Hacker News: bionsystem

New comment by bionsystem in "FreeBSD Laptop Compatibility: Top Laptops to Use with FreeBSD"

bionsystem — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 14:25:54 +0000

Incus is pretty damn good to be fair. You can mix and match VMs and containers, the terraform provider "just works", the setup is fast and easy, it plays well with ZFS. Now I wouldn't be surprised if it still lags jails (or Illumos Zones) in robustness or some capabilities but I'm a happy user of them now.

New comment by bionsystem in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)"

bionsystem — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 20:33:06 +0000

Any connection with bao or openbao, the fork of hashicorp vault ? I fail to see any reference on the site

New comment by bionsystem in "MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max"

bionsystem — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 12:37:59 +0000

In my new position (on a different product) I don't have enough fingers to count how many times the previous guy bullshitted the PO/PM with "that's not possible" of having some features / workflows enabled. Just because he didn't bother thinking through it or just didn't want to do it. Most of the stuff is a bit boring but just a few days of work and test. So yeah I entirely agree with you.

New comment by bionsystem in "The whole thing was a scam"

bionsystem — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 07:23:34 +0000

I still fail to see if that is their side hobby or the entire point for them.

New comment by bionsystem in "Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS"

bionsystem — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 08:36:58 +0000

You are missing out the entire point. In a justice system, a single innocent in prison is a thousand times worse than a free criminal. This is where most people draw the line if they think about it. Because when you put innocents under arrest, suddenly you are no better than dictatorships and terrorist state.

The real justice is investing in a security system that tracks, investigates, and condemn actual criminals, in a targetted way, so that honest people can live securely and free. Believe it or not, plenty of countries manage to do that pretty well.

New comment by bionsystem in "Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS"

bionsystem — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 08:30:31 +0000

There are companies I wouldn't candidate for, even with kids I think, although it's hard to say, I don't have kids, and apparently there is a mind-shift happening when you get one. Oracle, Palantir come to mind. But maybe not Microsoft, I don't know about that one. It's probably bad, but maybe not "I prefer to watch my kids starving" kind of bad.

New comment by bionsystem in "Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS"

bionsystem — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 08:27:07 +0000

Maybe not, there are plenty of hard things to do at Microsoft scale, hypervisors (which I guess could count as "OS" but maybe not "Windows" in the consumer-product line sense), compilers, languages, hardware since Microsoft is doing that too, browsers (although the hard part is chrome-based, probably they contribute to it), databases, distributed systems for cloud products, etc. Plenty of hard things to do.

New comment by bionsystem in "Noctia: A sleek and minimal desktop shell thoughtfully crafted for Wayland"

bionsystem — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 09:28:57 +0000

Depends on everybody needs obviously, but say you have your dev machine that is remote, and you want to connect to it from a laptop (for real-estate reason or just for working from everywhere you want), maybe you want everything on the same (remote) machine like browser, db, IDE, etc and access to it as a remote "desktop" not just an ssh session.

Of course cli tools would be enough for somebody who likes a full TUI dev environment (and for my own use cases that would be enough) but for some people I understand the need, and I feel it is a regression for them to not have it.

New comment by bionsystem in "Making niche solutions is the point"

bionsystem — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 07:10:07 +0000

Maybe not a shit company but a trash company indeed.

New comment by bionsystem in "Doing the thing is doing the thing"

bionsystem — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 13:44:11 +0000

I completely agree and went by the proverb "everything worth doing is worth doing poorly" about a year ago now, it took some time for it to sink in but now I'm actually productive. My main blocker was waiting for other's approval, now I feel a lot more free.

New comment by bionsystem in "The future of software engineering is SRE"

bionsystem — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 08:01:49 +0000

I agree with your nuance, but that's not my default mode, unless I know the language and the domain well I am not going to write an MR. I'm going to read the stack trace to see it it's a conf issue though.

New comment by bionsystem in "The future of software engineering is SRE"

bionsystem — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 05:16:51 +0000

Most devs can't do SRE, in fact the best devs I've met know they can't do SRE (and vice versa). If I may get a bit philosophical, SRE must be conservative by nature and I feel that devs are often innovative by nature. Another argument is that they simply focus on different problems. One sets up an IDE and clicks play, has some ephemeral devcontainer environment that "just works", and the hard part is to craft the software. The other has the software ready and sometimes very few instructions on how to run it, + your typical production issues, security, scaling, etc. The brain of each gets wired differently over time to solve those very different issues effectively.

New comment by bionsystem in "The future of software engineering is SRE"

bionsystem — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 05:08:50 +0000

My take (I'm an SRE) is that SRE should work pre-emptively to provide reproducible prod-like environments so that QA can test DEV code closer to real-life conditions. Most prod platforms I've seen are nowhere near that level of automation, which makes it really hard to detect or even reproduce production issues.

And no, as an SRE I won't read DEV code, but I can help my team test it.

New comment by bionsystem in "FreeBSD"

bionsystem — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 21:39:38 +0000

Maybe he meant boot environments ?

New comment by bionsystem in "FreeBSD"

bionsystem — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 21:38:10 +0000

I've said it before too, it is exemplary in terms of what documentation should be ; just read through it with a VM on, type the things, and everything just works, no googling or LLMing around. I heard it is the same for other BSDs as well, will try those some day. Also a testimony of how coherent this system is.

As a seasonned SRE it is a breathe of fresh air in this world where everything else seems to change from one version to another and nothing seems to work at first try, ever.

New comment by bionsystem in "Show HN: Rails UI"

bionsystem — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 19:57:27 +0000

There are a bunch of those for free no ? Rails blocks (paid, about the same price as this Rails UI), Ruby UI (MIT licensed), I think I saw a couple more here.

New comment by bionsystem in "Xfce is great"

bionsystem — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 05:45:31 +0000

Yep LXQt is a beast, super snappy and complete. I use it on an old laptop (2012) and it still works great with a very low memory footprint (much lower than XFCE when I tested a bunch of them).

New comment by bionsystem in "Pyinfra: Turns Python code into shell commands and runs them on your servers"

bionsystem — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 05:23:48 +0000

How does it compare to fabric ? I used neither of those. I'm quite proficient in ansible and fine with it but always interested in alternatives.

New comment by bionsystem in "Show HN: Play poker with LLMs, or watch them play against each other"

bionsystem — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 14:52:09 +0000

I just watched for 5 min and no they don't play very well. Deepseek squeezed with K4o against CO open and BTN call with full stacks. Grok 3b AI with 25bb in the button with Q4s. Those are very far from optimal play which is well known since solvers. I wonder how they've been trained.

New comment by bionsystem in "Show HN: Terminal UI for AWS"

bionsystem — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 06:31:29 +0000

I remember airport hostesses when they used it to get your boarding pass from the mainframe, it took them 5 seconds and a few key-strokes like 3 letter of my name to get the job done. When they switched to web-uis some year, I vividly remember seeing them, 4 at a time on the same screen, trying to figure out what was going on. Took them 15 minutes and a phone call to get the boarding pass ready. I feel sad when I think about this.