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kreigon Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)

Hermes agent assistant for homelab server maintenance backed by the (still cheap) DeepSeek v4 Flash 0731:

- Stack enhacements

- Updates/upgrades

- Security audit

- Prometheus/Grafana monitoring and alerting

- Backups

Basically a sysadmin for my own local cloud.

kreigon Map of Metal

FWIW, There's a lot of new bands sounding like the old classic Metal bands, they are `tagged` as NWOTHM (New Wave of Traditional Heavy Metal), such as:

- White Wizzard

- Tailgunner

- Skull Fist

- Wolf

- Enforcer

- 3 Inches of Blood

- Lucifer

- and many others

kreigon The beginning of scarcity in AI

I understood this concept with this simple equation: Agent = LLM + harness

kreigon Buying a retro game console

Not really, you can now use a Steam Deck or similar to replace the original pad, yet, you'll need to have the Steam Deck though https://github.com/vanilla-wiiu/vanilla

kreigon Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

Not really, /lib -> /usr/lib was worse for me

kreigon RTX 5090 and Raspberry Pi: Can it game?

Single-digit FPS can _absolutely_ be playable if you're a desperate enough ten-year-old...

Absolutely, sweet memories playing at less than 10fps using zsnes on a 486 dx2 by 1999...

kreigon The History of Windows XP

FCKGW-RHQQ2...

kreigon Sorry, grads: Entry-level tech jobs are getting wiped out

On the other hand, here in Latin America, the offshore/nearshore jobs have been increasing in the last couple of years. Source: LinkedIn spam, and a couple of past jobs I've worked have been for nearshore companies.

kreigon Parser Combinators Beat Regexes

It makes sense, Combinators can parse a superset of formal languages than regex, according to Chomsky's hierarchy [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy

kreigon The Potential Pitfalls of Pagination

One solution that we've been implementing in our APIs is the Seek Method (https://use-the-index-luke.com/sql/partial-results/fetch-nex...) which scales very well with large data sets in postgres, while avoiding some of the mentioned problems.

kreigon JetBrains AI Launch Event [video]

Yesterday I started to explore CodeGPT, it allows to download and run local model via llama.cpp, it's working fine for me so far, at least with with DeepSeek model 6.7b https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/21056-codegpt

kreigon The Netwide Assembler (NASM)

Same thing came to my mind, when zsnes became open source in early 2000s and we were able to explore its thousand of ASM lines in NASM dialect.

kreigon English is a pictographic language with 26 radicals

Funny, the last part reads a lot as if it was written phonetically by a Spanish speaker.

kreigon Big Tech's Takeover and Destruction of Open Protocols and Networks

Is more likely that XMPP was killed by Google instead, and Meta is trying to do the same over ActivityPub https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-netwo...

kreigon Stability AI Launches Stable Diffusion XL 0.9

That's not accurate, I was able to make my old RX 5500XT work with ROCm some months ago, only after 6 hours of compilation process though...

kreigon France’s Mistral AI raises a $113M seed round to take on OpenAI

Good to know, I initially tought that name was for the Nobel laurate writer Gabriela Mistral.

kreigon Where have all the laid-off tech workers gone?

Nearshoring companies that hires developers to be assigned to external clients, just acting as brokers.

kreigon Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation

Using Arch Linux since 2009 as my main desktop OS, and after 3 complete PC ugprades, I never had to reinstall it.

It has been working pretty well for me, except for a couple of issues that I ran over these years (e.g. the transition to systemd in 2012/2013, or no pacman -Syu for several weeks).

kreigon Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?

I've been following closely emulation scene since 1999, more recently, I started following FPGA recreation scene. Never imagined what emulation would turn nowadays, specially since it's officially supported and sold by companies which back in the day they saw it as an evil practice.

kreigon Europe’s energy crisis hits science

From my experience, usually micro-optimizations (such as optimizing code) don't have a great impact on execution performance than, for example, changing the approach at a higher level (introducing caching, etc), the same may apply on energetic performance I guess.

kreigon Ask HN: Why hasn't the ACH system been more abused?

Usually there's a 3 day window for the money to settle, if the bank claims that it did not receive the transaction on this time window, they will "deny" the failed transaction and send to the originator a "return"[1] which contains the type and explanation of why did it failed, and the money won't be transferred to the receiver.

If it surpass the 3 day window a "late return" will be sent to notify the origination that the transaction failed, however, the money may already have been transferred to the receiver.

[1]: https://www.moderntreasury.com/learn/ach-return-code-referen...

kreigon Ask HN: Why hasn't the ACH system been more abused?

I worked for a NACHA processing backend for some years, the mechanism of protecting overseas transactions from bad actors is usually based on sending additional information contained in the IAT transaction, which includes some extra data from both the origination and the receiver[1]. When the bank process it, it could either:

1) settle the transaction in the next few days (3 usually).

2) ask for additional information on the next few days.

3) deny (return) the transaction if it looks too suspicious according to the bank.

[1] https://www.nacha.org/system/files/2019-07/IAT-Specific-Data...

kreigon Why no Roman industrial revolution?

Let's not forget that a big part of these technological advancements was due to the invention of innovative ways of optimizing those devices and process, mainly by formulating and solving mathematical problems by using calculus, which coincidentally, was formulated during these times in Britain and Germany.

kreigon A laptop hard drive model could crash when exposed to a certain audio frequency

  Historical records should never be underestimated just by assuming they don't look too "practical" nowadays.

kreigon Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?

Nocash set of emulators and debuggers[1], created by Martin Korth some decades ago and they'are still widely used as a decent debugger, specially when developing gb/gba software.

1: https://problemkaputt.github.io/