HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

petronic

52 karma · joined February 17, 2015

submissionscomments
petronic··on I asked Claude build a physically accurate O'Neill cylinder you can walk around
Just a heads up - this site managed to choke WindowServer on MacOS 27/Safari long enough to trigger a watchdog reboot.

I never managed to load it and had to rush to kill its tab after the OS restarted and it began choking the machine again.

petronic··on Copying login keychains between Macs fails on Secure Enclave Macs with Tahoe
I've done Tahoe-to-Tahoe migration assistant moves between machines in recent months. No issues with login keychain migration.
petronic··on We Tested Nonstick Cookware: Coatings Don't Need to Look Worn to Shed Particles
It's basically lived on my stovetop since arriving. It weighs nothing compared to my previous favorites (carbon steel skillets from Made In) while basically performing like a Ducati on my induction range.
petronic··on We Tested Nonstick Cookware: Coatings Don't Need to Look Worn to Shed Particles
That was my breakthrough with both carbon steel and cast iron. Even if the seasoning is imperfect, it'll perform just fine if you preheat it thoroughly and oil it before use.
petronic··on We Tested Nonstick Cookware: Coatings Don't Need to Look Worn to Shed Particles
My current favorite pan is the best of all worlds - stainless clad outer layer, aluminum internal layer for efficiency in spreading heat and a carbon steel interior to develop non-stick seasoning with use.

Strata makes them, they're priced competitively with standard carbon steel pans.

Chris Young turned me onto them in his video about a $4,200 silver frying pan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdORIBH3R88

petronic··on I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels
What worked for me was handing them a credit card and transitioning myself out of the free tier. (I'd use the free credits they offer prior to doing this - they give you something like $300 immediately on signup.)

The always-free infra remains free, you just have the chance of incurring a bill if you make selections that aren't free or exceed block storage/egress (200GB/10TB) limits of the always-free tier. Leaving the free/trial tier gives you access to a much larger pool of instances. I never successfully deployed an A1 instance prior to becoming a "paying" customer - now I've done it hundreds of times without ever having an issue.

I've been running a small k0s cluster and a standalone webserver for months while incurring about $2.50 - $3 in spending each month, primarily from being slow to remove instance snapshots sitting in block storage.

Even things that are oddly expensive on AWS - like NAT - are free on Oracle. There are zero gotchas.

petronic··on A quick look at Apple's container runtime in macOS Tahoe
Author here -

Apple quietly introduced a native container runtime in macOS 26—and it doesn’t look like Docker/Podman under the hood. Instead of running all containers inside a single Linux host VM, Apple’s CLI (“container”) spins up a lightweight VM per container via Virtualization.framework. That means each container gets its own kernel, IP, ext4 block storage, and explicit CPU/memory limits. On M3+ Macs, you can even expose nested virtualization (I put a VM in your Container!) It’s OCI‑compatible (your existing Docker/Podman/Kubernetes images work), and Rosetta 2 even lets you run amd64 images on Apple Silicon.

I benchmarked Apple’s runtime (v0.5.0) against Docker/Colima on an M1 Pro (32 GB, macOS 26.0.1). I measured image pulls, cold/warm starts, lifecycle ops, parallel starts, file churn, plus stress‑ng, fio, and 7zip.

A few takeaways: Startup: sub‑second starts as advertised; “container system start” returns instantly (no host VM spin‑up).

CPU/Memory: competitive or slightly favorable to Apple in stress‑ng and 7zip; memory tests consistently leaned Apple.

I/O: Fio (the flexible I/O tester!) flipped the story—Docker performed substantially better on randomized reads and mixed RW.

Clickthrough to the post to find exact commands, scripts, and full outputs, plus charts comparing Apple vs Docker/Colima.

petronic··on Hyundai wants loniq 5 customers to pay for cybersecurity patch in baffling move
My understanding is that the firmware has some sort of DRM and it’s being sold - not freely distributed. (Admittedly, the comment I saw mentioning cost pegged it at 1k, not 20k for a license.)
petronic··on Hyundai wants loniq 5 customers to pay for cybersecurity patch in baffling move
“Gameboy-like device” - are they referring to Flipper Zeros with the firmware to exploit RF rolling codes?

https://www.rtl-sdr.com/flipperzero-darkweb-firmware-bypasse...

petronic··on Ask HN: What is the current (Apr. 2024) gold standard of running an LLM locally?
My experience with more traditional (non-Whisper-based) diarization & transcription is that it's heavily dependent on how well the audio is isolated. In a perfect scenario (one speaker per audio channel, well-placed mics) you'll potentially see some value from it. If you potentially have scenarios where the speaker's audio is being mixed with other sounds or music, they'll often be flagged as an additional speaker (so, speaker 1 might also be speaker 7 and 9) - which can make for a less useful summary.
petronic··on Nab 2020 Cancelled
They've been seeing more and more sponsors and presenters pull out in recent days. Better to cancel it and seem like you're doing the right thing than hold a poorly attended convention, get bad PR for doing so, and still risk infecting a large number of people.
petronic··on The Death of an Adjunct
The academic job market was very different in 2006 than even a couple of years later. With the downturn came a flood of people staying on for grad school instead of looking for jobs - and with them came a flood of free labor for the universities.

She probably assumed with her Columbia degree she'd have no trouble landing something quickly, even with her artificial constraints.

petronic··on The Death of an Adjunct
Most large (and thus expensive) athletic programs are more than self-funding due to ticket sales and alumni donors.

The real sucking force is all of the administrative positions that now outnumber educators.

petronic··on Who Controls Diners’ Data? OpenTable Moves to Assert Control
Most restaurants don't even list their good timeslots on OpenTable, as they're capable of filling those on their own.

It's mostly used to list the less busy "collar hours" (the hours adjacent to any rush) in the hopes that an alternate means to advertising might flip an empty table to a populated table.

I'll avoid talking to a human to make a reservation if possible, but I've had dozens of occasions where OpenTable shows no available reservations at say, 7pm and a quick phone call is all it takes to land the time I'd like.

petronic··on Illinois Bet on Video Gambling and Lost
I had a similar issue after moving from Illinois to Wisconsin and getting new plates - but forgetting to update the plates within I-Pass. (So, I had a valid I-Pass, it was just on the same old car with new plates.)

A few years later I received a collections notice for $1,400 for ~$30 worth of tolls. (This was the first notice they'd sent me. No one could explain why.)

After spending hours on the phone with I-Pass the best they could do was reduce the fine to $300 while making the snarky offer that I could go to court if I didn't like it.

This was effectively a customer service issue (I was a valid customer in good standing), and I still wound up paying 10x the actual cost just to avoid missing work and traveling.

petronic··on Lessons from Interviewing 400 Engineers Over Three Startups
On iOS the “Unobstruct” app ($0.99 - no connection to me) removes the popover nicely. It’s also great for removing dickbars that block a horizontal slice of the page.
petronic··on Macbook Pro frying USB peripherals
It's apparently a known phenomenon called "electrovibration" - I wound up googling it the first time that it happened.

https://blog.somaticlabs.io/electrovibration-in-ungrounded-m...

petronic··on Macbook Pro frying USB peripherals
I've noticed #1 when traveling with the ungrounded attachment for the power brick and a type-F power adapter. At home I still use the old 3-prong cable from my previous gen MBP or USB-C power from a dock's grounded power supply and don't get that weird sensation.
petronic··on The Opening Bell (no one told me I had to make a speech)
> I always found it strange that Sony wasn’t able to do my more to get Vegas established as a leading video editing platform.

Silos. Sony was (is?) a collection of companies that often didn't cooperate well. After the acquisition, SCS was under the heading of Sony Corporation of America. (SCA) They did little to interfere with the company and they had some fun perks, but they didn't seem to be able to do much to support or grow the products either. Want to add support for <$$$$ broadcast hardware>? SCA couldn't arrange a loan, or get you next year’s model before it launched.

Sometime around the economic collapse of '08, SCS was transferred under the heading of Sony Electronics and it felt like there was more support and more of an effort to promote the products of SCS by Sony (and we could finally borrow hardware!), but the market had moved on and SCS never regained its former glory.

petronic··on The Opening Bell (no one told me I had to make a speech)
One bit of SoFo lore that I was told on my first day: inspecting the metadata on one of the .wavs on win95 would reveal that it was edited using a cracked copy of Sound Forge.

/EVERYONE/ pirated Sound Forge.

petronic··on Common prostate cancer treatment linked to later dementia, researcher says
My father's currently 9 months into an 18 month course of Lupron (paired with an earlier course of radiation) for advanced, inoperable prostate cancer. He won't get his next 3-month shot until December.

I've already shared this study with him and asked him to talk about it with his oncologist. At this point, is there anything else that he can do with this information?

petronic··on A Grand Unified Theory of Apple Products
I've resorted to only enabling/disabling shuffle via Siri.
petronic··on How to die at Los Alamos
I've heard similar versions of this story, with the added anecdote being that the use of diluted alcohol as antifreeze wasn't unheard of prior to the use of ethylene glycol becoming commonplace.

That ties into the anecdotes of Parisians shouting "Viva Le Prestone!"[1] as troops moved through their city - each Jeep had "Prestone" stenciled on the hood, partially to mark that it'd been treated with antifreeze, and partially to warn GIs against attempting to drink it.

[1] http://www.300thcombatengineersinwwii.com/summer09.html (scroll down to the notes from Warren Chancellor.)