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rpigabon Priced out of home ownership

If it was a universally better financial decision to not buy a home, then who would you rent a home from? Someone who made a bad financial decision?

If this was the case, then there would be more and more renters, and less and less tenants, so rent would increase, and make homeowning a better financial decision. There's a stable equilibrium there, even taking into account the various taxes involved.

rpigabon Priced out of home ownership

You bought your house in 2010, if today in 2024 you had no house and had to buy one, could you? Haven't the mortgages and house prices increased a lot more than most salaries even in the remote countryside? (Just like the article says)

Also, remote countryside is cheap in most countries, but unless you can do 100% remote, they are very few jobs there.

rpigabon Ask HN: How to handle user file uploads?

If I was a malware distributor, I'd just throw a couple random bytes at the end each time I upload a malicious file, it'd still work and have a different checksum/hash.

rpigabon Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail

What if the only place where intelligent life was ever possible in the universe is being actively made impossible to live in by intelligent beings, which means after they're gone extinct, there'll be no intelligent beings to appreciate its beauty?

rpigabon Type Safety Doesn't Matter (2023)

In a 100m sprint, running fast does not matter, it's crossing the line very early that is.

rpigabon Infinitown

Half of the blocks should be replaced by parking lots to make it more realistic. Then remove all but one pedestrian crossing per road.

rpigabon Remake of the Windows 95 Solitaire game

Is that true or just hyperbole? On what system?

I love working towards making systems as efficient as possible, but in real life, engineer hours are limited and compromises exist.

Also, if this is quantitative, we could make the same argument with 1MB, and 1KB, and less. Sending text doesn't require RAM at all, it requires carrier pigeons.

rpigabon Remake of the Windows 95 Solitaire game

That's right, but we have to remember it's not really useful to optimize for binary size or RAM usage for a software that does not need multiple instances on servers, it's an end user app that you only need one of.

I think Java is a nice choice for a Solitaire game. If you're looking for efficiency, take a look at my command-line Solitaire that you can play in Gitlab pages or in a terminal : https://gitlab.com/rpigab/solitaire-cli

It's written in Rust so by design, it should be blazingly fast wink wink. Well there are many ways to shrink the binary, I didn't try to yet, the WebAssembly part too is way bigger that it would need to, but still, it's smaller and there's less colors, shapes and animations to display.

rpigabon Full Line Code Completion in JetBrains IDEs

I feel that way too, though in some cases I'd love to be able to summon this on-demand, make the suggestion appear on alt-enter or other context menus. Then I could either accept the suggestion, keep typing the line, continuing to process suggestions until I change lines, or dismiss the suggestions.

rpigabon The Making of Side 7: Gundam Evolution private server project

In theory, if AI was really crazy good, which I don't think will happen anytime soon or at all, it would be able to let you play the game, without any code being written other than the AI. Describe your game, connect inputs, and the model will make up some video and audio output through generative diffusion models. The challenge might be that it's way easier to do if you can let the AI have time to process each request, as opposed to having to react to many inputs per second.

It might require the entire power output of a medium-sized country to play a game, though.

rpigabon We ensure Cloudflare customers aren't affected by LE's certificate chain change

Old Androids and other systems where you don't get to update your root CAs mean that you can never add new CAs because too few devices trust them, or enfore new TLS versions because you have to assume that too many people use very old devices, maybe, I don't know, I'm not an expert, if someone can explain what really is at stake here.

rpigabon GNU Stow needs a co-maintainer

  $ stow --list --whatever-options-i-dont-know-it-just-making-a-joke
  ssh -> rsh

rpigabon Hello World

Assuming there's a vaccuum between the screen and your eyes (perfectly spherical), of course.

Otherwise, its gets very interesting and very very complicated. :)

rpigabon Notepad++: Help us to take down the parasite website

I love that you can find other adjacent s[cp]ams by looking at the other articles on mycours.es by the same author. Learn "Why you should play at a mobile casino", read reviews on cialis, viagra, ivermectin, in italian, also there's some code that looks like actual Brainfuck (but that might be obfuscated js) at the end of one of these articles, because why not.

https://mycours.es/gamedesign2016/2023/04/20/miglior-prezzo-...

This ivermectin article from april 2023 looks legit, it seems to be part of a section labeled "gamedesign2016". Might be a small mistake.

They say the internet's dead, I say it's flourishing, look at how easy it is, you can upload anything, make mistakes, it still "works". Some LEDs are blinking, everything looks alright to me.

rpigabon Choosing a Name for Your Computer (1990)

My router is skynet, my old Proxmox hypervisor was deathstar and a VM in it was stormtrooper, the Debian baremetal that replaced both is xwing, and my gaming desktop PC is themachine (from Person of Interest).

rpigabon Tool Use (function calling)

I've set it up this way: I've told Claude that whenever he doesn't know how to answer, he can ask ChatGPT instead. I've set up ChatGPT the same way, he can ask Claude if needed.

Now they always find an answer. Problem solved.

rpigabon Saffron: The Most Expensive Spice

Yes, it's also a difference in values and culture, we are fools to think that Azerbaidjan would desperately need expensive weapons in their recent conflict against Armenia, when in reality they'd always prefer a dozen saffron tea cups over a thousand mortar shells to shoot towards the Nagorno-Karabakh.

rpigabon Reflections on Distrusting xz

What if over 80% of all open source projects are secretly sleeper agents for various malicious actors, states, terrorists and whatnot, and they pretend to give use precious software updates for free so they can attack later?

What if proprietary software is running the same way, except they don't even give you free updates and you can't audit the source code and have to trust them when they push updates?

What if your mother gave birth to you just so she can slap you in the face when you're 30?

Yeah, we can go very far, but in this moment, xz is under so much scrutiny that in 2-4 weeks, I'd trust it with my life unless the big orgs looking at it issue more reverts (hence, the delay). So if there are issues, they're everywhere else.

rpigabon LLaMA now goes faster on CPUs

I was talking about cow eggs specifically! When ChatGPT et al got out, one of the funniest things to do was ask it about the best recipes for cow egg omelette or camel egg salad, and the LLM would provide. Sadly, most of it got patched somehow.

rpigabon Show HN: DN$ – an innovative, ad-supported DNS resolver

  $ dig @35.223.197.204 hackernews.com
  < HTTP 402 error.

Wierd, it shouldn't even use HTTP. Something's fishy.

rpigabon Show HN: DN$ – an innovative, ad-supported DNS resolver

You mean resolv.conf.ron? And why would you need anything else in that file, DN$ is all you need!

rpigabon LLaMA now goes faster on CPUs

I asked ChatGPT for some dataviz task (I barely ever do dataviz myself) and it recommended some nice Python libraries to use, some I had already heard of and some I hadn't, and provided the code.

I'm grateful because I thought code LLMs only sped up the "RTFM" part, but it made me find those libs so I didn't have to Google around for (and sometimes it's hard to guess if they're the right tool for the job, and they might be behind in SEO).

rpigabon LLaMA now goes faster on CPUs

Yes, just as the best professional cooks recommend avoiding to boil cow eggs, as they can explode.

rpigabon X confirms plans for NSFW Communities

I might start calling Twitter "X" once twitter.com redirects to x.com and not the other way around.

rpigabon Backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma leading to SSH server compromise

I'd love to be at Microsoft right now and have the power to review this user's connection history to Github, even though VPN exists, many things can be learned from connection habits, links to ISPs, maybe even guess if VPNs were used, roundtrip time on connections can give hints.

I really don't think some random guy wants to weaken ssh just to extract some petty ransomware cash from a couple targets.

rpigabon Backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma leading to SSH server compromise

Yeah, could be Venezuela. Though I'm not trying to make random statements to create uncertainty and doubt, so take this with a gigantic grain of salt.

rpigabon Ask HN: Who's getting their job applications rejected?

Sounds an awful lot like the dating site/app subscription fees model, they lose money if you ever find love.

rpigabon Scripts should be written using the project main language

I like the general idea, but it depends.

Sometimes these bash scripts are used in lots of contexts, local dev, CI pipelines, Docker build steps... good luck running Java or Rust in the last two. Even if you get it to work, good luck debugging if there are any issues.

rpigabon Only seven countries in the world breathe safe air. Three of them are in Europe

That's good to know. I heard Australia had the worst CO2 emissions per capita of the world in 2009, so even if PFAS air pollution isn't about CO2, there are correllations so it's wierd to see it both in the best and worst (of course extremely low population density can hide high air pollution per capita).