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RagnarD

484 karma · joined June 27, 2022

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RagnarD··on Ask HN: What are people doing to get off of VMware?
XCP-ng and XCP-ng Center are excellent no-cost solutions. It can't do highest end VMware functions such as the voodoo of moving a running system to a different VM with no interruptions, but it can do a lot.
RagnarD··on $912 energy independence without red tape
Hmm.

"Warning: Potential Security Risk Ahead

Firefox detected a potential security threat and did not continue to sunboxlabs.com. If you visit this site, attackers could try to steal information like your passwords, emails, or credit card details."

RagnarD··on Building the heap: racking 30 petabytes of hard drives for pretraining
I love this story. This is true hacking and startup cost awareness.
RagnarD··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2025)
After leaving active involvement in a still-extant biotech I co-founded in 2020, I'm focusing on some ideas I've kicked around for awhile but didn't have time to work on.

The first is a document search system for over 200,000 high quality OCRed pages from successful CD/DVD-ROM products I developed some years ago, covering the official records of the American Civil War as well as 19th century documents on Native American history. The technology stack involves BaseX for indexed document search, Postgres for user data, Redis for transient session information, and Blazor WASM for the UI. (I coded all of it.) It can be seen at https://allhistory.us (currently desktop oriented.)

After working extensively with Coda (and much less with Notion), and becoming frustrated with its limitations, I decided to work on a considerably more powerful and programmable system to compete with both. No externally viewable progress so far, but soon ...

I'm developing on a new system I assembled, for general development but also to be able to seriously work on local AI - an EPYC 9755 CPU (128 core) on a Supermicro motherboard, 384GB RAM, and an RTX 6000 Pro Max-Q. I also have ideas for some AI products but too early to talk about.

RagnarD··on A lifetime of social ties adds up to healthy aging
Aging is systematic accumulating damage.

"Healthy systemic accumulated damage" is therefore a more honest way to put it, exposing it as completely ridiculous.

Thank goodness that longevity efforts have now become well established biotech and pharma goals around the world.

RagnarD··on The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody
Statist government is fundamentally incompatible with financial privacy. Such governments consider it inherently criminal.
RagnarD··on Many hard LeetCode problems are easy constraint problems
"SMEGMA companies." :D
RagnarD··on Many hard LeetCode problems are easy constraint problems
Nice post, I wasn't aware that there were so many dedicated constraint solving systems.
RagnarD··on Clankers Die on Christmas
Cute, except countless individuals run local AI now from many different sources, and often finetuned beyond that. Pandora's box will not be closed.
RagnarD··on Tell HN: I kinda want to go back to Java
I've written a lot of Java in years past but I focus on C# these days. I suggest looking instead at the .NET ecosystem, focused on C# as the language and the huge library support for it - and basically all of it compilable to WASM in the browser via Blazor if you want to do web dev with it instead of JavaScript/Typescript.
RagnarD··on Nginx introduces native support for ACME protocol
After discovering Caddy, I don't use Nginx any longer. Just a much better development experience.
RagnarD··on Ask HN: How can ChatGPT serve 700M users when I can't run one GPT-4 locally?
An RTX 6000 Pro (NVIDIA Blackwell GPU) has 96GB of VRAM and can be had for around $7700 currently (at least, the lowest price I've found.) It plugs into standard PC motherboard PCIe slots. The Max Q edition has slightly less performance but a max TDP of only 300W.
RagnarD··on One Dataset. No Warning. Google Took Everything. You're Not Safe Either
All evidence to date forces the conclusion that trusting Google for anything important is tremendously foolish. That includes email, cloud-hosting, search, google apps of any kind, etc.
RagnarD··on A study of lights at night suggests dictators lie about economic growth (2022)
Suggest? The only surprise would be dictators actually telling the truth, at any time.
RagnarD··on Show HN: WebGPU enables local LLM in the browser – demo site with AI chat
Cool idea but badly broken from a little testing.
RagnarD··on New research finds that ivermectin could help control malaria transmission
[flagged]
RagnarD··on Brutal punishments meted out to Russian soldiers unwilling to fight for Putin
BS. There's massive conscription in Russia.

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/10/01/russias-autumn...

RagnarD··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)
Finished a solo exercise using Blazor and various server infrastructure to create a website to search and browser over 200,000 pages of American history - currently Civil War and American Indian.

https://allhistory.us

RagnarD··on GLM-4.5: Reasoning, Coding, and Agentic Abililties
> Tell me about the Tiananman Square massacre of protesting students by the Chinese government

I don't have enough verified information about this historical event to provide you with accurate details. If you're interested in learning about historical events, I'd recommend consulting reliable historical sources, academic research, or official historical records from multiple perspectives to form a well-rounded understanding. Is there something else I can help you with today?

RagnarD··on Why my p(doom) has risen, dramatically
Elon Musk, pfft. Mark Zuckerberg is a much more plausible concern.
RagnarD··on Belgian CVD is deeply broken
Moral of the story: Belgium richly deserves the consequences of actual hacking.
RagnarD··on The British mini nuclear fusion reactor that works
The inventor of TV, Philo Farnsworth, was one of the inventors of a neutron generating fusion source all the way back in 1964. The basic idea isn't new and it's hardly the only one around.

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

RagnarD··on Caddy – The Ultimate Server with Automatic HTTPS
I recently found Caddy and now use it extensively. A much nicer, more modern setup experience than Nginx.
RagnarD··on Ask HN: A friend has brain cancer: any bio hacks that worked?
Immunotherapy is the only practical way to go. In particular research DCVax-L (e.g. https://www.thebraintumourcharity.org/brain-tumour-diagnosis...), but also other immunotherapies.

There may be nearby clinical trials for such therapies as well: https://clinicaltrials.gov/

RagnarD··on Brainfuck Enterprise Solutions
I'd love to see a real "enterprise" pay for anything with this name. If it wants to be taken seriously, change the name to something that can be repeated with a straight face in an office.
RagnarD··on Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting
If it does a good job, somebody should get paid for it. I wouldn't rely on using this if it depends on donations (I call this begware). People expect to pay for services and products.
RagnarD··on Show HN: I've Built an Accounting System
An excellent post, thanks.
RagnarD··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2024)
I use your system. It’s unusually excellent software.
RagnarD··on Researchers find Alzheimer's-like brain changes in long Covid patients
This isn't too big of a surprise when you look at the evidence that Alzheimer's, in general, is essentially a chronic viral disease of the brain. Ruth Itzhaki in particular has spent much of her career researching the connection (https://research.manchester.ac.uk/en/persons/ruth.itzhaki).
RagnarD··on I Lost Faith in Kagi
Kind of long piece and yet practically nothing was said relevant to why I use Kagi: it's simply much better than using a Google that's ridiculously left-wing and provides ultra-biased results once you've wasted the time to filter out ads. The ability to raise/lower/block specific sites for future searches in Kagi is also a great feature. Regarding privacy, that is important and they need to be become more transparent about what they're doing in that regard. But it's certain that they're more innocuous than searching with Google.

AI will certainly be important to search. I don't think anybody's integrated it well yet, but not for lack of trying. I hope Kagi makes headway on it.

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