Hacker News: lamby

New comment by lamby in "Debian bookworm live images now reproducible"

lamby — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 11:01:32 +0000

This is not quite right. At least in Debian, only files that are newer than some standardised date are to that standardised date. This "clamping" preserves any metadata in older files.

New comment by lamby in "Debian bookworm live images now reproducible"

lamby — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 10:58:19 +0000

Strangely enough, sometimes using the epoch can expose bugs in libraries (etc.) when running or building in a timezone west of Greenwich due to the negative time offset taking time "below" zero.

New comment by lamby in "Debian bookworm live images now reproducible"

lamby — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 10:56:23 +0000

Debian's approach is actually to use the date specified in the top entry in the debian/changelog file. That's more transparent and resilient than any mtime.

New comment by lamby in "Debian bookworm live images now reproducible"

lamby — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 10:51:55 +0000

One of the authors of strip nondeterminism is here. The primary reason it's written in Perl is that given that strip-nondeterminism is used when building 99.9% of all Debian packages, using any other language would have essentially made that language's runtime a dependency for all building Debian packages. (Perl is already required by the build process, whilst Python is not.)

New comment by lamby in "They don't make them like that any more: the Yamaha DX7 keyboard"

lamby — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 10:16:26 +0000

Now, how about drums; an instrument everybody loves?

New comment by lamby in "Anti-royal protesters are being arrested in the U.K. as 'Not My King' tag grows"

lamby — Wed, 14 Sep 2022 06:40:35 +0000

I think that's OP's point.

New comment by lamby in "Why does iron deficiency cause fatigue, even in the absence of anemia?"

lamby — Thu, 07 Jul 2022 17:08:07 +0000

Very true, but when there's literally 100s of years of women's legitimate medical complaints being dismissed (sometimes with fatal consequences), it is surely not too much of leap to speculate that this is part of the reason.

New comment by lamby in "Phone is still the best way to order pizza"

lamby — Mon, 31 Jan 2022 16:00:17 +0000

> “Would you like to order the same thing you did last time?”

The next iteration of this clearly for them to call you when you are likely to be hungry (and/or drunk) and ask you this. :)

New comment by lamby in "Console Do Not Track – Proposal for a standard environment variable"

lamby — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 09:12:54 +0000

"It looks like you are writing a letter^W^W^Wexperiencing a systemic problem. Would you like an individualised solution to that?"

New comment by lamby in "Bflat: C# as you know it but with Go-like tooling"

lamby — Mon, 28 Jun 2021 08:59:55 +0000

> 2. The note D♭ is the same as the note C♯.

Well, actually...

New comment by lamby in "Myths in cycling: wider tires are slower"

lamby — Wed, 16 Jun 2021 09:55:27 +0000

> "If that were the case, surely Tour de France riders would..."

Apologies for appearing to pick you out here, but your comment is representative of a number of eminently "logical" comments made here (as well as many analagous comments on HN in general). So, modern professional cycling is a sport with a 100+ year history, and in 2021 represents a bizarre fusion of the sports entertainment industry, the romantisation/revival of the past, celebrity culture, global cycling manufacturers, the mid-life crises of Wonka-esque team owners, the aestheticisation/fetishisation of the working class, the 'Olympics industry', lurking labour disputes, the fast fashion sector, the ad-hoc application of modern sports psychology, a looming confrontation with its historical emphasis on (mostly horrifically underpaid) white males, neoliberal economics, petty and bountiful financial corruption, widespread pharmaceutical corruption, and the influence of petrochemical money from several ex-Soviet states... All mostly filtered through the celluloid lens of France and Italy, two European nations that have an extremely complicated relationship towards their own history which comes out as a muted pageant of lukewarm national pseudopopulism that is not only is confused within its own borders, but is more-or-less unintelligible to those in the Anglosphere. To imply in any way that a kind of efficient market analysis can apply to decisions made within this sport (that has, if I remember correctly, strict rules about sock length), suggests an insufficient engagement with the background.

New comment by lamby in "Why I prefer making useless stuff"

lamby — Tue, 25 May 2021 08:16:44 +0000

Reminds me of the Daoist parable about the "useless" tree that never gets cut down.

New comment by lamby in "Ask HN: Favorite purchases of last two years?"

lamby — Fri, 21 May 2021 13:37:40 +0000

> The only non-pain recommendation that comes close is coffee

Placebo or not, I'm a total pain without my coffee.

When Hackers Were Heroes

lamby — Sat, 08 May 2021 11:52:16 +0000

Article URL: https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2021/4/251341-when-hackers-were-heroes

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27086303

Points: 87

# Comments: 5

New comment by lamby in "The brain ‘rotates’ memories to save them from new sensations"

lamby — Mon, 19 Apr 2021 07:59:37 +0000

It would make an interesting essay or monograph to descrbibe the various similes and metaphors that people have variously used to describe the working of the human mind. Descartes, I believe, thought the brain worked via a series of hydraulics, and the Victorians thought that it worked by some variant of electricity, both of these being "new" and possibly exciting technologies for their times. Notwithstanding the scientific versimillitude of these previous theories, it seems only fitting that computers occupy that role today.

Reproducible Builds: Increasing the Integrity of Software Supply Chains (2020)

lamby — Fri, 16 Apr 2021 07:44:35 +0000

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.06020

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26830800

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by lamby in "Wall Street Begins Trading Water Futures as a Commodity"

lamby — Sat, 12 Dec 2020 08:44:53 +0000

> That's the development. Adjust your outrage accordingly.

Maybe folks are outraged that water is being bought and sold to begin with, but this is the first time they are hearing about it?

New comment by lamby in "Facebook was used as a proxy by web scraping bots"

lamby — Fri, 06 Nov 2020 00:19:58 +0000

May I ask which country?

New comment by lamby in "Debian donation for Peertube development"

lamby — Fri, 23 Oct 2020 08:30:52 +0000

https://peertube.debian.social/

New comment by lamby in "Ask HN: How do people become experts?"

lamby — Mon, 14 Sep 2020 19:31:24 +0000

Hubert L. Dreyfus's "On Internet" contains, amongst many things, one of the most succinct overviews about how one goes from novice to expert. I highly recommend reading this short book, especially in this time of online learning:

https://cryptome.org/2013/01/aaron-swartz/On-the-Internet.pd... (PDF)

The later chapters on virtual worlds in the second edition have dated a bit, but before that, it's almost entirely gold, even though it was written so long ago.