Hacker News Reader

These posts are just new slops. An operating system is far more than what you see. And the NixOS + Hyprland + Ghostty combo is clearly a meme now.

ritcgabon I went from literature/language to Rust systems programming in under a year

Welp, I guess LLMs truly helped a lot of people.

ritcgabon Purdue blocks admission of many Chinese grad students in unwritten policy

Purdue is ranked the 13th on csrankings.org. Let's see how it goes in 5 years.

ritcgabon Show HN: Minikv – Distributed key-value and object store in Rust (Raft, S3 API)

The commit history of this file is hilarious.

ritcgabon Show HN: Minikv – Distributed key-value and object store in Rust (Raft, S3 API)

A production grade key-value store, while .DS_Store is everywhere in its repository.

ritcgabon Toro: Deploy Applications as Unikernels

All specific to runc.

ritcgabon FediMeteo: A €4 FreeBSD VPS Became a Global Weather Service

To be fair, that is 4 dedicated cores not shared with other tenants.

ritcgabon What Does a Database for SSDs Look Like?

SSDs are more of a black box per se. FTL adds another layer of indirection and they are mostly proprietary and vendor-specific. So the performance of SSDs are not generalizable.

ritcgabon Tunnl.gg

Curious about this as well.

ritcgabon X.com is gonna snitch you out to the public if you use a VPN

There are tons of services like maxmind that can just tell you the origin of an IP - whether it is a datacenter one or a residential one.

ritcgabon We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner

> Yes all the normal Hetzner servers use ECC

This is wrong - or define "normal"? In their current product line, at least the default configuration of AX52/EX44/EX63/GEX44 doesn't have ECC. It is an upgrade option only.

The blog post says their server has "8 cores Intel Xeon W-2145", which is PX92 or its variant and its base configuration can be without ECC.

ritcgabon We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner

Looking at the root server hardware page on Hetzner [1], it is not clear if their server is using ECC memory. It would be pretty bad if not.

[1] https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/general-info...

ritcgabon Immutable Software Deploys Using ZFS Jails on FreeBSD

Very neat!

ritcgabon I'm spoiled by Apple Silicon but still love Framework

This is "obsolete" S3 sleep. Newer CPUs don't support this.

ritcgabon DuckDB NPM packages 1.3.3 and 1.29.2 compromised with malware

For critical infra projects like this, making a release should require at least three signatures from different maintainers. In fact, I am surprised that this is not a common practice.

ritcgabon The MacBook has a sensor that knows the exact angle of the screen hinge

There is no official statement about this issue but you can search for user reports like "M2 MacBook Air black screen" or something similar. It is not uncommon.

In older versions of macOS you can simply try two things:

* Press Esc in locking screen, or * Press "Sleep" from the menu bar icon and then press Esc immediately

If the machine crashes/reboots, the sensor is bad and it needs to be replaced. Apple Store replaces the whole display assembly.

15 inch and M3/M4 models are not affected, AFAIK.

ritcgabon The MacBook has a sensor that knows the exact angle of the screen hinge

And this little thingy makes a lot of M2 MacBook Airs fail.

ritcgabon A blog does not need “analytics”

This is true if you host your blog on a webserver under your control. If you host from platforms like GitHub pages, this is not an option.

ritcgabon From M1 MacBook to Arch Linux: A month-long experiment that became permanenent

The copilot key on every new Windows® laptop, though.

ritcgabon Pixel 10 Phones

You just cannot prove a party doesn't own something.

ritcgabon Get the location of the ISS using DNS

DNS is a federated, read-optimized, geo-replicated key-value store with eventual consistency.

ritcgabon Save your disk, write files directly into RAM with /dev/shm

This only stands for modern storage devices with a controller. For SD cards that don't have wear leveling, writing to the same region will make it die faster.

ritcgabon Canonicals Interview Process

Unubuntunable.

ritcgabon AI Won't Kill Junior Devs – But Your Hiring Strategy Might

Are the two recent graduate average fresh grads, or top ones?

ritcgabon One-Click RCE in Asus's Preinstalled Driver Software

This is really a well written blog post.

The practice of "injecting pre-installed software through BIOS" is such a deal-breaker. Unfortunately this seems to be widely adopted by the major players in motherboard market.

ritcgabon Ask HN: I'm an MIT senior and still unemployed – and so are most of my friends

Share you resume with the MIT alumnus who replied here and I am sure you will land a job pretty quickly.

You can even just anonymize your resume and make it public.

ritcgabon Cloudflare blocking Pale Moon and other browsers

Not saying MITM is a bad term but Cloudflare is the single biggest MITM.

ritcgabon WhiteSur: macOS-like theme for GTK desktops

This is good work.

But my desktop has looked identical for the last five years, and I wish it would stay the same for the next ten years.

ritcgabon Are SSDs more reliable than hard drives? (2021)

HDDs also have controller firmware and it's not unseen that they kill hard drives early.