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allanbreyeson To become a better writer, read as much as you can

I hope you publish, and I hope you tell that story. And I hope people read it.

There's a sobering article recently published in The Atlantic[1][2] about the end of reading and how we're in a postliterate age. We're reading more words than ever, but instead of coming from books, they're coming from digital media. We're losing that same muscle for long-form reading and deep focus that the original author talks about being so critical for writing. I think it's the same muscle that lets us think. Quoting from The Atlantic:

> What’s at risk is nothing less than the ability to think for oneself. If people become overreliant on AI to write for them, they could lose the capacity to interrogate or even develop their own views. These are quintessentially human capacities.

Accelerated now by generative AI, I fear that the end of reading goes hand-in-hand with the end of writing. I've totally sworn of AI for reading and writing. Maybe that makes me a Luddite, but I don't want to lose those muscles and I don't want the world to become a place where humans no longer read or write or think.

[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-...

[2]: https://archive.ph/Rpquh

allanbreyeson Infrastructure decisions I endorse or regret after 4 years at a startup (2024)

Martin Fowler called this (anti-)pattern an "integration database" and discouraged it since at least 2004[1]

[1]: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/IntegrationDatabase.html

allanbreyeson Big data is dead (2023)

There are machines that can fit that and more: https://yourdatafitsinram.net/

I'm not advocating that this is generally a good or bad idea, or even economical, but it's possible.

allanbreyeson Show HN: Open-source alternative to HashiCorp/IBM Vault

For your home network, you might like Mozilla SOPS for secrets storage. You can keep your secrets in an encrypted file and have a container that loads those secrets and puts it into each service's environment variables. At least that way you aren't committing plaintext secrets to source or having them laying around in the clear, plus it's a breeze to manage and edit them.

allanbreyeson Xzbot: Notes, honeypot, and exploit demo for the xz backdoor

Ugh, that this psyops sockpuppetry may have started or contributed to the maintainer's mental health issues seems like the most depressing part of all this. Maintaining OSS is hard enough.

allanbreyeson Short session expiration does not help security

NIST dropped the password change recommendation a while back [1] but it still lingers on. The staying power and long tail of this deprecated advice is unfortunate, to say the least.

I don't personally agree that short sessions is bad advice, but Phil Venables has an article that you might enjoy, "Ceremonial Security and Cargo Cults" [2]

[1] https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-FAQ/#q-b05

[2] https://www.philvenables.com/post/ceremonial-security-and-ca...

allanbreyeson Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

https://allan.reyes.sh/

I usually have more plans to write things than actual time, but I do keep some articles/lists "evergreen" and they come up in conversations quite a bit:

- https://allan.reyes.sh/reading/ - Books I'm reading, plan to read, or have read (and lightly reviewed) - https://allan.reyes.sh/courses/ - 50+ online courses I took (and also lightly reviewed) - https://allan.reyes.sh/insights/ - Same theme, but for papers and articles

allanbreyeson Ask HN: How do you test SQL?

This is a great way to test for backwards-incompatible changes if your fleet is running canaries or instances on different versions backed by a singleton database. You apply the migrations, checkout the app from the old version, and then re-run your test suite. Any failures are a reasonably high signal that some backwards-incompatible migration was introduced.

allanbreyeson Ask HN: Any pain points worth building an MVP for?

Have you tried Nix[1]? The learning curve was a bit steep for me, but I think I finally started "getting" it and it absolutely solves this problem for me. Now I'm at the point where if I install Nix on any computer, VM, whatever, I can just pull in my configs via home manager[2] and everything Just Works. It's seriously one of the best package managers I've ever used, and I can't imagine going back to anything else. Windows support is only via WSL, so this might be a non-starter for you.

[1]: https://nixos.org/

[2]: https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager

allanbreyeson New user guide: How to organize your qubes

The secure copy and paste feature always seemed to address the wrong threat model or use case for me. Sure, it's great that it keeps things isolated and compartmentalized across VMs, but it doesn't help much if you accidentally paste it into a phishing site. I wish there was just better browser integration for it, so you could have a password manager that could only access secrets on-demand + also automatically verify the domain or site you're trying to enter credentials into.

Anyway, still very cool stuff. I used Qubes for a few years before I made the mistake of purchasing a laptop that wasn't fully supported, but I often think about picking it back up or trying to install it again.

allanbreyeson Master’s Degree in Computer Science

Check out https://lucylabs.gatech.edu! David Joyner started it to help foster this opportunity for students and alumni, alike.

allanbreyeson Steam to Chrome OS

You can do remote play on a Chromebook right now with Moonlight! Works great (for me). Some other alternatives include Parsec and Rainway, and probably a few others I'm missing.

allanbreyeson Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?

You might enjoy: http://www.humansnotinvited.com

allanbreyeson Ask HN: What are the best advanced computer science courses online?

+OMSA (Analytics) +OMSCY (Cybersecurity)

These are fantastic programs that cost only $7-10k. https://omscentral.com has reviews of the classes, for the curious. My personal favorites are:

- Reverse Engineering and Binary Exploitation

- Reinforcement Learning and Decision-Making

- Bayesian Statistics

allanbreyeson Thinking of a Cybersecurity Career?

Can you talk about your interview process? e.g. types of interviews, screens vs. on-sites, distributions, etc. What are the shortcomings that keeps a candidate from an offer in the final steps, e.g. the candidate passes screening interviews, but falls short on an on-site interview. What are the indicators you observe that differentiate a senior candidate? How do you go about evaluating entry-level and junior candidates? Thank you!

allanbreyeson Thinking of a Cybersecurity Career?

A follow-up: how much do you value OSCP?

allanbreyeson Finally, I Closed My LinkedIn

I use uBlock Origin to completely block out the news feed and messaging, and it makes my LinkedIn experience orders of magnitude better. When I visit linkedin.com, now, I'm greeted with a navigation header bar and a blank page where the news feed used to be. It's perfect.

I personally found messaging to not be very useful or relevant, and I just couldn't keep up with the backlog of messages. If they really want to contact me, they can just email me.

Here are the UBO rules:

  www.linkedin.com###voyager-feed
  www.linkedin.com###messaging
  www.linkedin.com##.msg-overlay-bubble-header
  www.linkedin.com##.msg-overlay-list-bubble__content--scrollable.msg-overlay-list-bubble__content
  www.linkedin.com###msg-overlay
  www.linkedin.com###messaging-nav-item

allanbreyeson Show HN: k3sup ('ketchup') – bootstrap Kubernetes with k3s over SSH

It looks like this is more like "k3s up" to bootstrap k3s, which I just learned is purportedly a lightweight Kubernetes [1]. They named it K3s because:

> We wanted an installation of Kubernetes that was half the size in terms of memory footprint. Kubernetes is a 10-letter word stylized as K8s. So something half as big as Kubernetes would be a 5-letter word stylized as K3s. There is no long form of K3s and no official pronunciation.

[1]: https://rancher.com/docs/k3s/latest/en/

allanbreyeson GitHub was down

> a high rate of randomly-timed failures is a kind of degraded experience, but not as critical as blocky patches of downtime

Do you think that's an accurate generalization for all software and business contexts? I think a novel insight about the paper is that windowed user uptime is able to visualize the differences. (See Figure 20 from the paper.)

allanbreyeson GitHub was down

> What is the actual calculation?

Not answering this directly, but the paper Meaningful Availability [0] released recently really changed my opinion on how to calculate and visualize availability. There's a discussion on HN as well [1].

[0]: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/nsdi20spring_hauer_prepu... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22424173

allanbreyeson Switch from Chrome to Firefox

I didn't see this mentioned, but for a bit more customization, check out Firefox Profilemaker, a tool to "help you to create a Firefox profile with the defaults you like": https://ffprofile.com

allanbreyeson Army Camouflage That Failed to Hide Its Soldiers

It's also (marginally) useful for saving costs and time from sewing and having to purchase badges and patches for each uniform. This was pretty helpful while deployed IMO, since you'd just get new uniforms and could immediately put on your nametapes and patches.

Velcro pockets, though... those were terrible. Both in durability (their "grip" would weaken over time) and noise.

allanbreyeson Omscs: The Revolution Will Be Digitized

OMSCS grad, father, and full-time SWE, here, also currently enrolled in the OMS Analytics program. I had my first kid mid-way through the program, and it was pretty rough. Something's gotta budge, and for me, it was sleep. In total, I pulled about 15 all-nighters, give or take, and watched a whole lot of lectures holding an infant. Most of the all-nighters were for large assignments/projects. It's tough, but can be done. Some tips:

1. Load-balance your courses. omscentral.com is an excellent resource for this, and I made sure that the workload never exceeded 20 hours per week (there's crowd-sourced statistics there). Pairing some of the more work-intensive courses with "easier" courses was very helpful, in retrospect.

2. Spread out your courses. It's self-paced! You can take 1 course per semester, skip a semester, etc. Before my kid arrived, I front-loaded and took a 3-course semester.

3. Watch lectures at 2x speed. This was clutch. Most of the content has very slow speakers, likely for clarity, so if you're a native English speaker, watching at 2x speed is usually reasonable.

4. Be okay with mediocre grades. This was probably the most liberating aspect for me. In undergrad, I really cared about my grades. Not caring about grades in OMSCS (or caring more about learning what I want to learn) was more liberating. There were many times I submitted sub-par assignments because they just didn't interest me, or I would rather have spent time with my family.

Hope this helps. If you attend the program, join the unofficial Slack group (I run it). Happy to chat with you offline.

allanbreyeson YAML: probably not so great after all (2017)

I appreciate your humility and professionalism in a discussion thread that holds a lot of criticism; suffice it to say, I should have practiced a bit more humility and a bit less "Monday morning quarterbacking" in my original post. And I should have read your comment on YAML's history. To right the record: you got _so_ much right with YAML, and it's unfair for me to cherry-pick this example 20 years later. Sincere apologies...

As the saying goes, "there are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses." YAML, like any language, isn't perfect, but it's withheld the test of time and is used by software around the world—many have found it incredibly useful. Sincere thanks for your contribution and work.

allanbreyeson YAML: probably not so great after all (2017)

I'd like to propose the "YAML-NOrway Law."

"Anyone who uses YAML long enough will eventually get burned when attempting to abbreviate Norway."

Example:

  NI: Nicaragua
  NL: Netherlands
  NO: Norway # boom!

`NO` is parsed as a boolean type, which with the YAML 1.1 spec, there are 22 options to write "true" or "false."[1] For that example, you have wrap "NO" in quotes to get the expected result.

This, along with many of the design decisions in YAML strike me as a simple vs. easy[2] tradeoff, where the authors opted for "easy," at the expense of simplicity. I (and I assume others) mostly use YAML for configuration. I need my config files to be dead simple, explicit, and predictable. Easy can take a back seat.

[1]: http://yaml.org/type/bool.html [2]: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy

allanbreyeson Amazon EKS – Now Generally Available

HA seems like a poor choice as a default. I don't want to pay ~$150/month for dev and staging clusters, and I certainly don't need them to be HA.

IIUC, Google/GKE and Microsoft/AKS are single-zone by default... free for masters, but not free for HA.

allanbreyeson Amazon EKS – Now Generally Available

FYI: EKS is currently only available in us-west-2 (Oregon) and us-east-1 (N. Virginia)

allanbreyeson Amazon follows Google and Apple and bans system-wide ad blockers on app store

I have this on my mobile device. I'm using Wireguard as a VPN and the DNS sinkhole is on the server. I haven't noticed any severe latency problems, but yea, I've noticed that the battery runs out sooner. Encrypting/decrypting adds enough overhead that it's noticeable.

allanbreyeson Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS

No nested categories. They're all flat. Miniflux is ultra minimalist and "opinionated," which I ended up preferring to all the others. YMMV! If you're looking for a ton of features or customization, look elsewhere.

It's also wicked fast, resource-light, and the code is really easy to grok if you want to hack in anything. But, the update rate is a single global setting[1]. I wouldn't be surprised if it could handle far more than 700 feeds... you'll hit bottlenecks from bandwidth or the DB before anything with the app.

[1]: http://docs.miniflux.net/en/latest/configuration.html

allanbreyeson Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS

Sure. Probably would work well with name+newsletter@example.com type filters.

I just like to keep them separate, I suppose. And, I just naturally prefer to consume news through RSS feeds. Every newsletter or RSS feed I read is ephemeral, disposable, and I probably only ever read 1% of the content (if that). Email (for me) tends to be the near opposite, and anything I can do to keep the noise and cruft out of my email, I'll do.