Hacker News: lgeorget

New comment by lgeorget in "Ask HN: Why Databases Instead of Filesystem?"

lgeorget — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 20:01:51 +0000

That's orthogonal to the discussion, I think, you can also mount and access remote filesystems from any program as if it was a local filesystem.

New comment by lgeorget in "Ask HN: Why Databases Instead of Filesystem?"

lgeorget — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 13:56:14 +0000

More of a sidenote than an answer but a database system can be faster than using the disk directly: https://sqlite.org/fasterthanfs.html#approx.

It turns out having a defined abstraction like a database makes things faster than having to rely on a rawer interface like filesystems because you can then reduce the number of system calls and context switches necessary. If you wanted to optimize that in your own code rather than relying on a database, you'd end up reinventing a database system of sorts, when (probably) better solutions already exist.

Mauna Loa Solar Observatory Reopens to Support Artemis II Mission

lgeorget — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 13:47:28 +0000

Article URL: https://www.meteorologicaltechnologyinternational.com/news/space-weather/mauna-loa-solar-observatory-reopens-to-support-artemis-ii-mission.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47718115

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by lgeorget in "Am I German or Autistic?"

lgeorget — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 14:31:27 +0000

Yeah that's also how I work: be strict to yourself, indulgent to other, I feel this is the best strategy to get along. Obviously, the downside is the tragedy of the commons: the few bad people abusing the leniency of the rest and getting away with it, like people showing up late because "they hate waiting".

New comment by lgeorget in "Am I German or Autistic?"

lgeorget — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 14:26:36 +0000

I'm also neither. But I'm also very good at lying to myself, so who knows? (not me)

New comment by lgeorget in "What does " 2>&1 " mean?"

lgeorget — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 12:36:13 +0000

It reminds me of this answer I made some years ago: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/138046

The question was how to remember it's "2>&1" and not "2&>1". If you think of "&1" as the address/destination of, the syntax is quite natural.

New comment by lgeorget in "Topological Naming Problem"

lgeorget — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 16:47:01 +0000

I learned about it the hard way, ahah. Now I create intermediary planes for all distances and I extrude planes always with respect to those.

New comment by lgeorget in "A macOS app that blurs your screen when you slouch"

lgeorget — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 16:03:21 +0000

I have my best ideas and illuminations for the day when I brush my teeth in the morning. Somehow, that's when I can think best.

New comment by lgeorget in "LED lighting undermines visual performance unless supplemented by wider spectra"

lgeorget — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 10:38:52 +0000

How does enclosing the lamp in reflective material help with the energy efficiency? Isn't the infrared radiation emitted anyway? Doesn't that make the lamp overheat?

New comment by lgeorget in "Rouille – Rust Programming, in French"

lgeorget — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 09:48:25 +0000

Yes it's so strange, like bad and unreadable pseudocode.

I could see myself coding in Latin though: https://github.com/pianoman911/ferrugo. Something about the prepositions tickles my brain the right way.

New comment by lgeorget in "Tesla said it didn't have key data in a fatal crash, then a hacker found it"

lgeorget — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 13:07:29 +0000

I guess one charitable way to look at it is that after a crash, external people could get access to the car and its memory, which could potentially expose private data about the owner/driver. And besides private data, if data about the car condition was leaked to the public, it could be made to say anything depending on who presents it and how, so it's safer for the investigation if only appointed experts in the field have access to it.

This is not unlike what happens for flight data recorders after a crash. The raw data is not made public right away, if ever.

New comment by lgeorget in "Lucky 13: a look at Debian trixie"

lgeorget — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 10:33:07 +0000

I know that's not your point and I'm not saying this to cherry-pick your argument but in case that's particularly relevant to you, Debian Trixie ships with Kicad 9 : https://packages.debian.org/trixie/kicad. If you're stuck with an earlier version, maybe you have a dependency blocking your updates.

New comment by lgeorget in "Debian 13 arrives with major updates for Linux users – what's new in 'Trixie'"

lgeorget — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 07:09:38 +0000

Well... it just works, so it's fine. I remember a time when I was a student where I would change distribution every six months: Fedora, Debian, Archlinux, Gentoo, FreeBSD, etc. but I finally landed on Debian and stayed there as I grew older.

In the stable distribution, packages tend to be a little dated obviously, but at least it is _stable_. And you can go with the _testing_ distribution for more up-to-date packages.

Also, as a sysadmin, I like having it on my computer to develop and test scripts without having to SSH in a dedicated environment (I still have to eventually but only for the final tests).

New comment by lgeorget in "Major reversal in ocean circulation detected in the Southern Ocean"

lgeorget — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 06:20:56 +0000

The Tuvalu Islands are disappearing under water to the point that the population has to plan their emigration, that's one catastrophe.

New comment by lgeorget in "Life Expectancy in Europe Compared to the US"

lgeorget — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 10:25:04 +0000

Between USA and western Europe? Is there a difference?

New comment by lgeorget in "A new pyramid-like shape always lands the same side up"

lgeorget — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 22:17:06 +0000

The main difference, and it matters a lot, is that all the surfaces are flat.

New comment by lgeorget in "Can your terminal do emojis? How big?"

lgeorget — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 07:44:05 +0000

I like them when they're used as bullet points in lists for instance. Just like we've always used small icons of phones and envelopes in contact information boxes/business cards to identify the fields at a glance.

New comment by lgeorget in "From: Steve Jobs. "Great idea, thank you.""

lgeorget — Thu, 08 May 2025 21:33:04 +0000

It's usually configured correctly at some point in time and then the configuration "rots": it becomes inconsistent, some emails are forwarded, other are lost, nobody cares, etc.

In my case, I configured Postfix to redirect all mails looking like (root|admin|postmaster)@server to myemailaddress+(root|admin|postmaster)_server@domain and Postfix ignores what comes after the + in the user part. So I get all the emails but I still know where they come from. It has worked well for quite some years now but I'm not deluding myself, I know that at some time, that will rot too.

New comment by lgeorget in "Albert Einstein's theory of relativity in words of four letters or less (1999)"

lgeorget — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 13:44:38 +0000

Several variants of simplified English have been designed for the purpose of being understood by learners or people with only basic command of English as a foreign language. Wikipedia has a version in Simple English for instance: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_English_Wikipedia.

New comment by lgeorget in "Albert Einstein's theory of relativity in words of four letters or less (1999)"

lgeorget — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 13:40:29 +0000

Nice one but "'cos" does not go by the rule, I feel. You can use "for" at the same spot but, well, it has a tone you did not go for in your text.