rietta

We are loosing so many of the legends. I don't distinctly watching the Chronicles when it first aired - was too young, not in the right market - but as a computer history nerd watching the videos on the Internet has been eye opening. It is also a really good way to get a sense just how advancing things were in the 1980s and how in many ways we have gone backwards in many areas.

Interesting. The model picked Trixie as the name for Debian 18, which is actually the name of Debian 13 which is a current release in 2025.

Very succinct, I agree.

I honestly have never heard anyone—even those executing it poorly—try to frame Servant Leadership the way the original author did here (the "curling parent" analogy).

I have certainly seen people fail badly at practicing this style, but that failure was invariably due to a lack of character, poor communication skills, or other individual execution matters, not an issue with the core concept of servant leadership itself.

I think the author is significantly straw-manning the concept of servant leadership.

The short take presented in the article doesn't match my lived experience with this style, both in secular and faith-based circles. The core idea is absolutely not that of a "curling parent." Instead, it embodies living the walk, walking the talk, and putting the team's needs before your own ego.

In fact, this profound concept goes all the way back to Jesus Christ, who modeled it by washing the feet of his disciples—a task reserved for the lowliest servant of the time. This act was deliberately shocking and context-defying. He effectively "turned the world upside down" by saying, "Anyone who wants to be first must be the very last, and the servant of all."

I'm not trying to proof-text, but this idea is ancient and deep. It's a profound leadership style that is unfortunately often executed poorly or misunderstood by modern practitioners. Poor execution doesn't invalidate the concept itself.

It was 2017 that I decided to go all in ensuring that my main work computers were built from parts sourced via the local Micro Center. The real eye-opening situation is even if I have a top line most expensive MacBook Pro or most expensive Dell laptop with full warranty, the truth is anytime there was a hardware issue which happened every 2 to 3 years it would destroy a day or more of work. you cannot have it fixed and returned to you the same day being able to have more redundancy in the ability to source individual parts locally is a gigantic financial benefit when you’re livelihood depends on a working high-performance systems as a high-end consultant. I also ensure that I have two laptops capable of running my work though neither perform as highly as my high-end gaming class workstation.

I too am very sad. This has been my brand of ram for a long time. I’m also more of a software guy than hardware, but I appreciate being able to have high-performance gaming class systems for my work. It runs circles around much of the stuff my colleagues run, including in deployment in various cloud environments.

This sucks! I know more about software than hardware. Crucial is the only ram I have bought for decades now. As a practical matter does this mean one needs to buy DDR5 ram now from MicroCenter for a build planned for next year? I just put 128gb into my latest Linux workstation. I had been planning to build a new NAS to replace my aging TrueNas (nee FreeNAS). I was just thinking about possibly building another dev box after being very happy with this AMD 9950x performance.

My informal use of private missed the mark in a strict legalistic sense. We are on the same page about email left on the server being subject to subpoena.

For everyone else, unless you use POP3 to download your email to your own personal device and remove it from the server, the email left on the server is not as protected under US law as emails that are fully downloaded to your device. The later requires a search warrant to acquire without your consent.

The practical short answer is yes, yes it will. It is not privileged communication. It is not considered private since you have left it on a third party server. It is discoverable via legal process to the third parties that retain the chat log.

The same goes for communications on any social media or public forum, including discussions here on HN.

I have started to come around to thinking that as a practical matter as an individuL, making sure things actually make it into an actual bona fide landfill and ate buried is the most ecologically friendly thing we can do. All the other alternatives seem to break down and end up with stuff either not being encapsulated and impacting the environment that way, or shipped off to other countries and ending up in the oceans.

We use grocery bags as trash bags for the small bathroom bins. Also to contain poopy diapers for sanitation purposes. The thicker plastic bags Kroger has uses for their pickup service are harder to use for this. Also are not being reused since they always use new bags with every order. I save the bags we don’t use and place them in the bin outside Publix or Home Depot. Ironically the Kroger drop off pin appears to have been removed.

I HATE short form videos with an abiding passion. As a user, my preference is long form YouTube videos I can listen to while my hands are busy with the dishes, dog walks, etc. I am ventured more into podcasts because even such videos are painfully annoying with ad interruptions that demand skip click. Under no circumstances do I want to interact with the device every 60-90 seconds. That totally defeats the purpose of listening while being productive in the day.

Yells at cloud with visions of Windows 98 menu slide out animations stuttering on the barely good enough for the new OS pc! ;-p

I am confused. How can they be the first when there is an existing record? So fastest time but not first? An absolutely awe inspiring accomplishment!

I personally think the plain text howtos and forums of 1996-2002 were way easier to follow than the video links that come up these days.

I still play Solitaire on my computer sometimes ;-p

I suppose we do not know what she looked like, but Moses had a Kushite wife and was criticized for it. "Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Cushite woman whom he had married, for he had married a Cushite woman." (Numbers 12:1 ESV)

It seems that no evidence is a bit of hyperbole.

Indeed. Regular interaction in the region at minimum went from well from modern day Lebanon and down through Ethiopia (Kush). In the biblical timeline Moses had a Kushite wife. I have read a compelling account that links biblical Moses with a possible identification as Senenmut during the New Kingdom Period and connected with Hatshepsut (possibly Pharoh's Daughter). Following this period we know there was regular political and military correspondence from all over the region, such as the Amarna letters which are on display at the British Museum. The point I make, as a lay person who has read the biblical narratives and other sources, is Egypt was extremely well connected for an extremely long period of time and significant DNA mixing the entire time is to be expected and I doubt tells us too much about origin migrations.

The article states that 'his genetic affinity is similar to the ancestry appearing in Anatolia and the Levant during the Neolithic and Bronze Age.' As a layperson, I don't think we would find this particularly shocking. It's well known from written sources that there was significant communication and movement between Egypt and those areas during the broader Bronze Age, even extending back into the Neolithic for some cultural exchanges. This even aligns with biblical narratives that describe individuals and families traveling to and from Egypt for periods of time.

And being permanently barred from possessing firearms in the USA.

A major plot of my fictional book is going to be the resurrection of data from a DVD recovered from an archaeological site in from the ancient North American period (from the pov of the characters). It is a significant challenge fraught with perils, including the professor responsible being threatened with failure after failure in the field, budget cuts, and political barriers. But success will be the first glimpse after thousands of years into the unknown dark age that so little is known about.

Data not continuously copied is lost. Ironically the most future proof media is becoming increasingly rare. Those gold layer dvds may last well into the future but the readers will not be available.

Hard. I am slowly writing a book set in the future where we are a “digital dark age” where little to nothing is known about our time tentatively called Professor Bitrot.

If the software written in a one year period of time for $100k is an asset then I, as a small business owner, can go to the local credit union and take out a loan on favorable terms with the that asset as collateral. No, of course not! They would laugh me out of the branch or the loan would be credit card interest rates. Software is demonstrably NOT AN ASSET like a major piece of equipment.

I am writing my member of Congress right now.

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I'm writing to express my urgent concern regarding the negative impact of the 2022 Section 174 tax code changes on small businesses like mine. As owner of Rietta, Inc., a small cybersecurity firm, I still do much of the technical work. My wife and I have three young children under 6. My family and I have been directly negatively impacted by these changes from the 2017 act.

Previously, the tax code helped us afford open-source and experimental work that benefited customers. For example, modernizing applications to run on Docker improved testing and deployment. Our State government clients now benefit, but this was once experimental. Now we're largely back to just work-for-hire consulting, treated as cost of goods sold. I don't have the cash to pay for experimental software development only to then amortize it over five years. If I have $100k revenue and spend $100k, the current code allows only a $20k deduction. I owe taxes on the other $80k despite no cash or documented asset value. Experimental software doesn't work like that in this field.

I started this business 26 years ago. We provide important long-term custom programming and update work for private sector and State government clients ("STATE A" and "STATE B" judicial branches). Often, we work with code we didn't originally write.

As a professional computer scientist and business owner, I rely on my CPA for tax compliance. If I've erred in my example, that's on me. But I can tell you this amortization requirement particularly cripples small businesses like Rietta, Inc., where cash flow is critical, severely limiting the quality of services I can afford to provide. I support undoing this tax change.

This US tax code change directly impacted my small business in a very real way that was directly felt by my household. In the past, it was a big boon for us and helped me afford to pay for some open source work and experimental things that helped our customers in the long run. Now we are back to mostly doing work-for-hire consulting. Even the experimental work I am doing, I am just paying for it and writing it off as typical business expenses. I cannot afford to take the credit because that means no deduction for this year. I don't have the cash in this small business context.

Thousands is probably hyperbole, but there are many, many!

One that I find regular use for when copy+paste does not work because I am either connected to a terminal emulation, vm, or something of the like is typeitforme. It takes the contents of a text file and sends them through the keyboard buffer after a few second delay (that allows me time to switch focus to the window I want the typing done).

I currently have it as a entry in my ~/.bash_aliasas file.

alias typeitforme='sleep 3 && xdotool type --file '

This works in stock Ubuntu Linux. You can check out the xdotool documentation for ideas how to refine it to do more.

Fair point, but I only had limited HN commenting time budgeted, not getting a video set up to test this idea. I did confirm that the overlay feature exists via the official ffmpeg documentation.

I never found bash scripting disagreeable. I have thousands of scripts for both work and my everyday computer usage. I keep a ~/bin folder in my path where I place useful scripts that I have written for my own use. One thing that keeps me using bash for this purpose over Python or Ruby (which I use for serious programming) is that I can take a command line invocation that I manually constructed and tested and put it in a script without modification.

Wow, you are not wrong. I just asked Gemini "how can I use ffmpeg to apply a lower third image to a video?" and it gave a very detailed explanation of using an overlay filter. Have not tested its answer yet but on its face it looks legit.