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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 Dogs can distinguish between fearful and angry or sad human faces
Obvious but good to get confirmation. Anyone who's owned a dog knows that they can tell your mood in myriad ways, but this is the kind of basic research that is necessary to clear the way for more serious insights.
GauntletWizard··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (September 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.

I'm particularly selling my skills in PKI/TLS. My clients are rapidly moving to MTLS for all service-to-service authentication and even for browser-to-service authentication for internal tools.

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 Zohran and the Short Link
The problem with these short pithy urls is that their lifetime is limited - there's only so many initiative names and they're going to collide and be removed and replaced.

Cool uris don't change[1]. Short, readable uris are great but they should be merely redirecs, and the mapping should be version controlled and exposed to the public as an immutable history.

[1] https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI

GauntletWizard··on Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75oun5gvDAU&t=116s
GauntletWizard··on Slovakia finds Russian backdoor in traffic speed cameras
A big fuck-up, but some people prefer (nobly even if I don't abide by the same rule) to keep some words out of their mouths.
GauntletWizard··on OTel isn’t going well
Jaeger doesn't really implement an otel spec - Otel wrapped itself around Jaeger.
GauntletWizard··on OTel isn’t going well
The alternative is Prometheus (which is freaking great) and Jaegar (which is freaking great), each alone. This is better, because Otel is trying to put two distinct things (monitoring and metrics, distributed tracing) into one package, because they know how to use neither.

Neither Prometheus metrics nor Jaeger traces are magic bullets. Neither of them are complicated, either, and in fact the fact that they're not complicated is their greatest strength. You can and should understand every facet of what they entail. You should build the (very small) shims that they need for your company's framework every time. It's not hard. It's not hard because it's not complicated. The fact that it's not complicated seems to break people's brains. They are accurate because they're simple and they're easy to work with because they're simple, and OTel is neither.

GauntletWizard··on The Government Is Monitoring Anti-Flock TikTok and Instagram Accounts
I don't even have a problem with every cop being equipped with an automatic ALPR... So long as the data is not retained. I do believe that we need better auditing and oversight in response to the availability, but it's not a great evil that an APB can be virtually guaranteed to catch a car... So long as we're using them carefully and judiciously, in response to immediate and recent threats or a clearly understood long tail. There's supposed to be a balance of power; it's not evil to give the police new powers, but it is evil to give politicians unanswered and unlimited tracking of the movements of anyone they so desire.
GauntletWizard··on Pass the Passkey: A Novel Attack Surface in Passwordless Authentication
The primitives of a tpm ("observations", which in practice map to ca-signing keys of various levels of boot stage) are a very poor match for the real world. In order for them to be usefully consistent, you have to have consistent inputs. That means you can't observe the kernel itself, but instead you observe a key that signs a kernel. This is awful when it's Microsoft signing a series of kernels that advance one-way but the TPM doesn't actually ratchet to prevent downgrade attacks (and would be even worse if it did, because then you'd inevitably brick machines again and again). Instead you trust a long-lived CA and God help you when you need to rotate it.

It's even worse if you're self-hosting the signing, to the point that despite a ton of work put into making it safe and understood I wouldn't do it with the current design; a bare-state unlock is more predictable and reliable but I'll make sure to regularly exercise my backup key and header.

GauntletWizard··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (August 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.

I'm particularly selling my skills in PKI/TLS. My clients are rapidly moving to MTLS for all service-to-service authentication and even for browser-to-service authentication for internal tools.

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 Turning a dumb AC unit smart (without losing my security deposit)
I'm surprised we haven't seen a cheap, USB powered Bluetooth RE-232C dongle for home assistant yet.
GauntletWizard··on RTX 2080 Ti Memory Upgrade to 22 GB
If the untrained "you"'s failure rate is above about 25% with the failure result being a merely inoperable but repairable card, it's not an acceptable outcome for most people, who quite reasonably see it as an unacceptable risk.

In practice, it's more like a 75-90% failure rate if you're unfamiliar with ball-soldering techniques, which most are since it's been considered impractical to do soldering in the US since the through-hole days, and so there's not a professional tradesman class to teach kids. What does exist of soldering is stuck in the far past from an electronics manufacturing perspective.

Tl;dr: https://xkcd.com/2501/

GauntletWizard··on Three ways people respond to a problem (other than solving it)
Unusual? Only because we've made it so. Cruel? Nah. Locking someone up because they're criminally insane is less cruel than letting them roam the streets, both to the perpetrator and the people around them.
GauntletWizard··on Costco is the anti-Amazon
The postal service is a quasi government entity that has operated (not to get too deep into the politics of it) for many years at a loss. It does compete with Amazon, as well as being used by Amazon, but it's very different as a business than Amazon.
GauntletWizard··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (July 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.

I'm particularly selling my skills in PKI/TLS. My clients are rapidly moving to MTLS for all service-to-service authentication and even for browser-to-service authentication for internal tools.

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 Zuckerberg's war on whistleblowers
They have done worse things, since the beginning, that they know about but people are not primed to understand yet. Each whistleblower brings us closer to full understanding, bit by bit, showing that even the lower ranks see and are party to things that are unthinkable to the older generation and that the younger are only now waking up to being not okay.
GauntletWizard··on The (real) dead economy theory
I believe that AI is a singularity. Just like a Black hole, no information can escape and you're slowly (by subjective experience) dragged in and spaghettified.
GauntletWizard··on Kirkland Roundabouts
Yes, because nobody goes that way anymore - It's too much of a time sink, significantly because you never end up where you want to go. Instead the real crossing points got even more crowded, or were until this abomination got installed.

Thankfully, I literally sold my house because of it, and my timing was good and I got out before prices dropped.

GauntletWizard··on There's still no point in gigabit broadband
Don't let your average usage fool you. You do notice the snappiness of downloading a large file and having it take a third to a tenth the time. You rarely manage to fully saturate a gigabit connection, but while downloading isos and software updates in seconds rather than minutes, your Internet stays snappy the whole time.

Yes, your overall usage of gigabit is only a few percent. It's way oversold anyway, so you could never use all of that. It's still way worth it for those short bursts of speed.

GauntletWizard··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 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.

I'm particularly selling my skills in PKI/TLS. My clients are rapidly moving to MTLS for all service-to-service authentication and even for browser-to-service authentication for internal tools.

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 Nonprofit hospitals spend billions on consultants with no clear effect
Complicated legal structures, and favorable treatment by a government who uses it as a form of cultural diplomacy. The tldr is that there's a nonprofit that owns the company that operates as Ikea, while there's some concessions made to a for-profit that owns the IKEA branding.

https://www.europeanceo.com/business-and-management/ikea-com...

GauntletWizard··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 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.

I'm particularly selling my skills in PKI/TLS. My clients are rapidly moving to MTLS for all service-to-service authentication and even for browser-to-service authentication for internal tools.

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 Your Smart TV is taking screenshots of your screen every 15 seconds (2024)
That's because they understand how creepy it is. But you can find plenty of pieces about what great things it's doing for local municipalities, who have comparably small budgets, and read between the lines.

https://corporate.comcast.com/press/releases/comcast-expands...

GauntletWizard··on Your Smart TV is taking screenshots of your screen every 15 seconds (2024)
They're increasingly turning to contracts with Comcast and AT+T so that even if you don't have them on the network, they can phone home on the neighbor's wifi.
GauntletWizard··on Global freedom declined for the 20th consecutive year in 2025
Lobbying groups are two-faced all of the time. Not just "some of the time that is a lot", but all of the time. Lobbying groups basically never do in private what they say they do in public, and it is more common than any other type of lobbying group that a lobbying group is working directly against its front-page public relations and name.

For a recent local to me example, an organization called "Lake Washington Working Families"[1] lobbies against bringing in a new food wholesaler in a food desert. Every word in the name is a lie; they are not based in lake Washington, or even Washington at all. They do not represent families and especially not working families. They represent a specific, powerful Union; I do not begrudge them representing the interests of their union members, but I do begrudge the outright lies that they are using to do so.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1slg7v8/a_dive_int...

GauntletWizard··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (April 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.

I'm particularly selling my skills in PKI/TLS. My clients are rapidly moving to MTLS for all service-to-service authentication and even for browser-to-service authentication for internal tools.

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? (April 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.

I'm particularly selling my skills in PKI/TLS. My clients are rapidly moving to MTLS for all service-to-service authentication and even for browser-to-service authentication for internal tools.

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 OpenCiv1 – open-source rewrite of Civ1
There's another recommendation that I haven't tried, but I've played a bunch of https://rayfowler.itch.io/remnants-of-the-precursors and can recommend it.

I wish there were one for MOO2, though. With some modern rebalancing...

GauntletWizard··on Trivy under attack again: Widespread GitHub Actions tag compromise secrets
Because the true name of the feature is VisualSourceSafe actions. It's all over the code of the runner if you take a second to look, and the runner, like the rest of the feature, is of typical early 2000s Microsoft quality, which is to say, none at all.
GauntletWizard··on macOS 26 breaks custom DNS settings including .internal
I completely agree - The efficiency gains are purely from a selfish standpoint.
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