Ben bhpayne

Setting up a VPN on your own VPS is a great way to ensure privacy and avoid the limitations of commercial VPN providers.

The modern "gold standard" for self-hosted VPNs is WireGuard. It is significantly faster than OpenVPN, uses less battery on your Mac, and is easier to set up.

Here is the step-by-step guide to setting up WireGuard using an automated script (the easiest manual method) or Tailscale (the "it just works" method).

Method 1: The Standard Way (WireGuard)

This gives you full control. You will run a script on your VPS and install an app on your Mac.

Get files

$ docker run --rm -v `pwd`:/scratch --workdir /scratch datasci wget --wait 2 --random-wait --recursive --level=0 --page-requisites --convert-links https://treeid.arborday.org/

Caveat: if --recursive is used, defaults to 5 levels. Result:

Total wall clock time: 33m 45s
Downloaded: 943 files, 14M in 1.7s (8.01 MB/s)

As of 2025-06-01

$ openssl version
LibreSSL 3.3.6
$ which openssl
/usr/bin/openssl

macOS ships with LibreSSL, not the "standard" OpenSSL from openssl.org. While LibreSSL is a fork and aims to be API-compatible, build scripts (like wget2's configure) often specifically look for files and structures associated with the original OpenSSL, and they might not find what they need in the standard macOS system paths for LibreSSL's development headers and libraries.

Common Options

-#, --progress-bar Make curl display a simple progress bar instead of the more informational standard meter.

-b, --cookie <name=data> Supply cookie with request. If no =, then specifies the cookie file to use (see -c).

-c, --cookie-jar <file name> File to save response cookies to.

"Scar Tissues Make Relationships Wear Out"

04/26/2103. From a lecture by Professor John Ousterhout at Stanford, class CS142.

This is my most touchy-feely thought for the weekend. Here’s the basic idea: It’s really hard to build relationships that last for a long time. If you haven’t discovered this, you will discover this sooner or later. And it's hard both for personal relationships and for business relationships. And to me, it's pretty amazing that two people can stay married for 25 years without killing each other.

[Laughter]

> But honestly, most professional relationships don't last anywhere near that long. The best bands always seem to break up after 2 or 3 years. And business partnerships fall apart, and there's all these problems in these relationships that just don't last. So, why is that? Well, in my view, it’s relationships don't fail because there some single catastrophic event to destroy them, although often there is a single catastrophic event around the the end of the relation

Problem

I have two Github accounts: oanhnn (personal) and superman (for work). I want to use both accounts on same computer (without typing password everytime, when doing git push or pull).

Solution

Use ssh keys and define host aliases in ssh config file (each alias for an account).

How to?

Generate ssh key pairs for accounts and add them to GitHub accounts.

Stevey's Google Platforms Rant

I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It's pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn't let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it.

I mean, just to give you a very brief taste: Amazon's recruiting process is fundamentally flawed by having teams hire for themselves, so their hiring bar is incredibly inconsistent across teams, despite various efforts they've made to level it out. And their operations are a mess; they don't real

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	Latency Comparison Numbers (~2012)
	----------------------------------
	L1 cache reference 0.5 ns
	Branch mispredict 5 ns
	L2 cache reference 7 ns 14x L1 cache
	Mutex lock/unlock 25 ns
	Main memory reference 100 ns 20x L2 cache, 200x L1 cache
	Compress 1K bytes with Zippy 3,000 ns 3 us
	Send 1K bytes over 1 Gbps network 10,000 ns 10 us
	Read 4K randomly from SSD* 150,000 ns 150 us ~1GB/sec SSD

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