Hacker News: ahepp

New comment by ahepp in "How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)"

ahepp — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 09:51:25 +0000

I got a gen10 plus microserver and liked it so much that I got a second one.

Throw FreeBSD on it and add a couple lines to /etc/exports and rc.conf and it's a NAS right out of the box

New comment by ahepp in "How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)"

ahepp — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 09:48:04 +0000

I'd probably just buy a cheap prebuilt PC with a big case, or surplus enterprise tower. You can get cheap LSI PCI cards and do miniSAS to SATA if needed.

The biggest concern I'd have with USB is power delivery to the hard drives, but I haven't even done the napkin math so maybe it's fine. The SSDs seem like they might be a waste of money. USB hard drives have a poor reputation, but I don't have a ton of experience to say how much of that is deserved. On a practical level, I'd also be concerned about knocking the cable out.

New comment by ahepp in "CarPlay Is Additive"

ahepp — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 07:40:57 +0000

I'm guessing you mean fuel injector? The pump that pushes or pulls fuel up from your tank is not very sophisticated, afaik.

Fuel injector timing and quantity, along with ignition timing, is generally computer controlled, certainly on any modern vehicle.

New comment by ahepp in "I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI"

ahepp — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 22:45:17 +0000

I would love to hear more about this

New comment by ahepp in "Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation"

ahepp — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 20:03:34 +0000

> rarely we get things wrong (e.g. classical physics)

Curious, do you think quantum physics is the end of the line? I wouldn't claim to have a good understanding of anything beyond classical physics, but I've just assumed it's turtles all the way down and at some point we'll find serious issues with the quantum model

New comment by ahepp in "Epoll vs. io_uring in Linux"

ahepp — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 06:40:32 +0000

I would be interested to see benchmarks for that patch

New comment by ahepp in "10Gb/s Ethernet: switching to a Broadcom SFP+ module"

ahepp — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 03:48:37 +0000

I wasn't aware there was a substantial latency difference between fiber and copper. Some googling suggests copper might be .4-.8c and fiber might be a more reliable .6c? But even if there was a huge difference in speed of light through the medium, inside a home aren't the distances so short that it wouldn't matter?

New comment by ahepp in "10Gb/s Ethernet: switching to a Broadcom SFP+ module"

ahepp — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 03:35:18 +0000

That's pretty nifty. Another affordable option I found was this "SFP Buddy" [0] for $50, which at least at the time seemed like it was about 10x less expensive than other market options. No affiliation, just bricked an ONT-on-a-stick once and had to figure out a way to reset it without breaking the bank.

[0]: https://oopselectronics.com/product/SFPB

New comment by ahepp in "Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless"

ahepp — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 21:38:58 +0000

I got stopped after 5

New comment by ahepp in "Boot Naked Linux"

ahepp — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 20:09:53 +0000

buildroot does a nice job of tying a lot of this stuff together

New comment by ahepp in "Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism"

ahepp — Sat, 30 May 2026 16:51:32 +0000

> If you make money putting stuff into the stream of commerce, you're liable for unintended and evenunforseeable downstream damages

So if you’re a business offering poor quality services, and I come along and start offering higher quality services, I owe you damages for the impact I have on your business?

New comment by ahepp in "News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development"

ahepp — Thu, 28 May 2026 22:21:29 +0000

This sounds like a great approach to me. I've thought some kind of pi zero 2w based smart speaker system would be an awesome project for a while. I am having a difficult time imagining a cheaper option, especially if you want something like the hat ecosystem.

New comment by ahepp in "Private equity bought America's essential services"

ahepp — Wed, 27 May 2026 19:13:27 +0000

I think you have this pretty backwards. Private equity does not exist because of pensions. Private equity is investment that has not taken additional steps to be a part of regulated public markets.

It's true that private equity is dominated by institutional investors. One reason for this is that the investments are generally deemed too complicated, illiquid, and risky for retail investors (although the Trump administration is trying to change this).

Additionally, if we added the kinds of regulations, reporting requirements, standardization, etc, that would be necessary to scale this model to hundreds of thousands or millions of investors participating in an informed manner, we would simply recreate public markets.

Freakonomics recently did an episode on this that I thought was pretty good: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-the-public-ready-for-pri...

They've done some pieces on private equity in the past too: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/are-private-equity-firms-pl...

New comment by ahepp in "Defeating Git Rigour Fatigue with Jujutsu"

ahepp — Sun, 24 May 2026 22:16:40 +0000

> Switch to a previous commit, make edits, changes propagate into the future commits

In what way is that different from using `git rebase -i` to edit a commit?

New comment by ahepp in "The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics"

ahepp — Fri, 22 May 2026 10:55:57 +0000

what share of the DRAM market does China control today?

New comment by ahepp in "Minnesota becomes first state to ban prediction markets"

ahepp — Tue, 19 May 2026 21:30:50 +0000

Couldn’t we say that any market rewards prediction? And that this is generally seen as a beneficial quality that results in more accurate valuations with better liquidity?

New comment by ahepp in "Git Is Not Fine"

ahepp — Sat, 16 May 2026 09:24:47 +0000

Do stacked PRs do something to avoid rebase conflicts if two people touched the same file?

New comment by ahepp in "Git Is Not Fine"

ahepp — Sat, 16 May 2026 09:21:47 +0000

I don't mean to suggest you're doing something wrong, but it's not clear to me why you need three separate branches for this? Why not have these related changes as individual commits on a single branch?

New comment by ahepp in "Git Is Not Fine"

ahepp — Sat, 16 May 2026 09:11:01 +0000

I've also seen teams struggling to review massive PRs as a single diff, but when I've seen that it's always because they aren't structuring commits to be individually reviewable.

New comment by ahepp in "Claude for Legal"

ahepp — Fri, 15 May 2026 08:20:15 +0000

who do you think stands out?