Hacker News Reader

throwaway984393on Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop

Because there's big demand to mitm users of an extremely small and limited distribution from 2008?

throwaway984393on Iowa City made its buses free. Traffic cleared, and so did the air

More like never tackle the complex

throwaway984393on ICE Wants to Build Out a 24/7 Social Media Surveillance Team

America's Gestapo

throwaway984393on AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

IIRC limit isn't the copper, it's the CO interconnects with high/low frequency cutoffs, the same copper was used for 1.5Mbps synchronous DSL. For very short runs, 50Mbps VDSL

throwaway984393on Broadcom to discontinue free Bitnami Helm charts

38:28 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2308s&pp=0gcJCTA...

throwaway984393on IKEA ditches Zigbee for Thread going all in on Matter smart homes

"A software development kit (SDK) is provided royalty-free,[13][14] though the ability to commission a finished product into a Matter network in the field mandates certification and membership fees,[15][16] entailing both one-time, recurring, and per-product costs.[17] This is enforced using a public key infrastructure (PKI) and so-called device attestation certificates.[15]"

So it's a closed ecosystem that makes money for a cabal of corporations

throwaway984393on BorgBackup 2 has no server-side append-only anymore

No. Delete and overwrite are different. You need overwrite protection in addition to delete protection. The solution will vary depending on the storage system and the use case. (The comment in the PR is not an exhaustive description of potential solutions)

throwaway984393on The Pain That Is GitHub Actions

Drone.io

throwaway984393on When the Dotcom Bubble Burst

The stock may have suffered but Cisco as a company has been consistently profitable and dependable partly due to its financial management. They have a crap ton of cash, and they are very good at buying and integrating companies. I would consider them more reliable than IBM, partly because they do make "real things", and partly because they're just damn good at business. They are a great example of why you don't need an engineer to lead a very successful engineering company.

throwaway984393on Zentool – AMD Zen Microcode Manipulation Utility

I love that Tavis is only listed as a "Software Engineer"

throwaway984393on Fortune(6) – Linux Man Page

It's sad that some distros refuse to package with -o option support anymore

throwaway984393on When the U.S. tried to replace migrant farmworkers with high schoolers (2018)

The jobs are available for citizens. But they don't do them. And it's not because of immigration. Think about it for more than 5 seconds. They could just stop immigration for migrant workers and suddenly give citizens jobs. Every politician wants to be known as a job creator. But they don't. Why? There is not enough workers here. Proof? COVID. They stopped letting migrant workers in and farms failed left and right from lack of workers.

We weren't lacking teenagers. We were lacking a dirt cheap seasonal exploitable massive workforce. There are not enough teens even if we conscripted them all. And if you don't, teens don't like doing work. Most teens don't live in the sticks anymore. And (for teens) we care about these stupid things like safety, a minimum wage, and labor laws.

It's not 1950 anymore. The world has changed. The reason we need migrant workers is WalMart. Their demand for ever lower prices creates the need for the lowest priced highest supply scalable labor due to a global supply chain and pricing pressure. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. Want cheap shit? Then you hire migrant workers. Or give up on farms and buy from overseas. Or make robots that can pick fruit. There's no free lunch.

throwaway984393on The Bering Land Bridge was more like a swamp

So it was Florida but north

throwaway984393on Man suffers chemical burn that lasted months after squeezing limes

The medical term: Phytophotodermatitis (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytophotodermatitis)

You can get it from the carrot family, citrus, mulberry, and legume. Most people only know about the citrus.

throwaway984393on What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

Cars now have cell modems that you can hook up to select telecom providers to turn your car into a hotspot, so those cell modems/SIMs do have an APN for internet data

throwaway984393on ICC issues warrants for Netanyahu, Gallant, and Hamas officials

This will not amount to anything, but it's nice to know we aren't all crazy or anti-semitic for thinking the Israeli state has been acting very poorly in regards to the State of Palestine. Feels a little bit like trying to get organized crime on tax evasion.

throwaway984393on Linux on Apple Silicon with Alyssa Rosenzweig [audio]

Most of the software that ships works, but actually I've run into a number of bugs on stock. A bunch of seg faults and other crashes I couldn't trace.

For some reason a lot of apps have bugs in Wayland, like mousing over menus, only the first menu item shows up; move to a different item, then back to the first, and suddenly all the menu items show up. Persistently happens in several apps.

Some of the Flatpak apps also have serious performance issues and bugs that native ones don't. A big app I need to use is FreeCAD, which there was no ARM build for until the recent 1.0pre releases. Their FreeCAD build has some issues that their AppImage doesn't. But even the AppImage release has some weird bugs, and I wasn't able to figure out if they're FreeCAD bugs, Wayland bugs, Fedora bugs, or what.

And then there's DisplayLink drivers+userland, which amazingly kind-of works (after a bunch of tries), but then hard crashes or prevents the machine from resumung from suspend.

I also get weird giant green flashes on straight HDMI. And because the laptop resolution is fixed, when I attach a monitor, the laptop screen "invades" the monitor screen. Fullscreen doesn't work, the panels conflict, it's kind of a mess. I'm almost certain the latter is some kind of KDE/Wayland bug, but the green flashes must be the video driver.

There's a bunch of other issues I don't remember at the moment. But all of this adds up, sadly, to something I just can't make work. Really wanted it to.

throwaway984393on Linux on Apple Silicon with Alyssa Rosenzweig [audio]

What they've been able to accomplish in such a short time is nothing short of amazing, and I applaud them for their efforts.

That said, I've been using Asahi for a month, and I'm ditching it. Maybe in a year or two it'll be stable, but for now it's got too many bugs and unsupported features. A lot of the problems come down to Wayland and KDE/Gnome, as you literally have to use Wayland. But there's plenty of other buggy or challenging parts that all add up to a very difficult working experience.

One of the biggest challenges I see is support for hardware and 3rd party apps. Not only do all the apps need to support this slightly odd Arm system, but so do hardware driver developers. I never realized before just how much of a Linux system works because most people had an incredibly common platform (x86_64). Even if Linux on Mac became incredibly popular, it would actually take away development focus on x86_64, and we'd see less getting done.

(This kind of problem is totally common among Linux laptops, btw; there's a ton of hardware out there and Linux bugs may exist in each one. Adding a new model doesn't add to the number of developers supporting them all. If anything, the Mac is probably benefited by the fact that it has so few models compared to the x86_64 world. But it's still only got so many devs, and 3rd party devs aren't all going to join the party overnight)

throwaway984393on Jaywalking legalized in New York City

Yep. The times I've been hit by a car while walking it was the car rolling through stop signs, lights and turns.

throwaway984393on What's New in POSIX 2024

Sad. Use of that option is almost always a mistake. It only leads to undebuggable silent failures.

throwaway984393on Some Automattic employees accept severance package offer

I finally have an analogy for the "Open Source company":

A company creates a free buffet and sells seats at a table. They hope a competitor doesn't come and take the free food, slather it in hot sauce, and sell it at their own restaurant, because that would be rude.

throwaway984393on Starlink offering free internet access for 30 days for Hurricane Helene victims

Yep, in a few years these dishes will be $600 paperweights. We need real rural broadband.

throwaway984393on Gorhill pulls uBlock Origin Lite from Firefox store

This is why app stores / extension stores are simply an antipattern. The intent is to make usability easier, but it's actually useful functionality.

Get rid of the app and extension stores and let users just install software they find on the internet. Safe and secure software is found on websites dedicated to reviewing them, like the Freshmeat of old, Tucows, etc.

throwaway984393on If WordPress is to survive, Matt Mullenweg must be removed

Please, for the love of god, let it die. WordPress's horrible security, annoying maintenance, and cookie cutter sites have filled the internet with malware and garbage content. It's so annoying to maintain that we have to find these managed hosting places that provide very little value. And despite them, you still need to add a bunch of extra stuff to make a reliable site. Time to create something modern.

throwaway984393on NIST to forbid requirement of specific passwords character composition

Too bad it won't get adopted by existing systems. I know huge companies still doing mandatory frequent password changes despite us telling them it goes against NIST for years.

throwaway984393on Colocation: Non-Clown Hosting

I'm a little less grizzled, but I'm so glad I never have to deal with shuffling around broken hardware anymore, much less diagnosing the most inane, obscure bugs due to the hardware slowly crapping out. I've lost so much sleep to shit hardware and unstable, untrustworthy colos. APIs and automation rather than cage monkeys, IPMI, expect and crossed fingers. The Cloud is my church and I've seen the light, hallelujah.

throwaway984393on It is hard to recommend Google Cloud

Office365 is way better. You get native apps, which are obviously better than a web app, you get device integrations for enterprise, you get more advanced tooling, more features. Plus MS has better compliance options. If you're actually running a business, and not just a startup employee who doesn't need to do much, MS is the way.

throwaway984393on Gaining access to anyones Arc browser without them even visiting a website

https://arc.net/faq

I'm definitely not the target audience... Even after reading the faq I have no idea what it does

throwaway984393on Netflix's Key-Value Data Abstraction Layer

Back in the 2000s it was common to have libraries and services which would expose high level database functions to applications rather than give them direct database access. It solved so many problems.

throwaway984393on Drift towards danger and the normalization of deviance (2017)

I find this kind of thing fascinating. In the BDSM rope bondage world there is a lot of ceremony and almost theatrics about safety. But there's actually no real safety, because the participants keep doing things everyone knows is unsafe. The Takate Kote tie is probably responsible for 80% of nerve impingement damage in rope bondage, yet it's wildly popular because people find it pleasing and they keep coming up with new variations on it. Every time you bring up its danger, people like to shout you down like you're over-reacting and they're sick of hearing from you, and then they go give some poor newbie wrist drop.