Show HN: Port Zero – how I learned to stop worrying and love PORT=0(portzero.net)
15 pointsby octopoc8 hours ago6 comments
  • snowe20105 hours ago
    Wild to vibe code something in a week then charge $50/month for it. I understand servers cost money but lol there’s no way the costs are that high. Also insane the amount of code generated here.
    • IncreasePosts4 hours ago
      Why not charge $50/month for it? So little effort has been put into the endeavor that it failing to attract a single user wouldn't be heartbreaking
  • dasyatidprime5 hours ago
    For those interested in the history of alternatives to port numbers: Chaosnet[1] in LispM/ITS times used names for describing which service was being requested. On the TCP side, a spec for requesting services by name has existed since 1988: TCPMUX[2], using a short initial handshake after connecting to port 1. Just never caught on AFAIK.

    [1] https://chaosnet.net/protocol#application_layer [2] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1078

  • wannabe446 hours ago
    > Recently I wasted several hours wrangling my dev environment only to find out that the browser frontend was talking to the wrong version of the backend.

    I have never faced this problem even though I hard-code the port. It's because I run the server program through VS Code's debugger. If there's already a session, it would warn me.

    • drpotato4 hours ago
      Well, there's your problem! You're not getting the efficiency gains of multi-agent slop slinging loops working like that…
  • ignoramous7 hours ago
    > why on earth are we still using simple numbers to describe which process to connect to? Why not use names instead.

    Not super popular, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRV_record

    • yjftsjthsd-h7 hours ago
      Yep, my immediate reaction was "because browsers refuse to support SRV records" (although I think there was some new variant that kinda worked?)
      • octopoc6 hours ago
        True! But, you wouldn't just need SRV support in browsers--you'd need it in every part of your dev environment / stack that touches the network. If your backend talks to a database, then your backend needs to support SRV. So you need SRV support in your standard library and your browser.

        But at a larger level this tool just makes everything work so smoothly. If you have two services with the same name, it pops up a notification in the tray. If you start a new process with a different name, you don't have to configure SRV; the DNS just becomes available automatically. HTTPS is auto configured. That sort of thing.

        I think somebody could one day make something like this that was based on SRV, but it would still need all those niceties to make it work well for developers.

  • Uptrenda4 hours ago
    I get the problem well. I have built a networking runtime and a Python networking library that extensively used servers as part of testing. If you bind to a specific port and reuse it, you can end up with false failures due to:

    - old / zombie server processes

    - sockets that weren't properly cleaned up

    - TIME_WAITs

    my solution wasn't anything as clever as OPs though. Basically, I ended up conceiving of 127/8 as a rotating ring. Where you can pass offsets and easily end up on an unused bind tup every time. 127/8 gives you a huge number of IPs to play with. You just make address handling part of your test launcher and it sets a new IP each time.

    The issue is it doesn't really work for IPv6 (v6 localhost is only one address!) Though global-scope v6 interface blocks and manually assigned link-local scope, you could accomplish much the same thing.

  • LIYANJUN6 hours ago
    [flagged]