Hacker News Reader

eyegoron Backblaze drive stats for Q2 2026

Spinning rust is still the only cost effective answer to redundant 10+ tb storage. If you have 4+ disks, use raid 6 or raid 10 and you get decent fault tolerance too. Raid 10 also increases write performance but it's a bit less robust imo and more expensive per gb.

As for speed it's mainly tied to rpm and the market decided no one wants higher failure rates / lower mtbf for marginal speed gains.

If you need speed and capacity, throw an ssd or two in front of a raid disk array for caching with primocache or whatever.

eyegoron Goose:experimental lang 1.16x faster than C++ and 1.12x than safe Rust, mem safe

Might as well go back to ye olden days and put 100% of your memory in a giant preallocated block and instead of stack locals you just use the block. No allocation cost at runtime, cheese benchmarks by making the super arena.

eyegoron GitHub RCE Vulnerability: CVE-2026-3854 Breakdown

On prem beats the heck out of github post Microsoft though... At least you know how to get it working again when someone breaks it. These days with github you expect a weekly 500, a rainbow unicorn error, build failures due to unavailable errors, etc. Last I checked the third party tracker github services were barely pushing one 9 of reliability.

eyegoron OrangePi 6 Plus Review

"Chinese repos" is a very charitable interpretation of the Google drive links they used to distribute the os. It seemed like it was on the free plan too, it often didn't work because it tripped the maximum downloads per month limit.

eyegoron Spotlight on pdfly, the Swiss Army knife for PDF files

As nice as it looks, I have a lot of trouble believing the "we have magic money, it's free because that's good for business" logic.

    PDFgear is free of charge, and we don’t generate income through any hidden means. We Do NOT misuse or sell user data and we Do Not display ads. Here’s how we keep operations running: 
    We’ve secured investment to cover operational costs, including team expenses and technology like the ChatGPT API. We’re also experienced in optimizing technology usage to manage costs more effectively.

eyegoron OpenZL: An open source format-aware compression framework

Plans for language bindings? Should be trivial to whip up simpler ones like python or dotnet but I didn't see any official bindings yet.

eyegoron Zig builds are getting faster

> even a 1 minute compile time is dwarfed by the time it takes to write and reason about code, run tests, work with version control, etc.

You are far from the embedded world if you think 1 minute here or there is long. I have been involved with many projects that take hours to build, usually caused by hardware generation (fpga hdl builds) or poor cross compiling support (custom/complex toolchain requirements). These days I can keep most of the custom shenanigans in the 1hr ballpark by throwing more compute at a very heavy emulator (to fully emulate the architecture) but that's still pretty painful. One day I'll find a way to use the zig toolchain for cross compiles but it gets thrown off by some of the c macro or custom resource embedding nonsense.

Edit: missed some context on lazy first read so ignore the snark above.

eyegoron The Deletion of Docker.io/Bitnami

I've used them as a quick way to get rootless configured base images. Not sure if official repos provide those now, but it used to be a big hassle to get things like postgres images running without root in their containers. Although I often had to read through their dockerfiles to figure out the uid setup, where configs live, etc because they were not consistent between the various bitnami images.

eyegoron The Best Line Length

If you really want the 80 col experience, I think that was the fortran 77 default. You'd even get compiler errors if you try to exceed it. Of course there were flags to increase the line length limit but don't tell your colleagues.

eyegoron .NET 10 Preview 6 brings JIT improvements, one-shot tool execution

F# has been a third class citizen for a long time... Last I heard the entire f# team was ~10 people. Pretty sure "find references" still doesn't work across c# and f# (if you call a c# method from f# or vise versa). That also means symbol renames don't work correctly.

eyegoron Opencode: AI coding agent, built for the terminal

Side note, if you're a lazygit fan, consider using gitui as an alternative. Feature wise they're pretty similar but gitui is much faster and I find it easier to use.

https://github.com/gitui-org/gitui

eyegoron uv: An extremely fast Python package and project manager, written in Rust

I wish setup.py was actually on the way out, but sadly, it's the only straightforward way to handle packages that use cython or interop. In these cases, libraries use setup.py to compile the dll/so/dylib at install time. Naturally this is a bit of nightmare fuel since installing gets arbitrary code execution privileges but there's no real standard for privileges in python package installs.

eyegoron Python can run Mojo now

I guess they abandoned the python superset idea? I followed them for a bit when they first publicly launched and they said "don't worry, we'll be a real python superset soon" and the biggest omission was no support for classes. A few years later, it looks to be missing the same set of python features but added a lot of their own custom language features.

eyegoron End of 10: Upgrade your old Windows 10 computer to Linux

Is this advice insane or am I missing something

> to fix your busted drive, just nuke the boot sector and send it

> bash

> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/xxx bs=512 count=1 conv=notrunc

eyegoron Procolored printer drivers contained malware

That costs money to maintain, even if it's just a few bucks a month. I've seen plenty of Chinese companies using mega/gdrive/etc just because it's free. I used to think it was just cheapness, but depending on the company it can be a huge hassle to set up recurring small bill items. At my current company for example, it's much easier to pay $5-10k once than pay $5/mo.

eyegoron The 12-bit rainbow palette

https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/khroma/vignettes/tol...

The tol palettes are the best looking colorblind friendly palettes to me. Most of the others get complaints from non colorblind users about looking bad/desaturated.

eyegoron I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs

It sounds like you're trying to use these llms as oracles, which is going to cause you a lot of frustration. I've found almost all of them now excel at imitating a junior dev or a drunk PhD student. For example the other day I was looking at acoustic sensor data and I ran it down the trail of "what are some ways to look for repeating patterns like xyz" and 10 minutes later I had a mostly working proof of concept for a 2nd order spectrogram that reasonably dealt with spectral leakage and a half working mel spectrum fingerprint idea. Those are all things I was thinking about myself, so I was able to guide it to a mostly working prototype in very little time. But doing it myself from zero would've taken at least a couple of hours.

But truthfully 90% of work related programming is not problem solving, it's implementing business logic. And dealing with poor, ever changing customer specs. Which an llm will not help with.

eyegoron Murder Mystery: GCC builds failing after sbuild refactoring

I'll just pitch in as someone who's worked with several 40+ year old codebases and 3+ year old perl, the perl code is significantly harder to maintain. The language lends itself to unreadable levels of terseness and abuse of regex. Unless you use perl every day, the amount of time trying to understand the syntax vs the code logic is skewed too heavily towards obscure syntax. Even the oldest fortran/c is much easier to work with.

Except maybe arithmetic gotos designed to minimize the number of functions. Those are straight evil and I'm glad no modern language supports them.

eyegoron Htmy – Async, pure-Python rendering engine

In the real world, for web things, people use django or fastapi. I'd suggest picking a project with lots of stackoverflow questions and poking around their docs to see which makes you the most comfortable. Personally I tend to favor litestar these days since it has good docs and issues don't sit around for years waiting on one dude to merge prs (fastapi) and it's a lot nicer than django (and I hate django docs).

Flask/quart are painful to work with due to horrible documentation in my experience, but they're popular too. Quart is just an async rewrite of flask by the same owners.

Litestar has a half baked comparison chart here: https://docs.litestar.dev/latest/

eyegoron Noise-Canceling Single-Layer Woven Silk and Cotton Fabric

For papers sometimes you need to hit a page count to make your sponsor/advisor/conference happy. I've been told "this is a great paper but can you pad it out to 12pgs?", maybe that happened here as well.

eyegoron Is Python That Slow?

Nodejs/js runtimes in general get a lot of development effort to make the runtimes fast from Google et al. It's the default web language so there's a ton of effort put into optimizing the runtime. Python on the other hand is mostly a hacker/data science language that interops well with c, so there's not much incentive to make the base runtime fast. The rare times a company cares about python interpreter speed, they've built their own runtime for python instead.

eyegoron A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

I don't honestly think anyone can remember bash array syntax if they take a 2 week break. It's the kind of arcane nonsense that LLMs are perfect for. The only downside is if the fancy autocomplete model messes it up, we're gonna be in bad shape when Steve retires cause half the internet will be an ouroboros of ai generated garbage.

eyegoron Don't return named tuples in new APIs

Is there a difference between global setattr(object, v) and object.__setattr__(v)? I've seen setattr() in the wild all over but I've never encountered the dunder one.

eyegoron GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

Have you tried using chatgpt/etc as a starting point when you're unfamiliar with something? That's where it really excels for me, I can go crazy fast from 0 to ~30 (if we call 60 mvp). For example, the other day I was trying to stream some pcm audio using webaudio and it spit out a mostly functional prototype for me in a few minutes of trying. For me to read through msdn and get to that point would've taken an hour or two, and going from the crappy prototype as a starting point to read up on webaudio let me get an mvp in ~15 mins. I rarely touch frontend web code so for me these tools are super helpful.

On the other hand, I find it just wastes my time in more typical tasks like implementing business logic in a familiar language cause it makes up stdlib apis too often.

eyegoron WebGPU-Based WiFi Simulator

Coil whine (or capacitor whine) from the gpu running at too high a refresh rate. Easiest thing would be to use nvidia control panel to add an fps cap to something like 2x your monitors max rate for the browser (or globally). It's pretty common with any workload after like 600 fps.

eyegoron Zen 5's 2-ahead branch predictor: how a 30 year old idea allows for new tricks

I think it just predicts 2 branches per cycle instead of 1. So it can evaluate the result of n+2 ahead of time instead of only n+1 (typical branch prediction). How this works without wrecking the L1 cache, I'm not sure. It seems like the lookahead past n+1 would make cache evictions much more likely, so maybe I'm missing something here.

> Zen 5 can look farther forward in the instruction stream beyond the 2nd taken branch and as a result Zen 5 can have 3 prediction windows where all 3 windows are useful in producing instructions for decoding.

The original paper is open access but I haven't read far into it: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/237090.237169

eyegoron Zen 5's 2-ahead branch predictor: how a 30 year old idea allows for new tricks

Also happens to be why quicksort loses to almost anything else on small arrays, even bubble sort

eyegoron FlashAttention-3: Fast and Accurate Attention with Asynchrony and Low-Precision

What do you mean by "relatively universal"? This is Cuda only [0] with a promise of a rocm backend eventually. There's only one project I'm aware of that seriously tries to address the Cuda issue in ml [1].

[0] https://github.com/HazyResearch/ThunderKittens?tab=readme-ov...

[1] https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA

eyegoron Gh-dash: A beautiful CLI dashboard for GitHub

+1 for gitlab support -- self hosted gitlab (or gitea) is probably the most popular one, since self hosted github is very pricy

eyegoron pg_timeseries: Open-source time-series extension for PostgreSQL

What do you mean by "for anything serious it isn't open source"? I didn't see any red flags in the apache variant of timescale, just constant pleading to try their hosted option.

https://github.com/timescale/timescaledb/blob/main/LICENSE-A...