Top all-time · #2519
Sky Schubert
Personal blog · overengineer.dev/blogprogrammingweb
Sky Schubert's personal blog at overengineer.dev covers programming and web. Since 2021, 29 different Hacker News readers have linked it 34 times, most often “USB-C hubs and my slow descent into madness (2021)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-05-26, and you can follow it by feed.
Random thoughts, articles and projects by a chronic overengineer.
Most-linked posts?
- USB-C hubs and my slow descent into madness (2021)9 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2022-03-16
- USB-C hubs and my slow descent into madness (2021)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-07-18
- ActivityPub – Final thoughts, one year later3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-05-24
- VPN – A Very Precarious Narrative2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-07-09
- WebCompat Tale: Touching Clickable Things (2021)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-04-05
- Recreationally overengineering my location history2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-08-20
What Hacker News says?
Could you elaborate on why realtek was chosen for the ethernet expansion card? It does tend to have a pretty bad rep, with one of the recent documentations being https://overengineer.dev/blog/2021/04/25/usb-c-hub-madness.h...
Comment linking /blog/2021/04/25/usb-c-hub-madness.html
on “The new and upgraded Framework Laptop”Submitted USB-C hubs and my slow descent into madness (2021) as a story · 1144 points
HN discussionSee also this blog post on USB-C hubs: https://overengineer.dev/blog/2021/04/25/usb-c-hub-madness.h...
Comment linking /blog/2021/04/25/usb-c-hub-madness.html
on “Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW”Submitted Thread: Tech we can’t use or teach? as a story · 415 points
HN discussionThey just sent me a new one right away (<10 days) and there was no need to return the charger or anything. So I still use it, just blocked the bad port. I gotta say, whenever I encounter good customer service I become loyal. They are good with returns/replacements. My experience with their product quality has been less good though. I had a pair with earbuds from them, I think it had some firmware issue where on an A…
Comment linking /blog/2021/04/25/usb-c-hub-madness/
on “What went wrong inside recalled Anker PowerCore 10000 power banks?”Submitted USB-C hubs and my slow descent into madness (2021) as a story · 199 points
HN discussionInteresting parallel. I think I'd disagree that it's considered "fine" when company's do it, though. What the OP describes is basically a version of a "bait and switch" fraud, which is pretty widely illegal and not considered OK by anyone. Although you can find examples where people ride that line pretty closely[1], but even then people think it's bad behavior. A subtly different thing that's maybe closer to what yo…
Comment linking /blog/2021/04/25/usb-c-hub-madness.html
on “Ask HN: Have you experienced “hiring fraud?””Submitted VPN – A Very Precarious Narrative as a story · 98 points
HN discussionAs detailed in this post, RTL8153 with Mac also regularly hops down to 100 mbps and doesn't return back to 1 gbps: https://overengineer.dev/blog/2021/04/25/usb-c-hub-madness.h... A pertinent question, however, is: how do you know what chips an adapter uses, before buying? I'm in utter dread regarding the prospect of buying a usb hub, since just like in the above post, they're black boxes to me which of course turn o…
Comment linking /blog/2021/04/25/usb-c-hub-madness.html
on “AirPlay and Touch Bar = Network Disaster”Submitted Yet Another LLM Rant as a story · 93 points
HN discussionYour point would be true if ActivityPub was a properly defined specification, but it isn't. It is voluntarily vague in many places to accommodate for the differences in implementations, which means that each implementation needs to understand how other software works to interoperate. So in practice it is more accurate to say "Protocol like Mastodon", because even if you can talk with Mastodon it doesn't mean you can…
Comment linking /blog/2019/01/13/activitypub-final-thoughts-one-year-later.html
on “Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work”Submitted Recreationally overengineering my location history as a story · 56 points
HN discussionHere are the full texts of both emails I sent them: https://overengineer.dev/txt/2024-05-11-thread-group-emails/ The second one to their press team sounds super presumptuous, sorry for that, but I found that you kinda have to talk to press teams in that way if you want to get /any/ response at al.
Comment linking /txt/2024-05-11-thread-group-emails/
on “Thread: Tech we can’t use or teach?”Submitted Building boring webthings for lazy maintainers as a story · 4 points
HN discussionYou might enjoy this story: USB-C hubs and my slow descent into madness https://overengineer.dev/blog/2021/04/25/usb-c-hub-madness.h... It was recently discussed on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30911598 One interesting takeaway for me was that there are actually some quite cheap hubs available from AliExpress and the "branded" ones are essentially the same with a logo printed on (and hopefully some additi…
Comment linking /blog/2021/04/25/usb-c-hub-madness.html
on “Why do USB-C hubs still have USB 2.0 ports? (2021)”Submitted Personal ramblings about diaspora*, my work on it, and mistakes I made (2020) as a story · 4 points
HN discussion> and the wire ethernet is not a cheapo chipset either (Realtek) Buying Realtek does not guarantee getting good hardware, the RTL8153 is infamous [0], and I remember there were reports about Realtek chips flooding the network with corrupt packets if they were powered on via the charger but not connected to a laptop. [0] https://overengineer.dev/blog/2021/04/25/usb-c-hub-madness.h...
Comment linking /blog/2021/04/25/usb-c-hub-madness.html
on “FreeBSD on the Framework Laptop”Submitted Recreationally overengineering my Location History as a story · 3 points
HN discussionNot just Linux users. My wife got a Satechi On-the-Go USB-C hub for her MacBook. Satechi sells itself as a premium brand for Mac accessories. However, when the advertised 4k@60Hz support did not work, their support suggested that we update the firmware. They could only provide firmware updater for Windows. Unfortunately, even on Windows the firmware update would not work, spitting out completely uninformative error…
Comment linking /blog/2021/04/25/usb-c-hub-madness.html
on “Update Firmware of Samsung SSDs in Linux”Submitted ActivityPub – one protocol to rule them all? (2018) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis is the exact sort of situation that supports the ever increasing importance of brands. There are many brands that still profit off their good name, but by now are just selling generic Chinese designs with fancier enclosures. E.g. my wife bought a Satechi USB-C On-the-Go adapter. One of its stated features is that it supports 4k@60Hz. Except that it didn't work. We tried different 4k screen models from different…
Comment linking /blog/2021/04/25/usb-c-hub-madness.html
on “A blue connector does not USB 3.0 make”Submitted ActivityPub – Final thoughts, one year later. (2019) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe GIFs look good and I like how it lets the user diff between original code and AI-generated ones. But still, I would like to quote from an article on Thread (well, this Thread is a network stack) [1]: > No, seriously. Can we please not name new things using terms that are already widely used? I hate that I have to specify whether I’m talking about sewing, screwing, parallel computing, a social network from Meta,…
Comment linking /blog/2024/05/10/thread/
on “Show HN: Thread – AI-powered Jupyter Notebook built using React”Submitted Overengineering Coffee Bean Storage as a story · 3 points
HN discussionMaybe this post[0]? I remember relating to this part: > Again, I found multiple identical-looking products on Aliexpress for 10 to 15 euros. I appear to be paying a lot of money for products that I could buy for cheap on random websites is starting to piss me off a bit at this point. I don’t really care about paying too much - I’d be perfectly fine with that if the product did its job. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do t…
Comment linking /blog/2021/04/25/usb-c-hub-madness.html
on “A Cheap 2.5GbE PoE Unmanaged Switch”Submitted ActivityPub – Final thoughts, one year later as a story · 3 points
HN discussionOne starter article for how the market works - there are lots more. This one was discussed in HN too: https://overengineer.dev/blog/2021/04/25/usb-c-hub-madness/ Now, for hubs, I didn't need a full blown thunderbolt one, but my current hub this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F5PY4F2N?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_... which works fine - I looked at some competitors with 2x and 3x the money for the same and sometimes lesser sp…
Comment linking /blog/2021/04/25/usb-c-hub-madness/
on “DJI couldn't confirm or deny it disguised this drone to evade a US ban”Submitted Dynamic Denial of Crawlers as a story · 2 points
HN discussionthis comes to mind everytime vpn”s / debate comes up i read it years ago and never forgot it. https://overengineer.dev/blog/2019/04/08/very-precarious-nar... and this is here is scary i guess! https://www.theregister.com/2011/09/26/hidemyass_lulzsec_con...
Comment linking /blog/2019/04/08/very-precarious-narrative.html
on “Netflix is adding residential IP addresses to its VPN blocklists”Submitted WebCompat Tale: Touching Clickable Things (2021) as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
