Top all-time · #174
apenwarr
Personal blog · apenwarr.ca/logprogrammingsystems
apenwarr is a personal blog at apenwarr.ca about programming and systems. Since 2009, 253 different Hacker News readers have linked it 490 times, most often “The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-04, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 6 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Avery Pennarun's blog as a long-running source of essays on networking history, IPv6 design, and the economics of software and ads. Commenters cite specific posts as the reference point for these arguments.
- Recommended for · 6 comments
- Commenters call the IPv6 essay convincing and a great read, and recommend the networking-history posts.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Happy July 4th! For those of us around the world contemplating independence, it's a good day to think about how we came to rely on expensiv...
Most-linked posts?
- The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)27 people · 31 mentions · first linked 2019-06-12
- A log/event processing pipeline you can't have (2019)20 people · 24 mentions · first linked 2019-02-17
- What do executives do, anyway?17 people · 22 mentions · first linked 2019-09-26
- An epic treatise on scheduling, bug tracking, and triage (2017)15 people · 21 mentions · first linked 2019-01-14
- Forget privacy: you're terrible at targeting anyway13 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2019-02-01
- Mtime comparison considered harmful11 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2018-11-13
- Tech Debt Metaphor Maximalism8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2023-06-06
- Systems design explains the world: volume 17 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2020-12-27
- The gift of it's your problem now7 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2021-12-30
- IPv4, IPv6, and a sudden change in attitude7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2020-07-21
What Hacker News says?
With regards to the end of the article. > Can I work for a bad company and still be a good person? > No. https://apenwarr.ca/log/20201121
Comment linking /log/20201121
on “Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes”Submitted 100 years of whatever this will be as a story · 1475 points
HN discussion> any time you have thousand of interviews going on, you are bound to get some bad candidate experiences... and we try to minimize it for sure, but you will not get it to zero (especially when growing quickly) Spot on. Nor should anyone expend disproportionate energy in bringing down common causes of quality issues to zero . https://apenwarr.ca/log/20161226 > I just hate to see HN jumping into tear downs and wild co…
Comment linking /log/20161226
on “Accepted and ghosted: interviewing for a leadership position at Stripe”Submitted The gift of it's your problem now as a story · 756 points
HN discussionI like this blog post but I also happen to quite like long forms like these, too: https://mango.pdf.zone/finding-former-australian-prime-minis... / https://apenwarr.ca/log/20201227
Comment linking /log/20201227
on “It Can Happen to You”Submitted The world in which IPv6 was a good design as a story · 677 points
HN discussion> The advertiser has a tracker that it places on multiple sites and tracks me around. So it doesn't know what I bought, but it does know what I looked at, probably over a long period of time, across many sites. Using this information, its painstakingly trained AI makes conclusions about which other things I might want to look at, based on... > ...well, based on what? …Probably what it does is infer my gender, age, i…
Comment linking /log/20190201
on “Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics”Submitted What do executives do, anyway? as a story · 666 points
HN discussionOk, here's a few real example where I had only partial (but 100% correct) information had a hard time finding the right answer: 1. There's a shell (program) which feature a built-in file manager inspider by ranger, I forgot its name: try to find it. Answer: [1] 2. There's a particular gas that can (temporarily) kill a smartphone, but you forgot which. Find the article about this. Answer: [2] 3. There's a blog post (…
Comment linking /log/?m=201708
on “Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust”Submitted The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017) as a story · 589 points
HN discussionDon't blame the leadership, as apparently this is exactly what they need to be doing: To paraphrase [High Output Management], the job of an executive is: to define and enforce culture and values for their whole organization, and to ratify good decisions. — What do executives do, anyway?, https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190926
Comment linking /log/20190926
on “Amazon Pip Horror Story”Submitted 10 years of whatever this has been as a story · 480 points
HN discussionWebEx is terrible, FaceTime is Apple-only, Skype is circling the drain since being bought by Microsoft, so there is a lot of pent-up demand for a good cross-platform videoconferencing tool. Zoom is one of the front-runners. There is a good overview of the options in an article recently posted here - see under "Videoconferencing": https://apenwarr.ca/log/20200309
Comment linking /log/20200309
on “SpaceX bans Zoom over privacy concerns”Submitted A profitable, growing, useful, legal, well-loved... failure as a story · 436 points
HN discussionAvery, co-founder at Tailscale, has some strong opinions about why SSO is sufficient for their product. They wrote a bit about their thought process: Factors in authentication (2019), https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190114 > It seems to me that the above successful enrollment patterns all use one or more of the following techniques: > A human authenticates you and issues you a token (usually in person). > A short-distance…
Comment linking /log/20190114
on “Tailscale raises $100M”Submitted Systems design explains the world: volume 1 as a story · 337 points
HN discussionSurprised no one mentioned https://apenwarr.ca/log/ yet - such a great read!
Comment linking /log/
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted Forget privacy: you're terrible at targeting anyway as a story · 312 points
HN discussionI'm not "we" but I have some experience in this area. Computers are fast, basically. ACID transactions can be slow (if they write to "the" disk before returning success), but just processing data is alarmingly speedy. If you break down things into small operations and you aggregate by day, you can always have big numbers. The monitoring system that I wrote for Google Fiber ran on one machine and processed 40 billion…
Comment linking /log/20190216
on “How Discord Stores Billions of Messages (2017)”Submitted The Curse of Smart People as a story · 260 points
HN discussionSuprising to see a recommendation for QUIC by someone who seems to ackowledge djb's contributions and incredible attention to detail. http://apenwarr.ca/log/?m=201103#28 Correct me if wrong, but QUIC was inspired by djb's CurveCP? Would you rather have djb implement your trusted UDP congestion-controlled overlay or a company with 70,000+ employees who are paid from the sale of online ads? @hashbreaker Apr 15 CurveCP…
Comment linking /log/?m=201103
on “The world in which IPv6 was a good design”Submitted The Curse of Smart People (2014) as a story · 246 points
HN discussionWhen we started Tailscale in 2019, we weren't even sure we wanted to be a venture-backed company. We just wanted to fix networking. Or, more specifically, make networking disappear — reduce the number of times anyone had to think about NAT traversal or VPN configurations ever again. Isn't logtail what got Avery et al started? https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/tree/main/logtail https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190216 /…
Comment linking /log/20190216
on “Tailscale has raised $160M”Submitted Git is as revolutionary as Unix pipes (2008) as a story · 235 points
HN discussion> It means you're able to generate more revenue per person, No. It means they are able to generate more profit . And that is an indirect reflection of efficiency. > a company that respects your privacy will be unable to compete in that metric. That's a common opinion, but I think this remains to be proven - see e.g. https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190201 . The choice quote: "That's a lot about profiling for ad targeting,…
Comment linking /log/20190201
on “Google’s Search Preference Menu Eliminates DuckDuckGo”Submitted Quotes from 1992 as a story · 230 points
HN discussionI can't tell you how happy I was to see your comment at the top of this discussion. Relevant: "Python is Only Slow If You Use it Wrong" http://apenwarr.ca/diary/2011-10-pycodeconf-apenwarr.pdf
Comment linking /diary/2011-10-pycodeconf-apenwarr.pdf
on “Let's Remove the Global Interpreter Lock”Submitted Absolute Scale Corrupts Absolutely as a story · 214 points
HN discussionI wish any of these projects(obsidian, logseq, Roam) supported WikiWord autolinks alongside [[Mediawiki]] ones. See also: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20100901
Comment linking /log/20100901
on “Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files”Submitted I simulated California housing and learned about simulators as a story · 208 points
HN discussion
