HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

stryan

1,380 karma · joined November 20, 2013

submissionscomments
stryan··on Gitea 28.0
I wish they had an actual feature comparison list. I've been trying to find anyone who can give me a list of non-trivial differences between the two; so far it's always either FUD about Gitea's governance and security structure or ForgeFed. The former has made me rather wary of the project[0] and the latter has been stagnate for years and I'm no longer convinced anything will come from it. Otherwise it's just silence.

Personally I thought Forgejo was doing better work on their actions runner for a while from casual changelog browsing but Gitea's been putting a lot of work into theirs. Otherwise it mostly still looks like a soft-fork in practice to me.

[0] Not that I'm thrilled with Gitea's semi-open-core setup and company but they make it seem like they're kicking puppies and dangling features over non-enterprise users head before snatching them away.

stryan··on Omarchy Is a Power Grab
> Are the changes Omarchy specific or distro-agnostic? You say both.

The changes are specifically for Omarchy. They just happen to still be distro-agnostic. There is no guarantee this continues in the future.

The discussions:

Using managed tool-stub bundles for Omarchy’s lazy CLI layer: https://github.com/jdx/mise/discussions/12597

Proposal: give every Omarchy user a declarative "my machine" file with mise bootstrap: https://github.com/jdx/mise/discussions/12709

Proposal: give Omarchy dotfiles automatic history, easy restore, and optional sync with mise: https://github.com/jdx/mise/discussions/13022

> I don't even know what hyperland and quickshell are. I don't use mise because it seems to solve problems I solve with containers.

Okay? Your lack of awareness of the tools does not change the fact that 15 millions dollars that is supposed to "support the linux desktop", but right now is mostly funding its own distro.

stryan··on Omarchy Is a Power Grab
It was easy to ignore before it "raised" around 15 million dollars. That's a lot of money to be throwing around a mostly-donation based ecosystem.

I'm already seeing discussions on the mise[0] Github discussions about Omarchy specific changes and designs. I'm not saying anything about these specific changes and they seem mostly distro-agnostic for now, but it goes to show how it can affect other distros/software even if you don't use it.

[0] mise is being sponsored by the Omacon foundation, which is what all this money is technically going to. It also happens to be the only "independent" tool being sponsored by the foundation, as the hyperland dev is essentially contracted by them and the QuickShell dev was hired by DHH.

stryan··on How the Tobacco Industry Drove the Rise of Ultra-Processed Foods (2025)
> Also, Japan doesn't actually have a 'colonial history' having never been colonized by another nation.

It was never colonized but I've often heard it talked about in a similar way due to the effects of the Commodore Perry and the post WWII occupation (i.e. see their infamous pornography laws), as well as neighboring affects from China's colonial history.

stryan··on How the Tobacco Industry Drove the Rise of Ultra-Processed Foods (2025)
>Japan has ultra processed foods and they don't seem to have an obesity epidemic.

Most of that's from a much stronger national guidance on weight control + societal expectations, but IIRC they also are gaining weight. Their ultra processed foods (in the salt and preservative sense) are also why they have one of the highest rates of stomach cancer.

> They also don't have a marijuana epidemic.

Not sure if I'd categorize the US as in a marijuana epidemic (and this is coming from someone who doesn't consume it and dislikes being around it) but even if we were, the states with the highest marijuana usage (west coast and NE) and the states with the highest obesity rates (deep south) are almost non-overlapping circles. If we're tying a drug to be obesity rates I'd be much more willing to believe it's the American propensity to chug large amounts of cheap 100-120 calories a pop beer.

stryan··on Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI
I don't think there's a way to really say a comment like this "with all possible respect" given the (albeit meager) content of the article.

Either way, I'd be much more willing to bet that if Toady had Opus/Sol/whatever we wouldn't have Dwarf Fortress, we'd just have Rimworld: perhaps a technically better game, but not !FUN! in the same way Dwarf Fortress is fun.

stryan··on You probably own this 7-Eleven (and that's why it looks so sad)
Good news for you then, they are trying to increase the food quality to be closer to the Japanese stores: https://www.tastingtable.com/2216099/7-eleven-major-changes-...

The decline of the classic US fast food restaurants (McD's, Wendy's, BK) has been matched by gas station food getting better and better. The 7-11 breakfast sandwiches are pretty good these days and sometimes the hamburgers even taste like real meat :) .

stryan··on The Quest for a Hangover Cure
As someone who A) likes to drink and B) gets truly horrendous hangovers (all-day, barely can get out of bed since age 22 hangovers) I've been pretty disappointed with the lack of research in hangovers. There's a "Alcohol Hangover Research Group" that meets yearly that I keep up with it but nothing major yet.

Personally my pet theory (as mentioned in the article) is there's more of an immune system reaction then people think. This would explain some of the difference in hangover sensitively and reactions, plus from my personal "experiments" I've noticed pseudoephedrine+painkiller really clears my hangovers up sometimes, much like a bad head cold. On the other hand, it doesn't work every time making me thing that some hangovers are immune-system based, some acetaldehyde based, some dehydration, etc. Plus there's the effects of the beverages drunk and low level gluten or hops intolerance.

DHM-based (Cheers and Zaca usually) and Zbiotics are the best preventatives I've tried so far; they won't stop everything but I do feel a bit better the next day after taking them compared to without. All three are very expensive unfortunately and none are better than the greatest preventative of all: drinking water throughout the night :) .

stryan··on Codefloe Is a Professionally Hosted Public Git Forge
At the very least, the main guy behind this is pat-s who was originally a WoodpeckerCI dev and has been in and around Codeberg/Forgejo/Woodpecker for a while so I trust he knows his stuff. His work on CrowCI (Woodpecker fork) has been great.

I also swear I've read that same "buy a hetzener dedi install forgejo" etc etc line before, but maybe it's just you're not the only person cynical about the situation.

stryan··on Go 1.27
It's the usual English drift perhaps, but "bold faced lie" has been used since the 17th century, which is also apparent from "thirty seconds of Google searching". Three hundred years is enough usage for me to count it as correct.

On a side note, "bold faced" does not mean the persons face is bold, only that it is said boldly, which implies a level of rudeness that "bald-faced" or "bare-faced" does not.

stryan··on Go 1.27
"bold-faced lie" and "bald-faced lie" are both valid expressions. The original expression is "bare-faced lie" but they're all pretty similar to each other.
stryan··on Data centers raise nearby temperatures by up to 4 degrees in Phoenix
Alas, something like that wouldn't have helped me either as I was on the other side of the river :) . But yeah some sort of regional coordination between local governments or something like that would fix or at least help the problem.

Like I said in my original comment, I think really the problem is just the scale of the build out. Before the AI boom DCs were being built slowly enough that it wasn't a problem and/or costs could be amortized over time. But cost sharing agreements and subsidization needs to be done before the DCs are built the they're certainly not going to push for it, so the people need to. Lower state taxes in the future due to DCs subsidizing power is (sincerely) great and all, but it doesn't do shit for the families deciding between food and heating their house in the winter before those benefits kick in.

stryan··on Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
Loudoun County is a very rich part of NOVA and was able to fight for those concessions, as well as being in a very desirable part of the country for those DC's to built in (close to major infrastructure but still undeveloped at the time) so they had a better position to argue from.

Plus, as I mentioned in another comment, while Loundoun County gets the tax benefits the whole area is affected by the DC's power consumption due to the regional power grid and shared infrastructure (i.e. the Potomoc) so part of my already high power bills was due to the data centers there and I got minimal benefits.

stryan··on Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
I'm also in favor of making them pay, and in the end I'm expecting/hoping that's what will happen. But either way, when negotiating it's better to start from a harder position (no building) and soften up (limited building, cover the cost of extra electricity) then vice versa. Plus I'm sure some DCs would just pick another spot if forced to compromise; there's always some red county out there willing to do whatever just for a company to build there, that's why a lot of the DCs are being build in LA/AL/MS etc.

It might also be more complicated than you might think though due to the complexities of increasing power supply. Power companies also use prices raises to discourage residential use and conserve the existing supply for larger customers. They can't refuse to service residential but they also can't increase supply yet, so they just raise the prices until residential users "choose" to lower their power consumption.

My old power company told me it would be a temporary increase until supply was increased, but they said that the last time and it never happened. which, speaking of NOVA, was caused by the Loundon County allowing more data centers to be built. They get the money but since the power grid is regional everyone gets the bill :) .

stryan··on Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
Some of it's a panic, but I'm leaning towards many of the concerns being true or at least partially true due to the sheer scale of the construction. The figures I've been seeing are something like half of all current private construction projects are data center related these days and it's the biggest single sector of construction in terms of money spent.

It's also a lot easier to protest data centers then AI companies and they generally provide minimal benefits to the local communities (a brief job boom for construction but minimal reoccurring benefits afterwards) and quite a few negatives like power consumption and noise. People can't stop their jobs from replacing them with an LLM, but they can at least stop the local data center from being built and raising the electricity bill by $70 a month[0]. This batch of data center construction is essentially yet another physical representation of the (often negative) changes the general populace faces with AI.

[0] $70/month is how much my old power company said they'd have to raise prices if several proposed data centers were built. I was already paying $150-200 a month to power a 1 bed apartment so you can bet your ass I filed a complaint with the county about it.

stryan··on Single log line is 49KB+ (ext4) / 110KB+ (btrfs) of systemd-journald disk writes
While the rest of systemd is actually pretty modular, journald is unfortunately the only other required component. You can not run systemd without journald running in some way; closest you can get is setting Storage=none and forwarding the logs elsewhere.

journald is in a weird state where its "good enough" and mandatory that most people forget how bad it is until something like this pops up.

Normally I'm pretty happy with systemd and its many components; I even willingly run systemd-resolved, which is probably the other most hated component. But journald makes a lot of weird choices and if I could drop it I would in a heartbeat.

stryan··on The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)
>> given the current political state the US it's foolish to vote for one of the parties

> It worked well for us until now. Today your call for ignoring party affiliation asks us to also ignore insurrection and child rape. That's asking too much, and I'm surprised you had the gametes to even float the idea.

You know, I really debated on including that line because I suspected someone would misinterpret it, but I figured it would be a sorta of subtle reference to show I wasn't trying to "both sides are equally bad" type of situation. I guess I was too subtle.

To put it clearly, the party it's foolish to vote for is the Republicans. I thought that was obvious given that broad state of things. However, I also think that people don't pay attention to the primaries or local elections just Vote Blue No Matter Who on election day, then get surprised we've end up with a bunch of milquetoast centralist Democrats instead of people willing to make changes like Mamdani or El-Sayed.

stryan··on The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)
A fair point! Both states I've lived in so far have not been gerrymandering-battleground states so I haven't had that problem.

I'm willing to take a softer stance than OP's start and be okay with just knowing basically any of your representatives i.e. some combination of your two senators and one or more representatives.

stryan··on The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)
> The names are printed on the ballot, along with party affiliation. No memorization needed. ... > but when the final election happens you generally only have two choices in the US per position and you simply vote for your party of choice.

I want to discourage voting blindingly by party affiliation. Personally I think you should at least know the general ideas and policies of the candidate(s) you're choosing, even though given the current political state the US it's foolish to vote for one of the parties, but even besides that how hard is it to remember their name so you can check if they actually follow through with anything? I'm not expecting perfection, but for example I know my senators names so whenever there's a big vote I can at least scan the list of supporters and see if I should be pissed at them or not. That lets me have at least a general vibe towards them come primaries and election season and whether I vote for their re-election.

> In a primary there may be a bit of research needed, but even then you get a sample ballot beforehand so you can research the alternatives,

Technically out of scope from OP's original point, but there's also a variety of local elections that can have multiple candidates per party. But either way, that "bit of research" with a sample ballot is all I'm really asking for out of people. These days they're tons of great voters guides out there too that include short Q&A's with each candidate for each hot topic issue, policy standpoints, etc. Because so many people just vote by party affiliation arguably the primaries and local elections are the most impactful votes you can do.

stryan··on The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)
> Feels disingenuous to ignore the fact that what I said applies to the rest of the comment too, don't you think?

Then quote the whole thing your responding to, otherwise your response seems disproportionately overreacting.

> For starters, something like almost ~half of students move away from their families to attend college. And then look at moves for jobs and retirement and everything else. And then when an incumbent leaves, all of their constituents end up in a similar boat as someone who just moved. And I'm not even beginning to touch the fact that a lot of people's unawareness of politics is (spoiler, I know) due to them not having the luxury to be able to devote as much bandwidth to it as HNers do.

I am very aware of that situation. I moved away from my home town and state for school, I moved cities post college three times, and I am now quite literally in the middle of a move to another state. While I won't pretend that I'll immediately get into the weeds of local city politics, I've still participated in local politics and I will participate in politics in my new city/state come this fall.

>All these people shouldn't have any political opinions whatsoever until they figure out their representatives because... some wise guy on HN thinks knowing your representative's name is a good litmus test for whether you can tell good from bad? Do you expect any other response than "screw you"?

Consider the context of the comment: "do you know who represents you in Congress [...]. If not, you probably don't vote or don't pay attention when you do, and you've definitely never called your Congresspeople to complain about their votes, so you probably don't really care that much about whatever it is you say you care about, since you haven't done the easiest thing you can do to make a change."

If you don't know the names of your representatives you can't vote for them. Seems pretty straight forward to me. I think it's pretty fair to say if you're complaining about a political situation but haven't even voted about it you probably haven't tried that hard.

> Quite a confession given the side you're standing on. You'd think such a model citizen would've at least cared to contact their rep one damn time to suggest something about such a serious issue. Like maybe helping educate people about the government and politics better so they become as enlightened as the others.

To be clear, I've contacted my representatives plenty of times, I just haven't called them. I hate phone calls. But I have written emails, physical letters, and on several occasions spoke to them in person at events to express my issues.

> If you (and/or parent, whoever feels this way) genuinely want a good outcome for something so serious instead of standing on a high horse and looking down on the uneducated, maybe actually go campaign to put your lovely literacy tests in the constitution, or whatever else would advance your cause forward. If you have some integrity, perhaps also campaign to fund the education system better and make it easier for citizens to vote in the same amendment, so that you're actually helping the people you presumably care about.

1. I have campaigned for better education funding; I used to work in higher education.

2. No one mentioned literacy tests, so I have a suspicion there's a lot of background context in your head that you're imposing here. Either way, I have no interest in them.

stryan··on The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)
Feels a little disingenuous to quote this line and not the full section where OP was just asking you to know your local representatives.

I've never called anyone about anything political, and I also haven't lived at the same address (or even in the same state) for 20 years but I still know at least who my senators are and some of my representatives. State elections are every two years; you have to almost actively not pay attention to not know anything about yours.

stryan··on Gentoo bugzilla closed due AI bot scraper overload
1. You shouldn't need to be a professional sysadmin to be able to deploy a basic semi-dynamic website

2. Considering the spike of complaints over the past two years and the fact that they range from small time site operators to larger orgs (Linux Kernel, GNOME, Duke University, etc), do you think that maybe you're missing part of the problem space?

stryan··on A week in Matrix
Nope, just Matrix. Second best option is XMPP with various cobbled together XEPs but that has its own set of problems.

For all the (sometimes rightful) grief Matrix gets, it's essentially the only solution targeting hard problems like multi-device encrypted group chats[0] or truly federated multi-user chats. It can also be a very quickly moving ecosystem, which is difficult to handle when you're an open federated spec. Hence why several of the complaints in this post are caused by old and no longer supported clients and servers.

[0] Infamously, WhatsApp and LINE both support encrypted chats but all the encryption keys are stored on your phone, so you can only have one phone working at a time and desktop access is actually routed through it.

stryan··on Dubious research tied to Red Bull has shaped energy drink policy
Speak for yourself, I love the taste of taurine. Plus there's something strangely satisfying about the taste of a standard diet Red Bull. There's no attempt at natural flavoring there: you can rightly tell God had no part in making it.

But besides that, energy drinks are an easy consistent way of getting exact amounts of caffeine. I drink pre-workout before gym days for that exact reason since it's a lot easy to get 200mg of caffine via one cold 10oz drink than trying to brew and chug two hot coffees at 8am.

Plus occasionally there's non caffeinated benefits; the Monster Rehab line really does seem to help in the morning after a night of hard drinking.

stryan··on Delta flight hit by firework while landing at Midway Airport on Fourth of July
> This may be unsatisfying for many people but the impossibility of enforcing fireworks bans in the US captures an important component of the American zeitgeist. It is annoying for me sometimes but I recognize that this reflects an aspect of American culture that you can’t just erase.

I've taken to describing this aspect of Americana as "the fatal need to have a pretty good time", after the Minced Mockingbird post[0].

[0] https://www.mincingmockingbird.com/products/fatal-american-n...

stryan··on Podman v6.0.0
Yeah that's an unfortunate downside of the daemon-less design. Service management (like dependencies, health checks, etc) are outsourced to systemd since there's nothing locally available to monitor them. The fact that the documentation doesn't mention this is a major miss.

For anyone curious, there's more details on why this is tricky to do with Podman at https://github.com/podman-container-tools/podman/pull/27033 .

stryan··on Podman v6.0.0
To be clear, it doesn't explicitly not support Ubuntu or anything, it just doesn't privilege it. Podman doesn't produce packages for any distros.
stryan··on Podman v6.0.0
> but instead to create a bespoke mechanism involving a bunch of tiny files, all of which is insanely system (linux) specific, and therefore completely non-portable.

To nit pick slightly, it's not really a bespoke mechanism it's just re-using the mechanisms provided by systemd. Quadlets are implemented as a systemd generator in order to re-use the existing service management system that exists on essentially all major Linux distros. Quadlets are less a direct competitor with compose (hence why Podman implements the compose spec) and more a way to better integrate containers with the rest of a system. The closer Podman native equivalent to compose is Kube files.

stryan··on Podman v6.0.0
Swapped a few years back (pre 5.0), haven't looked back. For compose files I'd look into using quadlets.

For quick conversions you can use compose files directly with podman-compose or docker compose pointed at the podman socket[0].

There's also podlet[1] which converts compose files into native quadlets. It does a pretty good job of taking care of everything for you and for a lot of simple to medium complexity compose files it will Just Work. There's talk of making it into a library of some kind so other tools can transparently convert compose files to quadlets so hopefully we'll see more stuff like it.

Otherwise, writing your own Quadlet files isn't too hard if you're at all familiar with systemd unit files. Most `docker run` or `podman run` arguments have direct quadlet conversions so once you get used to the INI format versus yaml it's pretty easy to see a compose file and churn out the equivalent quadlet(s).

[0] https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/podman-docker-compose

[1] https://github.com/containers/podlet

stryan··on Steam Machine launches today
We know they've been kicking the idea around since the first line up and I believe pretty decent leaks saying they were working on it were out around 2019.
Page 1 of 12Next →