Hacker News: mboerwink

New comment by mboerwink in "Israel creates fake think tank in likely attempt to dupe AI chatbots"

mboerwink — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 03:28:19 +0000

The comparison to pre-atomic steel is poignant. I have found myself preferring pre-AI sources in some cases even (especially?) for computer related information. It is difficult to view pre-slop info as a limited resource without implying decline until the status quo changes again.

New comment by mboerwink in "Beyond All Reason (Free Total Annihilation Inspired RTS)"

mboerwink — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 14:41:39 +0000

I play Zero-K (a related open source game) a few times a month. I really enjoy their 'cold take' blog series discussing game mechanics and the history of TA derivatives. https://zero-k.info/mediawiki/Cold_Takes

New comment by mboerwink in "Upcoming Changes to Let's Encrypt Certificates"

mboerwink — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 21:52:42 +0000

PCI still recommends 90 day password changes. Luckily they've softened their stance to allow zero-trust to be used instead. They're not really equivalent controls, but clearly laid out as 'OR' in 8.3.9 regardless.

New comment by mboerwink in "AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1"

mboerwink — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 14:37:27 +0000

I think this could still be a very useful question for an interviewer. If I were hiring for a position working on a complex system, I would want to know what level of complexity a prospect was comfortable dealing with.

New comment by mboerwink in "Microsoft dumps AI into Notepad as 'Copilot all the things' mania takes hold"

mboerwink — Fri, 23 May 2025 17:48:30 +0000

I worry that this change increases the attack surface of what was a very safe application for viewing untrusted files. Of course, I worried about that at the release of 'new' notepad too...

New comment by mboerwink in "Amazon Elastic File System Update – Sub-Millisecond Read Latency"

mboerwink — Tue, 15 Feb 2022 15:49:10 +0000

I actually recently delivered a project which uses almost this exact technique. Python lambdas that operate on SQLite files have the benefit of being much simpler and cheaper than most other scalable database solutions (like Aurora) for very light loads.

That said, accessing SQLite databases is surprisingly disk IO heavy. I haven't gone too deeply into measuring the effect, but it seems the core issue is that traditional RDBS wire protocols are better than SQLite's disk accesses wrapped over NFS (or whatever connection the lambda/EFS join is). Stuff especially starts to break down when you need any sort of concurrent access. The small overhead for locking/unlocking files can quickly become awful when multiplied by the EFS latency, so you really do need extremely fine sharding.

New comment by mboerwink in "Why are we still tailing log files?"

mboerwink — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 16:20:55 +0000

I personally replaced tailing logs with lnav (lnav.org, also in Debian repos). Coloration, decompression, filtering, etc. with no learning curve made it an easy transition for me after hearing about it on HN. It isn't nearly so featured as a log aggregator like splunk, but it was a total tail replacement for me.

New comment by mboerwink in "Roguelikes: The Misnamed Genre (2011)"

mboerwink — Sat, 15 Jan 2022 19:49:43 +0000

I have always interpreted bones/ghosts as using previous runs as an additional source of level-generation data, rather than a progression mechanic. In the game, it is realistic that other adventurers would have attempted what you are attempting (and died trying). The game could fill in this assumption by randomly generating ghosts and loot, but real-world data is more interesting and nuanced. For example, one of my favorite components of the nethack bones system is seeing the cause of death of the ghosts I run into. Again, 'cause of death' could be reproduced with some random generation, but it wouldn't be as good.

Anyway, I only play nethack on public servers or using the nethack hearse tool, so I don't 'progress' by using my own bones files. Maybe if you play purely locally, you can view your own bones files as a form of progression.

New comment by mboerwink in "Why would dice be “retired” from a Casino floor?"

mboerwink — Wed, 12 Jan 2022 04:45:17 +0000

Some casinos sell some retired dice with holes drilled through them as souvenirs. They retain a good-enough balance for casual play.

Here is a link I found by searching 'dice holes drilled'. It goes into more detail about the 'why' of retirement than I know about.(https://www.goodgamblingsites.com/articles/why-do-casinos-dr...)

New comment by mboerwink in "In practice, Debian and Ubuntu have fixed minimum system UIDs and GIDs"

mboerwink — Sun, 09 Jan 2022 05:06:59 +0000

I start my manual picks at 3000 to avoid conflicts with users created by people like you. (I'm not only making a joke, I really do. My siblings are people like you, too.)

New comment by mboerwink in "Understanding UUIDs, ULIDs and string representations"

mboerwink — Wed, 05 Jan 2022 05:45:45 +0000

Snowflake ID[1] is another system related to those in the article. It uses 64 bits only, and has good sharding support, so can be more useful in some contexts. However, it naturally has worse independent random-collision chances than a 128 bit system. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowflake_ID

New comment by mboerwink in "Open 3D Foundation announces first major release of Open 3D Engine"

mboerwink — Fri, 03 Dec 2021 06:37:35 +0000

It seemed very strange. Many big partners, but social media accounts less than a year old. Turns out, it is the evolution/opensourcing of AWS Lumberyard. Wikipedia cites <https://venturebeat.com/2021/07/06/amazons-lumberyard-become...>

New comment by mboerwink in "[dead]"

mboerwink — Wed, 01 Dec 2021 03:17:54 +0000

Sorry if I'm missing context, but where is the write-up?

New comment by mboerwink in "Remove or replace usages of “sanity” (Wikimedia)"

mboerwink — Mon, 22 Nov 2021 08:10:37 +0000

I don't care for some of the chosen replacements - "sanity check" and "double check" are not equivalent phrases to me. The only linked justification I could find was inclusivenaming.org, whose Tier-2 list provided better alternatives like "confidence check" and "coherence check". Changing word choice risks losing subtleties in the original meaning, and I'm not sure it worked out this time.