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binarin

92 karma · joined January 29, 2021

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binarin··on Ask HN: How to deal with shipping AI-written code you don't understand?
Yeah, we already saw what "within limit" means e.g. in the case of "make me a C compiler" with kinda unlimited compute.
binarin··on What I self-host
I renew it automatically via DNS. But as I use Cloudflare for DNS, and it doesn't allow to precisely control access to subdomains, I use a separate locked down VM that is only responsible for issuance and makes the resulting certs available for download.
binarin··on What I self-host
NixOS?
binarin··on What I self-host
I'm mostly consume proton via proton-bridge, which is running in a dedicated VM. Then all my IMAP clients connect to that single instance.

Also, for email sending I use smtp2go free tier - primarily because I use random emails on my own domains to see who's leaking, and I don't want to set them up separately proton-side.

In that setup, proton itself is kinda unnecessary - I keep that path mostly as an insurance, just in case of acatastrophic homelab failure.

binarin··on The problem is not AI code, but not knowing about system architecture or intent
There are still some places that operate that way, as outlined in this Jane Street talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR9PpXWsKFQ (Production Engineering When Trading Billions of Dollars a Day).

> capacity to reason about it (during critical downtime) and communicate it

That's one of the things that's put into limelight in that talk.

I personally think that most of "Web Scale" software is inconsequential (inconsequential for its creators, not for users) - as there are no consequences for bugs and outages at all. A data breach -> slap on a wrist. Reputational damage because on an outage/data loss amidst general public? - almost impossible (clownstrike, anyone?)

The funny thing is that web scale software that's consequential is often in an ethically grey zone - but at least you won't be surrounded by colleagues who don't give a shit.

binarin··on Topcoat is pushing the boundary of server applications with Rust
You can't forbid people doing something "really dynamic". And in a sufficiently big system, over long period of time, this stuff will accumulate - 100%. Then you'll get to a point where answering questions like "is this piece of code still alive" with enough confidence is almost impossible.

The question is where the "enough confidence" border lies - and in the worse case the only way to do some reliable investigatios would be printf debugging or its alikes.

binarin··on Topcoat is pushing the boundary of server applications with Rust
Okay - not earning, but processing. Adjust the figure a bit for varying traffic patterns during week and seasonality, and it'll be kinda like that.
binarin··on Topcoat is pushing the boundary of server applications with Rust
It's the Python guys whom I totally don't understand - it's all fun and dandy until you try to maintain and cleanup a legacy codebase of tens of millions lines of code in any dynamic language :)

With or without AI - doesn't matter. Only at that point you gain understanding of the limitations both of LLMs and of dynamic languages.

edit: Forgot about "Nightmare" difficulty - try enjoying dynamic languages and LLMs when your legacy codebase is earning tens of thousands $ per second.

binarin··on Linux from Scratch
I've learned the most from LFS long time ago, when I had no internet. I had a mismatching set of Slackware and redhat source CDs, and LFS itself didn't match the versions on CDs too. Since then I can build anything and anywhere, even if it's not cooperating :)
binarin··on Stop making swap partitions—use swap files instead
With some workarounds, I've put chrome and slack into the same RAM-limited cgroup - no more whole system freezes. From my anecdotal evidence, this also answers the question "who should you kill" :)
binarin··on Sony makes bold claim about game ownership
Yeah, exactly, it's not stealing, it's just ignoring the terms of license. The same thing in spirit as e.g. different corps shitting on GPL. And should be enforced with the same eagerness (lol).
binarin··on Maiao: Gerrit-style code review workflow for GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, others
Sadly doesn't work with git worktrees at all. (As a side note, this is not the first time I observe where go-git and worktrees don't play along nicely).
binarin··on Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin
I didn't know who Charlie Kirk was, and no facts about DHH other than him being Rails creator.

"will never be awesome" is missing some quantifier about US-centricity.

binarin··on As a Windows user, it's a surreal way to install a program
Not necessarily. The only real thing about this restriction is that Netflix is afraid that this OS version can be used to pirate their content. Which is orthogonal to the question whether this OS is safe to use for random internet browsing.
binarin··on The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded
It has to do with installing packages that use PAM to e.g. validate user passwords (e.g. display managers, screen lockers). So there is a system PAM with its configuration, but making a program packaged with nix respect that system PAM config is not as easy as just linking with libpam from nixpkgs.
binarin··on Microsoft raises Xbox prices by up to 43%
Isn't playstation going download only way in a year or so, with no physical disks at all?
binarin··on Neverclick: Desktop application for performing mouse actions with your keyboard
Actual problem on Wayland is that it often doesn't work when you are trying to click somewhere in the menu - for the mouse clicking app to read keyboard input, it must take focus away from the app where the click should go. And some toolkits just close menus on focus loss.

I personally use wl-kbptr, and the problem above is the only one that can't be solved without explicit support from the compositor.

binarin··on Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation
libghostty is a bigger contribution, it's being embedded left and right.
binarin··on GrapheneOS has been ported to Android 17
The most hilarious is McDonald's app - it refuses to work without Play Integrity check. I wonder what braindamaged reasoning is behind this. Do they want to position themselves as a bank or something?
binarin··on GrapheneOS has been ported to Android 17
My company MDM doesn't consider GrapheneOS good enough to give me access to email/calendar - impasse?
binarin··on Defeating Git Rigour Fatigue with Jujutsu
https://git-scm.com/docs/git-history - git got the remaining piece of the puzzle to make massaging history relatively easy. "git history split", interactive rebase and fixup/auto squash allow you to do anything in a more systematic way than resetting/selectively staging/committing again and again.
binarin··on Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract
Everyone is up in arms because this is not the first shady thing bambulab does (like patenting prior art). And probably not the last.
binarin··on SSH has no Host header
What I had is roughly the following: users connects via SFTP to external.website.com@my.proxy.com. Proxy server (which handles SSH protocol itself) authenticates the user using the principal, then checks whether this principal is allowed to access an external web-site and what exactly it can do here. Then proxy connects to the external website using its own secret credentials. In the end, it solved the problem of having a shared google doc with a bunch of passwords in there which everyone had access to.
binarin··on SSH has no Host header
In kinda the same situation, I was using username for host routing. And real user was determined by the principal in SSH certificate - so the proxy didn't even need to know the concrete certificates for users; it was even easier than keeping track of user SSH keys.

Certificate signing was done by a separate SSH service, which you connected too with enabled SSH agent forwarding, pass 2FA challenge, and get a signed cert injected into your agent.

binarin··on 10 years of personal finances in plain text files
Yes, I'm using parts of this codebase. But Haskell is only being used as a build tool, so you can replace it with anything that you're comfortable with, like make, bazel, ...
binarin··on 10 years of personal finances in plain text files
I've tried to track personal finances several times, but it only started to work when I've discovered the idea (from https://github.com/adept/full-fledged-hledger) that you need to treat the whole PTA story more like a project compilation:

- Everything is managed by build system that is able to track dependencies

- Inputs from financial institutions are kept in the repo as is

- Those inputs are converted by your scripts to .csv files that are readable by PTA import engine

- There are rules files that describe how to convert .csv lines to PTA entries

- Generated files are included from per-year PTA journals (and you can put any manual transactions in here also)

The benefit is that you can change any part of this pipeline, and just re-generate the changed parts:

- improve the program that converts to .csv - raw data immediately gets better across the whole repo

- add/customize import rules - better classification is immediately applied to all of the past data

And with this approach you can start small (like, a single month of data from your primary bank), and refine the thing in steps, like adding more historical data or adding more data sources (examples being not only bank statements, but even things like itemized Amazon orders and Paypal slips).

binarin··on Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig
"Oh no" is what you'd say after getting yourself some nice RSI and discovering that your hands hurt due to mouse or trackpad usage.
binarin··on Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig
There is at least one area where both macos and windows suck - handling window focus. MacOS is regularly having trouble with tracking focus across multiple monitors and multi-window apps, making it unusable with keyboard only. And Windows just loves to steal focus in the most inappropriate moments.
binarin··on Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?
You've missed a lot sarcasm in that statement.

claude-code rendering pipeline often goes awry, and start scrolling back and forward very fast, causing insane flickering. They have some explanation in https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/769#issueco... describing that they've made that tradeoff in the name of native terminal experience (instead of learning per-program shortcuts/etc).

Funnily enough, before reading their reasoning, I thought that the whole rendering pipeline was badly vibe-coded.

binarin··on Windows 11 – There's still nothing worth my time
For my personal computers I was actually buying Windows licenses up to and including Windows 10, but now I switched to alternative acquisition methods again, and mostly run Windows in VMs with GPU pass-through and disabled networking. Just an honest relationship - they don't respect me, I don't respect them.
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