Hacker News Reader

honestSysAdminon Microsoft reveals new Surface Pro laptops with up to 22 hours of battery life

Some DevOps guys I know are running on Macbook M2 a Gentoo musl+llvm+openrc userland on a Linux that has Asahi patches and https://grsecurity.net patches.

The only "downside" is no Windows VMs, but they don't seem to care about that.

honestSysAdminon CDC data are disappearing

"Some things are more important than GDP".

honestSysAdminon Archivists work to save disappearing data.gov datasets

Smart.

honestSysAdminon CDC data are disappearing

  "The government of Columbia has agreed to all of President Trump's terms, including the unrestricted acceptance of all illegal aliens from Colombia returned from the United States, including on U.S. military aircraft, without limitation or delay. Based on this agreement, the fully drafted IEEPA tariffs and sanctions will be held in reserve, and not signed, unless Colombia fails to honor this agreement. The visa sanctions issued by the State Department, and enhanced inspections from Customs and Border Protection, will remain in effect until the first planeload of Colombian deportees is successfully returned. Today's events make clear to the world that America is respected again. President Trump will continue to fiercely protect our nation's sovereignty, and he expects all other nations of the world to fully cooperate in accepting the deportation of their citizens illegally present in the United States."

honestSysAdminon Microsoft reveals new Surface Pro laptops with up to 22 hours of battery life

We have been running RaptorCS servers for years, are evaluating RISC-V based options in a lab, and we are looking at Oxide.

What Purism offers with its Pureboot and hardware security chip that enforces deemed-tolerable ME payload is sufficient enough for our ask.

> Are there any modern Intel systems that can

The lack of availability of a product does not change the desire for the product to exist. RISC-V is already successfully playing in a market space with products that satisfy my asks above, maybe Intel can catch up some day.

> clients' needs,

Our clients came to us and were clear about what their ask was. I'm kind of chuckling right now, because one of clients in particular, if he saw your post would shoot back with "it's not called the Bill of Needs".

Some of the other ones are government. But I appreciate you trying to be helpful.

honestSysAdminon Microsoft reveals new Surface Pro laptops with up to 22 hours of battery life

I want a Surface Pro, that exact hardware as perceived on the outside as a user, sans the ""accidental"" backdoors. I have partial responsibility running a business that administrates high value deployments and many of our internal users doing "general office stuff" want exactly this kind of hardware.

And I want one or two for myself too, sans the backdoors...

honestSysAdminon Avoid ISP Routers (2024)

Always treat hardware you get from someone else as not just untrusted but hostile until proven beyond any reasonable doubt otherwise.

Put an OpenBSD machine to act as a router/firewall between supplied devices and your own network to keep things clean.

honestSysAdminon Microsoft reveals new Surface Pro laptops with up to 22 hours of battery life

My immediate questions are:

  - where can I set machine-owner-key for rEFInd to do secure boot with Linux?

  - where can I set the *real* machine-owner-key to load only a copy of board firmware compiled from not-license-encumbered source code on a machine I control?

  - can I remove the wireless network interface so that I have a wireless network interface that does not run binary blobs?

  - is there a clean interface to remove the Intel Management Engine binary blob and replace it with something that I can see the code so don't need to worry about something opaque and untrusted having "ring -3" access to my system?

I feel like I already know the answers to these questions. But these are questions anyone who has one of these machines should be asking themselves.

honestSysAdminon Archivists work to save disappearing data.gov datasets

In my experience, to archive effectively you need a physical datacenter footprint, or to rent capacity of someone who does. Over a longer timespan (even just 6 months), having your own footprint is a lower total cost of ownership, provided you have the skills or access to someone with the skills to run Kubernetes + Ceph (or something similar).

> Is this a use case for Torrents?

Yes, provided you have a good way to dynamically append a distributed index of torrents and users willing to run that software in addition to the torrent software. Should be easy enough to define in container-compose.

honestSysAdminon Archivists work to save disappearing data.gov datasets

The pedestrian "right", which I encounter on a day-to-day basis the months I visit client sites a couple hundred miles inland of the Gulf of America, will look at climatelinks.org and say something like: "all I see are foreign countries, why are we spending money on this instead of citizens of the United States?".

honestSysAdminon Archivists work to save disappearing data.gov datasets

Let's make torrents and seed them.

honestSysAdminon CDC data are disappearing

A vicious hoax campaign is not merely "getting things wrong" tho.

honestSysAdminon CDC data are disappearing

I asked for specific examples of what your concern is. You have still not presented a question of any substance.

honestSysAdminon CDC data are disappearing

If fascism means secure borders, an end to the kinetic conflict in Ukraine, an end to social media censorship, and a booming economy, more than half the country will vote for fascism. Promises fulfilled or not aside.

honestSysAdminon List of Hoaxes in Wikipedia Articles

Why would the "tent pole" hoax, the "fine people" hoax, be missing? WikiPedia is an unbiased and objective source of information. Totally. 100%. Yep.

  https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-very-fine-people/

honestSysAdminon Anti-Intellectualism

  https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-very-fine-people/

honestSysAdminon Health and climate information disappearing from federal websites

> as the Trump administration works to scrap anything that has to do with climate change, racial equity, or gender identity.

The college educated person -- but not the university educated STEM degree holder -- takes these three things to mean what they are labeled as at face value.

honestSysAdminon Scalable OLTP in the Cloud: What's the Big Deal?

I could be wrong here, I'm not an expert with databases, but I believe -- this is a belief, please help me disconfirm it if you think it is wrong -- that CitusDB's approach that shards Postgres across redundant mirrors, should successfully scale horizontally for OLTP without sacrificing consistency.

honestSysAdminon Scalable OLTP in the Cloud: What's the Big Deal?

> From my experience, the vast majority of complications in systems is people not realizing they are asking an OLAP question while wanting parts of OLTP semantics.

If you could elaborate on this further, I and others are probably very interested in reading more about it.

honestSysAdminon A major Postgres upgrade with zero downtime

> then I'd call that a no-downtime upgrade!

It'd be really convenient for me, well not me but others, if we could tell our customers this. However, those of us running DBaaS do have to offer an actual no-downtime upgrade.

honestSysAdminon A major Postgres upgrade with zero downtime

As far as I know, there is not. I could probably write something up.

honestSysAdminon A major Postgres upgrade with zero downtime

Zero-downtime Postgres upgrades have been kind of normalized, at least in the environments I have been exposed to, with pgcat

  https://github.com/postgresml/pgcat

honestSysAdminon The AI bust is here

There's also lot you can do with not-brand-new server hardware that doesn't cost that much. The hard part is a location to put it where the noise is not bothersome. Though many who are "upper middle class" or on low-cost private land can manage to make this happen. I have seen people that don't have a lot of money, rather young people, do a lot on private land. Small dedicated server buildings are a thing.

honestSysAdminon The AI bust is here

I do consulting for multiple GPU hosting companies. DeepSeek means more things can be done with less and the demand for access to GPU has only increased.

The analysts, analysts who do not code, analysts who don't run GPU clouds, are wrong.

The anals are wrong.

honestSysAdminon FTC takes action against GoDaddy for alleged lax data security

> since they would need very good security

As someone with 20+ years experience in IT/DevOps/Cloud/whatever, I disagree.

They would simply need to actually use the security that is already there. Data leaks that happen due to lack of "very good security" are extremely rare. In almost every case, someone was doing something very stupid that everyone already agrees is a very obvious thing to not do.

> In fact companies would go out of their way to not store any of your data.

The companies that already use existing IT systems, as they are already designed to be used, have no problem protecting customer data and not leaking it. The companies that can not properly hire our outsource competent IT people shouldn't be storing data in the first place. Commerce is subject to regulation, due to human nature, and different regulation is needed today.

> and insurance to cover themselves in case they do lose your data

I would prefer that this kind of insurance not exist.

honestSysAdminon Freeze on grant funding temporarily halted by federal judge

I have been consulting with startups in the SF Bay Area, many of them are in their B-series and C-series funding rounds ; offices in SF skyscrapers and general SV / San Jose area. In the C-series I have been involved in long enough, I can count the closet Trump supporters on more than one hand. At the B-series companies, it's more than just one person.

Personally, I'm not among them, but I don't lean into "Orange Man is Hitler" either. I grew up in a place where I know what real extremists do actually look like.

Treating those with different opinions, is brewing the "fascism" we are hearing so much about but aren't going to see, not in this presidential term at least. We need to try actually talking to people more.

But these people are never going to admit they are Trump supporters. If you think you are someone that could they should believe they could have a rational conversation with them, ask yourself if you still believe the "fine people" hoax, and check what Snopes (yes, Snopes) has to say about that hoax before replying here.

honestSysAdminon Freeze on grant funding temporarily halted by federal judge

  https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/24/us/embassy-us-flag-blm-gay-pride.html

honestSysAdminon Windows 7 boots slower if you set a solid background color

You're in good hands.

  https://vanillaos.org/team

honestSysAdminon FTC takes action against GoDaddy for alleged lax data security

A good law would be that if a customer's data is leaked, any and all revenue that was made with/through that customer must be returned to the customer. All of a sudden companies will magically remember how to do half-way sober IT again.