Hacker News Reader

5e92cb50239222bon Calibre replacement considerations (2019)

  $ ebook-convert source.fb2 .epub

I don't know about the other two, never needed them.

5e92cb50239222bon The History of Windows NT 3.1

Add the "annoyances" list in your adblocker. (What newsletter modal?)

5e92cb50239222bon Open-sourcing SQX, a way to build flexible database models in Go

It's easy to drop down to pure SQL in every ORM I've ever used. Meanwhile, a good ORM gives you type safe queries, and saves from having to write boilerplate for trivial CRUD.

I honestly would like to know which ORMs most critics have experience with. If it's something terrible like Hibernate, then no wonder. For reference, the ORM I've used the most is Entity Framework (the new one, rewritten for NET Core), and it's simply wonderful for 90%+ of my work, and doesn't get in the way for the rest of it.

5e92cb50239222bon ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is

Who cares what they say, the Russian constitution can be rewritten in a couple of days when a certain person needs something from it.

5e92cb50239222bon ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is

Good, let's further isolate the population from independent sources of information and leave them completely in the dark about what's happening both in the outside world, and in their own countries. I often wonder who and for what purpose posts comments such as this one because they play so well towards what these dictators want. Or is it just ignorance coming from those who has never lived in a dictatorship.

I will also let you know that many neutral countries receive our internet through some of those you imply by your statement. You would cut significant chunks of mostly poor population off the internet. We have some connectivity through other countries, but it will be back to the dial-up days for at least 5-10 years until more fiber is laid out.

5e92cb50239222bon Doas – dedicated OpenBSD application subexecutor

https://xn--1xa.duncano.de/slicer69-doas.html

5e92cb50239222bon Keystroke timing obfuscation added to ssh(1)

https://github.com/ggerganov/kbd-audio

It's quite good at decoding my own typing, although I am a quite aggressive typist and that may help. I haven't tried it on others, though (honest, officer).

5e92cb50239222bon We put half a million files in one Git repository (2022)

Among mainline Linux filesystems, xfs started doing this first. The test suite is still named xfstests, although many more filesystems rely on it now. They regularly test xfs on enormous filesystems which 99.9% of us will never see, both with hundreds of billions of tiny files, and relatively small numbers of very large ones, plus various mixes of the two. Pushing it into edge cases like billions of files in one directory without any nesting. I really like that strong engineering culture and that's why I prefer xfs for most stuff.

5e92cb50239222bon My hobby became my job, 50% extra pay, just needed to let go of GPLv3

I looked at OP's account. No comments at all, and every submission leads to his own website. Many of them marked as [dead]. I thought this was strictly against HN guidelines?

5e92cb50239222bon Ten killed in private jet crash – Wagner leader Prigozhin 'on passenger list'

You should also mention Utkin's callsign: Wagner.

5e92cb50239222bon Ask HN: As a self-taught developer, what are your self-directed learning tips?

Very few exams I've taken tested anything but the ability for rote memorization.

5e92cb50239222bon The Terrifying Possibility of Accidental Nuclear War

Yeah, you just keep believing that. According to various internet experts, Russia has run out of armored vehicles, out of rockets, out of drones, out of everything five or six times by now. Luckily for me, your military brass and political leadership don't take advice from the internet (since I am unlikely to get bombed if an all-out nuclear war starts, and don't care much for Mad Max-like existence).

5e92cb50239222bon GNU Parallel, where have you been all my life?

  > Tange, O. (2023, July 22). GNU Parallel 20230722 ('Приго́жин').

Looks like the latest release is named after Prigozhin. Yeah, probably that one, although I couldn't find anything in the mailing list to confirm it.

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

edit: all releases are named after current political events:

https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/parallel.git/refs/

5e92cb50239222bon GNU Parallel, where have you been all my life?

I wanted to say 'not anymore', but it turns out that some distributions remove that message.

https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/pa...

Debian too (thanks to iib for pointing this out)

https://salsa.debian.org/med-team/parallel/-/tree/master/deb...

And looks like the author is aware of both:

https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/pa...

5e92cb50239222bon How They Tried to Kill Me

https://archive.is/TOJCx

5e92cb50239222bon How They Tried to Kill Me

Personally I think the world would be a lot better without people such as yourself. This would cull maybe 20% of Russia (including almost all of their "elites"), and the rest of us would live happily ever after.

5e92cb50239222bon How They Tried to Kill Me

They didn't really "move", it a different (though related) paper that lost some journalists from the old one who were unable or unwilling to emigrate and are kept silenced by fear for their personal safety. It is managed by a different editor (promoted from the old paper) and has a quite different feel to it.

5e92cb50239222bon Podman v4.6 Introduces Podmansh: A Revolutionary Login Shell

Have you looked at toolbox? it might already be doing what you want — it's a thin wrapper around podman that integrates containers with the rest of the system — you don't really even feel that you're running a container.

https://github.com/containers/toolbox

5e92cb50239222bon The first messenger without user IDs

Have you been living under a rock for the past couple of years? Some have never learned anything from the original Red Scare, so now we're full into Red Scare 2.0.

Reminds me of that HN comment I saw where some US company started a rewrite of their frontend when they discovered that the 100% FOSS UI components library they had been using was developed by a Chinese company. Cut off your nose to spite your face and all that.

Wait until they learn how much code of Chinese and Russian origin there is in the Linux kernel.

5e92cb50239222bon CIQ, Oracle, SUSE Create Open Enterprise Linux Association

https://www.redhat.com/en/store/red-hat-enterprise-linux-wor...

  > SELF-SUPPORT (1 YEAR)
  > Does not include Red Hat customer support.
  > Starting at US$179

https://www.redhat.com/en/store/red-hat-enterprise-linux-ser...

  > SELF-SUPPORT (1 YEAR)
  > Does not include Red Hat customer support.
  > Total US$349

5e92cb50239222bon CIQ, Oracle, SUSE Create Open Enterprise Linux Association

For me: yast (easy to use GUI/TUI for many administration tasks — useful for less experienced admins), snapper (filesystem snapshot management tool which automatically creates them before and after package management operations and allows you to boot into them or roll back if anything goes wrong. Quite similar to FreeBSD boot environments.)

zypper is probably the best 'classic' package manager there is (although dnf is great too; it's more of an argument against Debian and its derivatives).

Then there is https://build.openbuildservice.org which automatically builds packages for all supported distributions and architectures from a single RPM spec file and creates a ready to use repository for you.

OpenSUSE Leap is built from SLES sources and is thus comparable in its stability guarantees to the old CentOS (or any of the current RHEL rebuilds).

5e92cb50239222bon The Future of the Vim Project

MariaDB didn't "strangle off" MySQL. The latter is still significantly more popular (probably 10 times as much, if not more) if you look outside our HN/Linux bubble. It also had one of the best releases ever under Oracle's guidance back in 2018, many years after the split, when very few of the original developers were still at Oracle. Meanwhile, MariaDB development slowed down significantly over the past few years as they're having financial problems.

(You might counter that by saying that the last MySQL release was in 2018, but it's not really comparable: Oracle does all of its development behind closed doors and then does major code dumps when it's ready. MariaDB prefer shipping small releases every 6 months or so.)

5e92cb50239222bon The Future of the Vim Project

> killing them

MySQL 8 was released nine years after the split, and was one of the best releases throughout the project's history (cleaning up many decades old problems, modernizing the underlying storage engine, introducing window functions, CTEs, transactional DDL, lots of other stuff like that).

5e92cb50239222bon The most prolific packager for Alpine Linux is stepping away

I don't know about Alpine specifically, but many distributions put a lot of red tape around becoming a maintainer (for good reasons). I just don't want to get into it. AUR from Arch Linux has an interesting take on this — anyone can become a maintainer in a matter of minutes — and while that results in some low-quality packages and the expectation that you're supposed to review everything you install (which is easy though thanks to the excellent package format, which Alpine also uses with minor modifications), most of them are fine, and AUR gets a lot more maintainers than any other distribution.

You also don't put any obligations on yourself by becoming a maintainer on AUR — you can always orphan a package in less than a minute, no questions asked. Some users actually place new packages on AUR and orphan them right away. If it's of any use, it usually get a volunteer maintainer within a few days.

5e92cb50239222bon US smartphone shipments fall sharply, but Android more than iPhone

It's not a meme in poorer countries. At least not in those that I am familiar with. Quite a few iPhone users I know use it as a status symbol, many have bought it in credit and paid out over the next several years with a significant chunk of their modest incomes (because they couldn't have acquired one any other way). Just in time to get the next model. Eh, whatever, at least it's more useful than expensive clothing.

5e92cb50239222bon Treat your CI system as a product for faster and better feedback

I used PHP for years since it's quite popular in this part of the world.

For someone like me, "server-side rendering" introduced in JS land (particularly for React projects, but not only them) is one of the stupidest things I've seen in my life. We had this solved in the 90s and it didn't require converting a client framework into a server one (all while pulling in 2000 dependencies), and a multi-stage build process. Thankfully, the whole IT sphere is large enough now that we can just pretend this kind of stuff doesn't exist and avoid companies that use it.

5e92cb50239222bon Fly.io Postgres cluster down for 3 days, no word from them about it

> ^H^H^H^H

alt+backspace will wipe that substring in most shells in one go.

5e92cb50239222bon Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

It will always be a fringe effort since the vast majority of the people doing the actual work are fine with it. It's been what, ten years by now? If instead of complaining all that time systemd haters cooperated and put in the work, they could have produced something (supposedly) much better by now.

Alpine is probably your best bet, it's pretty widely used. All of the others are a minority of a minority of a minority.

5e92cb50239222bon ASUS to manufacture and sell Intel’s NUC products

So they're not worse than ASUS then.

I've had several motherboards from them, and they stopped receiving BIOS updates a year or two after release. Never got anything since meltdown & spectre have become known, for example (I think BIOS updates are needed for microcode updates on Windows, so this would be a serious problem for most users).

I've also used two ASUS smartphones, and… never again. The last one received one major update (from Android 5 to 6), and stopped receiving security updates a year after the phone was announced. Fuck that company.

5e92cb50239222bon Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

Maybe. I don't recommend it for the typical user of this site (probably could have phrased that one better — I believe `EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK` should use 9.9.9.9 instead of Google or Cloudflare, not that they should implement my parallel bullshit).

It makes sense here because of bad peering: 8.8.8.8 may be responding in 90 ms right now, but could very well start taking 200 ms a few hours later. So I use multiple services as a backup of sorts.