Hacker News: meekins

New comment by meekins in "Azure's Weakest Link – Five Full Cross-Tenant Compromises"

meekins — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 13:33:05 +0000

When it comes to the amount of cross-tenant leaks Azure looks to be way ahead the competition. Makes me wonder why enterprises still flock there.

New comment by meekins in "Dutch governments builds alternative for Microsoft based on NixOS"

meekins — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 14:59:29 +0000

Although if you want to play the same game you played 20 years ago today, running it on Wine is your best bet to get it running.

New comment by meekins in "Switzerland's Federal Government Is Replacing Microsoft on 3k Computers"

meekins — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 08:15:40 +0000

The rendering won't be 1:1 but installing the most common MS fonts already does a lot

New comment by meekins in "Z80 – The 1970s Microprocessor Still Alive (2021)"

meekins — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 10:59:07 +0000

Due to its simplicity it's a fun little processor to program. Hacking on some assembly on a ZX spectrum emulator is a nice way to stay sane in this high abstraction LLM age.

New comment by meekins in "Axios Compromised on NPM – Malicious Versions Drop Remote Access Trojan"

meekins — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 04:03:59 +0000

It also supports proxies which is important to some corporate back-end scenarios

New comment by meekins in "Neovim 0.12.0"

meekins — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 19:00:48 +0000

Really excited about this! At least in Sublime Text I've found multiple cursors a really powerful tool for ad-hoc transformations on snippets of semi-structured text or instantly and visually applying the same edit on multiple similar lines.

New comment by meekins in "Wired headphone sales are exploding"

meekins — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 07:36:41 +0000

Please recommend a troubadour who knows the Neat Records, Guardian Records n' Tapes and Heavy Metal Records singles catalogues and I'm sold :)

New comment by meekins in "The Performance Revolution in JavaScript Tooling"

meekins — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 11:27:44 +0000

The comment was especially about TypeScript. Unlike the ancient JavaScript versions best used for web sugar you're possibly thinking of, it's a highly pragmatic and well designed general purpose programming language with an unique and very powerful type system.

New comment by meekins in "FFmpeg to Google: Fund us or stop sending bugs"

meekins — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 06:24:56 +0000

This is what I've done in those rare cases I've had to fix a bug in a tool or a library I've used professionally. I've also made sure to do that using online identities with no connection to my employer so that any small positive publicity for the contribution lands on my own CV instead of the bureaucratic company getting the bragging rights.

New comment by meekins in "Leaving serverless led to performance improvement and a simplified architecture"

meekins — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 10:28:36 +0000

Developer-specific sandbox environments with hot code reload is the golden standard here but Localstack is great if you can't do that due to (usually IT deparment-related, not technical) reasons.

New comment by meekins in "Leaving serverless led to performance improvement and a simplified architecture"

meekins — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 10:21:15 +0000

As someone with years of experience on serverless stuff on AWS I might be a bit biased BUT I'd argue serverless is the sweet spot for most applications. You need to remember however that most applications aren't your typical startups or other software products but simply some rather boring line of business software nobody outside the company owning it knows of.

Concerning how IT departments in most non-software companies are, the minimal operational burden is a massive advantage and the productivity is great once you have a team with enough cloud expertise. Think bespoke e-commerce backends, product information management systems or data platforms with teams of a handful of developers taking responsibility for the whole application lifecycle.

The cloud expertise part is a hard requirement though but luckily on AWS the curriculum is somewhat standardized through developer and solutions architect certifications. That helps if you need to do handovers to maintenance or similar.

That said, even as a serverless fan, I immediately thought of containers when the performance requirements came up in the article. Same with the earlier trending "serverless sucks" about video processing on AWS. Most of the time serverless is great but it's definitely not a silver bullet.

New comment by meekins in "KDE celebrates the 29th birthday and kicks off the yearly fundraiser"

meekins — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 16:52:22 +0000

The 4.x series was the one where the ideas still making Plasma so powerful were seeded. While I loved KDE 3 the design for 4 seemed revolutionary. Too bad it was alpha/beta quality up until the 4.6 release years later. I fared through all the bugs, crashes and performance issues with a young student's determination (while running Fluxbox on the side) but I can very well understand people doing serious work had limited patience for the issues.

Anyhow, happy anniversary from a long-time KDE user!

New comment by meekins in "It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds"

meekins — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 16:26:12 +0000

Smartphones?

New comment by meekins in "SST: Container Support"

meekins — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 14:21:54 +0000

In a sense the simplicity of SLS is a trap: immediately when you need to move past the synchronous lambda invocations via API GW use case (caching, service integrations, step function workflows etc) you need to either fall back to plain CloudFormation or rely on third party plug-ins with possible problems with maintenance, quality and feature-completeness. This makes it a difficult choice to recommend beyond simple use cases.

New comment by meekins in "Forget CDK and AWS's insane costs. Pulumi and DigitalOcean to the rescue"

meekins — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 06:49:46 +0000

In an AWS scenario I can think of:

Pro vs pulumi: you get a declarative template to debug and review

Pro vs CDK: The declarative template is applied via APIs instead of CloudFormation. The CDK CloudFormation abstraction leaks like hell

New comment by meekins in "Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO"

meekins — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 13:06:30 +0000

Same story with Azure. All the good services are acquisitions, rest is low quality feature catch-up with AWS augmented by a terrible IAM system.

New comment by meekins in "PowerToys Run: extensible quick launcher for power users"

meekins — Mon, 08 Jul 2024 06:57:45 +0000

KRunner [1] on Plasma is pretty awesome. Plenty of plugins available [2] and it's also very useful out of the box on most distributions.

[1] https://userbase.kde.org/Plasma/Krunner

[2] https://store.kde.org/browse?cat=628

New comment by meekins in "Trinity keeps KDE 3 on life support"

meekins — Fri, 31 May 2024 09:38:42 +0000

I loved the folder view! It really highlighted the shift to a modular design in Plasma and solved the problem of desktop eventually ending up as a garbage dump of stuff that at some point was relevant but now impossible to find by providing configurable views to files that exist elsewhere and can be adjusted to fit current needs.

The 4.0 release was otherwise painful though as it was a slow, constantly crashing mess of bugs. At around 4.3 it became stable enough to serve as the primary desktop but IIRC that took years and I saw a lot of friends adopting Gnome or XFCE.

New comment by meekins in "Descent 3 Source Code"

meekins — Tue, 16 Apr 2024 06:04:09 +0000

Overload is awesome! However I wonder if some remnants of 90s game design like tight time limits and repeating enemy ambushes that make the game such a familiar and intense experience for the old school in reality disadvantage the game and the genre from reaching wider audiences.

There was also another classic Descent contender, Forsaken, that got remastared in 2018 to run on Linux and macOS in addition to modern Windows platforms. The original game was actually used as a graphics benchmark for early 3d accelerators due to its lighting effects.

That said, looking forward to playing Descent 3 on a modern platform!

New comment by meekins in "Support for Windows 10 will end in October 2025"

meekins — Sat, 06 Apr 2024 09:11:21 +0000

The only Windows box I have is an AMD-based gaming rig and last time I checked the hardware isn't Windows 11 compatible. Time to check out how the gaming experience on Linux is these days.