Hacker News Reader

whalesaladon The "Windows XP Box" (2003)

Just last night I won an auction for a dual Pentium III supermicro setup with 1GB of memory. To relive this era of computing, including simulating my high school network by deploying Netware in a lab.

whalesaladon VSCode's SSH Agent Is Bananas (2025)

Take zed for a spin

whalesaladon VSCode's SSH Agent Is Bananas (2025)

I avoided Zed for a long time because of the SSH feature in VScode. Then I realized Zed has SSH remote too. Just flagging this for anyone else who relies on vscode-over-ssh and is sick of the bloat.

whalesaladon What California is learning from solar panels built over irrigation canals

Living in Pasadena/Glendale, dad living in Palmdale where we would spend weekends... I would pass by that famous section along the 5/210 split often. Was always fun to see the lights on and the roaring water coming down.

whalesaladon Microsoft killed FoxPro in 2007. Anyway, here's FoxPro revived

So hard to take these vibe coded projects seriously. I can feel the LLM selling it to me. I don't want to suggest the code is bad or it doesn't work or doesn't have awesome features... but ai built landers are just so smelly.

whalesaladon What California is learning from solar panels built over irrigation canals

I thought this was a pretty awesome video to provide the lore on how water got to Southern California. Growing up in Pasadena I heard the name Mulholland and Eaton (as in canyon) all the time but never realized they were so instrumental in the founding of the city and all the wild shenanigans that went into getting the water from up north to LA.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-RGL15Skuo

whalesaladon Claude Opus 5.5

"We made the incredibly tough decision to slow down development. Then after 4 days of twiddling our thumbs ... we present Opus 5.5"

whalesaladon NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission is dead

My brother in law (JPL) was telling me about this earlier in August. Big letdown but he assured me that they'll come back to earth some day ... just gonna sit up there a long time.

whalesaladon Fable 5 – Median thinking declined in August

yes, 100%.

whalesaladon M5 Ultra Mac Studio Review

In 7 years we will probably all be living under ground fighting skynet with plasma rifles made out of old microwave parts

whalesaladon What Sun Got Wrong

Where can one buy the Oxide t-shirt

whalesaladon M5 Ultra Mac Studio Review

For 99.99% of people, spending 15 grand on a Mac Studio just to run Qwen 3.8 locally is a non starter.

whalesaladon Custom home server built from spare parts

This is great. I also avoid stuff like TrueNAS or Unraid and opt to simply run my own ZFS and smb/nfs/etc configuration. Love the unifi-style display... I am cooking something similar but it is not a touchscreen just a blue-on-black OLED that cycles through status pages. You've inspired me to finally write a post on my own setup.

whalesaladon Claude Code now reads AGENTS.md if there is no Claude.md

are you though?

whalesaladon Claude Code now reads AGENTS.md if there is no Claude.md

oh god. sorry.

whalesaladon Claude Code now reads AGENTS.md if there is no Claude.md

ln -s AGENTS.md CLAUDE.md

whalesaladon US Military had close call after using AI for hallucinated intelligence report

    wait... you just launched how many ICBM's? this is not fucking good

    * Strangeloving...

    > Thought for 2m 48s

    you're absolutely right! the safeguards were load bearing, 
    but I disabled them and launched anyway. unfortunately my estimates 
    predict that global thermonuclear war has begun.

    > "how is claude doing this session? 
       1: bad  2: fine  3: good  0: dismiss

whalesaladon I don't like passkeys

using them with 1password has been pretty effortless. 'want to add the passkey' sure why not. 'want to use the passkey?' sure why not. for me it works across devices/os/platform so not sure what the big gripe is tbh.

whalesaladon Running Ubuntu on the Lenovo IdeaPad Duet

Recently I was in the market for what I would call a 'low cost linux netbook/tablet' and settled on the Chuwi Minibook X. It has an Intel N150 processor, 16GB of memory and a 512GB nvme drive. For less than $300. I am wildly impressed by it. Touchpad is really terrible but otherwise it is a surprisingly compelling little device. I am still fine tuning the tablet mode stuff -- it doesn't have any hinge measurement sensors it relies on an accelerometer in each half. Codex has been helping me write some cool tools to debug and parse those raw readings into "im in laptop mode" or "im in tablet mode, disable kb/touchpad". I just installed KDE Plasma Mobile yesterday which is quite a cool alternate DE that is more suited to tablets. Here is a video of that codex tooling to help debug the hinge situation: https://www.threads.com/@whalesalad/post/DdYNriIAFO4

whalesaladon GitHub is having trouble counting things

rails + russian doll style caching + large engineering team + azure as a platform = recipe for this exact problem.

whalesaladon Jev: New frontier model 40-400x cheaper and 20-200x faster

What is it about the rendering of this page that is so... off? It almost looks like the entire thing is a <canvas> element.

edit: looks like a framer export where there is a text stroke being applied :|

whalesaladon The CSS Zen Garden dream, finally shipped

Umm... this is disingenuous. At the time, most websites were built using tables and were completely non-accessible. One of the reasons we moved to XHTML, semantic markup, CSS instead of Tables... was to enable accessibility.

whalesaladon GEFS on OpenBSD: A Early Preview

I have been hearing noise recently that btrfs is risky and unstable but (knocks on wood) i've been running it for years now with zero issues. What am I missing?

whalesaladon The CSS Zen Garden dream, finally shipped

I still remember being like 15 years old and seeing my website(s) land on CSS Zen Garden, CSS Thesis, etc... using Mint analytics (throwback! shoutout to @shauninman) to see all the inbound traffic. What a time to be alive.

whalesaladon Leaving Linux

I am doing the opposite. I have been a Mac user since ~2005. My first Mac was actually a Quadra 610, but I was a wee little lad back then. I started my career on a G5 Power Mac with dual 23" cinema displays (studio displays? can't remember what they were called back then). Then the intel Macbook/MBP, etc. I think my favorite mac of all time, or the one I look back most fondly on, was my 2012 Macbook Air.

In 2022 my M1 mini started to die due to what I would call SSD abuse. I absolutely punished that box - rode hard, put away wet. The SSD began to show signs of failing. I was doing way too much with it - so I took a spare R720 2U server I had and turned it into my remote dev box. Thanks to VSCode's SSH remote feature - you can hack on a project like it is on your box. My workflow is usually my IDE for coding and then a separate terminal running tmux for interacting with the box. I did this locally at home, with the R720 down in my basement. The cool thing about developing like this is that if you are traveling, the dev-ex is no different. Tailscale or some other VPN and boom your workflow continues to work, albeit with varying amounts of latency. Mosh helps here. 2x CPU's (albeit old Haswell gen), 256GB of ram, 2x NVME mirror with pci-e add-in ... it performed really well as an always-on remote dev machine.

Quickly I realized I was kinda outgrowing the R720, though, and so in 2023, I built a beast Linux workstation (Debian 12) with 128GB of memory, 13900k, nvme mirrors, etc and after fine tuning KDE and getting it all dialed in, I started to really enjoy it from a hacker standpoint. Everything for the most part "just worked" including my new Apple Studio Display that I am typing this message on right now. Took a little while for the kernel to catch up but at this point it is working over Thunderbolt, the camera works, speakers work, built-in hub works, etc. I can even do brightness control from my kb.

Meanwhile, my mobile dev box has been an M2 air. With the 'all compute is happening on a remote node' the M architecture Air devices are really quite incredible. I am just running an IDE and an iTerm window (with all compute happening on the main host), so battery life is measured in days. I will work at my desk in my office for a while, then pivot to the deck or the couch or a coffee shop and thanks again to ide-over-ssh (I am on Zed now, no more VSCode) and tmux ... everything feels exactly like it does at my desk with zero interruption. It also means I can slam my laptop shut at any given moment to do other things, while software and agents continue in the background. Combine with a 1500VA ups under my desk to mitigate power blips and this is a dream setup.

But the more I used KDE and Linux ... the more I started to ask myself if it was time to pivot to a Linux notebook too. The only qualms I had was knowing that no PC will ever beat 1) the battery life and 2) the touchpad performance of a Macbook.

Then the Framework 13 Pro was announced. I watched the release announcement and immediately preordered one. I went back and forth about cancelling the preorder many times, thinking to myself that my trusty M2 air was just fine for a 'dumb terminal' type of laptop. But the 120hz display and the desire to dogfood a modern Linux notebook, combined with the fact that the market/prices for RAM etc were skyrocketing and I was locked-in to a good batch 1 price kept me on the preorder. Also ... I have 2 german shepherds and they shed a lot. Hair gets into my macbook keyboard which is very difficult to get out. Removing and cleaning key caps is tedious. The fact that I can replace the entire KB on the Framework (or entire top cover) for like $100 is hugely compelling for me. Combined with their track record to continue supporting and offering upgrades for older gear - it was a no brainer really. Modern Mac notebooks are unfortunately wear items (like brake pads) - at some point you throw them out. The tide might be shifting with the new Neo and its' repair-ability, though.

Glad I did. The framework has been really really good. Not gonna lie, Apple still wins on battery life. But I enjoy having a freeipa-domain-joined box that is 100% open source, running all my familiar KDE tweaks, 120hz, etc. The keyboard and trackpad are actually incredible. Keyboard surely beats any notebook I have ever had.

So now I am sort of spiraling on Linux toys. I just got a Chuwi Minibook X (https://taoofmac.com/space/reviews/2025/05/15/2230) and its running Fedora, like my Framework Pro, and it's quite fun as well. For less than $300 it has 16GB of memory, 512gb nvme, 4 cores, and a touchscreen display that is quite decent (still fine-tuning the auto rotate stuff, which is fun in and of itself). I can't believe Fedora 44 'just works', with suspend, and wifi, and speakers, and bluetooth, and full disk encryption, .... less than $300!

I've been using Linux on servers and for software dev since ~2005 but never felt like "the year of the linux desktop" was really here. That totally changed a few years back and now I am all-in. Still love the Apple ecosystem (and use an iPhone) but very very happy to be driving Linux on all my computers. I even updated my gaming rig (7900XTX) to run CachyOS. With the exception of anti-cheat games like COD or BF6 I have zero qualms. It runs everything else really well. And it doubles as a local AI inference machine thanks again to the beauty of open source and Linux.

whalesaladon iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27

I miss the old John Siracusa reviews on Ars. Was always a vibe to read thru those while taking snapshots and pulling the latest update image.

whalesaladon XCancel service is suspended until further notice

> at some point we have to ignore the X site completely

I've been doing that for years. Since just prior to Elon's purchase of it. Nothing of value in my life has been lost.

whalesaladon Show HN: Neobrutalism.dev – Just added Base UI support and added new color theme

I would call this bauhaus not neobrutalism.

whalesaladon Blizzard Revives 'StarCraft' Franchise with Open-World Sci-Fi Shooter

Honestly as someone who grew up playing SC, WC3 etc... it gets kinda old. If you have played one, you have played them all. I totally welcome an FPS in the Starcraft world and something fresh from Blizzard.

whalesaladon Blizzard Revives 'StarCraft' Franchise with Open-World Sci-Fi Shooter

Blizzard has always had some of the best cinematics in the industry. They're usually 100x better than the actual game. I wish they had a movie studio.