apenwarr
Avery Pennarun writes on networking, software engineering, tech debt, and how tech companies and executives work.
What HN says
HN commenters recommend his code and writing, and often point to his IPv6 essay, noting it has been submitted many times. His BeamLab diagram also gets cited.
Stats for nerds
253HN people shared it
281linked in comments
13Kstory points
Sep 2025last shared
Top posts on HN
- 1100 years of whatever this will be3 people · 1.5K points · first shared 2021 · 896 comments on HN
- 2The world in which IPv6 was a good design4 people · 761 points · first shared 2017 · 191 comments on HN
- 3The gift of it's your problem now7 people · 760 points · first shared 2021 · 293 comments on HN
- 4The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)29 people · 725 points · first shared 2019 · 238 comments on HN
- 5What do executives do, anyway?17 people · 708 points · first shared 2019 · 203 comments on HN
- 6The Curse of Smart People5 people · 574 points · first shared 2014 · 223 comments on HN
- 710 years of whatever this has been1 person · 480 points · first shared 2021 · 704 comments on HN
- 8Forget privacy: you're terrible at targeting anyway13 people · 454 points · first shared 2019 · 114 comments on HN
- 9A profitable, growing, useful, legal, well-loved... failure2 people · 436 points · first shared 2012 · 90 comments on HN
- 10The strange story of etherpad9 people · 429 points · first shared 2011 · 74 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
- pr337h4mDec 2022
If Puter/FriendOS can support legacy Windows enterprise apps not updated in over a decade and adds collaboration, SSO, 2FA, access controls, VPN/intranet, etc. - basically what FrontEgg (https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/28/with-40m-in-new-funding-frontegg-looks-to-expand-its-b2b-user-management-service/) offers - on top on them, it could be a pretty great business.
This is a great illustration of this type of business: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20120326. A lot of customers totally need, not just want, this type of thing.
Puter/FriendOS type systems can graft upon some modern features on top of all legacy apps, which is far far better than having to build it out for every single one. Especially as the market lies more in the long tail of the custom software tailed to specific companies, that has been chugging along for 15 years in maintenance mode.
- ignoramousJun 2025
> Building a profitable business reduces both the problem and the solution space by a huge margin, and if you can find a way to get rid of that, the space opens up.
That's one way to look at it. Usually though, for upstarts, what's paramount is not the profits part, but the risks inherent in working on a solution for a perceived problem (or worse, for customers one is ill-placed to sell to [0]). I like what Seibel recommends: the v1 must solve an acute problem for the customer to pay up [1]. From there, building out a holistic product may put our upstart on path to growth & profitability while simultaneously expanding the scope of the problem space building such a product brings [2].
[0] https://www.michaelseibel.com/blog/users-you-don-t-want
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13109480
[2] https://apenwarr.ca/log/20211024
- a_cJun 2023
This is illustrated in The Innovator's Dilemma and happens all the time. Established companies want to focus resources, increase profit margin, and improve operational efficiency. They improve their best product and sell to big customers. Not-so-successful product with not so wealthy clients got de-prioritized. They don't mind letting competitors take the market share. Why would they? It is lower margin business with low quality customers anyway. They may even sell the money losing product to competitor to milk out the last pennies.
The section "Q: Won't Big Company X just clone your product and steal all your customers?" in https://apenwarr.ca/log/20180724 also described this phenomenon
- mindslightDec 2021
Yeah I was going to touch upon that. I understand where they were coming from design wise (apenwarr's post is fantastic for that - https://apenwarr.ca/log/20170810). Privacy extensions mainly seems like doubling down on an unworkable idea. I can see the hypothetical benefit on a shared network, where say a coffee shop has a /64 and you can have every single app looking like a separate device on that network to an outside observer. I just foresee the inevitable future where IP surveillance databases contain information like "this /48 hands out /64 to each end user, so treat it as one entity", rendering those extra bits as a mere liability to be mitigated.
- ZephyrBluJun 2024
This is a tech-focused selection from my personal list, with a few more business-y sources thrown in:
- https://erikbern.com
- https://lethain.com
- https://commoncog.com
- https://scattered-thoughts.net
- https://danluu.com
- https://ideolalia.com
- https://staysaasy.com
- https://collabfund.com
- https://blog.nelhage.com
- https://jacobian.org
- https://equalventures.substack.com
- https://defmacro.org
- https://spakhm.com
- https://apenwarr.ca
- https://scarletink.com
- https://benkuhn.net
- https://cpojer.net
- https://brandur.org
- https://zeptonaut.com
Let me know if you want some reading recommendations for any of these!
- advisedwangSep 2021
bit per second is a pretty standard way to measure network traffic. Just be glad they aren't listing baud!
The networking community historically follows a tradition coming from telecoms, which is why there is a bit of a cultural split between networking folks and other computing folks (software and hardware folks have more cultural connection to each other than to networking!)
Apenwarr actually traces this cultural and historical split forward [1] even to the difference between lower levels of the stack defined by IEEE standards (e.g. 802.11) and higher levels of the stack defined by IETF (e.g. IP).
[1] https://apenwarr.ca/log/20170810