Hacker News: infinet

New comment by infinet in "Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD"

infinet — Fri, 22 May 2026 02:46:54 +0000

Content wise the RedHat docs are great, but navigating the doc has a wired feeling that is hard to describe. Everything is black and white, the page has low information density perhaps because of the line space or paragraph space; the typesetting of command line and configure examples is not clear separated from surrounding text; mouse cannot select text of the command line examples; the page top is distracting because it keeps showing and disappearing as mouse scrolls up and down. Somehow the left navigation pane is also difficult to follow, easy to get lost when trying to find a section.

New comment by infinet in "Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD"

infinet — Fri, 22 May 2026 02:41:03 +0000

I hope FreeBSD has longer supporting cycle. Its release has a supporting life of less than one year, if missing the upgrade window, then later upgrade is more difficult than others such as debian stable.

New comment by infinet in "OpenBSD 7.9"

infinet — Tue, 19 May 2026 20:47:31 +0000

I just switched to single thread and didn't try to fix the issue. Single thread is fast enough to me, it has throughput ~ 730 Mbits/s in a OpenBSD 7.8 vm on a 7th gen i7 linux kvm host.

https://github.com/infinet/rs-wgobfs/commit/c5e62796

New comment by infinet in "Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore"

infinet — Tue, 19 May 2026 18:15:38 +0000

There is a saying that many countries have offshored building hardware, aka manufacturing. Now they are offshoring software building to AI. Perhaps the silicon valley will grow a rust belt.

New comment by infinet in "OpenBSD 7.9"

infinet — Tue, 19 May 2026 17:27:28 +0000

I tried OpenBSD recently and found it behaves very differently from other OS. The same code works on Linux/FreeBSD/Windows but has poor multi thread performance on OpenBSD, async socket stopped working after sending at high speed for few seconds. I am not saying there is anything wrong in OpenBSD, it is just different.

New comment by infinet in "CERT is releasing six CVEs for serious security vulnerabilities in dnsmasq"

infinet — Wed, 13 May 2026 15:04:08 +0000

There are few dnsmasq (only?) features that are indispensable to some. Examples: sending query of *.example.com to certain upstream servers, or returning NXDOMAIN for phishing sites, or adding all resolved IPs for *.example.org to an ipset for policy routing. The last one works on FreeBSD as well although BSD does not have ipset. The list of *.example_xyz.com can be huge and it is said recent dnsmasq can handle them efficiently.

New comment by infinet in "Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes"

infinet — Tue, 12 May 2026 12:28:32 +0000

It is very difficult for people with impaired vision to find the scrollbars, buttons et.al. on windows 11. The scrollbars are too narrow and often auto hidden. The buttons are flat and not easy to separate from normal text. Tell one window from another is also quite challenge.

New comment by infinet in "Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained"

infinet — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 18:39:19 +0000

Anyone put the standby on ZFS or other filesystems that can take snapshots for backup?

New comment by infinet in "DuckDB 1.5.2 – SQL database that runs on laptop, server, in the browser"

infinet — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 14:55:10 +0000

From my very limited experience with duckdb, being a column based database, simple query also need loads entire columns and that uses a lots of RAM if a table has millions of rows. Perhaps there is a way to make it more memory friendly but I don't know how.

New comment by infinet in "Setting Up a Cluster of Tiny PCs for Parallel Computing"

infinet — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 16:30:47 +0000

Very interesting!

For completeness, the job in the article is not strictly parallel, instead, they are separable tasks, which fall under high-throughput computing. HTCondor is a popular choice and is widely used in physics. If the cluster has a shared filesystem such as NFS, it does not even need ssh to each node. Moreover, nodes can share the same R installation on NFS, remove the complexity of installing same set of R packages on all nodes. HTCondor is available on Ubuntu.

New comment by infinet in "Debian adds LoongArch as officially supported architecture"

infinet — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 17:27:18 +0000

Once I used an old MIPS debian in qemu to test big endian. I thought since LoongArch has its root in MIPS it may be big endian. It turns out "LoongArch bit designations are always little-endian".

New comment by infinet in "CraneSched: An open-source distributed scheduler for HPC and AI workloads"

infinet — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 13:28:32 +0000

Documentation https://pkuhpc.github.io/CraneSched/en/index.html

CraneSched: An open-source distributed scheduler for HPC and AI workloads

infinet — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 13:28:32 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/PKUHPC/CraneSched/blob/master/README_EN.md

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46288253

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by infinet in "Interview with Kent Overstreet (Bcachefs) [audio]"

infinet — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 01:31:23 +0000

One reason is to use the Linux page cache instead of dedicating RAM to ZFS, given how expensive memory is now. I am very happy with MGLRU and won't miss ZFS's ARC.

New comment by infinet in "An off-grid, flat-packable washing machine"

infinet — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 23:06:36 +0000

> to make this in an area with less infrastructure you might use a template and carbide gas torch to cut

Metal work seems very expensive in some places. In a 2025 paper [1], a cooking pot looks like several aluminium rings welded together, about 50 cm tall and 70 cm in diameter, is 416 USD in Ghana, which is one of the destinations of this hand-crank washing machine.

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266711312...

New comment by infinet in "An off-grid, flat-packable washing machine"

infinet — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 22:31:28 +0000

Sticking head into a barbecue oven for 10 minutes might get rid of lice, but expecting cooking smoke kill bugs is absurd. People use the three stone and hearth fire not because they want the smoke, but because they do not know better. Combustion is a complicated process, it generates CO2, H20, CO, H2, CH4. The higher the temperature, the more thorough the burning. It requires the right amount of air, enough to burn all the biomass, but not too much that carries heat away thus lowers the temperature. Higher temperature also transfer heat more efficiently to the cookware. Only a well designed stove can do that. These are not things that can be figured by meditating in front of an open fire.

Saving fuel is a matter of life and death in the ancient world. Winter is brutal to the poor largely because gathering fuel is difficult, especially in areas that have supported large population for centuries.

New comment by infinet in "An off-grid, flat-packable washing machine"

infinet — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 14:25:45 +0000

I am interested in unit cost for mass production. It needs to be significantly cheaper than an old style top-loading washing machine to be affordable. The design of old style washing machine is mature and priced at around $100 for 8kg model. I suspect it can be stripped down further, remove water pump, remove program controlled inlet valve et al. to reduce the cost to below $50. Granted, washing machine like that needs electricity, but solar panel may be cheap enough.

One more thing, the water is not always easy to get in poor places. It is often much easier to carry laundry to a well, creak, or river than transport water to home. The path to the water sources may be a narrow trail often going up and down hills, so even with wheels on the machine, it is impractical to drag the machine to the water.

New comment by infinet in "An Orbital House of Cards: Frequent Megaconstellation Close Conjunctions"

infinet — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 19:45:57 +0000

> the worst case is that we would have to ditch the space station (which is already planned in a few years)

There is more than one Space Station up there. "Tianhe space station module conducted preventive collision avoidance due to close approaches by the Starlink-1095 (2020-001BK) and Starlink-2305 (2021-024N) satellites on July 1 and Oct. 21 respectively." [1]. Wikipedia also has a long list of planned and proposed space stations.

1. https://www.n2yo.com/satellite-news/Chinas-space-station-man...

New comment by infinet in "Show HN: I got tired of switching AI tools, so I built an IDE with 11 of them"

infinet — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 18:26:52 +0000

My apologies for the digression. But it reminds me a post I saw long time ago when a guy installed all the antivirus/antimalware software he could find on a Windows machine. It started an antivirus civil war and the Windows fell into a coma within seconds.

New comment by infinet in "Frequently Asked Unicycling Questions"

infinet — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 16:04:50 +0000

I'd love to know more about Unicycling. Is it just my browser, or is anyone else seeing the huge black Q letter or magnifying glass icon that occupies 2/3 of the screen?