News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

lasftew

Re:Men Who Stare at Walls on Wednesday April 29, 2026 @06:49PM (#47955743)
I quit cold turkey about two years ago. It wasn't enjoyable at all, as I felt dizzy and very unproductive for weeks. I was also suffering from prolonged headaches and slept two hours more per night than usual.

The upside of this though was that it showed me how heavily dependent I was on caffeine to just function. Which helped me to endure the withdrawal, and I guess that's the only advice I have: Turn it into positive energy and let that insight power your determination to get your body into a more natural state. After a few days, I definitely noticed that I got better, which also helped.

Now I feel better, fresher and more balanced than ever. Waking up in the morning is much easier, and have no reason or intent to ever go back to cafeinated life.

Re:Men Who Stare at Walls on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @03:10AM (#47931299)
OP mentions they are a coffee drinker, and use caffeine a lot to fight tiredness and brainfog. While the suggested methods to refocus are great, maybe there is some improvement potential by looking at root causes?

As a former heavy coffee consumer, I experienced varying degrees of tiredness over my workday, and inconsistent sleep patterns.

Ever since I stopped drinking it, my energy levels have been far more predictable and decrease rather linearly until bedtime. There is definitely no more "hitting the wall" in the early afternoon! Living caffeine free has generally been a considerable QOL improvement (after initial withdrawal).

Most congested stretches of highway in Switzerland use dynamic speed limits based on traffic for that reason.

https://www.astra.admin.ch/astra/de/home/themen/nationalstra...

Re:Forum reactions to Satoshi's Bitcoin paper on Friday February 23, 2024 @04:16PM (#39486211)
If everyone who has been holding bitcoin for years cashed in their balance today, the price would rapidly approach zero.

Emperors, clothes, and all.

Re:Chromebooks will get 10 years of automatic updates on Thursday September 14, 2023 @05:00PM (#37514770)
This has all the devices and dates: https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366
The fallacy is that organizations as a whole can only do so many different things efficiently. Capital allocation becomes less efficient if a single hierarchically structured entity has to decide on how and where to invest its capital, compared to the alternative of free market competition for capital (as usual ceteris paribus).
Re:Windows on Btrfs on Saturday April 22, 2023 @05:05AM (#35664635)
It might be convenient, but it is also more complex than just being able to read file systems. External disks or partitions containing data in particular will / should always be fully encrypted nowadays, so you'd need interoperability of disk encryption schemes as well (dmcrypt, bitlocker). NAS can handle that transparently.
Not really? Here is a listing in Germany for 1246 EUR (including VAT), which is not cheap but substantially lower than 1500 EUR:

https://www.galaxus.de/de/s1/product/apple-macbook-air-2022-...

It sounds like these problems are related to their end-user backup solution - can't comment on that as I've never used it.

However, when referring to Backblaze, I think most people here refer to their nice (and cheap) S3-like cloud storage solution, which works perfectly with the likes of restic, rclone and friends. That's probably what you should use if you care about control.

I generally agree with you. I believe it is all about the culture and by extension the systems which have evolved over time to govern the political process.

I took objection however with "people do not fall prey so easily to misinformation like they would in other countries [...]". People as individuals are as prone to believe anything they read or hear as they are in any reasonably developed and educated country.

The key difference to me seems to be that the political system offers fewer incentives for political actors to act destructively. Proportional representation and multi-member districts mean nobody can assume they will win a majority alone, and a strong pull towards consensus (multi-party governments) means no party will ever govern alone. Everywhere, including in Switzerland, any political party will use information for a certain benefit or advantage, and "misinformation" is just the derogative term for that process, usually from the vantage point of the political opponent. However, there is less to gain from it when you need other parties to find an acceptable compromise and bring forward your objectives.

The Swiss are not smarter than others. We just have a system that keeps the misinformation by all parties in a relative equilibrium.
Swiss here. This is true. Buy an expensive watch and want to pay with credit card? We'll need to verify name and address, apologies Sir! Have a bag of cash? No questions asked, have a nice day!
Re:Lego Is Discontinuing Mindstorms on Wednesday October 26, 2022 @05:57PM (#33350122)
Looks like https://pybricks.com/ is a usable alternative firmware for the Robot Inventor hub.
Re:Using GNU Stow to manage your dotfiles (2012) on Wednesday July 27, 2022 @03:04PM (#32255125)
Use the --no-folding flag to prevent stow from linking directories.
Re:The integrated timetable of Switzerland on Monday June 20, 2022 @11:05AM (#31811220)
I don't think this is true. There were massive investments into the Ticino regional rail network over the last 10-20 years, partially driven by the NEAT extension, which shortened travel times between regional centers (Lugano - Locarno - Bellinzona) dramatically.

What doesn't seem to work well are interconnections with neighboring Italy, but that is likely not due to underinvestment on the Swiss side. Road traffic is therefore still a huge issue in Ticino, as many Italian workers cross the border twice per day by car due to the lack of adequate public transport options.

Re:The integrated timetable of Switzerland on Monday June 20, 2022 @10:57AM (#31811120)
> second class citizen

As far as I know, investments in particular in local and regional trains is heavily driven by cantonal investments. For example ZVV (Zürcher Verkehrsverbund) contracts the S-Bahn network from SBB and finances a good part of its operations. While Zurich's network is therefore quite excelent, I am not sure other cantons invest at similar levels and therefore enjoy a worse experience.

Re:The integrated timetable of Switzerland on Monday June 20, 2022 @10:47AM (#31810965)
That's all correct. In addition, you can get almost the same convencience without purchasing an expensive GA by using the EasyRide feature [1]. No more worrying about buying and choosing the right ticket.

[1] https://www.sbb.ch/en/timetable/mobile-apps/sbb-mobile/easyr...

Re:Tell HN: I got 10x Hetzner storage at the same price on Saturday February 19, 2022 @02:45PM (#30399878)
Storagebox is a nice service, but what I really love with Hetzner is their auction of used dedicated servers ("Serverbörse") at https://www.hetzner.com/sb.
Re:LXC vs. Docker on Friday February 18, 2022 @06:10PM (#30392432)
My home server runs Nixos, which is an amazing server operating system: every service is configured in code and fully versioned. I also use this server for development (via SSH), but while Nixos can be used for development, it's relationship with VS Code, its plugins, and many native build tools (Golang, Rust) is very complicated, and I prefer not to do everything the Nix way, which is usually convoluted and poorly documented.

LXD is my perfect fit in this scenario: trivial to install on top of Nixos, and once running, allows for launching some minimal development instances of whatever distro flavor of the day in a few seconds. Persistent like a small VM, but booting up within seconds, much more efficient on resources (memory in particular), and - unlike docker - with the full power of systemd and all. Add tailscale and sshd to the mix, for easy, secure and direct remote access to the virtualized system.

Not in Switzerland. Bank accounts and salary information are not accessible to either level of government (communal, cantonal, federal), due to strong privacy legislation and a traditional distrust for central data collection and authority.

But nevertheless the yearly filing process is rather straightforward, as the tax authorities provide their own free web app for this purpose. It hasn't always been great but it improved significantly over the last few years.

Re:The Swiss reject key climate change measures on Monday June 14, 2021 @08:10AM (#27501643)
There are ways to implement such a scheme in a way that does not increase the overall tax quota, by either reducing other taxes (VAT, income tax) or directly giving back to the people (tax credits).

One key argument of opponents of the proposed law was indeed that it would have resulted in an overall tax increase, with a lot of money being channelled into a dedicated "green innovation fund", outside of regular parliamentary control.

Unsurprising, many MPs on the pro side were affiliated with the "clean tech" and construction industries, who would have received most of that money.

Young people were more likely to vote against the CO2 law than older people [1]. They also are more likely to be affected by increased costs of living and traveling that were proposed, due to much smaller incomes and budget.

[1] https://nzzas.nzz.ch/schweiz/gar-nicht-so-gruen-junge-stimme...

Our last parliamentary election in Fall 2019 led to a sweeping victory of green parties [1], as the summer 2019 was extremely dry and hot.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-swiss-election-idUSKBN1WY...

Re:Neural networks emulate any guitar pedal for $120 on Monday May 31, 2021 @06:45PM (#27348910)
I deliberately bought quite a limited but good sounding 4W tube amp for bedroom practice (Vox AC4). Having only a handful of easily understood knobs allow me to focus on my playing.

I have had modeler amps in the past, but every so often I'd just nerd away with the dozens of available amp models and the myriads of settings, and come out with the dissatisfied feeling of having just wasted a lot of time instead of engaging with music.

I find modelers have their place when it comes to replacing a set of analogue pedals, which is the reason I traded my three Boss pedals (compression, reverb, delay) for a Boss GT-1000Core. Overkill for my purpose, as I really never use any amp sims, cab sims, of any of the advanced signal chain stuff that the device is capable of. I just have one patch with my three pedals for practice, going into the AC4, occasionally turning the same knobs as on the analogue versions, but enjoying that I now have built-in a tuner as well :-)

I built knut (https://github.com/sboehler/knut), a personal finance CLI tool. It is similar in terms of use cases to ledger and beancount, but focused on getting multi-currency and valuation right.
Re:Put macOS on the iPad, You Cowards on Thursday April 22, 2021 @01:40PM (#26905535)
As a happy owner of a Surface Pro, I tend to agree. Being able to have both a powerful laptop and a reading and media consumption device in one is great. While the iPad is a better tablet and (certainly the M1 powered) Macbook is arguably a better laptop, I still stay with the Surface.

With Microsoft's nice recent improvements to WSL2 (GUI apps!), the development experience is mostly on par or even better than on MacOS, certainly if you workflows are mostly Linux based anyways.

I find Windows is doing an ok job bridging between the touch and pointer worlds, so it's certainly not impossible for Apple to follow along.

Re:AMC, GameStop Give Hedge Fund Mudrick Capital $200M in Gains on Wednesday February 03, 2021 @03:36PM (#26018773)
Money was made by fools at the expense of greater fools. Short-term trading is a zero-sum game, always has been, always will be.

Except for the HFT firms and market makers, who basically own the Robinhood flow and who thrive in foolish volatility. Guess who's paying so that r/WSB bros pay zero commisions? It's not the Red Cross.

Re:Plain Text Accounting on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @05:02PM (#25754540)
The advantage of text-based accounting is that files can be version controlled, just like software. I am using git and commit whenever I have a consistent state, as verified by (lots of) balance assertions.

In some sense, git commits are "meta transactions" for my personal journal, leading from one consistent state to another consistent state.

Re:Plain Text Accounting on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @12:13PM (#25749900)
I am not aware of any that does. With modern hardware, and in a personal finance context (a few transactions per day), it is unlikely you will have too much data to handle. The algorithm to compute a balance is O(n) with the number of transactions, or O(nlogn) if the tool allows for unsorted input.

If required, you could always close a balance in one file and start with new accounts in a new file, sharding your journal by year, for example.

Older »