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azdle

1,623 karma · joined January 27, 2014

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Contact Me: azdle@azdle.net

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azdle··on GrapheneOS' rewritten Messages app is released
Can confirm the same works on Graphene. Also works directly from the "Recents" list.
azdle··on Never Give Them Your Face
I was just at a US airport and there were a bunch of signs saying you can opt out of having your face scanned at security, you just have to tell them.

Though, if you have a passport or driver's license, its not like they don't already have your face...

azdle··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)
It's actually already using wasmtime as one layer in its sandbox. I just think that trying to support other languages, especially in a fully language agnostic way, would make things like documentation far more complex than I could handle and make the service complex enough that the only people who could understand it would be the type of person who don't really need a service like this in the first place.
azdle··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)
Thanks!

> Did you choose Lua because you love using it, or for some other pragmatic reasons?

A bit of both, though I'm literally drinking out of a coffee mug with the Lua logo on it that was given to me after playing a big part in making Lua a thing at a prevoius job. That might speak to my love of Lua.

> Do you think a service like yours with support for many variety of languages a good idea?

From a technical perspective, it would be relatively easy to add support for other languages, the biggest problem would be UI and documentation complexity. Each added language would either require a completely seperate set of documentaion or would require the docs to describe everything one layer of abstraction removed from the code people would actually be writing. Both of which would be less than ideal for my goal of extreme simplicity.

I think it can be a good idea, but to support something like that _well_ would require a pretty large team of people.

I do plan to support some level of 'other languages' for libraries, at a minimum some subset of native Lua libraries (ie. libs written in C). That means it would be possible to find a way to use pretty much any other language interpreter. However, I'm not sure that will ever be a top level feature, there'll probably always be some level of Lua glue code holding everything together.

azdle··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)
Great to hear! And thanks for saying so. I've definitely tried to make it as simple and straight forward as possible, but I really didn't know if it would be simple and straight forward to anyone but me.
azdle··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)
It doesn't say because there's no special support for any auth protocols. Long-term I want to have out-of-the-box support for things like OAuth (for user-facing auth) or mutual TLS (for device/service auth). _Technically_ there's currently support for the cryptographic primitives required to do JWT (I added that because I wanted to support WebPush w/ payloads for myself), but those aren't documented because I intend to remove the current slightly-hacky custom APIs and replace them with some off the shelf libraries, but I'm still figuring out user-added libraries (and on top of that I'll also need to figure out support for native libraries).

Are there any auth protocols / flows you think would be important to support?

azdle··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)
Thanks!
azdle··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)
I know the homepage needs way more answer to "WTH is it?", I just don't really enjoy doing the 'marketing' side of things. I hadn't really considered just throwing something informal up there, but I guess I don't really know _why_, so, thanks for the suggestion.
azdle··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)
My meta side project for building other side projects: https://bodge.app/

I've always had a bunch of small side projects that I want to do that aren't worth the overhead required to actually put them together & keep them maintained. So, I built a small Lua-based FaaS platform to make each individual project less work whenever inspiration strikes. So far I've built:

* A current-time API for some hacked-together IoT devices: https://time.bodge.link/

* A script for my wife that checks her commute time and emails her before it's about to get bad.

* An email notification to myself if my Matrix server goes down.

* A 'randomly choose a thing' page. https://rand.bodge.link/choose?head&tails

* A work phone number voicemail, the script converts the webhook into an email to me.

* An email notification any time a new version is released for a few semi-public self-hosted services.

* Scrapers for a few companies' job listings that notify me whenever a new job is posted matching some filters.

* A WebPush server that I eventually want to use for custom notifications to myself.

* An SVG hit counter: https://hits.bodge.link/

Since I'm already maintaining it for myself, I figured I might as well open it up for others. It's free to play with, at least for now.

azdle··on Show HN: Bodge.app – μFaaS for hacked-together personal tools and small projects
Thanks!

Coincidentally, I'm currently working on supporting luarocks packages. (Well, some of them, I want to at least support the ones that are pure lua or use the "builtin" build system (which means they don't have any native dependencies).)

azdle··on Show HN: Bodge.app – μFaaS for hacked-together personal tools and small projects
Thanks!

Sadly no, it shutdown in 2017. If you try to login, it doesn't actually go anywhere.

Best I can tell the domain was picked up by some SEO scam. I'm guessing the way it works is they republish all the old content to keep the domain's reputation and then added a bunch of links to their sites to try to boost those site's reputation.

azdle··on APT Rust requirement raises questions
I've found the rust core team to be very open to feedback. And maybe I've just been using Rust for too long, but the syntax feels quite reasonable to me.

Just for my own curiosity, do you have an examples of suggestions for how to improve the syntax that have been brought up and dismissed by the language maintainers?

azdle··on Steam Machine
Waking up the deck works for me with my xbox controller connected via bluetooth. Are you using those controllers via BT or USB?

Edit: Now that I think about it, this might have been a feature added to the OLED model.

azdle··on PCB Edge USB C Connector Library
I think they probably mean standard through-holes. It's the old trick where you stagger the holes just enough that the flex of the pinheaders still let's them be inserted, but have just enough friction to stay in place while you're flashing or whatever.
azdle··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2025)
Oh, interesting! Thanks for that link, I hadn't managed to come across that when I was looking for existing alternatives.

I'm not sure I would have actually started building this if I knew that was an option. Hopefully their existence is telling me "there's a market, go for it" and not "there's already a better alternative, don't do it", heh. Though their pricing tiers really tells me I need to optimize my sandboxing. I don't think I can match those request limits at those prices just from the CPU cost of my per-request sandboxing overhead.

azdle··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2025)
I'm working on https://bodge.app/

I'm calling it a "Micro Functions as a Service" platform.

What it really is, is hosted Lua scripts that run in response to incoming HTTP requests to static URLs.

It's basically my version of the old https://webscript.io/ (that site is mostly the same as it was as long as you ignore the added SEO spam on the homepage). I used to subscribe to webscript and I'd been constantly missing it since it went away years ago, so I made my own.

I mostly just made this for myself, but since I'd put so much effort into it, I figure I'm going to try to put it out there and see if anyone wants to pay me to use it. Turns out there's a _lot_ of work that goes into abuse prevention when you're code from literally anyone on the internet, so it's not ready to actually take signups yet. But, there is a demo on the homepage.

azdle··on State of AI-assisted software development
It's not even claiming that. It's only claiming that people who responded to the survey feel more productive. (Unless you assume that people taking this survey have an objective measure for their own productivity.)

> Significant productivity gains: Over 80% of respondents indicate that AI has enhanced their productivity.

_Feeling_ more productive is inline with the one proper study I've seen.

azdle··on AI web crawlers are destroying websites in their never-ending content hunger
Another option that wouldn't contribute to more centralization might be neocities. They give you 3 TB for $5/month. That seems to be _the_ limit though. The dude runs his own CDN just for neocities, so it's not just reselling cloudflare or something.

P.S. Thank you for ProtonDB, it has been so incredibly helpful for getting some older games running.

azdle··on The HTML Hobbyist (2022)
For people who are excited about this idea, this coming Saturday is HTML Day: https://html.energy/html-day/2025/
azdle··on Apple introduces a universal design across platforms
Ideomorphic seems like it would work for that.

Turns out it's actually already a word: having the proper form or shape —used of minerals whose crystalline growth has not been interfered with

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/idiomorphic

That seems to fit amazingly well here too.

azdle··on Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood
There's no official definition of what the "the suburbs" means, but when people say that they usually mean "areas that follow a post-war suburban style of development". Think culdesacs and no sidewalks. The area you linked looks to me more like an older "streetcar suburb", which I think most people would just call "the city".
azdle··on Rhai: An embedded scripting language for Rust
I've used rlua (mlua is a fork of it) and mlua extensively. The part you've shown is absolutely the easy part. Doing anything interesting with the runtime after that is much less obvious. Even something as simple as 'load a lua file that returns a table of functions and use those functions from rust' is surprisingly hard to figure out. (I know, I just did that a few weeks ago.)

I haven't used Rhai, but Lua has a lot of impedance mismatch with Rust that could be avoided with a fresh language. (Or maybe even just a fresh implementation of Lua, like piccolo is trying: https://github.com/kyren/piccolo)

azdle··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (November 2024)
Location: Minneapolis, MN, USA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No, probably not.

Technologies: Rust, Lua, C, Networking, CoAP, HTTP, TLS, Sandboxing, Docker, and a whole lot more

Résumé/CV: https://psbarrett.com/cv

Email: hn@psbarrett.com

Just to be upfront, I'm not looking for just anything. I left my job about a month ago and usually like to take ~3 months off between each. I'm just starting to look now. But, I'd be willing to hop into something that sounds fun sooner than that.

I seem to have fallen into doing mostly Rust, usually somewhat in the vein of lower-level network programming. I've been doing Rust development since Rust v0.6 (2013) & I've got 12 years of experience as a software dev overall. That work has straddled the line between embedded and cloud side with most being embedded linux application development.

The work I've done that I'm most proud of was designing and leading development for Samsung SmartThings' Edge Device Driver Platform which is a system written in Rust, embedded within an existing C application, which runs sandboxed user-written 'Edge Device Drivers' on user-owned IoT hubs.

I've also got experience doing project & product planning, though I'm really looking to do primarily software dev.

Big plusses for me are: Working with Open Source, Working on Tools for Other Developers, Doing Work "For Good"

Other assorted things I want an excuse to learn/get involved with more deeply: Cryptography, C++, WASM, Large Scale Server Side Programming, P2P, Decentralization, rustc (& ecosystem) Dev, Linux Kernel, Mapping, Autonomous Drones, Spaaaaaaaccce, Guix, Scheme/Lisp, Erlang/Elixr

azdle··on Foliate: Read e-books in style, navigate with ease
Hey, might I suggest adding a public domain example book? I tried adding a couple of different epubs that I happen to have on my phone, but it just says "Please select an EPUB file." when I do. (Using mobile Firefox.)
azdle··on Ask HN: Do you already see the impact of LLMs on the job prospects for dev's?
As far as I've seen, LLMs used to write code are only good for getting juniors to a PR features faster. But, it slows down everything else in the process. Reviews take ages because there's random nonsense landmines scattered around, the previous PR feedback is less likely to be applied to later code because they're not writing it, bug fixes take much longer because no one understands the code well, and there's just so much more code to deal with at every step since it doesn't matter to them if they are copy-pasting 10 lines or 1000.

I've tried using them myself, but they end up sapping more of my time than they save because of all the dead ends they send me down with plausible sounding bullshit. Things that use real terms, but incorrectly. I basically treat LLM output like that one guy who doesn't know anything except the existence of a bunch of technical terms and who throws those terms around everywhere trying to sound smart. It might be nice to know that a term exists if you're unfamiliar with the topic, but only to go look up what it actually means elsewhere.

azdle··on Ask HN: Do you already see the impact of LLMs on the job prospects for dev's?
I love your idealism, but allow me to be your data point. The place where I work just fired our CTO because he was doing exactly that, to "speed up" the software team, after I complained to other execs that this was massively slowing us down because of all the time we spent trying to figure out what the nonsense code he was shotgunning into main was supposed to do. (Not the only reason, I'm told.)
azdle··on Some Mexican pharmacies are selling full bottles of Adderall. But it's meth
As far as I could tell reading that DEA memo, they were being really sneaky with what they said. None of the pill manufacturers had hit their allotment, but they didn't say anything about the raw ingredient manufacturers which are under a different quota. And most of the shortages I've seen in the FDA shortages database were listed as 'shortage of active ingredient'. (Or 'demand increase', which isn't specific enough to know that it's not literally the same thing.)
azdle··on Ask HN: What to Do After Burnout?
> Or you can be sitting bored for 8 hours at your desk stretching out 1 hour of responsibilities to last all day and feel super burned out.

Can confirm, this is exactly how I burnt-out at my first professional job. I've burnt-out of 3 jobs, and I honestly think make-work / work-stretching burnout was the worst, or at least the most soul crushing. (Though, to be fair, it was also the first for me, so I was least equipped to know what it was / deal with it.)

azdle··on Steam Deck OLED
The DeckHD is still an IPS LCD, it just has better color coverage: https://deckhd.com/#specs
azdle··on Mass producing the most expensive rice cooker [video]
IIRC, it's just temperature (and maybe time). Once the bottom of the pot goes above boiling, all the water has been absorbed/boiled off. Cheap rice cookers then just click over to warm, fancy ones might do something based on time, which can change based on other things like how log it took to come to a boil or how long between coming to a boil and the water finishing absorbing.
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