Hacker News: mxxc

New comment by mxxc in "Show HN: An immutable ostree-based Arch Linux image"

mxxc — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 20:05:02 +0000

it's the same idea, done slightly differently because with fedora you can start from their own atomic images and change them a bit. the setup is much easier and probably more robust because it feels less like a hack. ironically, my intermediate step between silverblue with layered packages and vyy was similar: https://github.com/myyc/silverpurple/ – using bluebuild instead of containerfiles.

New comment by mxxc in "Show HN: An immutable ostree-based Arch Linux image"

mxxc — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 17:56:52 +0000

exactly. plus i mean, this particular build is quite boring because it's, like i said, silverblue. vanilla gnome and all that. but one can go quite wild and make vastly different builds. building locally takes very little since it's basically decompressing a bunch of packages, moving some files around and building an initramfs, so the infrastructure one actually needs is minimal (especially if said upgrades happen silently).

i must say that even though this tech has been around for a while it's still very much WIP. much of the ostree command line is undocumented, some commands are hidden and even though there is significant overlap between rpm-ostree, ostree and bootc, they do quite different things and some things are easy with one tool and outright impossible with the other. but personally i think this is the future of "mainstream" linux, and even though "immutable linux" has been often associated to locked platforms (e.g. android), it's been fun to showcase how you can do it yourself too, with whichever distro you like.

New comment by mxxc in "Show HN: An immutable ostree-based Arch Linux image"

mxxc — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 17:19:45 +0000

this one technically doesn't have an ostree server because it would require dedicated infrastructure, but if you decide to either try out images (they're in ghcr) or fork the project and build your own, you can schedule nightly builds (as it's being done now) and use bootc rather than ostree. the problem is that you'd always have to pull a 2GB image rather than incremental updates.

Show HN: An immutable ostree-based Arch Linux image

mxxc — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 13:47:16 +0000

i've been a big fan of fedora's atomic distros and i decided to make my own but arch based to get the best of both worlds, which is kind of funny now because it looks exactly like silverblue. is it worth it? not sure, but it's been a interesting experience – and it's usable as a daily driver if your specs match.

worth noting that because of the constraints of the setup you can develop something similar on your main machine without any realistic possibility of data loss since you never really touch the bootloader or the filesystem (partitioning and so on).

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46401832

Points: 12

# Comments: 7

New comment by mxxc in "I got hacked: My Hetzner server started mining Monero"

mxxc — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 08:24:50 +0000

regardless of firewalls and best practices and all, i'd just put all sorts of admin-related stuff behind tailscale (or similar), including ssh. hetzner allows you to have ssh closed in your public ip and still open a terminal via the console if ssh-on-tailscale fails. for the web stuff you should do a similar trick. blog and public websites on the public address, while admin stuff goes on tailscale. and if you do it nicely with letsencrypt you can even have nice hostnames pointing to your private stuff.

New comment by mxxc in "Users don't care about your tech stack"

mxxc — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 11:37:37 +0000

but but but what about "made in rust(tm)"

New comment by mxxc in "Premature Graying of Hair: Review with Updates"

mxxc — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 07:56:27 +0000

lol at scientific papers using the word "caucasian" like it's the 70s

New comment by mxxc in "A snappy "guess the flag" game with no trackers etc."

mxxc — Sun, 21 Apr 2024 21:39:41 +0000

that's my favourite feature :)

A snappy "guess the flag" game with no trackers etc.

mxxc — Sun, 21 Apr 2024 18:55:56 +0000

Article URL: https://flags.myyc.dev/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40108211

Points: 2

# Comments: 4

New comment by mxxc in "DRM-free e-books are a big deal (2019)"

mxxc — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 15:00:35 +0000

regardless, kindle books can be cracked. not the easiest thing ever, but it's doable. cracking ADE books is much, much easier. i crack all my ebooks because otherwise i can't read them in my ereader

New comment by mxxc in "Most companies do not need Snowflake or Databricks"

mxxc — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 14:08:00 +0000

i am not sure why everyone (comments, this post, etc.) assume there is a one-size-fits-all solution to every problem, even this one that looks quite simple. companies have to align a few things, ranging from the skills of the current employees, hiring plans, investor/shareholder management, or how to make sure the CEO really gets that boat he really wants and deserves.

not all businesses are the same. businesses with fat contracts but few users won't have massive operating costs, and they can use whichever easy and non-scalable technology they want, because once the business scales up, those fat contracts will pay for enough data engineers. a gaming startup will face high server costs right away, without any optimisation, while data platforms (e.g. bigquery) with a tiny bit of optimisation (materialising 2-3 summary tables, for example) will bring the cost down to "laughable" pretty easily.

it is true that many of these things are choices, e.g. do you really want to spend a shit ton of money for looker when superset for most users is just as good? are you even able to make that choice? if these choices are hard to make because a potential user (or set of users) in the company really wants something instead of something else, well, that is not a technical choice, and the issue you have has nothing to do with the technology.

New comment by mxxc in "Google promised to delete sensitive data. It logged my abortion clinic visit"

mxxc — Tue, 09 May 2023 15:49:16 +0000

plenty of countries in the world where this is a non-issue :)

New comment by mxxc in "Iran discovers world’s second largest lithium reserve"

mxxc — Fri, 03 Mar 2023 14:38:14 +0000

not what i said at all. it's obvious that the cradle is a whitewashed organ of a dictatorship that pretends to be neutral.

New comment by mxxc in "Iran discovers world’s second largest lithium reserve"

mxxc — Fri, 03 Mar 2023 14:24:32 +0000

very few people bringing up that thecradle is a pro-mullahs, pro-russia and pro-hezbollah outlet disguised as a normal geopolitics website? :)

New comment by mxxc in "Alexander the ‘Accursed’ and Zoroastrianism"

mxxc — Fri, 17 Feb 2023 19:00:04 +0000

i enjoyed the shitstorm i unintentionally created but i don't think most people (even religious ones) make the connection with dhu-l-qarnayn. it's probably, like someone else said, something that has to do with softer or harder persian nationalism. after all, even religious iranians are still iranians.

New comment by mxxc in "Alexander the ‘Accursed’ and Zoroastrianism"

mxxc — Wed, 15 Feb 2023 15:03:58 +0000

not sure to which degree current islamic republic brainwashing has messed up with this but many "modern not too or not at all religious iranians" call alexander the great just "alexander" and don't have a good view of him.

New comment by mxxc in "šljiva, Serbia's popular brandy, could be the next mezcal"

mxxc — Wed, 15 Feb 2023 10:20:46 +0000

trigger warning: serbia is referred to as "southern europe"

New comment by mxxc in "Stackit: Cloud and Colocation"

mxxc — Wed, 30 Mar 2022 13:27:09 +0000

the hype in terms of money they can pour here could potentially be a factor, as opposed to "feature completeness" right now.

New comment by mxxc in "Stackit: Cloud and Colocation"

mxxc — Wed, 30 Mar 2022 13:23:59 +0000

i mean right now one can't even sign up properly. but obviously since they want to compete on a platform level as opposed to whatever you were doing for them, surely "not being able to create an account" isn't gonna draw users away from gcp/aws.

New comment by mxxc in "Who Are the Greeks? (2019)"

mxxc — Thu, 16 Dec 2021 08:21:10 +0000

it is a bit baffling that 99% of the articles talking about greece go on and on about a period that after all lasted 300-400 years and until the macedonians it was sort of politically irrelevant. this compared to the thousand years of hellenised eastern roman empire where not the same philosophical works have been written, but "byzantine domination", really?

those were greeks and the main inspiration for both the great idea (it was about restoring byzantine prestige, certainly not "athenian"), and the state structure afterwards, with kings called constantine and the church as a relevant part of the state.

"modern greeks don't seem to have much to do with the old ones". that's right. I wonder what happened in those 2000 years we keep wanting to ignore.