Hacker News: mrslave

New comment by mrslave in "NixOS is not reproducible"

mrslave — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 13:08:19 +0000

It's more like the whole upgrade is either successful, or it is not, and you are not left in an indeterminate state.

E.g. A depends on B. In a large update, B updates, something unrelated fails to install and the update fails, and now A doesn't run because it wasn't upgraded and the still installed old version of A depends on the no longer available previous version of B.

In NixOS, you either enter the new environment with all packages updated, or you don't. In the situation where you discover run-time - not install-time - errors, you can simply roll back to the previous set of packages. If the new packages cause a system crash, you can enter previous states from the bootloader.

Now none of this magically solves the software defects themselves. But it gives you a consistent system state that can be transactionally upgraded, or reentered at any time. And then you can raise the appropriate bug tickets.

Your system configuration is in a single file and the need to reconfigure different services in a particular order is gone.

Also your dependencies are all nicely pinned with Flakes. This makes importing arbitrary dependencies - open-source or proprietary - a breeze. This has removed any previous appetite we had for a monorepo, which was primarily to ease access to our other libraries.

It's all very nice, once you are over the not insubstantial learning curve that is.

Paper Straws Are Toxic

mrslave — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 07:03:38 +0000

Article URL: https://www.xatakaon.com/health/paper-straws-are-often-touted-as-a-great-alternative-to-plastic-but-theres-a-small-problem-theyre-toxic

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41188844

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by mrslave in "Pattern of brain damage is pervasive in Navy SEALs who died by suicide"

mrslave — Tue, 02 Jul 2024 03:05:04 +0000

PEDs.

See the Kyle Mullen death during the SEAL entry testing[0] and subsequent policy to test for PEDs[1].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32656856

[1] https://www.military.com/daily-news/2023/10/20/navy-seals-st...

New comment by mrslave in "The rarest move in chess [video]"

mrslave — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 02:09:29 +0000

Interesting, but I initially expected this to be about the unusual opening employed to victory by Magnus Carlson against Kacper Piorun on May 7, 2024[1] (1. a4 e5 2. Ra3).

It's even more interesting because an unknown IRL Chess.com player named Viih_Sou (since revealed to be Brandon Jacobson[2][3]) used this opening to defeat Daniel Naroditsky on May 2, 2024[4] only to be subsequently banned for violating the Fair Play Policy[5].

[1] https://www.chess.com/analysis/game/live/108840009759?tab=re... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/1claxsm/its_me_viih_... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Jacobson [4] https://www.chess.com/analysis/game/live/108394316331?tab=re... [5] https://www.chess.com/blog/Utkarsho/a-grandmaster-account-ge...

New comment by mrslave in "AI in software engineering at Google: Progress and the path ahead"

mrslave — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 07:58:24 +0000

Just to be charitable to GP and not to enter the debate, many of my colleagues have replaced Google with ChatGPT as their first port of call.

New comment by mrslave in "On the trail of my identity thief"

mrslave — Mon, 20 May 2024 04:43:13 +0000

Article on original site that incidentally includes a lot less JavaScript

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/05/15/magazine/on-the-trail...

New comment by mrslave in "Why time seems to go by more quickly as we get older (2016)"

mrslave — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 23:46:12 +0000

re: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39522249

Why time seems to go by more quickly as we get older (2016)

mrslave — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 23:46:12 +0000

Article URL: https://theconversation.com/why-time-seems-to-go-by-more-quickly-as-we-get-older-63354

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39531845

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

New comment by mrslave in "Housing wealth is meaningless, destructive and fundamentally changing society"

mrslave — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 01:22:14 +0000

It's the slave morality for an inflation-based economy.

New comment by mrslave in "Expo – Open-source platform for making universal apps for Android, iOS, and web"

mrslave — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 08:54:06 +0000

Slightly off-topic: how practical is it really to build devices (iOS and Android) and web from the same code base?

My poor understanding is that React Native, and hence Expo, doesn't use the same CSS frameworks as web development. I'm curious how that works from the same code base, or perhaps that's one of the major difficulties.

Also I see Expo as a fancy build framework but it's still fundamentally a RN application. Is this correct?

(My front-end colleagues are on another continent and we don't get any water-cooler time. Sorry for the possibly awful questions.)

New comment by mrslave in "How can we compare expressive power between two Turing-complete languages?"

mrslave — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 06:50:59 +0000

https://www.bootstrapworld.org/ for the curious

New comment by mrslave in "An AI Girlfriend made $72K in 1 week"

mrslave — Sat, 13 May 2023 14:17:10 +0000

I'm curious whether the developers were pitched this by management as some lofty social goal like democratizing digital relationships or perhaps disrupting OnlyFans DMs?

New comment by mrslave in "After 30 years, a father is exonerated in 'Satanic panic' case"

mrslave — Wed, 12 Apr 2023 06:21:28 +0000

Link please?

New comment by mrslave in "I have never been treated this bad in an interview process in 20 years"

mrslave — Fri, 31 Mar 2023 01:14:35 +0000

We'll find out why when the new CTO is publicly announced. I suspect they simply found someone else. Doesn't help that the CEO is quick to make promises verbally, but I'm sure this is common.

New comment by mrslave in "Gitlab loses one-third of its value after company issues weak forecast"

mrslave — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 02:35:12 +0000

What's your preferred CI/CD system to pair with Gitea? I tried Drone once and found the configuration to be nasty, specifically OAuth2 under Docker Compose. Also the Drone UI left a lot to be desired. This was a while ago so grain of salt etc.

New comment by mrslave in "Our production servers were suspended by Google Cloud"

mrslave — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 14:05:43 +0000

Why does everyone want a copy of our identity documents? It's creepy and unsafe.

New comment by mrslave in "Show HN: Mathesar – open-source collaborative UI for Postgres databases"

mrslave — Fri, 03 Mar 2023 06:27:23 +0000

I won't repeat supportive comments except to say well done.

Feature request: historical tracking. E.g. on update, expire the old record with who & when.

New comment by mrslave in "Is_email()"

mrslave — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 22:58:19 +0000

O PHP! The language where it's difficult to discern between genius and madness.

New comment by mrslave in "Bullshit Has Dominated the Tech Industry"

mrslave — Sun, 19 Feb 2023 02:44:37 +0000

I don't get Raspberry Pi. The $35 computer that's often out of stock, doesn't include a USB adapter or case, and is rarely found below $70. And the unfortunately complex boot process involving binary blobs. It's not as cheap & open as originally implied.

New comment by mrslave in "Gentoo Linux 2022 Retrospective"

mrslave — Sat, 11 Feb 2023 12:07:53 +0000

Recovering Gentoo user here. I have lost so many hours to the time sink that is incomplete system package updates on Gentoo. Moved to Nix and never looked back.

On Nix either the install - and occasional build - succeeds and I enter the new environment, or it fails and I don't. In the worst case scenario where the build succeeds but something is funky I can just roll it back.

Now I have all this free time to lose to the time sink that is learning how to package applications in the Nix language.