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proaralyst

1,069 karma · joined August 22, 2016

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proaralyst··on Gnome and Mozilla Discuss Proposal to Disable Middle Mouse Paste on Linux
It's a feature of X (so works in any app running in X, not just FF and your terminal emulator). Wayland changed clipboard behaviour (along with many other things) and decided the selection clipboard was too large a security hole to keep. It's pretty useful though, so Gnome added it back, on top of Wayland. It's still a large security hole though!

Separately, PuTTY has a similar mechanism for copy, though this goes in the normal Windows clipboard.

proaralyst··on Instant database clones with PostgreSQL 18
You could use LVM or btrfs snapshots (at the filesystem level) if you're ok restarting your database between runs
proaralyst··on US hits $38T in debt. Fastest accumulation of $1T outside pandemic
US treasuries (bonds, notes and bills) are mostly considered as good as cash. They're used heavily in the international banking system (for payments, and as loan collateral themselves). They're also held to maturity by large institutional investors with predictable liabilities (ie payments) like pension and insurance funds. Banks will hold some of their assets (eg deposits) in treasuries too.

Also foreign governments and central banks will have holdings. Tether (the cryptocoin) is largely backed by US treasuries.

proaralyst··on New Firefox Add-On Policies
> “Closed group” prohibition lifted

This is great: I've wanted a personal extension for a while (roughly to replace my userscripts but with more power and better sync) but was put off by it having to be public or manually installed. Now I can make this!

proaralyst··on Show HN: Roons – Mechanical Computer Kit
This is cool! The simulator was useful for understanding what was going on, I hadn't realised until I watched a few that the roons can push marbles out in between squares.
proaralyst··on Why does Britain feel so poor?
I don't see planning mentioned much in the article or comments. The Town and Country Planning act is a large cause of high development costs in the UK. Roads, rail, public works, nuclear power stations, onshore renewables and above all housing have all suffered significantly because getting things approved is so difficult.

Most other affluent nations have some form of zoning instead, which make planning much much easier. Most other affluent nations have more central control over planning too, which makes consensus over megaprojects easier to reach.

proaralyst··on LED's Efficiency Exceeds 100% (2012)
This feels similar to heat pumps being >100% efficient though? Perhaps a less misleading headline would be 'Very low-power LEDs also convert heat to light'
proaralyst··on Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers
Ukraine's drones are already partly automated because of the jamming environment: they can visually lock the drone onto a target from up to 10km away.[0][1] They're also using drones that trail a fibre optic over several kilometres to avoid jamming.[2]

[0] https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/03/12/... [1] https://www.csis.org/analysis/ukraines-future-vision-and-cur... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2024/11/07/ukrain...

proaralyst··on BYD says new fast-charging system could be as quick as filling up a tank
Well, the chargers won't be pulling 1MW continuously, so you can smooth this out by installing batteries with the chargers. The grid demand becomes a more constant trickle into the batteries co-located with the charger
proaralyst··on Engineer eats efficiently for $2.50 a day (2016)
This was a compelling idea, so I looked it up. Unfortunately it doesn't appear to be true: https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/253034146
proaralyst··on Ask HN: Has anyone tried adapting a court reporter keyboard for writing code?
I've used my Kinesis Advantage 2 for years and am inseparable. I'd like to swap to the Kinesis 360 but my current keyboard is just fine and it feels like a small upgrade
proaralyst··on Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages
What's your problem with UEFI? If your OEM wanted to install malicious firmware they can do that in BIOS no?
proaralyst··on Show HN: Cronexpr, a Rust library to parse and iter crontab expression
Systemd timer units are usually two: one for the service you want to run, one for the timer file.

I think you're confusing systemd timer units with Cronie[0], a crond implementation that I think predates systemd? It's possible there's some systemd thing I don't know about though!

I think most distros at least have an installable crond

[0]: https://github.com/cronie-crond/cronie/

proaralyst··on Ask HN: What tools should I use to manage secrets from env files?
If you're already using systemd, you can use its built-in credentials manager[0] which uses a combination of an on-disk key and the TPM2 to encrypt secrets at rest.

Probably annoying if you have more than one machine though

[0]: https://man.archlinux.org/man/systemd-creds.1

proaralyst··on The Slow, Painful Death of Agile and Jira
I just don't think agile is designed for fixed-anything. Every project has unknowns: you can either spend effort to de-risk the project and increase your confidence in the time/cost estimates, then sell the job (ie waterfall/big plan first); or you can Just Try Stuff and adapt as you figure out that various things are easier or harder than you thought.

I think consultancies and corporations looked at vertically-integrated tech companies having lots of success with agile & decided they needed agile themselves, but didn't want to give up fixed-price. Probably correctly! But the key to those tech companies' success was the vertical integration, not the agile methodology

proaralyst··on Zen, a Arc-like open-source browser based on the Firefox engine
Work make me use Chrome, and I have recently converted hard to tab groups. I've found two main uses: one for a collection of reference tabs that I mostly want open or closed together (specific API references that are normally spread out over a few pages); the other is to organise groups of tabs for different projects I'm working on.

Both of these make context switching easier as I can quickly hide all of the tabs I'm not currently using, knowing they'll be just as easy to reopen later. In Chrome, tab groups can be saved too, so they give you a bit of the persistence of bookmarks.

I'm still a Firefox user where I have a choice, and I'm really excited to hear they're working on first-class tab groups

proaralyst··on Dual action antibiotic could make bacterial resistance nearly impossible
I'm not a biologist, but I'm guessing that having the concentrations of two antibiotics peak at the same time etc is much much trickier than having one molecule with two mechanisms of effect. Thus in actual (not perfect) use you end up with both effects active within a bacterium at one time, rather than potentially having some distance between the peaks.

From the article, it does look like they're smushing two antibiotic active sites into one molecule, so it seems a somewhat similar idea

proaralyst··on What's the point of std:monostate? You can't do anything with it
I think it's not correct to say that void is a monotype in C++, because the compiler won't allow you to assign the result of a function marked void to a variable, and you cannot declare a variable of type void.

I'd accept that it's not the same as the empty type though, given that void* can be occupied and functions marked void can return. Probably someone with more type theory than me can name this properly

proaralyst··on What's the point of std:monostate? You can't do anything with it
Void is different from this type though, as a variable of type void can't be occupied.

In ML and friends monostate is called unit (and gets used a lot because void returns aren't allowed by the languages). Some have empty types too, which can never be occupied. A function returning Empty can't return, for example, though there are other use cases

proaralyst··on Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
I strongly suspect the chances of Orion-style propulsion happening are close to zero. I think we're much more likely to see fission engines (where the heat from a conventional fission reactor is used to superheat water, which then goes through a conventional nozzle), or something a little more exotic like pulsed fusion (where little capsules of lithium containing deuterium go through a magnetic pinch and fuse, again in a more-or-less conventional nozzle) are more likely. They also have very high ISP but with much lower abuse risks (can you see any government agreeing to have a giant stockpile of nukes in space?)
proaralyst··on Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
The strength of the body of the rocket comes from some level of pressurisation – much like a drinks can. I suspect that if the tank got holed the ship wouldn't have held up during the flip
proaralyst··on Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
Impressive the flap actuators held up too!
proaralyst··on Things I won't work with: the higher states of bromine (2019)
This is such a good book, and it was very accessible as someone with little chemistry education.
proaralyst··on Why you can hear the temperature of water
Is that explained by capacitance? I'm sure the capacitance of your finger through paint is pretty low but capacitors allow AC to pass
proaralyst··on Development Notes from xkcd's "Machine"
I believe davean has been involved for a while, they're mentioned on the about page: https://xkcd.com/about/
proaralyst··on I Know the secret to the quiet mind. I wish I'd never learned it (2021)
This is a really interesting account. One thing I found myself wondering was how much is the shift in her caused by the TBI, and how much by the assertion that she and her family are mortal?
proaralyst··on Man creatively sneaks onto Delta flight, but gets caught
Or you can check id at the gate
proaralyst··on MTA board votes to approve new $15 toll to drive into Manhattan
London's congestion charge is £15 (about $18) and has largely been a success. I suspect there's a difference in PPP though, so the Manhattan charge is potentially less impactful
proaralyst··on Claude 3 surpasses GPT-4 on Chatbot Arena for the first time
Have you tried https://ollama.com/ ? You may find you already can
proaralyst··on Microsoft reuses its OpenAI playbook with Inflection takeover
I agree they shifted to avoid the reporting requirement but I don't believe they did that cynically to manipulate prices, mainly because it's unclear to me that anyone has suggested a possible exit from their positions that made them any money. Archegos is a family office, so it's not fees. It's not generally possible to make a profit pushing the price up by buying as the price will collapse faster than you pushed it up. (Absent external demand as in a pump and dump.)

I suspect the intent behind the position disclosure is so control is disclosed, not economic exposure. The design of the regulatory system in the US is that you're either regulated and thus have a lot of responsibility and reporting requirements, but you get better access to the market (Archegos's brokers); or you're 'unregulated' and have less (but access the market through a regulated company).

Also you don't usually get different margin treatment through TRS than you would through normal ownership. If you do, your prime broker is doing something stupid. Your TRS is a contract with them, they tend to just go buy the shares to hedge so it's usually exactly the same as buying your long through them (except you can't vote your shares, you don't get dividends and you can't lend your shares).

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