Hacker News: erikw

New comment by erikw in "US sanctions force The Netherlands off Microsoft and toward alternative NixOS"

erikw — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 20:12:13 +0000

Reflecting on it, I guess my OS config has turned into a codebase. I have a single Nix closure that includes all my OS config, all the services running on it, and all the small utilities that need to be compiled from source (either because they are something I wrote, or something that isn't packaged in Nixpgs). I'm not sure whether this is considered best practice or not. To your point though, I would be unaware if an upstream maintainer released a security patch for something that I'm compiling from source, because I am pinned to a specific Git commit. On the other hand, I can just point an LLM at my Nix source, and ask it to scan it for security issues periodically. I do this from time to time with one of the smart models, but it might be an interesting experiment to set up a daily scan with an inexpensive or even a local model.

New comment by erikw in "US sanctions force The Netherlands off Microsoft and toward alternative NixOS"

erikw — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 16:12:55 +0000

I think people are unfairly downvoting this comment, but I do want to drill into your point (1) a bit. You're right that you can't really do a delta patch in NixOS. But I feel like that is so so so important these days with active supply chain attacks. I don't want a 200kb change to a core library that is "claimed" to be backward compatible to be able to make its way into my codebase. In an ideal world sure, there would be some way to prove that the update doesn't break anything and isn't malicious, and that is certainly possible for some limited subset (provers like Rocq, OS functionality like BSD Pledge, etc), but for now this is mostly based on trust.

New comment by erikw in "US sanctions force The Netherlands off Microsoft and toward alternative NixOS"

erikw — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 16:04:04 +0000

I was so disappointed that Valve chose Arch as their base for SteamOS. SteamOS is excellent, and all the work they do has gone back upstream to make Arch and Linux gaming better, but I feel like it was a missed opportunity. I've always thought that NixOS (and immutable distros like Fedora Silberblue etc) are perfect for embedded or consumer appliances. I feel like a bit of help from a company that actually uses NixOS in a mass market product would really push it over the edge in terms of usability.

New comment by erikw in "US sanctions force The Netherlands off Microsoft and toward alternative NixOS"

erikw — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 15:46:27 +0000

I think it depends on what they want it for. I can imagine NixOS being perfect for user workstations for example, as an alternative to Windows workstations managed with Active Directory.

I imagine you have a lot more experience than I do packaging for NixOS and other distros given your product, but in the few cases that I've needed to run a binary, I just wrap it with a flake and it's done. I also stay on NixOS stable, so I avoid the sharp parts of "bleeding edge". In my experience as a desktop user, I've never had a failed rollback since using NixOS as my primary OS since around 2016. However, whenever I try to use it as a server OS, I often do hit the pain point you mentioned around statefulness. More specifically, the happy path is extremely happy, but once you need something off the happy path, you find yourself creating some really ugly glue to get it to interface with the happy path. The pattern I've settled on is using Podman quadlets for most services, but that isn't without pain either. Then you find that you've become a Unix sysadmin, managing different UIDs for rootless podman, different network domains, dealing with permissions issues, etc. I'm currently experimenting with microvm.nix to see if that will be cleaner, but no conclusions yet.

New comment by erikw in "Claude Opus 5"

erikw — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 18:58:05 +0000

Very interesting that Fable took more creative liberties. Have you tried giving Fable the same task, but also specifying that it implement a pixel-perfect design? I think that I prefer the Fable implementation. I find the UI elements in the Fable implementation to have more contrast, which feels more usable to me. I also like how the right padding on the "Book Your Escape" CTA in the upper right matches the top and bottom padding, which I think is an improvement over the mockup.

New comment by erikw in "Hardcore IndieWeb: Run your own website 100% independently for only $0.01/day"

erikw — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 22:47:07 +0000

You can programmatically update DNS whenever your dynamic IP changes. One issue though is that some residential ISPs prohibit webhosting in their terms.

New comment by erikw in "RTS for Agents"

erikw — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 19:50:22 +0000

I don't know about this... I think that the "expert" AIs on RTS games just get more resources (not compute resources, but in-game resources) so they can create more units. I'd love to play against an AI component that has the same resource collection speed as the human player.

New comment by erikw in "US to suspend immigrant visa processing for 75 nations, State Department says"

erikw — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 22:13:44 +0000

I'm surprised that you can get non-attendant citizenship in Canada. They don't even give automatic citizenship to children of Canadian parents born outside of Canada (maybe if both parents are Canadian they do, but my experience is with one Canadian and one American). US citizenship for a child born outside of the US to US parents is as simple as bringing their birth certificate to the consulate. And if you marry a Canadian, they won't give you residency unless you physically reside in Canada.

New comment by erikw in "US to suspend immigrant visa processing for 75 nations, State Department says"

erikw — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 21:40:13 +0000

Saint Kitts and Nevis sells passports, so I imagine that is the rationale. I see some other microstates on the list that fit that pattern as well.

New comment by erikw in "Xfce is great"

erikw — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 05:46:16 +0000

My reflexive response was "xfce is ugly, and that's by design", but actually, this looks pretty slick: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/13k5p5o/xfce_my_x...

New comment by erikw in "Quill OS: An open-source OS for Kobo's eReaders"

erikw — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 02:13:48 +0000

Love Plato- it’s so performant! I’ve always wondered why Kobo doesn’t just throw out what they’ve got and fork it.

New comment by erikw in "Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost"

erikw — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 18:38:20 +0000

Have you verified that these "academic bureaucracy roadblocks" exist? Surprisingly, I was able to pick my studies back up after almost 20 years, and not only were all of my existing credits counted, but they also exempted me from new requirements that had been added in the subsequent 20 years.

New comment by erikw in "Microsoft and Google overstate job creation at Chile data centers"

erikw — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 02:25:46 +0000

When I was last working in Chile on a SaaS product for use in Chile, we deployed everything to US-EAST. We still had local CDN caching, but it is always nice to be closer to your hardware. I can't tell from the article what types of datacenters these are, but if these are new Azure and Google Cloud availability zones, this will be a great for latency.

Edit: It looks like all the major cloud providers have Chile AZs except Amazon, which has one planned: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/coming-soon-aws-south-ameri...

New comment by erikw in "KDE launches its own distribution"

erikw — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 23:44:35 +0000

I don't know that that will happen- not even Windows is as smooth as MacOS. But that's because Microsoft and Linux developers are tackling a more difficult problem- getting an OS to work with effectively infinite hardware permutations. Apple has given themselves an easier problem to solve, with just a handful of hardware SKUs and a few external busses.

That said, Android is pretty stable, because a given Android distro typically only targets a small hardware subset. But I don't think that's the kind of Linux distro that most people contributing to FOSS want to work on.

New comment by erikw in "Apple Debuts iPhone 17"

erikw — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 18:49:42 +0000

I'd be curious to understand their rationale for not making a small, reasonably priced phone like the iPhone SE used to be. I probably will be leaving the iPhone ecosystem the next time I have to buy a smartphone (even though I use a Mac, iPad, and Airpods, which all work together really well) because I'm uninterested in using a large phone.

Thinking through my own use case, I just use my phone for messaging, maps, and the occasional app, so I'm not going to need a big screen for consuming content. I also don't want to spend a lot of money on a phone, since I don't need any fancy features. So perhaps that intersection of use cases doesn't make much sense to target?

New comment by erikw in "I did 98,000 Anki reviews. Anki is already dead"

erikw — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 20:11:04 +0000

I'm so tempted to try improving my language skills with Anki, both for my native language and my daily use language. But the commitment feels so daunting- I've barely missed a day in my reviews for the last two years, and only have 28,000 reviews total. I'm very impressed by your 98,000!

I guess the best way to start is just to create a new deck in it with one card and then go from there. I already have a daily review habit, which is the most important part.

New comment by erikw in "I did 98,000 Anki reviews. Anki is already dead"

erikw — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 19:04:12 +0000

I think that the author was using Anki incorrectly, and that led them to the spurious conclusion that "Anki is dead". I also have attempted to use Anki this way- using someone else's deck to try to force myself to learn something new. But that doesn't work, because it is just memorizing random symbols, as they noted in the article ("The enemy is the static card"). For example in maths learning, memorizing arbitrary terms, symbols, etc is useless. However, once I am introduced to a concept for the first time, then I add it to my Anki deck so I can make sure I remember it. The key is the context, and writing terms / definitions etc that speak specifically to me. I still need to work out different variations of the concept to understand it, and that's not something that Anki can help with.

I haven't used Anki for language learning, but I imagine that if I did, it would be to add some new vocabulary I had just learned from a book, conversation, film, etc. I don't think it would help me learn a language from zero though- that would require practicing it.

In summary, Anki is great for reinforcing something you've just learned, but you can't reinforce your way into the context that is necessary to truly understand something.

Brave1 Market – Ukraine's New Online Marketplace for Drones, Kit and Equipment [video]

erikw — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 20:46:28 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vURzYBhnQ6Q

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44459037

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by erikw in "OpenAI o3 and o4-mini"

erikw — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 19:12:53 +0000

What language / framework are you using? I ask because in a Node / Typescript / React project I experience the opposite- Claude 3.7 usually solves my query on the first try, and seems to understand the project's context, ie the file structure, packages, coding guidelines, tests, etc, while Gemini 2.5 seems to install packages willy-nilly, duplicate existing tests, create duplicate components, etc.

New comment by erikw in "OpenAI o3 and o4-mini"

erikw — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 19:06:15 +0000

Interesting... I asked o3 for help writing a flake so I could install the latest Webstorm on NixOS (since the one in the package repo is several months old), and it looks like it actually spun up a NixOS VM, downloaded the Webstorm package, wrote the Flake, calculated the SHA hash that NixOS needs, and wrote a test suite. The test suite indicates that it even did GUI testing- not sure whether that is a hallucination or not though. Nevertheless, it one-shotted the installation instructions for me, and I don't see how it could have calculated the package hash without downloading, so I think this indicates some very interesting new capabilities. Highly impressive.