News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

gertop

Re:FreeDNS on Saturday October 24, 2026 @12:52PM (#50223017)
afraid.org has been there offering free DNS hosting since the year 2000, 26 years

Whilst it would be nice to know their contingency and continuity plans, I feel like their history is a better indicator of the future than just a bunch of feel-good words that you'd likely find a way to interpret pesssimisticly anyway.

Using the system WebView has pretty much the same bloat as electron (in terms of cpu and ram) unless I'm missing something? Sure it's nice that it's not 500MB on disk but day to day it doesn't affect me as much as the fact that you're still running in a browser.
Re:Docker Is Weird on Thursday October 22, 2026 @11:37PM (#50204216)
For me it's not about the cpu time, but the memory. If you spin up hundreds of containers the docker overhead becomes very real.
Re:Docker Is Weird on Thursday October 22, 2026 @11:32PM (#50204187)
I think you're confusing userland threading (also known as green threads) with a regular thread pool implementation (that uses regular OS threads).

Because most web servers use OS threads. Nginx, Apache, litespeed, they all spin up `core count` threads but they can all work single threaded just fine as well.

Re:11 of 23 Core Open Source Projects Run on 1 or 2 People on Friday October 09, 2026 @11:32PM (#50029288)
The only valid point is your last one. It's not only about having more eyes either, but also backup eyes for when the main eyes are unavailable.

All the other things you mentioned are just things you personally wish for but may very well be undesirable to the project.

Re:11 of 23 Core Open Source Projects Run on 1 or 2 People on Friday October 09, 2026 @11:29PM (#50029270)
I can feel your hatred of LLMs and the article is clearly written by it. But don't let it blind you. "One" maintainer makes perfect sense here, "the" would sound odd. It's truly been used that way for a long time.
Re:So You Think You Could Be an Electrician? on Saturday October 03, 2026 @11:38PM (#49950353)
I'm an electrician. I used to be a programmer. I still program for fun and sometimes get small gigs.

In my city the pay scale for the first 5-7 years of a grad software engineer and grad electrician careers are comparable and I expect that to be the case in most of the world outside the handful of American bubbles. One thing I enjoy is that the minimum pay is regulated by a union so I don't have to hop job every year to make sure I'm not underpaid.

After that the salaries diverge quite quickly and the ceiling is much much lower as an electrician.

It's still pretty good money, though, so I don't think that's really a con to this career.

You can't get it back there's nothing to attach it to. There's also no point for the risks involved.

Organs can be transplanted twice but it's very rare and it's usually when the first recipient dies shortly after the transplant. It's called (quite obviously) retransplantation if you want to Google it.

Re:Toyota is finally taking its best-seller electric on Thursday September 24, 2026 @11:52PM (#49840021)
3.5kW might be enough but you conclusion that 1kW is also enough is absurd.

12kWh is 40 miles, closer to 25-30 in cold climate.

This is absolutely not a range that the average person would be happy with. And no, this isn't range anxiety or bad faith, it's literally less than the average daily commute (30 miles round trip).

A lot of the things you mention aren't things that have been "conveniently forgotten", they're simply things that mean nothing to most people to begin with...

> From shipping a fully certified UNIX with a modern UI

Ignored because nobody cares or wanted it.

> to getting all the music player market and influencing how any music player would be from then on

Anybody born after millennials have only ever known Spotify, they don't know about iTunes and 99c songs. That's like saying Napster has been conveniently forgotten.

> to seamlessly moving between Motorola and Intel and Apple Silicon with the ability to run the older software from a different architecture with Rosetta

That's a remarkable engineering achievement but that's an implementation detail. Backwards compatibility on the desktop was and still is tablesakes.

> to the first modern touch smartphone

Nobody forgot, there's always one of you to remind the class that Apple was first (by your own definition of modern touch smartphone)

> to getting wireless earpods (and pairing) right

They were clearly the first to demonstrate that people did indeed want fully wireless despite HN's objections at the time.

> to designing their own fucking integrated CPU, and even their own broadband chip

That would be impressive if they were a startup. Every trillion dollar tech companies design their own CPUs.

> Even simple things, like making the best touchpad in the market.

I don't know anyone who claims otherwise, and for the longest time they didn't make their own touchpads. So much for being conveniently forgotten.

Re:Stop making swap partitions–use swap files instead on Friday September 11, 2026 @02:59PM (#49663547)
Windows has no problem with hibernation and FDE and it uses a swap file.

Windows and Linux run on the exact same hardware. Windows hibernation doesn't rely on secret bios features.

Unreliable hibernation is 100% and undeniably a Linux problem, there is no secret advantage or conspiracy to keep it down. It's just that nobody cares enough to make Linux not suck.

Re:RISC-V Emulator and Linux System from Scratch on Friday September 11, 2026 @01:16PM (#49661881)
What's funny? That's how every linux computer start. The boot loader copies the kernel to RAM then jumps to it.
Re:Shutting down our public encrypted DNS on Saturday September 05, 2026 @01:50PM (#49578931)
I frequently get mini failures with quad9 and my DNS client is too dumb to retry with another server (or quad9 returns a valid but bogus response that prevents my client from hoping to the next server) so I had to ditch quad9.

Quad9 also has worse latency but I could live with it, I just can't live with web pages failing to load several times per day(especially hacker News that has their DNS TTL set to 1 second)

It doesn't happen with my ISP's servers nor with CloudFlare or google or even good ol' L3.

Re:Statichost.eu – European static site hosting on Saturday September 05, 2026 @01:33PM (#49578737)
None of what you say makes Europe better when it comes to the topic at hand, though?

If I have to choose US or EU to host my website, the size of their army, the strength of their currency, or their history as political bullies doesn't affect my blog or nextcloud instance.

What affects me is their privacy and data harvesting laws. EU is nominally better with the former, but the latter is eroding very fast and they're roughly the same.

Re:Statichost.eu – European static site hosting on Saturday September 05, 2026 @01:26PM (#49578665)
They give you the full /64 even on vps or kimsufi(low end servers) it's just that the interface is configured with the ::1/128 by default in their cloud-init.

Their documentation about it is not consistent though, so the confusion is understandable.

Re:Statichost.eu – European static site hosting on Saturday September 05, 2026 @01:16PM (#49578561)
They support any build stack you want. You basically give them a docker compose file and you do what you want.

Knowing that, it seems important to have some limits.

Re:Paint.net 5.2 alpha now runs on Linux on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @02:44PM (#49540585)
Programs running under wine don't have the same level of system/desktop integration as native programs, it's a very important distinction.
Re:Paint.net 5.2 alpha now runs on Linux on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @02:42PM (#49540562)
Paint.net itself is still not open-source, so no distro will distribute it.

If this shin even becomes "good enough" then I'm sure it will appear in the AUR and flathhub, however.

Re:Paint.net 5.2 alpha now runs on Linux on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @02:40PM (#49540527)
Pinta is the continuation of this source, it already exists.
SSD still have slower reads when the data isn't sequential. Not slow enough to matter, especially with extents meaning the data is probably in a handful of locations, not 10000, but it's absolutely measurable if your blocks are small enough (<1MB typically, though disk benchmarks usually use 64KB random reads and sometimes 4KB).
You keep shifting the goal posts...

He did something illegal, repeatedly, he got caught, he got offered a lenient plea deal of a few months. Those are the facts.

Yet somehow y'all turn it into: he was harassed, his family's life was threatened, he was going to get life in prison.

> Now, they're only denied the right to vote and to participate fully in political and economic society.

Given that the only modern slaves in America are prisoners I think it's by (reasonable) design that they can't participate in society...

Re:The A.I. In Google's New Pixel 11 Is Not Helpful on Wednesday August 19, 2026 @03:28PM (#49366084)
> All data is in my phone

It's stored in your phone but it's still going to the LLM when working on it, right?

Unless you invented a system of magic placeholders?

I hate Google and their dark patterns as much as the next guy but I agree: Having the pop-up once or twice or even three times is reasonable. A lot of people value the backup more than their privacy.

But after saying no three times, it really ought to leave the user alone...

Force close the app and clear the cache, your photos will come back.

Or clear data completely, then open the app "for the first time" and immediately log out.

It'll work, but as you've discovered, google made sure that it isn't the happy path.

Also no search (not even by file name), no albums, some editing functions won't work (even though they're local), and a few more annoyances. but also no more backup prompt...

It's a distasteful take to be sure. But, what is GP supposed to do?

Frankly I'd rather be told that than the other common but tired SV-resident take of "just hustle, bro, stop sleeping, hustle hustle hustle. Learn to code, take loans from friends and family. Doesn't matter that you're born in a shithole, I was born in a median family myself, we only had one car and we rented our house!!! Just gotta work for it, everybody can achieve it. Those who don't, are clearly not working hard enough."

> Personally I don't see the benefit of this since you're going to have to recompile your software anyway

The benefit is a unified toolchain. Make a chip, get the entire software toolchain for free.

In the past if you made your own chip you had to write your own assembler, compiler, debugger, etc. Many manufacturers forked gcc but of course it's still a lot of work and the license isn't great (for them, not the user).

This universal compiler toolchain is massive benefit for both the chip makers and the end user.

Re:RISC-V: They should have known better on Friday August 14, 2026 @09:00PM (#49306472)
Risc-v is nowhere near dominant, people are just being swayed by headlines such as Western Digital or Nvidia shipping billions of risc-v cores.

I do find it odd that you go on and compare to x86 marketshare however, the topic you've quoted is very clearly about MCU and whilst 8086 MCU still exists they haven't been used in greenfield projects for decades. Let alone any more recent x86 implementation.

There is a lack of understanding, but it's coming from you not the BBC.

There is a difference between elimination and eradication.

As usual you fail to understand nuance.

> depression, anxiety, hearing loss, and low back pain

I suffer from all of those things and I'm only halfway to 100, are you saying I wont make it there?

Older »