HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

tom_alexander

285 karma · joined August 27, 2025

submissionscomments
tom_alexander··on Microsoft fixes a Windows 11 annoyance as PC revenue declines
Both AMD and Intel have open source graphics drivers which are upstreamed into the Linux kernel, so that situation would be impossible with an AMD or Intel graphics card. Any driver issues are a pain that nvidia decided to inflict on you.
tom_alexander··on Ask HN: Which TV do you recommend for privacy?
> PS: Yesterday I opened the case and disconnected WiFi antenna. Just in case.

While this couldn't hurt, it also won't stop the TV from being able to connect to wifi. I ran my desktop without an antenna attached for months. The speed noticeably improved when I attached an antenna but it was fine for browsing the web and downloading software updates without one.

tom_alexander··on Nixpkgs for the Front End Impaired
Yep! Personally I use nixd but there are multiple nix lsps. There are definitely places where nixd stops helping due to nix being a dynamically-typed language. For example, when writing functions it doesn't know what the types of any of the parameters are because they could be literally anything. That being said, the example from the screenshot of typing `pkgs.neo` and getting a list of completions for package names absolutely works with nixd.

What's weird is Farid absolutely knows about both nixd and `nix repl` but he didn't mention either of them or compare, instead making it sound like nix doesn't have a repl or a language server.

tom_alexander··on Nixpkgs for the Front End Impaired
> Ask nixpkgs a question in a loop. Interrogate and explore nixpkgs in a REPL

  nix repl --expr 'builtins.getFlake "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-unstable"'

  nix-repl> builtins.filter (name: lib.licenses."${name}" ? spdxId && lib.strings.hasPrefix "GPL" lib.licenses."${name}".spdxId) (builtins.attrNames lib.licenses)
  [
    "gpl1Only"
    "gpl1Plus"
    "gpl2"
    "gpl2Only"
    "gpl2Plus"
    "gpl3"
    "gpl3Only"
    "gpl3Plus"
  ]
tom_alexander··on Here be monsters: What do you still need to know when agents do the work?

  > Sorry, you have been blocked
  > You are unable to access hashnode.dev
Well this is a first for something posted to HN. I'm not blocked anywhere else, so I don't know what you're doing different on your website.
tom_alexander··on Show HN: Uberblok – an interactive museum of ZFS internals
Everyone has mentioned the license, which is the reason ZFS isn't everywhere. I just wanted to add: Don't let the license scare you away. The CDDL is actually a nice compromise between copyleft (GPL) and copyfree (BSD). The CDDL is essentially the same as GPL except the GPL applies to everything it touches (include a single GPL *.c file in your project and now your entire project is subject to the GPL). Whereas the CDDL only applies to the CDDL-licensed files themselves. So you can include ZFS in your project without making your entire project subject to the CDDL.

The issue is, the GPL wants to spread to everything it touches (including the CDDL-licensed ZFS files), which would make the ZFS files subject to both the GPL and the CDDL. But the CDDL and the GPL are incompatible, which is why Linux can't include ZFS whereas more permissively licensed projects like the BSDs can.

So it's an unfortunate situation, but ZFS' license is not "bad". It's just the GPL and the CDDL are incompatible.

tom_alexander··on NixOS is making me less afraid
Admittedly I haven't been in the C++ space for about a decade, but back in the day I used to love premake for this exact reason. You wrote your build config in a completely standard real scripting language: lua.

https://premake.github.io/docs/What-Is-Premake

tom_alexander··on Tell HN: Remember to migrate away from .name domain
Not just "could" but originally it was the only option.

> When the TLD name was first launched, only third-level registrations and forwarded e-mail addresses were available.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.name

tom_alexander··on Show HN: Llmspeed – feel how fast a local LLM runs before you buy the hardware
This is great. It solves two of my issues:

  1. It is difficult to figure out if dropping $10k+ on hardware will make a meaningful difference for running local models.
  2. Downloading each model and each quantization of that model to see the speed seems rude to free services like hugging face, so now I can see things like "with my hardware, going to a Q8 only results in 3 more tokens per second"
My one complaint is picking my hardware (9070XT) and Qwen3.6 27B FP16 results in the message:

> This combination won't run. Qwen 3.6/3.8 27B at FP16 needs 54.6 GB — the AMD RX 9070 XT 16GB has 14.9 GB usable. No quantization of this model fits; pick a smaller model or more memory.

While it is true that it won't fit in your GPU memory, it demonstrably does run on my hardware. Llama.cpp supports putting some layers on the GPU and running others on the CPU.

Also, that message says "No quantization of this model fits" but switching to a different quantization of that model (for example, Q8_0) makes the message go away?

tom_alexander··on E Ink Kaleido 4
> Think it's also debatable what value colour brings unless you are regularly reading full colour magazines, PDFs etc.

A photo frame in your home that rotates through a set of photos. My grandmother had one to help her remember her family, but it was an LCD. A color e-ink one would be so much nicer.

Any sort of information panel/dashboard or even just graphs inside education books. There are e-ink screens with only a couple colors (like black, white, red, and yellow), which lets you do things like "make this graph red when my waterheater is broken" but a full-color display opens up the possibilities considerably! For example, having line graphs with multiple lines.

If it was high refresh rate, I would consider it for a computer display for coding. I could never give up syntax highlighting so I need color.

tom_alexander··on Pixel 11 doesn't yet meet the GrapheneOS security standards and may be skipped
T-Mobile recently had a trade-in promotion where you could trade in any phone and get a pixel 10 for "free". The free is in quotes because what actually happens is you get signed up for device financing which spreads the cost of the phone over 2 years, and then they give your account a credit each month for the same amount charged by the device financing. So they'll end up charging you $33 per month and crediting you $33 per month, resulting in the phone actually being free. The catch is it locks you into 2 years on T-Mobile because if you cancel the account or pay off the phone early, you forfeit all the remaining credits.

Since it was free and I had no plans on leaving T-Mobile in the following 2 years, I went ahead and did the trade-in with an old Pixel 3a. What I didn't realize is since the phone is on a payment plan, the phone is not only carrier-locked (which would be fine) but also bootloader-locked until the end of those 2 years, so I cannot install GrapheneOS on it until ~2028. My free pixel 10 is sitting in its box gathering dust until 2028.

Here is a reddit thread discussing the trade-in promo as proof that it existed: https://www.reddit.com/r/tmobile/comments/1r0by30/pixel_10_f...

tom_alexander··on Memory Companies Have Destroyed the Consumer Market
You're suggesting gambling that Nvidia will start to fall within the next 3 months? That sounds like requiring perfect timing to me.
tom_alexander··on Why do we need human mathematicians anymore?
> unless someone--a human--can verify and understand it, it doesn't count.

One counter-point: Humans have not figured out how general anesthesia works, but we use it every day to great effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theories_of_general_anaestheti...

tom_alexander··on Fuck it, make it anyway
https://www.facebook.com/twonks/posts/great-job-/13130659843...
tom_alexander··on Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables
I use twine for the same reason. Dirt cheap. Lasts forever. Doesn't leave residue on your cables. The downside is I end up cutting the twine when I need to use the cable but a couple inches of twine in insignificant.
tom_alexander··on Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
Relevant comic expressing the same idea: https://www.facebook.com/twonks/posts/great-job-/13130659843...
tom_alexander··on Don't Use a gmail.com Address
Good suggestion! Fixed.
tom_alexander··on Don't Use a gmail.com Address
I have my own domain. I've been asked for my email, to which I replied "myname@foo.example" and they replied "myname@foo.example.com?".

edit: Changed domain based on ButlerianJihad's suggestion

tom_alexander··on Reflections on Americans' Net Worth
> who the author is

The article has the author listed at the top. If you click on it, you'll see which university he works for. With his name and university, you can Google to find his wikipedia page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Caplan

tom_alexander··on Internet centralization and the original sin of NAT
> If not for NAT, we'd all need a firewall

You still need a firewall regardless of NAT. Otherwise, every time you take your computer outside of your home, you're no longer protected. Any attacker or compromised device on your hotel, airport, or coffee shop wifi network would have direct access to your machine.

tom_alexander··on Arbitrary code execution in QubesOS via copy-to-VM error reporting backchannel
> being able to run different applications over Tor, VPN or plain internet simultaneously, the ability to isolate non-safe binaries and being able to backup your VMs easily.

These are all possible using light containers. For example, on FreeBSD I will spin up a jail which runs wireguard, and then I'll bridge that to another a jail. That 2nd jail is running entirely off wireguard without any other way to access the network. Since it is a jail, it is isolated. And backing up is as simple as a zfs snapshot and zfs send. I assume the same is possible on Linux.

tom_alexander··on Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
Because freedom isn't free!

But in all seriousness, "free as in freedom" seems fine to me but it is replacing the already unambiguous "free as in speech". You're still stuck with the sometimes-confusing "free as in beer" and they're still cumbersome compared to gratis/libre.

tom_alexander··on What's new in Emacs 31.1
> seeing how much of my old third-party config I can replace with builtins

There are projects that seek to do just that. I'd recommend taking a look at them to get an idea of whats possible with an almost-entirely-vanilla emacs setup.

  Examples:
  https://codeberg.org/ashton314/emacs-bedrock
  https://github.com/LionyxML/emacs-solo
tom_alexander··on Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
This is why I prefer "gratis" vs "libre" instead of "free as in speech" vs "free as in beer". gratis/libre are clear and succinct.

As for an actual answer: parties, weddings.

tom_alexander··on I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs
> Or maybe you pipe into xargs and pray your filenames don’t have spaces:

> find . -name '*.log' | xargs rm

No need for prayer:

  find . -name '*.log' -print0 | xargs --null rm
That uses null as a delimiter instead of linebreaks.
tom_alexander··on In Emacs, everything looks like a service
In my case, I am a very senior member of my team so 25-50% of each day is spent helping and/or teaching teammates. In situations like that, it is useful to be deeply familiar with the tools that your teammates are using so you can tell them exactly what to do.

For example, if I'm teaching a new hire to set up their vscode it is not very helpful to tell them "now you need to activate the python venv". It is much more helpful to be able to tell them "Now we're going to activate the python venv. To do that, open your command palette and search for 'select python interpreter'".

In my personal life, I still exclusively use emacs (which I have scripted to auto-detect venvs) but I put up with using vscode at work to be a greater utility to my team.

tom_alexander··on GrapheneOS has been ported to Android 17
They're referring to the partnership between GrapheneOS and Motorola: https://motorolanews.com/motorola-three-new-b2b-solutions-at...
tom_alexander··on The AV2 Video Standard Has Released (Final v1.0 Specification)
It's at the end on the conclusion slide @24:40:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se8E_SUlU3w&t=1480

tom_alexander··on Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs
My area has a net-metering plan available, so you can send any surplus out to the grid to offset energy pulled from the grid, essentially treating the grid like a large battery. That can extend the 8 hours into full 24-hour coverage with enough panels.
tom_alexander··on Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs
With enough solar panels it is!
Page 1 of 4Next →