Hacker News Reader

mgerdtson Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce

Beware! Y’all doesn’t necessarily include everyone:

> All y'all is used in the Southern United States when a speaker wishes to include everyone being addressed. Y'all may refer to an indefinite set of members of a group, but all y'all definitively includes everyone in the group.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/all_y%27all

mgerdtson A Dynamic and Distributed Virtual GPU Cloud Built on Idle Apple Silicon Devices

And on IRIX, SunOS, and DG-UX boxes too. Once Linux existed for a bit, they were added to the fold. The software to do this - Condor - is still maintained.

https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~danb/ref-v7.7.5/ref.html

mgerdtson The largest electric aircraft just flew [video]

It seems like a great option to get between MSN, MKE, or RFD and ORD. Maybe even an interesting connector between MDW and ORD.

The key thing question is whether smaller more frequent flights eat up too much runway time to be economical.

mgerdtson The largest electric aircraft just flew [video]

But it may be for getting from Denver to Breckenridge or Winter Park. A flight to bypass Berthoud Pass in the winter seems quite attractive.

More likely, this replaces the turboprop or commuter jet from Colorado Springs to Denver to catch the connecting fright to any other major airport.

mgerdtson We could save petabytes of cache storage with Zstandard and Pingora

ZFS compresses recordsize or volblocksize chunks down to some whole number of disk blocks, as determined by 1 >> ashift. In practice, this typically means that each 128k chunk gets compressed to some number of sequential 512 or 4096 byte blocks. These compressed blocks are referenced by block pointers that contain flags indicating compression and what type.

mgerdtson We could save petabytes of cache storage with Zstandard and Pingora

For the cost of a small amount of metadata the offsets of every MiB or so could be stored. I did something like this with pigz as I was implementing multithreaded compressed and encrypted kernel zone suspend and resume for Solaris.

mgerdtson 'Mad honey' that can stop your heart is being sold online

Had to look that up and stumbled across this:

> The information about ghost pipe containing grayanotoxin is based on a single source from 1889. (Yes 1889, not 1989!)

https://unrulygardening.com/ghost-pipe-faqs/

They are also listed as endangered in several states. I see them with some regularity in Wisconsin, even had one in my yard a few years back.

mgerdtson AliExpress runs silent WebAudio fingerprinting that breaks Bluetooth multipoint

Is this tunable per hearing program? When in an even moderately noisy environment I find myself switching to AirPods if I’m streaming. I would love for the HA to give separate controls for BT audio vs ambient like AirPods do.

mgerdtson AliExpress runs silent WebAudio fingerprinting that breaks Bluetooth multipoint

The cheap hearing aid cost $750 for one and is substantially the same as the same thing sold from standalone audiologists for much more. These are not cheap over the counter devices.

Charging only happens while in the cradle, not while worn.

mgerdtson AliExpress runs silent WebAudio fingerprinting that breaks Bluetooth multipoint

With my previous hearing aid I noticed that visiting a wide variety of web sites would cause a change in the amplification of environmental noise. I always assumed it was doing something with Bluetooth, and probably not for a good reason. This is with an iPhone 13 and one Kirkland/phonak hearing aid.

I haven’t noticed this recently, but I also now have two newer Phonak hearing aids and a few iOS updates have happened. Maybe the silent Bluetooth shenanigans are less disruptive to my new aids or the programming is different. Surely shenanigans continue.

mgerdtson Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio

I wonder if similar results would come from just adding a second 10 Gb NIC. If his workload runs SMB multichannel at sufficient queue depth, the load should spread across the multiple paths. If the queue depth is always 1, SMB multichannel is not helping on the 25 Gb NIC either.

mgerdtson Oracle could face $7B collateral bill for Wisconsin data centre

Even better, get rid of the mandate for ethanol and cover a portion of the ex corn fields with solar panels with native plants under and around them. A small portion of the land that is near existing transmission lines is needed to replace combustion vehicles with electric vehicles. The bulk of the rest of this land could be available for other uses, including data centers.

This gives: sustained income for landowners, CO2 reduction, power for new uses, and partially restored ecosystems that have been greatly harmed by chemical laden monocultures.

mgerdtson REO Trucks I4 4WD Pickup Truck Starts at $21,500

I was at the Toyota dealership today. A TRD off-road with TRD Off-Road Upgrade Package and other goodies has a MSRP of $61k and the tag hanging from the rear view mirror said the no haggle price was $54,608. Still a lot of money and it is a huge truck for the passenger and cargo payload.

https://www.smarttoyota.com/new-Madison-2026-Toyota-Tacoma-T...

mgerdtson Organic Maps

AllTrails has a heat map feature as well. I think this feature is now paywalled.

mgerdtson Organic Maps

You can record tracks with (I think) both Organic Maps and CoMaps. If you are interested in the social aspects of sharing tracks https://wanderer.to/ and a few others offer imports of GPX and other track formats.

mgerdtson Reducing tick density along recreational trails in Ottawa, Canada

I’ve seen a tick in Wisconsin every month of the year over the past five years or so. That is I’ve seen a January tick one year, February tick that same year or another year, etc. Whenever there is a bit of a warm spell they appear. Presumably small upward trends in temperature allows such warm spells to happen more frequently.

mgerdtson 15-minute at-home Lyme disease tick test

> you squeeze their contents through their mouths

Whenever someone recommends removal using tweezers, I wonder if the person offering this advice has ever removed a well attached tick. I’ve found tools like a Tick Tornado work better, but are still problematic with smaller ticks.

https://www.zenpetusa.com/tick-tornado

mgerdtson 15-minute at-home Lyme disease tick test

https://lymealert.com/how-it-works/

I’m not optimistic this will be all that helpful. Just because the tick you found is negative, that tells you nothing about those you did not find. Just because a tick is positive, that does not mean that it has infected whoever it was attached to.

My understanding is that the ticks only transmit disease after they have been attached long enough to become engorged. None of the ticks shown were engorged.

mgerdtson Treating pancreatic tumours may have revealed cancer's master switch

By any chance does this person live near Montrose CO and tend to the lawn at a church next to the Holiday Inn Express?

mgerdtson 245TB Micron 6600 ION Data Center SSD Now Shipping

And out of band management, hot plug capable form factors, and a bunch of other things described in the OCP NVMe SSD spec.

https://www.opencompute.org/documents/datacenter-nvme-ssd-sp...

mgerdtson 245TB Micron 6600 ION Data Center SSD Now Shipping

A big consideration for efficiency and TCO calculations is the number of servers required to house the drives. NVMe drives tend not to be in external JBOF enclosures.

Fewer servers means fewer cpus, less RAM, fewer fans, and maybe fewer switches.

mgerdtson Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)

In the late 80s I worked in an industrial controls shop. This is the type of place that makes the cabinets with all the buttons, switches, and lights commonly associated with nuke plant controls. Only we did mostly controls for paper making machinery for Kimberly-Clark, Appleton Papers, etc.

Most of our green cabinets were spotlite green. Seafoam green was rare. Both paint colors were prepared by our local sherwin Williams. The colors looked pretty much the same to me.

mgerdtson VitruvianOS – Desktop Linux Inspired by the BeOS

You aren’t alone:

https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/working-defini...

mgerdtson How do you capture decisions made in Slack so they don't get lost?"

I record them in a different system that is more likely to survive shifts in technology, business relationships, and arbitrary expiration date changes to save money.

mgerdtson What not to write on your security clearance form (1988)

I remember similar advice.

In Navy boot camp the person reviewing my security clearance application (which was filled out weeks before) was very helpful in the way he asked the critical question. “It says here you tried marijuana once. Is that true?”

mgerdtson How did Windows 95 get permission to put Weezer video 'Buddy Holly' on the CD?

Back in 1997 or so I bought an ATI video card that also had a Weezer video on the CD. I remember being amazed that it could play the video at 1024x768 with just a little bit of tearing.

mgerdtson Why E cores make Apple silicon fast

This sounds like Solaris doors. The remainder of the time slice of the door client is given to the door server.

mgerdtson Microsoft gave FBI set of BitLocker encryption keys to unlock suspects' laptops

Exactly. I question why the parent says you have to re-encrypt the drive.

Microsoft has the KEK or passphrase that can be used to derive the KEK. The KEK protects the DEK which is used to encrypt the data. Rotating the KEK (or KEKs if multiple slots are used) will overwrite the encrypted DEK, rendering the old KEK useless.

Or does BitLocker work differently than typical data at rest encryption?

mgerdtson Verizon starts requiring 365 days of paid service before it will unlock phones

And if you don’t use a lot of data, at least US Mobile has a by the gig plan. My family has three phones on it for a total $30 per month. Those months that we go over, it automatically charges $2 for each extra GB, with data pooled between the lines.

It is easy to switch between Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile as well. This was helpful for me as all three of the networks normally have one bar or less at my house. T-mobile WiFi calling works more reliably than Verizon.

mgerdtson Native ZFS VDEV for Object Storage (OpenZFS Summit)

Mirroring between s3 providers would seemingly give protection against your account being locked at one of them.

I expect this becomes most interesting with l2arc and cache (zil) devices to hold the working set and hide write latency. Maybe would require tuning or changes to allow 1m writes to use the cache device.