Hacker News: leptons

New comment by leptons in "Math Is Still Catching Up to the Mysterious Genius of Srinivasa Ramanujan (2024)"

leptons — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 07:11:26 +0000

He lived in India. In the early 1900s. The average lifespan in India in 1920 when he died was 21 to 25 years old. He was 32 when he died, so better than the average. The math checks out.

New comment by leptons in "Can Claude Fly a Plane?"

leptons — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 06:58:11 +0000

Does Claude know the plane isn't at the car wash?

New comment by leptons in "Someone bought 30 WordPress plugins and planted a backdoor in all of them"

leptons — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 19:32:35 +0000

Node has an extensive "standard library" that does many things, it's known as the "core modules".

Maybe you're referring to Javascript? Javascript lacks many "standard library" things that Nodejs provides.

New comment by leptons in "Someone Bought 30 WordPress Plugins and Planted a Backdoor in All of Them"

leptons — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 19:29:16 +0000

When I'm looking for a new NPM module to do some heavy lifting, I always look for modules with zero dependencies first. If I can't find one then I look for modules with the fewest dependencies second. No preinstall or postinstall scripts in package.json, not ever. It isn't perfect, but at least we try. We also don't update modules that frequently. If it isn't broken, don't fix it. That has saved us from some recent problems with module attacks.

New comment by leptons in "I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack"

leptons — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 01:54:56 +0000

For most things I personally use AWS Lambda and S3, with some SimpleDB. If I needed something more in the DB department, I'd probably use DynamoDB, but S3 actually works well for most of the data I need to store. I pay about $0.50/mo and most of that is S3 cost for media files. I don't have a lot of users, but even if I did I'd still be paying way less than $20/mo. And when I do have a lot of users, I don't have to worry about scaling anything (and that will happen soon). I think the first million Lambda invocations are free, and if/when I start paying for Lambda invocations, the AWS costs will definitely be covered easily by user subscriptions.

I also use pretty much the same stack at work, where we currently have about 150,000 users. The cost is about $15/day, mostly in S3 costs, we have a lot more data at my day job. We also do use a few hundred EC2 instances in short bursts, and the VPC has stupid high costs, and other costs add up, but it's probably about 1% of what the rest of the teams cost that run on EC2 and Postgres and other AWS tech.

New comment by leptons in "I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack"

leptons — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 22:23:11 +0000

I'm not anticipating everything ahead of time, I'm choosing mature tech that does what I need and then some. There's no misstep there. The real problem I've seen with choosing software tech is "new, shiny".

New comment by leptons in "I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack"

leptons — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 19:35:03 +0000

A feature you don't think you need today, might be one you actually need tomorrow. It would be short-sighted to choose some tech based only on what you need today. If the extra features don't cost you anything, I can't see that as a "net negative".

New comment by leptons in "Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)"

leptons — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 18:02:05 +0000

I recently went (almost) all-in on Linux after many years on Windows. The final straw for me was that I paid for a "lifetime license" for Outlook, because I've been using Outlook for decades, and have every email I've ever sent or received in Outlook. Well, I upgraded the CPU on the server where I run the VM which hosts Outlook, and then Microsoft wanted me to purchase a full new copy of Outlook because of the CPU upgrade. That was it, I'm done.

I moved Linux Mint and Thunderbird for email, and it's honestly been great. I switched all of my Windows-based VMs to Linux Mint.

My main workstation/laptop is still on Windows due to some hardware issues, but I will work those out in time. Mainly I have a USB4 port that also outputs Displayport, which I connect to a Displayport splitter so I can run three 4k monitors. That's the only thing that I haven't solved on Linux, but I haven't put much time into it. And I don't really blame Linux for that, I more blame the laptop manufacturer for not fully supporting Linux.

New comment by leptons in "Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)"

leptons — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 17:27:26 +0000

I've never really understood how Apple can let people download MacOS for free, and then tell them where and how they can run it - only on Apple's hardware. If I download a copy of Windows or any software ever written, I can run it on any hardware that exists that can run it. But somehow Apple gets to dictate to people where and how they can run freely available software that anyone can download?

New comment by leptons in "Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)"

leptons — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 08:27:17 +0000

>I run macOS because Apple understands that QA testing is something of actual importance, and designing yet another package manager is not.

Apple demonstrated with their latest releases that they don't give a single fuck about QA. OSX 26 is very buggy. The corner resize debacle, the glass debacle, and problem after problem that has made it to the HN front page is enough to know they don't care about QA the way you think they do.

The list of problems are described are not typical, I've seen none of that running Linux. YMMV

Apple decided to focus on "Glass", an outdated UI style that was introduced in Windows Vista. They didn't have to, it wasn't wanted by anyone and it has caused significant embarrassment for apple and problems for users. Why couldn't they replace Finder with something actually useful? Why couldn't they fix the UI so "About this software" isn't the first thing on the first menu which is a waste of space. They made MacOS objectively worse.

New comment by leptons in "Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)"

leptons — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 08:15:27 +0000

Most "serious" companies do not support Linux in their IT infrastructure. I've begged to run Linux, but it's a hard no from IT. They only support Windows and MacOS, and that's all. So I choose a Windows desktop, because I am not a fan of Apple. Having been forced to use Macs in past jobs, I'll choose Windows every time. I liked being able to dual-boot Windows on a MBP in the past, but that is no longer an option.

New comment by leptons in "Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)"

leptons — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 08:11:07 +0000

Recently an article on HN front page was about a guy who had to file down his MBP because the front edge of it was too sharp and resting his wrists on it hurt his hands. At least two people in the comment section noted how the sweat on their hands over time caused the sharp edge of the MBP chassis to pit and it caused it to turn in to a sharp serrated edge that actually cut their hands.

You can say other laptops are "plastic and shitty" all you want, but Apple's offerings aren't necessarily the best thing out there either. I personally like variety, and you don't get that from Apple. I can choose from hundreds of form factors from a lot of vendors that all run Linux and Windows just fine, plastic or not.

New comment by leptons in "Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)"

leptons — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 07:38:40 +0000

I've run MacOS x86 VMs on Windows, it used to work great for a while. I haven't done that lately. I just don't care that much about supporting Apple users anymore, Apple makes it too expensive and difficult.

New comment by leptons in "Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)"

leptons — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 04:38:48 +0000

But aren't Mx based macs supposed to be the fastest computers you can get? Why wouldn't they be able to run more than 2 VMs?

I can run a ton of Windows VMs at the same time, wouldn't Windows be a comparable resource hog to MacOS?

Apple M2 CPUs can have up to 192GB of RAM. If we look at the Mac Neo that has only 8GB of RAM, then an M2 host should be able to run at least 20 VMs before memory gets scarce.

There's no good reason Apple limits to 2 VMs except for greed, which they are well known for.

New comment by leptons in "Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)"

leptons — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 04:32:29 +0000

>The "two VMs per unit hardware" has been in their license for at least a decade.

I'd be pretty surprised if there isn't a workaround or hack for this.

Microsoft has had limits on some things like RDP on some versions of Windows, but there have always been ways to get around it.

New comment by leptons in "Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)"

leptons — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 04:30:10 +0000

You are not Apple's target market, and never will be.

They don't care what you want to do with the hardware you own.

New comment by leptons in "Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)"

leptons — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 04:24:57 +0000

I tried to launch a MacOS instance on EC2 recently (on my work account), and was blocked.

So I asked the IT dept and they said it's stupidly expensive to run a MacOS instance on EC2, and that they would just send me a Macbook Pro instead.

I wish I were kidding.

New comment by leptons in "Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)"

leptons — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 04:21:31 +0000

Frustrating for you, hilarious for me. I had no idea they had hobbled MacOS in this way. It doesn't surprise me at all really, and it's pretty ridiculous.

I'm not sure why people keep giving Apple their money, especially tech-savvy people that would want to run VMs.

New comment by leptons in "Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident"

leptons — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 03:39:19 +0000

>90% of the jobs people have today didn't exist 50 years ago.

We also have 100% more people on the planet than we did 50 years ago.

New comment by leptons in "JSON formatter Chrome plugin now closed and injecting adware"

leptons — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 03:16:34 +0000

I frequently look at the DOM of webpages, so that I can bend them to my will.

There's always some things about practically all websites are frustrating. I fix that with custom CSS and/or Javascript that runs when I load specific sites that I use frequently. I can turn a cluttered site into a streamlined site for my needs. I also block a lot of ads, popups and other annoyances this way.