Hacker News: nbf_1995

New comment by nbf_1995 in "Zed 1.0"

nbf_1995 — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 18:40:14 +0000

> There's no View menu

Control + , > Window & Layout > Show Menus = true

This unhides the menu instead of hiding everything behind a burger. This should be the default. The defaults are awful in many ways and they've only gotten worse with the recent panel rearrangement.

New comment by nbf_1995 in "New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper"

nbf_1995 — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 01:56:12 +0000

I have never heard of ethernet cables getting hot to that degree except when PoE is involved.

New comment by nbf_1995 in "I stopped using NixOS and went back to Arch Linux"

nbf_1995 — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 02:01:24 +0000

The server is configured as a caching reverse proxy (just nginx with cache.nixos.org as upstream) which I think is similar to squid proxy.

Outside my LAN I do have the ability to tunnel home, but depending on the connection and the updates I just deal with the timeouts, or just wait until I get home.

I think technically you can override substituters using cli options but its not ideal. There are several proposals for configuring timeouts per substituter but none of them are merged yet.

New comment by nbf_1995 in "I stopped using NixOS and went back to Arch Linux"

nbf_1995 — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 21:00:21 +0000

I think this is a mostly fair criticism of nixos. Nixos has a lot of powerful tools, but if you don't need them, they can get in the way. Some assorted notes:

> unless you run nix-collect-garbage periodically

    nix.gc.automatic = true;
    nix.gc.options = "--delete-older-than 10d";

> the constant cycle of rebuild → fix → rebuild → fix → rebuild

I've found this useful to eliminate the rebuild loop: https://kokada.dev/blog/quick-bits-realise-nix-symlinks/ It lets you make the config of the program you choose a regular mutable file instead of a symlink so you can quickly iterate and test changes.

> In contrast, Arch Linux simply downloads prebuilt binaries via pacman or an AUR helper

If a binary exists. A lot of AUR packages I used to rely on didn't have a binary package (or the binary package was out of date) and would have to build from source. On nixos my machines are set up to use distributed builds (https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/Distributed_build). Packages that do need built from source get built on my server downstairs. The server also runs a reverse proxy cache so I only need to download packages once per version.

Distributed AUR builds are possible on arch, but they require a lot of setup and are still fragile like regular AUR builds, your only choice of dependencies are what's currently available in the repos.

> On my machine, regular maintenance updates without proper caching easily take 4–5+ hours

It sounds like the author may be running the unstable release channel and/or using some heavy unstable packages. Which might explain a lot of other problems the author is having too.

Back when I used arch, I found that as time went on, my system would sort of accumulate packages. I would install $package, then in the next version of $package a dependency would be added on $dep. When I updated, $dep would be installed, then eventually $package would drop the dependency on $dep, but $dep would remain installed. I would periodically have to run pacman -R $(pacman -Qtqd | tr '\n' ' ') to clear out packages that were no longer required.

New comment by nbf_1995 in "Level S4 solar radiation event"

nbf_1995 — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 01:09:53 +0000

Title says "S4" solar radiation event, but the linked page says "G4" geomagnetic storm

New comment by nbf_1995 in "I switched from VSCode to Zed"

nbf_1995 — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 15:31:49 +0000

Can you expand on how you use Zellij? I tried it and I understand you can use it for splits, and tabs similar to tmux. But I might revisit it if it allows an IDE like workflow with Helix.

New comment by nbf_1995 in "Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?"

nbf_1995 — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 18:46:24 +0000

> Maybe someone ports Vanadium to desktop linux

https://github.com/secureblue/Trivalent

New comment by nbf_1995 in "I made a quieter air purifier"

nbf_1995 — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 02:32:10 +0000

I think it's because there are no grills on the outside. If the fans were sucking air out of the box, dust would build up on the outside, and bumping it would dislodge dust back into the environment.

With the fans blowing in, all the dust is on the inside of the box (and on the fans).

The box fan version also blows air into the box

New comment by nbf_1995 in "State of Embedded: Q4 2025 Overview"

nbf_1995 — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 16:34:36 +0000

The solidrun LX2 offers 4x SFP+, but that board is getting quite old at this point.

There are a couple of bananapi router boards that have 1 maybe 2 SFP+

New comment by nbf_1995 in "Shai-Hulud malware attack: Tinycolor and over 40 NPM packages compromised"

nbf_1995 — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 20:02:07 +0000

Just curious, what did you switch to?

New comment by nbf_1995 in "The GitHub website is slow on Safari"

nbf_1995 — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 17:50:00 +0000

Firefox has a setting in about:config to only send referrer headers when navigating to links on the same base domain.

network.http.referer.XOriginPolicy = 1

New comment by nbf_1995 in "Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org"

nbf_1995 — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 14:24:35 +0000

Something to note: Certain service providers (e.g. Twitch) will not allow you to sign up using an '@mailbox.org' email address. I do not know if this ban extends to custom domain addresses.

New comment by nbf_1995 in "SQLx – Rust SQL Toolkit"

nbf_1995 — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 00:02:53 +0000

SQLx and F# type-providers are probably the best developer experience for writing database access code. I wish more languages had something equivalent.

New comment by nbf_1995 in "SQLx – Rust SQL Toolkit"

nbf_1995 — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 00:00:58 +0000

It's a rust library that you can use to run sql queries against a database. It also inspects the database at compile* time to figure out the type of each column in your query so that your code is type-safe.

* Or in your editor as you're writing code.

New comment by nbf_1995 in "What went wrong for Yahoo"

nbf_1995 — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 21:25:26 +0000

Yahoo Japan is a different company to Yahoo.

New comment by nbf_1995 in "lsr: ls with io_uring"

nbf_1995 — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 18:32:30 +0000

Technically, the first, third, and fifth occurrence of "it's" should be "its". The dog chased its tail.

I didn't notice when I read the article though. The original commenter is being pedantic.

New comment by nbf_1995 in "Trying Guix: A Nixer's impressions"

nbf_1995 — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 18:07:35 +0000

From the article:

> My goal was to take my Unchartevice laptop with its strange Zhaoxin x86_64-compatible CPU...

> Sure, this is a laptop with a CPU broadly equivalent to old Intel Atom CPUs...

Yes, guix pull is slow, but the author is using some old/exotic hardware. The last time I tried guix on a 5th gen dual core i5, the initial pull was not that slow. And as other commenters have pointed out. The first pull is the slowest by far.

New comment by nbf_1995 in "Underwater turbine spinning for 6 years off Scotland's coast is a breakthrough"

nbf_1995 — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 15:40:41 +0000

https://cs.stanford.edu/people/zjl/pdf/tide.pdf

New comment by nbf_1995 in "Show HN: ToplingDB - A Persistent Key-Value Store for External Storage"

nbf_1995 — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 18:06:23 +0000

Like RocksDB from which this appears to be forked, the primary usage is as a storage engine for other applications/databases. Compared to rocksdb, it seems like ToplingDB has added more facilities to better support distributed use-cases.

Some databases that utilize RocksDB for their storage engine: https://kvrocks.apache.org/ - Redis/ValKey compatible distributed database with disk persistence via RockDB. https://github.com/pingcap/tidb - MySQL compatible distributed database. Mentioned elsewhere in this thread. https://github.com/tikv/tikv - Distributed, transactional, key value store. Originally by the same company as TiDB.

In theory you could use it as an in-process KV store similar to how SQLite provides an in process sql database, but the api is far from ergonomic for that use case.

New comment by nbf_1995 in "YouTube's new anti-adblock measures"

nbf_1995 — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 17:52:05 +0000

> Are you just happy to throw your money away if it goes to a giant corporation?

45% (which is a lot) of the money goes to the giant corporation. The other 55% gets divided up among the people whose content you watched.

I mostly watch smaller creators, so I don't mind 55% of my membership fee ending up in their pockets so they can keep making videos for me to enjoy.

I don't watch ads, the people I watch get paid because I watched. And obviously I'm not happy about the cut google takes and I would rather a higher percentage of my money go to the creators.