Hacker News Reader

arp242on Nobel Peace Prize 2025: María Corina Machado

He won the award for his excellent ability of not being George W. Bush. In fairness, he really is quite good at this. I haven't really followed his career post-presidency, but reportedly he continues to not be George W. Bush to this day.

arp242on Indefinite Backpack Travel

Guess I've not had a "real life" for my entire life then.

arp242on NFS at 40 – Remembering the Sun Microsystems Network File System

I just use sshfs for most things today. It's by far the simplest to set up (just run sshd), has good authentication and encryption (works over the internet), and when I measured performance vs. NFS and Samba some years ago it seemed roughly identical (this is mostly for large files; it's probably slower for lots of small files – measure your own use case if performance is important). I don't know about file locking and that type of thing – it perhaps does poorly there(?) It's not something I care about.

arp242on European Union Public Licence (EUPL)

EUPL almost 19 years old (first published in Jan 2007).

arp242on European Union Public Licence (EUPL)

There's a few, but not too many. See e.g. some package repos:

https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Afreebsd%2Ffreebsd-ports+%...

https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Avoid-linux%2Fvoid-package...

https://github.com/search?q=repo%3ANixOS%2Fnixpkgs+%22EUPL12...

Most of the software from the EU and some governments are also under EUPL, but those tend to be "source dumps" that no one really builds.

arp242on The phaseout of the mmap() file operation in Linux

mmap is POSIX, so it's not going anywhere and you can rely on it until POSIX systems are phased out or the heat death of the universe, whichever comes sooner.

arp242on Not all OCuLink eGPU docks are created equal

I use a eGPU via USB4/Thunderbolt (I think it's the same? Not entirely clear). Works out of the box on Linux. No real setup needed. Main downside is that removing it tends to make the system somewhat unstable and lock up (sometimes hours later) after a kernel "oops". I need to look into that because it's probably a relatively minor Linux kernel issue. But minus that: it works great.

arp242on UK Petition: Do not introduce Digital ID cards

I mean, that's kind of how the political system works in both the UK and US, and is not exactly a new thing. Often the "real" opposition are the backbenchers of your own party, rather than the opposition party.

arp242on UK Petition: Do not introduce Digital ID cards

Starmer seems to be under the impression that Labour needs to focus on immigration to stave of Reform. This is a mistake because most people don't really care about immigration as such, they care about cost of living, health care, and basic things like that. Research and polling in many different countries over many different years have shown this again and again and again. People like Farage like to present "one easy answer to all problems politicians don't want you to know!" First: EU, now: immigration, next: gingers?

Focusing so strongly on immigration and related issues only strengthens Farage. It does nothing to convince the die-hard Reform people and alienates your own voters. We're already seeing Labour split to a new party (well, assuming it doesn't implode in classic left-wing infighting). It's lose-lose.

Labour won 2/3rd of MPs with just 1/3rd of the vote, the biggest gap between MPs and vote share in modern history by quite a margin. In many ways they "lost" last year's election because that's a very underwhelming result after running against a deeply unpopular government that's been in government for almost 15 years. They've been on a thin ice since day one.

All of this is such an obvious mistake that I truly don't understand what Starmer is even thinking.

arp242on The doctor who says we can improve our vision – at any age

This sounds useful in case you're the only survivor of a nuclear war and finally have time enough at last to read all the books you want, but end up breaking your glasses.

While I would not be surprised at all there's something to this, things like "improve and enhance our vision and brain function, at any age, along with it our sleep, balance, attention, and our cognitive and mental health" kind of set off my bullshit detector a bit. That seems way too many conditions to fix "with one easy trick!"

Things like "go out and have a walk" also exposes you to fresh air, and even mild exercise can make you feel better for all sorts of reasons. Is it really primarily about the vision system as the article says? Not so clear to me. This sounds a bit too much of a tunnel-visioned viewpoint.

arp242on Why use mailing lists?

You can't seriously claim that this is good UX. And that's what this is about: not that it's impossible but that the UX is not good, especially for the casual user only interested in the occasional thread.

arp242on Ubuntu 25.10's Rust Coreutils Is Causing Major Breakage for Some Executables

Sorry, I meant "roughly identical [to my Go program]", not "roughly identical [to the version without OpenSSL]". The ~/verify binary is my little Go program that is ~4 times faster on my Void system, but is of roughly equal performance on the Arch system, to check that coreutils is not slower than Go (when using OpenSSL). Sorry, I probably didn't make that too clear.

arp242on Ubuntu 25.10's Rust Coreutils Is Causing Major Breakage for Some Executables

Cheers; I guess I should have checked the coreutils implementation; I kind of just assumed it has one implementation instead of being a compile option :embarrassed-emoji:

I also have an Arch machine where it does link to libcrypto, and it seems roughly identical (or close enough that I don't care, this is a live server doing tons of $stuff so has big error bars):

  md5sum              1.58s user 0.31s system 98% cpu 1.908 total
  ~/verify -a md5     1.59s user 0.13s system 99% cpu 1.719 total
  
  sha256sum           0.71s user 0.12s system 99% cpu 0.840 total
  ~/verify -a sha256  0.74s user 0.12s system 99% cpu 0.862 total

Still wish it could do multi-core though; one reason I looked in to this is because I wanted to check 400G of files and had 15 cores doing nothing (I know GNU parallel exists, but I find it hard to use and am never quite sure I'm using it correctly, so it's faster to write my own little Go program – especially for verifying files).

arp242on If you are harassed by lasers

Can't vouch for every model, but on all the ThinkPads I've owned every single LED can be disabled, including on the X13 I got last year.[1] This is actually one reason I buy ThinkPads. Other models I've had were T61, X270, E585, X280. I've heard the Carbon models are quite different from the T/X ones, so maybe you can't disable on those? That would be disappointing.

If you're on Linux the dot on the cover is /sys/class/leds/tpacpi::lid_logo_dot. See the other files in that directory for other LEDs.

I don't know about Windows off-hand because I don't use it, but the BIOS exposes the functionality so there should be a program to do it. In a quick search: https://github.com/valinet/ThinkPadLEDControl

FreeBSD doesn't support it, but quite easy to write a patch for it if you want it (I actually wrote a patch for this, but didn't really put the finishing touches on it and submit it as my previous one got no feedback at all, so *shrug* – I ended up just installing Linux again). Same for the other BSDs.

[1]: You need to compile your own kernel for the charging/power LED which wasn't needed on older models, because that's registered as "unknown LED" and protected behind a compile option. It's a tad annoying, but it's possible.

arp242on Ubuntu 25.10's Rust Coreutils Is Causing Major Breakage for Some Executables

Who? When?

Writing bugs in Rust is trivial and happens all the time. "do_stuff(sysv[1], sysv[2])" is a bug if you reversed the sysv arguments by accident. You can easily create a more complex version of that with a few "if" conditionals and interaction with other flags.

There are many such silly things people can – and do – trivially get wrong all the time. Most bugs I've written are of the "I'm a bloody idiot"-type. The only way to have a fool-proof compiler is to know intent.

What people may say is something like "if it compiles, then it runs", which is generally true, but doesn't mean it does the right thing (i.e. is free of bugs).

arp242on Ubuntu 25.10's Rust Coreutils Is Causing Major Breakage for Some Executables

> "once it compiles, it works"

That is not a quote from that post. I am very much not pedantic about only using quotation marks for quotes as long as it reasonably accurately gets the gist right, but in this case it very much doesn't.

You are leaving out the qualified language of "generally", which completely changes what was said. And worse, the post explicitly acknowledges that it doesn't solve all bugs in the next sentence.

And even if you can dig deep and find someone using unqualified language somewhere, I'm willing to bet a lot of money that this is an oversight and when pressed they will immediately admit so (on account of this being an internet forum and not a scientific paper, and people are careless sometimes). "I like coffee" rarely means "I always like coffee, all the time, without exception".

arp242on Why use mailing lists?

Spent some time on this a few years back and have a half-finished project for it. The thing that proved to be a huge roadblock was importing existing archives since many don't provide a good interface to it.

The https://lore.kernel.org site is actually fairly decent, but limited to Linux kernel stuff and some adjacent projects. Gmane was quite nice too, but now defunct (the web UI anyway).

arp242on Why use mailing lists?

What if you're not subscribed? I don't usually care about the day to day of Linux kernel dev, but that one thread might be of interest to me. Actually, I might have something to contribute, but since I'm not subscribed the UX on that sucks too.

"Just use mutt" as a reply to "I want to read this one email thread" is rather missing the point. Plus the reality is most people neither use nor want mutt. Many people think the UX on mutt is horrible. Nice if it works for you, but it doesn't for many. So there's that.

arp242on Why do we remember some life moments but not others?

"Previous studies have disagreed on whether or not weaker memories are stabilized, or made easier to recall, by attachment to a more prominent one."

So doesn't seem that obvious at all.

I remember random mundane events from tons of random days, unconnected to any prominent event (as near as I can determine anyway). And I also remember some random mundane stuff from days something prominent did happen. Whether there's a bias towards days with prominent events is entirely unclear to me.

arp242on Ubuntu 25.10's Rust Coreutils Is Causing Major Breakage for Some Executables

Prove me wrong. Find someone saying that Rust will prevent all bugs.

arp242on Ubuntu 25.10's Rust Coreutils Is Causing Major Breakage for Some Executables

This is on Void. It doesn't have --with-openssl configure args in the package, although the binary also doesn't link to lib{ssl,crypto}. It probably gets auto-detected to "no"(?)

arp242on Ubuntu 25.10's Rust Coreutils Is Causing Major Breakage for Some Executables

As an aside on the GNU *sum tools, I found they're quite slow. A few months ago I wrote a simple replacement in Go for UX reasons and somewhat to my surprise, the Go implementation of most hash algorithms seems about 2 to 4 times as fast when using a simple naïve "obvious" single-threaded implementation. It can be sped up even more by using more than one core. Go has assembly implementations for most hash functions. I didn't really look at the coreutils implementation but I'm guessing it's "just" in C.

At any rate, small teething issues aside, long-term things should be better and faster.

arp242on Ubuntu 25.10's Rust Coreutils Is Causing Major Breakage for Some Executables

No one has ever claimed Rust prevents all bugs. This is such a tired strawman trope.

arp242on Redis is fast – I'll cache in Postgres

> A difference of 0.5ms is negligible with single digit network latency

Yes, that was my take-away.

arp242on Redis is fast – I'll cache in Postgres

Unlogged table, yes. 1ms is more than fast enough so I didn't bother to look further.

arp242on Redis is fast – I'll cache in Postgres

When I last benchmarked Redis vs. PostgreSQL for a simple k/v cache it was about ~1ms for PostgreSQL to fetch a key, and ~0.5ms for Redis with a similar setup as in this post (although I used "value bytea" instead of "value string" – I don't know if it matters, probably not; 1ms was fast enough that I didn't care to test).

I didn't measure setting keys or req/sec because for my use case keys were updated infrequently.

I generally find ms to be a more useful metric than reqs/sec or latency at full load, as this is not a typical load. Or at least wasn't for my use case.

Of course all depends on your use case etc. etc. In some cases throughput does matter. I would encourage everyone to run their own benchmarks suited to their own use case to be sure – should be quick and easy.

As I rule I recommend starting with PostgreSQL and using something else only if you're heavily using the cache or you run in to problems. Redis isn't too hard to run, but still just one less service to worry about. Or alternatively, just use a in-memory DB. Not always appropriate of course, but sometimes it is.

arp242on UK, Canada and Australia formally recognise Palestinian state

e.g. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna24235665 (many more, just a quick search)

Whether you believe them is another issue of course. But you need to at least try and no one ever did. After many years of refusing to talk to the IRA in the end the British government did, and that was key to the lasting peace. This was hugely controversial at the time and Major government lead talks in secret which were leaked. Lots of drama. But in the end it worked. In 1988 people could have said about the IRA what you're saying about Hamas (and they did). The Good Friday accord didn't even demand immediate disarmament by the way, but rather over time. There were plenty of violent hick-ups too (e.g. Real IRA).

And sure, long-term there is no future for Hamas – certainly not the paramilitary wing – just as there wasn't for the IRA. But Sinn Féin (IRA's political wing) still exists and that's okay. It's impossible to exclude Hamas from any and all negotiations in the short term because they're doing the fighting.

A pure military solution will never be the answer (well, except via genocide, which is hardly an "answer"). Even if one could kill every single Hamas member, you will just end up with a new Hamas-ng and we're back where we started. This is why you need to address some of the underlying injustices, which is that the British government did.

And that was my entire point. Everything may seem impossible and hopeless today. But so did things in 1988 NI. There are real challenges for sure, but the outlines of a solution are actually not all that complicated.

arp242on UK, Canada and Australia formally recognise Palestinian state

Do you think a Gish Gallop of tons of quotes is a good way of engaging? Their follow-up post is fine so no hard feelings. But critiquing someone dragging down the quality of the conversation after an attempt to raise the level is not a personal attack.

arp242on They Thought They Were Free (1955)

It's a contentious issue and many historians disagree. However, even many Jews at the time didn't really know what was going on, as evidenced from letters and diaries of the time. Many Jews genuinely thoughts they were Ghettos or concentration camps, which were surely horrible and surely people needless died there, but are far removed from outright extermination camps. So based on that I'm somewhat inclined to believe many didn't really "know" about the extent of the Holocaust.

Of course it's easy to say in hindsight they "knew" or "could have known", but in hindsight everything is easy, right? There were rumours about Jimmy Saville going back to the 70s, but did the British public really "know" what he was up to? Evne Mark Lawson, one of the few people who actually did stop and report a sexual assault (in 2006, see [1]) didn't really know the full extent of things, not really. He may have suspected, but that's not the same.

Another thing is that during the first world war there was a lot of (mostly British) propaganda about atrocities Germans were supposed to have committed, from raped and crucified nuns to Germans killing children for sport to the infamous "German Corpse Factory". This was widely reported and believed during the war, but after the war this all turned out to be a huge load of bollocks. It severely undermined the trust in the media.

There was 21 years between the wars – that's less time than the start of the Iraq war and today. Imagine what your response would be if the US government would say "we found weapons of mass destruction in $country, here as some vague satellite photos as evidence, we have no choice but to invade".

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/apr/01/the-day...

arp242on They Thought They Were Free (1955)

> even The Guardian grasps this but can't extricate from their use, the news is addicted to stories financially

The dilemma that The Guardian faces is that it neither wants to draw attention to the lie, but also doesn't want to let it stand without some counter-argument. After all, if you just ignore everything then no counter-argument is ever offered and that's not good either.

This is really the "democracy hack" they're using: you don't want to draw attention to it, but you also can't really ignore it. In a healthy system, people that employ these kind of shameless dirty tricks would be excluded by the sense of civic duty of other people of their own party, as well as enlightened self-interest because in the end this will be bad for everyone. Yet here we are.