard··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (March 2026)
SEEKING FREELANCE WORK | US | Remote OK

I am a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), Google Style, with experience at both large and small organizations. I can help you build a Platform Engineering practice from the very beginning. I'm looking to help small dev teams increase their velocity by implementing best-practices of Devops: CI/CD, Kubernetes Deployments, and effective Monitoring frameworks.

My resume: https://resume.gauntletwizard.net/ThomasHahnResume.pdf

My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-hahn-3344ba3/

My Github: https://github.com/GauntletWizard

GauntletWizard··on Museum of Plugs and Sockets
As someone who lives in an RV and has done some marine electrical, I was disappointed to see zero mention of those uses. North America uses NEMA 6-50, NEMA 14-50, NEMA L6-30 and L17-30 for RV and marine uses.
GauntletWizard··on Zuckerberg's "fix" for child safety could end anonymous internet access for all
I have no problem supplying my real name online - it's trivially attached to this account via my resume, and I use this account name all over. I also have several other account names, some disposable and some not.

There are plenty of reasons to be anonymous online. There's plenty of reasons not to be. I kind of wish that the government would launch a series of public political debate forums that required real ID, not that I think they would actually be valuable places for debate, but the technical challenges would be worthwhile to solve and the ability to publicly register debate positions would be incredibly useful for nailing politicians down.

The problem comes when the government tries to regulate one form or another, because strongly authenticated, pseudonymous, and anonymous forums all have their place in debate, and there's reasons for both public and private entities to host all three.

GauntletWizard··on Spain’s LaLiga has blocked access to freedom.gov
Absolutely, America does seize domains with the assistance of local authorities[1] for crimes that are in prosecution. You may disagree with the reasoning for these crimes, or disagree that they are crimes at all, but US censorship works as a part of the legal system with well defined due process and remedies.

This is classic whataboutism compared to the outright corporateocracy of la liga's blocking and seizure.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-law-enforcement-assists-bu...

GauntletWizard··on Amazon blames human employees for an AI coding agent's mistake
That person was unlikely to be the line employee, but rather the management chain putting pressure on engineering to "10x" their productivity by using it, and enforcing it's use as a part of that plot.
GauntletWizard··on Mamdani Hires Lisa Gelobter as Chief Tech Officer
That's their post breakup HQ - they moved in there in 1929. The Boss Tweed days were in 190 Nassau Street and 141 East 14th Street (demolished)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tammany_Hall#Headquarters

190 Nassau Street - https://maps.app.goo.gl/3zjkd2mC6PwAYVB26?g_st=ac

GauntletWizard··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2026)
SEEKING FREELANCE WORK | US | Remote OK

I am a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), Google Style, with experience at both large and small organizations. I can help you build a Platform Engineering practice from the very beginning. I'm looking to help small dev teams increase their velocity by implementing best-practices of Devops: CI/CD, Kubernetes Deployments, and effective Monitoring frameworks.

My resume: https://resume.gauntletwizard.net/ThomasHahnResume.pdf

My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-hahn-3344ba3/

My Github: https://github.com/GauntletWizard

GauntletWizard··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (February 2026)
SEEKING WORK | US | Remote OK

I am a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), Google Style, with experience at both large and small organizations. I can help you build a Platform Engineering practice from the very beginning. I'm looking to help small dev teams increase their velocity by implementing best-practices of Devops: CI/CD, Kubernetes Deployments, and effective Monitoring frameworks.

My resume: https://resume.gauntletwizard.net/ThomasHahnResume.pdf

My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-hahn-3344ba3/

My Github: https://github.com/GauntletWizard

GauntletWizard··on Notepad++ supply chain attack breakdown
Unless there's an announcement of a zero day, update a month after each new release. Keeps you on a recent version while giving security systems and researchers time to detect threats.
GauntletWizard··on In praise of –dry-run
That is the default, but the correct (and poorly documented and supported) way to use terraform is to save the plan and re-use it when you apply. See the -out parameter to terraform plan, and then never apply again without it.
GauntletWizard··on Late night pizzeria nearby The Pentagon has suddenly surged in traffic
Read more about the burrito tunnel here: https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...
GauntletWizard··on The Netflix Simian Army (2011)
Much of the value from Chaos testing can be gotten much more simply with good rolling CI. Many of the problems that Chaos engineering solved are now considered table stakes, directly implemented into our frameworks and tested well by saidsame CI.

A significant problem with early 'Web Scale' deployments was out of date or stale configuration values. You would specify that your application connects to backend1.example.com for payments and backend2.example.com for search. A common bug in early libraries was that the connection was established once at startup, and then never again. When the backend1 service was long lived, this just worked for months or years at a time - TCP is very reliable, especially if you have sane values on keepalives and retries. Chaos Monkey helped find this class of bug. A more advanced but quite similar class of bug: You configured a DNS name, which was evaluated once at startup, and again didn't update, Your server for backend1 had a stable address for years at a time, but suddenly you needed to failover to your backup or move it to new hardware. At the time of chaos monkey, I had people fight me on this - They believed that doing a DNS lookup every five minutes for your important backends was unacceptable overhead.

The other part is - Modern deployment strategies make these old problems untenable to begin with. If you're deploying on kubernetes, you don't have an option here - Your pods are getting rebuilt with new IP addresses regularly. If you're connecting to a service IP, then that IP is explicitly a LB - It is defined as stable. These concepts are not complex, but they are edge boundaries, and we have better and more explicit contracts because we've realized the need and you "just do" deploy this way now.

Those are just Chaos Monkey problems, though - Latency Monkey is huge, but solves a much less common problem. Conformity Monkey is mostly solved by compliance tools; You don't build, you buy it. Doctor Monkey is just healthchecks - K8s (and other deployment frameworks) has those built in.

In short, Chaos Monkey isn't necessary because we've injected the chaos and learned to control most of what that was doing, and people have adopted the other tools - They're just not standalone, they're built in.

GauntletWizard··on 50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don't own a record player
I buy vinyl for the album cover. If somebody were to sell me a digital download which also ships me an empty slipcase, I would buy it, for almost the same price that I pay for vinyl. I do have the record player, but I don't think I've used it more than a dozen days in my life.

There's a lot of value to the physical artifact, but the precise nature of the physical artifact is up for playing with.

GauntletWizard··on Amazon will allow ePub and PDF downloads for DRM-free eBooks
You've never purchased a DVD or Blu-ray?
GauntletWizard··on Carrier-grade NAT: The Killer of the "Homelab"
AI driven research tells you everything you need to know about your conclusions; there's a hint of truth that's hiding an incredible web of misconceptions.

Mesh VPNs as a security mechanism replacing having secure server to server communication is just replacing one soft-center security mechanism with another. Mesh VPNs as the gateway to services that are themselves well secured is well over doubly secure over just having publicly accessible services; now you need the security holes to line up.

GauntletWizard··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (December 2025)
SEEKING FREELANCE WORK | US | Remote OK

I am a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), Google Style, with experience at both large and small organizations. I can help you build a Platform Engineering practice from the very beginning. I'm looking to help small dev teams increase their velocity by implementing best-practices of Devops: CI/CD, Kubernetes Deployments, and effective Monitoring frameworks.

My resume: https://resume.gauntletwizard.net/ThomasHahnResume.pdf

My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-hahn-3344ba3/

My Github: https://github.com/GauntletWizard

GauntletWizard··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (December 2025)
SEEKING WORK | US | Remote OK

I am a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), Google Style, with experience at both large and small organizations. I can help you build a Platform Engineering practice from the very beginning. I'm looking to help small dev teams increase their velocity by implementing best-practices of Devops: CI/CD, Kubernetes Deployments, and effective Monitoring frameworks.

My resume: https://resume.gauntletwizard.net/ThomasHahnResume.pdf

My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-hahn-3344ba3/

My Github: https://github.com/GauntletWizard

GauntletWizard··on Building the largest known Kubernetes cluster
The reason to target k8s on cloud vms is that cloud VMs don't subdivide as easily or as cleanly. Managing them is a pain. K8s is an abstraction layer for that - Rather than building whole machine images for each product, you create lighter weight docker images (how light weight is a point of some contention), and you only have to install your logging, monitoring, and etc once.

Your advice about bigger machines is spot on - K8s biggest problem is how relatively heavyweight the kublet is, with memory requirements of roughly half a gig. On a modern 128g server node that's a reasonable overhead, for small companies running a few workloads on 16g nodes it's a cost of doing business, but if you're running 8 or 4g nodes, it looks pretty grim for your utilization.

GauntletWizard··on NSA and IETF, part 3: Dodging the issues at hand
The NSA has railroaded bad crypto before [1]. The correct answer is to just ignore it, to say "okay, this is the NSA's preferred backdoored crypto standard, and none of our actual implementations will support it."

It is not acceptable for the government to be forcing bad crypto down our throats, it is not acceptable for the NSA to be poisoning the well this way, but for all I respect DJB, they are "playing the game" and 20 to 7 is consensus.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG

GauntletWizard··on The Bay Area is cursed
I found the opposite problem. I tried to hang out with non-tech people, I spent a lot of time hanging out with non-tech people. The kinds of people who I ended up hanging out with, and I recognized that this might just be a me problem, though I certainly tried to avoid pigeonholeding myself, were not great people. The great non-tech people I met didn't stay very long.
GauntletWizard··on Python Steering Council unanimously accepts "PEP 810, Explicit lazy imports"
Removing "print" in 3.0 helped their case significantly, as well.
GauntletWizard··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?
SEEKING WORK | US | Remote OK

I am a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), Google Style, with experience at both large and small organizations. I can help you build a Platform Engineering practice from the very beginning. I'm looking to help small dev teams increase their velocity by implementing best-practices of Devops: CI/CD, Kubernetes Deployments, and effective Monitoring frameworks.

My resume: https://resume.gauntletwizard.net/ThomasHahnResume.pdf

My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-hahn-3344ba3/

My Github: https://github.com/GauntletWizard

GauntletWizard··on You Don't Need Anubis
Anubis's design is copied from a great botnet protection mechanism - You serve the Javascript cheaply from memory, and then the client is forced to do expensive compute in order to use your expensive compute. This works great at keeping attackers from attempting to waste your time; It turns a 1:1000 amplification in compute costs into a 1000:1.

It is a shitty, and obviously bad solution for preventing scraping traffic. The goal of scraping traffic isn't to overwhelm your site, it's to read it once. If you make it prohibitively expensive to read your site even once, nobody comes to it. If you make it only mildly expensive, nobody scraping cares.

Anubis is specifically DDOS protection, not generally anti-bot, aside from defeating basic bots that don't emulate a full browser. It's been cargo-culted in front of a bunch of websites because of the latter, but it was obviously not going to work for long.

GauntletWizard··on Independently verifying Go's reproducible builds
This is important work, and I thank you for it. These public transparency logs are important for keeping honest people honest, but also for keeping dishonest people out - If someone does manage to backdoor Google's build process, this is how they'll know.
GauntletWizard··on Apple alerts exploit developer that his iPhone was targeted with gov spyware
An opinion, based on meeting people like https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/capital-one-hacking-sus...
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