Top all-time · #54
Fly.io
Company blog · fly.io/blogprogrammingsystems
Fly.io is the company blog at fly.io, writing about programming and systems. Since 2017, 560 different Hacker News readers have linked it 1,051 times, most often “Show HN: Fly – A global load balancer with middleware”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-23, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 1 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Fly.io's engineering blog for posts on its infrastructure, such as Corrosion, LiteFS, SQLite and Firecracker sandboxing, and for the AI essay 'My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts'.
- Recommended for · 1 comments
- Recommended as a read ('check this out') for the gVisor and user-mode WireGuard material in the SSH and user-mode IP post.1
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.
Deploy apps, agents, and databases on fast, hardware-isolated VMs. Pay only for the seconds they run. Sign up free.
Most-linked posts?
- /31 people · 39 mentions · first linked 2017-03-10
- Show HN: Fly – A global load balancer with middleware30 people · 35 mentions · first linked 2017-03-29
- API Tokens: A Tedious Survey19 people · 19 mentions · first linked 2021-08-24
- I'm all-in on server-side SQLite18 people · 18 mentions · first linked 2022-05-09
- /docs/about/pricing/16 people · 16 mentions · first linked 2020-12-01
- Docker without Docker15 people · 18 mentions · first linked 2021-04-09
- My AI skeptic friends are all nuts14 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2025-06-02
- Fly.io Distributed Systems Challenges13 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2023-02-22
- Sandboxing and workload isolation11 people · 16 mentions · first linked 2020-07-30
- Globally Distributed Postgres10 people · 16 mentions · first linked 2021-06-30
What Hacker News says?
AI posts (including this one) are all over his employers blog lately, so there’s some stake (fly MCP, https://fly.io/blog/fuckin-robots/ , etc).
Comment linking /blog/fuckin-robots/
on “My AI skeptic friends are all nuts”Submitted My AI skeptic friends are all nuts as a story · 2356 points
HN discussionThe author defends mediocore code, yet wrote this piece: https://fly.io/blog/vscode-ssh-wtf/ Where he dunks on how SSH access works in VSCode. I don't know. The code and architecture behind this feature may well be bananas, but gets the work done. Sounds like a clear case of mediocority. I wonder how does he reconcile those two articles together. For me this is more of a clickbait. Both of the articles. With that in…
Comment linking /blog/vscode-ssh-wtf/
on “My AI skeptic friends are all nuts”Submitted I'm all-in on server-side SQLite as a story · 1353 points
HN discussionOP: https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/#but-its-bad-at-rust > (from https://lukasatkinson.de/2025/net-negative-cursor/ ) looks inside complaining about Rust code
Comment linking /blog/youre-all-nuts/
on “My AI skeptic friends are all nuts”Submitted You should write an agent as a story · 1070 points
HN discussionIt's rather shocking for a company to admit to flaunting software licensing in public communications. But this is not new https://fly.io/blog/wrong-about-gpu/ > At one point, we hex-edited the [NVIDIA] closed-source drivers to trick them into thinking our hypervisor was QEMU.
Comment linking /blog/wrong-about-gpu/
on “My AI skeptic friends are all nuts”Submitted We were wrong about GPUs as a story · 921 points
HN discussionHmm a bit of a tone shift from: https://fly.io/docs/about/open-source/ > Fly.io builds on the work of a tremendous open source infrastructure community. We want open source authors to benefit from their work because we think a healthy, thriving open source ecosystem will help us build better products. To the fine article: > Meanwhile, software developers spot code fragments seemingly lifted from public repositories…
Comment linking /docs/about/open-source/
on “My AI skeptic friends are all nuts”Submitted Free Postgres databases for small projects as a story · 841 points
HN discussionhere is the mentioned blog post for anyone interested (and lazy): https://fly.io/blog/api-tokens-a-tedious-survey/
Comment linking /blog/api-tokens-a-tedious-survey/
on “Ask HN: What are some cool but obscure data structures you know about?”Submitted How we got to LiveView as a story · 802 points
HN discussionI think Consul is great, for what it's worth; we were just abusing it. https://fly.io/blog/a-foolish-consistency/ https://fly.io/blog/corrosion/
Comment linking /blog/corrosion/
on “Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025 post mortem”Submitted VSCode’s SSH agent is bananas as a story · 737 points
HN discussionMost recently, a few weeks ago (but you'll find more just a page or two into the blog): https://fly.io/blog/corrosion/
Comment linking /blog/corrosion/
on “Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025 post mortem”Submitted Docker without Docker as a story · 689 points
HN discussionAccording to Fly's latest logbook post [1], they now have a workaround for this. [1]: https://fly.io/blog/logbook-2022-05-13/
Comment linking /blog/logbook-2022-05-13/
on “I'm all-in on server-side SQLite”Submitted SQLite Internals: Pages and B-trees as a story · 667 points
HN discussionThe article doesn't seem to discuss one of the most fundamental guarantees of current-day DB-application interaction: Acknowledged writes must not be lost. For example, if a user hits "Delete my account", and gets a confirmation "You account was deleted", that answer must be final. It would be bad if the account reappeared afterwards. Similarly, if a user uploads some data, and gets a confirmation (say via HTTP 200)…
Comment linking /docs/reference/postgres/
on “I'm all-in on server-side SQLite”Submitted LiteFS as a story · 648 points
HN discussion> there’s no obvious way to resize disks Yes, this sucks right now. Resizable disks is on our list, we just need somebody to spend a few days on it. Luckily we're hiring platform engineers [1] to work on fun problems like that. > I actually am bothered that I basically don’t get billed. We actually had a bug that skipped charging a bunch of accounts. :) Regardless, we're not overly concerned about making $1/mo from…
Comment linking /jobs/platform-product-engineer/
on “I'm all-in on server-side SQLite”Submitted Phoenix.new – Remote AI Runtime for Phoenix as a story · 639 points
HN discussion> We have a feature for redirecting HTTP requests that perform writes to a single VM. This makes Litestream + replicas workable for most fullstack apps: https://fly.io/blog/globally-distributed-postgres/ Thereby making it a constraint and (without failover) a single point of failover? What’s the upper limit here?
Comment linking /blog/globally-distributed-postgres/
on “I'm all-in on server-side SQLite”Submitted Fly.io has GPUs now as a story · 605 points
HN discussionLitestream does a couple of things. It started as a way to continuously back sqlite files up to s3. Then Ben added read replicas – you can configure Litestream to replicate from a "primary" litestream server. It's still limited to a single writer, but there's no s3 in play. You get async replication to other VMs: https://github.com/fly-apps/litestream-base We have a feature for redirecting HTTP requests that perform…
Comment linking /blog/globally-distributed-postgres/
on “I'm all-in on server-side SQLite”Submitted SOC2: The screenshots will continue until security improves as a story · 546 points
HN discussionThere's also rqlite. There's definitely a place for this kind of stuff. But we already use a bunch of stuff that does distributed consensus in our stack, and the experience has left us wary of it, especially for global distribution. We almost used rqlite for a statekeeping feature internally, but today we'd certainly just use sqlite+litestream for the same kinds of features, just because it's easier to reason about…
Comment linking /blog/a-foolish-consistency/
on “I'm all-in on server-side SQLite”Submitted JIT WireGuard as a story · 485 points
HN discussionYou’re right, I stand corrected: > The problem is mitigated somewhat by our orchestration system. The control plane for Fly.io is Hashicorp Nomad, about which we will be writing more in the future. https://fly.io/blog/persistent-storage-and-fast-remote-build...
Comment linking /blog/persistent-storage-and-fast-remote-builds/
on “The architecture behind a one-person tech startup”Submitted Our User-Mode WireGuard Year as a story · 482 points
HN discussion
