<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: laurowyn</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=laurowyn</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Fri, 10 Apr 2026 12:53:00 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=laurowyn" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by laurowyn in "Your File System Is Already A Graph Database"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>And when the system fails for whatever reason?<p>Just because AI exists doesn't mean we can neglect basic design principles.<p>If we throw everything out the window, why don't we just name every file as a hash of its content? Why bother with ASCII names at all?<p>Fundamentally, it's the human that needs to maintain the system and fix it when it breaks, and that becomes significantly easier if it's designed in a way a human would interact with it. Take the AI away, and you still have a perfectly reasonable data store that a human can continue using.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 08 Apr 2026 12:23:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47689208</link><dc:creator>laurowyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47689208</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47689208</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by laurowyn in "Your File System Is Already A Graph Database"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Why does AI need that folder structure? Why not a flat list of files and let the AI agent explore with BM25 / grep, etc.<p>It doesn't. The human creating the files needs it, to make it easier to traverse in future as the file count grows. At 52k files, that's a horrendous list to scroll through to find the thing you're looking for. Meanwhile, an AI can just `find . -type f -exec whatever {} \;` and be able to process it however it needs. Human doesn't need to change the way they work to appease the magic rock in the box under the desk.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 08 Apr 2026 12:13:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47689124</link><dc:creator>laurowyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47689124</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47689124</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by laurowyn in "Ubuntu LTS releases to 15 years with Legacy add-on"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Why not think of it a different way; why do we need to put up with breaking changes at all?<p>I'd much rather stand up a replacement system adjacent to the current one, and then switch over, than run the headache of debugging breaking changes every single release.<p>To me, this is the difference between an update and an upgrade. An update just fixes things that are broken. And upgrade adds/removes/changes features from how they were before.<p>I'm all for keeping things up to date. And software vendors should support that as much as possible. But forcing me to deal with a new set of challenges every few weeks is ridiculous.<p>This idea of rapid releases with continuous development is great when that's the fundamental point of the product. But stability is a feature too, and a far more important one in my opinion. I'd much rather a stable platform to build upon, than a rickety one that keeps changing shape every other week that I need to figure out what changed and how that impacts my system, because it means I can spend all of my time _using_ the platform rather than fixing it.<p>This is why bleeding edge releases exist. For people who want the latest and greatest, and are willing to deal with the instability issues and want to help find and squash bugs. For the rest of us, we just want to use the system, not help develop it. Give me a stable system, ship me bug fixes that don't fundamentally break how anything works, and let me focus on my specific task. If that costs money, so be it, but I don't want to have to take one day per week running updates to find something else is broken and have to debug and fix it. That's not what I'm here to do.<p>And as for cleaning the house - we always have the option of hiring a cleaner. That costs us money, but they keep the house cleanliness stable whilst we focus on something else to make enough money to cover the cleaner's cost plus some profit.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 23 Nov 2025 14:29:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46023826</link><dc:creator>laurowyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46023826</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46023826</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by laurowyn in "Google flags Immich sites as dangerous"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> They are no longer able to process the requested commercials with due diligence<p>no longer able? or no longer willing to, because it impacts their bottom line?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 23 Oct 2025 10:57:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45680427</link><dc:creator>laurowyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45680427</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45680427</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by laurowyn in "Undocumented backdoor found in Bluetooth chip used by a billion devices"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> But let's ignore that web API worst case. Imagine that you have some semi-trusted software and because you don't want to take any risks, you run in nested VMs three layers deep. The software has some plausible excuse to require access to the Bluetooth (perhaps it's a beacon demo?) so you grant an exception. You're not happy with the result (the beacon demo does not work as promised?), you remove the software and you also reset all three VM layers for good measure. Gone for good, nice. Unfortunately, the guest the malware installed on the ESP when it had access is still there...<p>You're hopping through 4 security boundaries and granting direct hardware access. If you don't understand the decisions you're making by doing that, all bets are off.<p>Better to give a virtualised bluetooth device and let the hypervisor drive the real one. Will hit performance a little, but it's far more secure.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 08 Mar 2025 22:39:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43304227</link><dc:creator>laurowyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43304227</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43304227</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by laurowyn in "Backdoor detected in ESP32 Espressif IoT chip"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's absolutely a good thing, and arguably not a security issue at all.<p>It needs access to the command interface of the chip, which means you need to either have physical access to the device or compromise whatever is physically connected to the device.<p>It's practically like calling a read/write filesystem a security issue. Yes, an attacker can write to disk and persist there, and they can overwrite files, etc. But there needs to be a flaw that allows access to that behaviour first, else it's just a part of the interface.<p>And in this instance, it's a part of the debug interface of the chip. And practically makes it a perfect candidate for future bluetooth security tools, similar to the Atheros chipsets used for WiFi sniffing. Now we can do bluetooth impersonation attacks for $2 instead of hundreds.<p>Betting there'll be some good bluetooth research in the near future, showing all sorts of devices are vulnerable to attacks using $2 hardware. That's the real security problem here.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 08 Mar 2025 22:34:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43304197</link><dc:creator>laurowyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43304197</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43304197</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by laurowyn in "To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language (2020)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I would say `narrator voice` in this context is distinctly different from internal dialogue. Obviously the internal voice can narrate to yourself, but that voice tends to be slightly different in my experience.<p>Narrator voice is a specific voice, cadence, pattern etc. that your internal voice takes on when reading a narrative, rather than the narration of your experience. For me, I have a different voice when reading/writing technical documentation compared to reading/writing fictional works, which both are different from my day to day internal dialogue.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 26 May 2024 15:09:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40482748</link><dc:creator>laurowyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40482748</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40482748</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by laurowyn in "To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language (2020)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I have a narrator voice when reading code. It's the same narrator voice as when reading technical reports and white papers. I do sometimes struggle to process code that doesn't read well, likely because the cadence of the narrator voice gets disturbed and doesn't flow well.<p>I've found that my descriptions and explanations of how things work generally follow the same cadence as this narrator voice, which tends to help me explain things succinctly and transfer knowledge quickly.<p>I do agree it's distinctly different from the narrator voice for fiction books. I would assume that's due to the presence/lack of emotive language between the two types of writing.<p>Perhaps this is a similar phenomenon to the inner monologue that some people have but others don't? Or the ability to imagine various levels of detail of objects without physically seeing them? The mind is a strange beast.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 26 May 2024 15:05:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40482708</link><dc:creator>laurowyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40482708</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40482708</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by laurowyn in "93% of paint splatters are valid Perl programs (2019)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>...you can mark all the books you've checked with a hole so you know you've checked them.<p>Work harder, not smarter. /s<p>Jokes aside, I still agree with GP, in that there are more practical skills that are left out of education that would be far more useful in day to day life. The Dewey Decimal System has been replaced with search engines.<p>I don't need to know how a search engine works in order to type in "how to use a drill press" and read the results. But that's because the knowledge and understanding of how computers work at a high level circumvents the need to do that - a search engine is a form, give it something to search and hit the submit button. Easy.<p>Being taught by someone to use machining tools helps build an understanding of how every day items are made using those tools, so you have a more fundamental understanding of the items could be combined together into other more interesting things, repair them, take them apart and service them.<p>It's almost the opposite problem of maths in schools. We're taught maths in various incresasingly complex ways, all the way up to calculus. Those methods teach us how to use maths to do clever things. But every day maths doesn't need that. We're taught compound interest, but we have to use that to figure out how to do our taxes by ourselves without any help. Wouldn't it be nice to have an overlap there, hit two birds with one stone and we all walk away with a stronger understanding of the world?<p>If we're not taught how to make things, we struggle to learn how things are made, which means less things get made. Learning how to make things early, and embedding the knowledge of how things are made, enables more things to be made in future.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 29 Apr 2024 19:19:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40202755</link><dc:creator>laurowyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40202755</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40202755</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by laurowyn in "As solar capacity grows, duck curves are getting deeper in California"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>But the only differing cost in that scenarios is the 2 extra conductors to the local transformer, and more likely just to the edge of the property. The 3-phase power is still present in the area, as ideally alternating houses are on alternating phases to balance the load over the phases. The difference in cost would be a one-time hit during installation, and the ongoing maintenance would be the same as 3 separate houses (1 house per phase). That maintenance could be rolled into the cost per watt, so the more you have available the more you can use and the more you could pay.<p>The installation cost should vary based on what the house wants access to, and the ongoing cost should be the same as every household. A standing charge for the cost of the infrastructure existing is ridiculous when that same infrastructure is what the power company relies on to deliver their chargeable commodity. It's effectively double dipping - how is it any different from ISPs charging for access and then charging for data on top?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 26 Jan 2024 18:37:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39146185</link><dc:creator>laurowyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39146185</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39146185</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by laurowyn in "Order/license chaos for VMware products after Broadcom takeover"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Certainly an interesting one.<p>IANAL, but I believe the terms of the purchased license would be to use the product with only the license key provided. Therefore using an alternative key would be a breach of the license terms, meaning you're using unlicensed software and subject to all relevant laws.<p>I can see an argument that the vendor is in breach of contract by failing to provide a valid key with the license, and therefore the contract is void and the vendor should refund.<p>And yet again, I can see an argument that the license has been paid for, and a different key is used in the interim to access the paid for software, therefore no loss has occurred to either party rendering the whole argument moot.<p>Would be interested to know if this has been tested in the court system.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 15 Jan 2024 13:03:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39000413</link><dc:creator>laurowyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39000413</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39000413</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by laurowyn in "On Keeping a Logbook (2010)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Commonplace books, reading reflection, daily log, zettelkasten are all alternative techniques that achieve much the same as a log book, with various pros and cons to each. Building a Second Brain is also an interesting technique, but is more focused on knowledge documentation rather than logging and benefits massively from being digitised.<p>I'm a believer that logbooks, journals, diaries, notes, or whatever else you want to call it, are a personal thing and so it's about finding your own way of achieving what you want to achieve with those things. I've not found a single technique that works for me as it's described. That may be an issue with the author, the article, the concept or (more likely) me. But I try to adopt the ideas that I found work well and drop those that didn't.<p>I keep a bullet journal, although it's kind of somewhere between a bullet journal, commonplace book and daily log. Similar to the article, I tend to take lists of tasks each day; not as a todo list, but as a list of things I want to achieve. As I achieve them, they get ticked off. As I progress them, I write notes about what I'm doing or have done towards them, perhaps splitting them down into smaller tasks, etc.<p>There's also some personal tracker things from bujo I use, but they are generally just metadata around each daily log. Things like mental health, meal tracking, etc. But the most important thing is separating daily logs from single and double page spreads, and labeling them in a contents page for easy navigation.<p>If I come across something of interest, I treat it like a commonplace book to capture that interesting thing; recipes, project ideas, reference materials, arbitrary thoughts, and more. Similar to zettelkasten's fleeting notes concept, anything I want to revisit later I write down.<p>In my opinion, the power of this technique comes from how to link these things together - just writing them down isn't all that useful to me. So maintaining an accurate contents page to be able to quickly jump to a project or tracker spread makes navigation easier, while also maintaining an index for collating specific ideas mentioned sporadically across the entire logbook means I can trace an idea through the logbook (or multiple logbooks). These both mean I can actually go back and look at something specific, or quickly scan for topics that may relate to a new idea and leverage the work I put in when originally writing it.<p>But, this is just what works for me and doesn't necessarily mean anybody else would benefit from it. And I think this is the key thing naturally omitted by many note taking tutorials, blogs, etc. They're trying to sell you on the solution to end all your problems, when there's no guarantees that the technique even works let alone will work for you.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 25 Oct 2023 14:33:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38013228</link><dc:creator>laurowyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38013228</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38013228</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by laurowyn in "VyOS From Scratch – Edition 1 (set up your own router)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>So the equivalent of:<p>iptables -N eth0toeth1; 
iptables -P eth0toeth1 DROP; 
iptables -A FORWARD -i eth0 -o eth1 -j eth0toeth1; 
iptables -A eth0toeth1 -m tcp -p 80 -j ACCEPT; 
# add any more rules<p>Or, as you say to avoid exponential combinations, just make a chain for each zone (interface) and explicitly allow specific protocols/ports to target interfaces. Zones with multiple interfaces are just multiple rules to jump to the same zone chain.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 28 Jul 2023 15:06:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36907862</link><dc:creator>laurowyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36907862</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36907862</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by laurowyn in "VyOS From Scratch – Edition 1 (set up your own router)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>except vbash drives those tools by generating configs.<p>But this is my point; why is VyOS a distro when vbash could just be a package available to other distros?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 28 Jul 2023 15:01:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36907779</link><dc:creator>laurowyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36907779</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36907779</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by laurowyn in "VyOS From Scratch – Edition 1 (set up your own router)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>define zone based?<p>If wanting internal and external subnets as "zones", iptables/nftables lets you match against incoming and outgoing interfaces. It would be trivial to make match against an incoming interface and jump to a zone specific chain. This is how I manage private subnets. fw-mark is also useful for setting routing rules. Can change which routing table is used by matching rules in iptables.<p>If wanting to do more stateful things, I'm not aware of any default package, but setting a rule to send packets to an NFQUEUE and implementing some custom logic on that nfqueue would be rather trivial too. I'm sure eBPFs are useable in there somewhere too, but I've very little experience with them.<p>Obviously iptables/nftables has its own issues, as seen in recent (and not so recent) posts about it being bypassable with raw sockets, but that tends to be host only and not when used as a gateway.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 28 Jul 2023 12:17:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36905764</link><dc:creator>laurowyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36905764</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36905764</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by laurowyn in "VyOS From Scratch – Edition 1 (set up your own router)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If you want a web GUI, then pfSense or OPNSense are the general go tos.<p>However, if you're comfortable with CLI and modifying configs in /etc/ then just running a bare metal Alpine Linux box is perfectly doable on a tiny box. iptables/nftables for firewall/NAT, dnsmasq/bind9 for dns, dnsmasq/isc-dhcp for DHCP. I've got a handful of these boxes all interlinked via wireguard, sharing routes via BGP using bird.<p>Sure, you miss the config verification that VyOS provides, but does mean you learn the underlying tools themselves and that knowledge is portable to any other box running those systems.<p>Personally, I don't quite understand why VyOS is a standalone distro when it could just be a config generator/checker package. Could even support multiple different underlying tools so if you want to use dnsmasq over bind9, or vice versa, it can provide a unified config interface for them.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 28 Jul 2023 10:22:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36904945</link><dc:creator>laurowyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36904945</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36904945</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by laurowyn in "Lithium battery ripe for disruption, inventor says"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Petition IEEE to change the title. Hacker news just parrots the original title. Them's the rules, always has been.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 16 Apr 2023 22:58:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35594977</link><dc:creator>laurowyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35594977</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35594977</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by laurowyn in "Curious C++ Lambda Examples: Recursion, constexpr, Containers C++23 included"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Modern Effective C++ by Scott Meyers is my go to for people in this situation. I'm not sure if there's an even more recent edition that covers C++17 and C++20, but C++11/14 is definitely a great head start over C++03 and earlier.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 14 Aug 2022 09:59:13 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32457965</link><dc:creator>laurowyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32457965</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32457965</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by laurowyn in "Minecraft mod that runs RISC-V Linux"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Somewhat agree, however I think it's because building redstone actually requires some materials science type knowledge. i.e. how different materials and physical structures affect the redstone signal.<p>Redstone blocks vs redstone torches, and their relative strengths/purposes. Torches on sides of normal blocks with signals entering the side of the block. Using normal blocks to prevent redstone signals from connecting (particularly when going up or down stepped inclines). Space requirements to allow a signal to drive a block and not just terminate the signal next to a block.<p>These are all game analogues of laying out P and N state semiconductors, or conducting signals from one area of a chip to another and maintaining their signal quality, when designing ICs. Granted, these processes are hugely automated by tooling, but someone has to know, learn and understand how the materials science works in order to develop those tools.<p>This is why I'm surprised I've not yet seen a VHDL/Verilog compiler for minecraft redstone. Converting a gate array and netlist into a minecraft world feels like a relatively simple challenge for anyone with the knowledge, but I guess it's too niche of a project? Or I'm just not looking hard enough for it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 11 Jan 2022 13:12:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29891071</link><dc:creator>laurowyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29891071</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29891071</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by laurowyn in "Dev corrupts NPM libs 'colors' and 'faker', breaking thousands of apps"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Pin all you want, if the repo/vendor/maintainer pulls the release then you're not getting access to your dependencies at all.<p>If anything, this is the reason you use pull-through proxies. Your proxy will hold the version you depend on, regardless of upstream drama. Keep your proxy backed up and you'll be able to use those dependencies until the end of time, or you finally decide to migrate to an alternative.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 09 Jan 2022 22:38:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29868066</link><dc:creator>laurowyn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29868066</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29868066</guid></item></channel></rss>