Hacker News Reader

mindcrashon Musk says first mission to Mars will launch next year

I think he should first focus on managing towards a Starship without RUD.

Oh, wait... focus...

Same pain as with good old (native) partitioning, right? :)

As with partitioning, in my experience something like a common key (identifying data sets), tenant id and/or partial date (yyyy-mm) work pretty great

mindcrashon You Can Make Postgres Scale

That's because Amazon wants to do whatever they like themselves... you apparently can get stuff to work by running your own masters (w/ citus extension) in EC2 backed by workers (Postgres RDS) in RDS:

https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2015/07/15/scaling-postgres-r... (note that this is a old blog post -- pg_shard has been succeeded by citus, but the architecture diagram still applies)

And me saying "Apparently" because I have no experience dealing with large databases on AWS.

Personally had no issues with Citus too, both on bare metal/VMs and as SaaS on Azure...

mindcrashon Making Postgres scale

Well, ofcourse it does! :)

Another (battle tested * ) solution is to deploy the (open source) Postgres distribution created by Citus (subsidiary of Microsoft) on nodes running on Ubuntu, Debian or Red Hat and you are pretty much done: https://www.citusdata.com/product/community

Slap good old trusty PgBounce in front of it if you want/need (and you probably do) connection pooling: https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2017/05/10/scaling-connection...

*) Citus was purchased by Microsoft more or less solely to provide easy scale out on Azure through Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL

mindcrashon The Dark MAGA Gov-Corp Technate – Part 1 (and Part 2)

Part 2: https://unlimitedhangout.com/2025/03/investigative-reports/t...

mindcrashon Trump administration seeks to slash NASA's budget by 50%

"as SpaceX essentially colonizes the moon"

FIFY

This has nothing to do with budget cuts, and everything with the rise of technocratic populism

mindcrashon Ask HN: Is X.com's (Twitter) Tor Broken?

Nobody, because the people who made this happen no longer work there.

mindcrashon Signal is the number-one downloaded app in the Netherlands. But why?

^ Dutch native.

The reason is quite simple.

Almost everybody here, no matter their political ideology, despises the 2025 Trump administration.

Mark Zuckerberg decided to put his full support behind Trump. This is the result.

mindcrashon The epic SNL skit ridiculing the Zelensky visit

Featuring Mike Myers as Elon Musk!

Also, this was a good laugh especially because my country is now weeks away of getting invaded, bombed, or in the worst case nuked thanks to a silly EU which thinks they can take on Russia without support from the US.

mindcrashon Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18f employees

Cuban: "It’s just a matter of time before DOGE needs you to fix the mess they inevitably created. They will have to hire your company as a contractor to fix it. But on your terms. I’m happy to invest and/or help."

Unfortunately these people (Musk and friends) are so full of themselves that it's more likely they will rather let the whole proverbial house burn down than ask for help.

It's one of many reasons why I am currently a political orphan. Absolutely sick and tired of the shenanigans of both the "left" and the "right".

mindcrashon Microsoft begins turning off uBlock Origin and other extensions in Edge

Brave supports uBO blocklists OOTB, no extension needed.

So even when they have to say farewell to Manifest v2 it really doesn't matter, at least in case of privacy (and for some medical) protection.

mindcrashon Ask HN: What fiction/non-fiction book should everyone read on the topic of CS?

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold

https://codehiddenlanguage.com/

Algorithms to Live by: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths

Mythical Man Month by Frederick Brooks

mindcrashon Does Firefox sell your personal data?

To be honest, the writing was on the wall way earlier; when Mozilla integrated Firefox Sync (unless you sync to your own server, ofcourse: https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncserver) and more recently the acquisition of Pocket in 2017, after a 2 year partnership.

Data mining gold galore, not unlike Yahoo's acquisition of the "free" Delicio.us back in the day.

mindcrashon Material Theme has been pulled from VS Code's marketplace

As a example: Rider (https://www.jetbrains.com/rider/) - a IDE - comes with everything you could possibly need to build and compile .NET apps out of the box, while VSCode - a code editor - relies on extensions (and thus mostly the community surrounding VSCode) for this.

Or to make things more succinct:

* VSCode is a extendable code editor (like vim, neovim, Zed and Sublime)

* Jetbrains Rider is a fully equipped Integrated Development Environment (like Microsoft Visual Studio or its direct sibling Jetbrains IntelliJ IDEA)

And while extensions are optional within a IDE (and often solely used for increased productivity), more often than not they are a necessity in a code editor to even become productive.

mindcrashon Dutch software firm Bird to leave Europe due to onerous regulations in AI era

Europe (or more precisely the EU) has very strict regulations regarding data (and data storage) and privacy to which corporations need to abide.

This is also the reason why, for example, Apple Intelligence on iOS just only recently became available in preview across the EU.

mindcrashon Best Books ever of 10 years' votes at 4chan /lit/

Pretty amazed Aleksandr Solzjenitsyn didn't make it on the list.

Or it's just me being tired and I missed it.

mindcrashon Show HN: I made a site to tell the time in corporate

Calendar days are meaningless in corporate. Better state workdays (or best of both worlds: mention # of calendar days and # of actual workdays)

mindcrashon Wine 10.2 – Run Windows Applications on Linux, BSD, Solaris and macOS

Another great way to run Windows apps AND games, because it includes Wine and everything else required for the particular app or game you want to run, is Bottles: https://usebottles.com/

mindcrashon DOGE puts $1 spending limit on government employee credit cards

I thought and was somewhat hopeful they could make a difference way back in 2016, not unlike Obama's rise to power, but after that shitshow and very much noticing something very, very wrong (IQ ~110+1/2SD and a real knack for deduction and pattern recognition combined with a strong interest in psychology and the human condition) I tried to warn my Trump supporting American friends to no avail.

Devastated to see a once great nation (and with that I mean 80s/90s United States, _not_ current United States) rapidly falling apart as fast as my own.

mindcrashon Microsoft removes Windows11 24H2 official support on 8th 9th 10th Gen Intel CPUs

Once a consumer friendly Linux distribution hits the market Microsoft is completely and utterly screwed.

They do NOT control when someone buys or does not buy hardware. WE ARE.

mindcrashon Product Development Processes You Might Not Have Heard of (2022)

In case you are interested in Shape Up and want read more about it, Ryan Singer - the inventor of the methodology - has written a really great book about how they have been, and currently are, building and shipping products and features at 37signals.

The book is called "Shape Up" (doh) and the electronic version is totally free:

https://basecamp.com/shapeup

I would also really recommend the rest of the books, lots of great thoughts on development and management from actual experience. Also free:

https://37signals.com/books

mindcrashon USAFacts

He was already killing it when he was at Microsoft. (I can tell, because I worked at a pretty big EU based Microsoft partner at the time).

Note that pretty major stuff like .NET (developers, developers, developers!), Windows Mobile, Windows Phone, Surface, Xbox, and Azure all got launched under his watch.

Sometimes I even think Nadella fucked it all up. Windows 10 was meh, Windows 11 is shit, Mobile was killed even though the Nokia phones were top notch, Sony just publishes first party games on PC to earn extra cash while MS needs to do it to keep the Xbox division alive (because everything released on day 1 on Xbox is also released on PC so why bother with a console...), the AI hype will not lead anywhere, and I could go on and on...

... but oh well.

mindcrashon Remarks by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte at European Parliament's Committee

Don't believe anything this snake says, wants, or does will lead to anything good.

During his time as prime minister he has ruined the Netherlands.

Also under his watch, hundreds - maybe thousands - of families were ruined, both financially and socially, by the Dutch IRS ("toeslagenschandaal" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scand...)

In other words: He loves to make and see people suffer. And now he has the authority to not do that just to the Dutch, my people, but to EVERYONE.

Most of you out here despise Donald Trump. Most of the people in the Netherlands despise Mark Rutte as much as you despise Donald Trump. Hell, we probably even despise Rutte even more than you despise Trump (!).

Yes, he is that evil.

mindcrashon 'Headed for technofascism': the rightwing roots of Silicon Valley

Oh fracking please.

When the likes of Zuck, Dorsey and Schmidt evidently censored everybody and everything on behalf of radical left wing ideology and radical left wing elites everybody was dead silent, but now the likes of Zuck, Musk and Pichai are licking the boots of Trump to ensure that they financially, and their companies, survive this presidency we are heading into "technofascism" and Silicon Valley suddenly has rightwing roots?

Give me a fracking break.

And before you come with Peter Thiel: Alex Karp, on behalf of Palantir -- which has Thiel on the board, supported Kamala Harris. ALSO EVIDENTLY.

If anything, the top of SV consists out of unprincipled, spineless opportunists.

mindcrashon Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

You are kidding right?

OpenAI -- for now -- is planning to build 5 gigawatt data centers (yes, plural) to continue its quest towards AGI. -- see HN archives. Meanwhile they are also looking into private nuclear power for the same purpose.

Any serious competitor will likely need to do the same.

So there's a rational choice and tradeoff to make:

Net zero or AGI.

We can't have both.

mindcrashon Microsoft loses status as OpenAI's exclusive cloud provider

Microsoft does not only provide compute through Azure, but currently also has a stake of 49% in OpenAI.

So while they don't have anyone actually on the board, they do have quite some leverage.

mindcrashon US Cloud soon illegal? Trump punches first hole in EU-US Data Deal

This will have tremendous bad consequences.

If Trump does not back down the EU will have no other choice than to terminate access to every online service sharing data originating from EU citizens with US based companies.

And I mean every online service. Not "just" mostly consumer facing stuff like Facebook, Instagram and X, but also down to the likes of Azure, GCP and AWS -- and everything in between.

This would be bad for everyone, not only for us here in Europe; but also for those of you out there in the United States. I hopefully don't have to explain why.

Pray that he doesn't succeed in making the EU walk away...

mindcrashon Microsoft loses status as OpenAI's exclusive cloud provider

If that plan to cultivate a strong OpenAI competitor within Microsoft is still a thing, and I think it is, I think they will not give a single F.

That they gave green light to OpenAI to do this says a lot.

mindcrashon Shifting Cyber Norms: Microsoft security POST-ing to you

Yeah, I thought it was running locally but it runs in Microsofts cloud.

However, that opens up ANOTHER similar attack vector as Bert is saying:

"We may wonder also what fun a determined hacker could have with Microsoft running random bits of JavaScript on their servers and allowing these to talk to the world (or to Microsoft itself even)."