Hacker News: nrdvana

New comment by nrdvana in "Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers"

nrdvana — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 01:44:14 +0000

Yeah but for $6/mo you can get a tiny linode or digital ocean droplet, and not worry about hardware failing. It's true that a laptop probably has more resources than the smallest VMs, but no remote management interface and can't scale if you suddenly had a surge of traffic.

New comment by nrdvana in "Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?"

nrdvana — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 22:48:26 +0000

Maybe at rendering menus and documents, but flash had graphic routines written in optimized assembly that simply weren't possible with JavaScript on that era of hardware.

I feel like people are talking past each other a bit here. FlashScript was never very fast, and rendering a document as a giant collection of bezier curves was not fast, but the people doing animations with it were getting the equivalent of modern day CSS3 animations + SVG, and it ran nicely on hardware two orders of magnitude slower than what we need for CSS3+SVG

New comment by nrdvana in "Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?"

nrdvana — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 22:20:25 +0000

I still hate touch and would still buy a keyboard phone if anyone was making a good one

New comment by nrdvana in "Default musl allocator considered harmful to performance"

nrdvana — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 12:11:47 +0000

Maybe the large number of standard library functions that operate on globals and require you to remember the "_r" variant of that function exists, or the mess with handling signals, or the fact that Win32 and Posix use significantly different primitives for synchronization? Or maybe just the fact that most libraries for C/++ won't have built-in threading support and you need to synchronize at each call site?

Unless I'm writing Java, I avoid multithreading whenever possible. I hear it's also nice in Go.

New comment by nrdvana in "A deep dive into Debian 13 /tmp: What's new, and what to do if you don't like it"

nrdvana — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 04:29:55 +0000

The third mitigating feature the article forgot to mention is that tmpfs can get paged out to the swap partition. If you drop a large file there and forget it, it will all end up in the swap partition if applications are demanding more memory.

New comment by nrdvana in "FCC bars providers for non-compliance with robocall protections"

nrdvana — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 04:00:54 +0000

But then, ICQ also died of spam...

New comment by nrdvana in "Stack Overflow is almost dead"

nrdvana — Fri, 16 May 2025 14:43:39 +0000

But then you can just ask it to write that missing library! Some day in the future you can probably ask it to author the whole package and publish it itself.

"Oh sorry, that package doesn't exist yet, but it ought to. One moment... Ok, try installing it now."

New comment by nrdvana in "A M.2 HDMI capture card"

nrdvana — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 05:30:05 +0000

You're using 100GbE ... in an end-user PC? What would you even saturate that with?

New comment by nrdvana in "CVE program faces swift end after DHS fails to renew contract [fixed]"

nrdvana — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 15:44:34 +0000

In most of the video clips I saw, he was saying "I don't know anything about that", which could be entirely true. Often I see hints that he's attempting to play the Aes Sedai game of "speak no word that is untrue" but he's too dumb to do it well. Anyway, as an extension, both comments can be true, that Trump himself has no plan and is an idiot, but that his administration is enacting Project 2025.

New comment by nrdvana in "Ask HN: Do US tech firms realize the backlash growing in Europe?"

nrdvana — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 23:46:02 +0000

If they cared about fiscal responsibility they wouldn't have passed the 2017 tax cuts, or be trying to renew them now. IMHO taxes were fine in the 2010-2017 era and if we'd just kept that, we'd be close to a balanced budget. Instead, they cut taxes (the popular part) without cutting spending (the unpopular part) and let the debt run wild under the assumption "well the economy will grow so much it will pay for itself". Well, they were half right - it caused so much inflation that the debt is effectively 30% less because dollars are worth 30% less. They want to pile on new spending (deportation) while keeping the tax cuts that they still can't find enough spending cuts to justify. The fiscal arguments are basically a joke at this point.

New comment by nrdvana in "Rsync vulnerabilities"

nrdvana — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 19:18:27 +0000

He said where untrusted parties aren't able to run rsync.

If I was running an rsync daemon facing the public, it would be in a chroot with dropped privileges.

New comment by nrdvana in "Hoarder: Self-hostable bookmark-everything app"

nrdvana — Tue, 24 Dec 2024 21:37:55 +0000

If you're hosting it yourself, I would expect that you also make backups of your whole server and/or database if one is involved. A custom backup feature built into the app seems redundant.

New comment by nrdvana in "A curious case of O(N^2) behavior which should be O(N) (2023)"

nrdvana — Sun, 22 Dec 2024 14:08:35 +0000

O(n) is generally indistinguishable from O(log n) so if there is any chance of different behavior than the expected optimum, go with the better algorithm.

New comment by nrdvana in "A curious case of O(N^2) behavior which should be O(N) (2023)"

nrdvana — Sun, 22 Dec 2024 03:25:16 +0000

Why was the solution not to get rid of the linked list and replace it with a red/black tree?

New comment by nrdvana in "Trump wins presidency for second time"

nrdvana — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 16:03:49 +0000

Its true that rich people often (always?) "have debts", but not true that they are "in debt" overall, otherwise they wouldn't really be rich anymore. Poor and middle-class people are often in debt in the sense that they have borrowed against their future earnings. For things like a house, borrowed over 30 years, the inflation on that amount really does benefit them. By the end of the loan, people who stayed in one house barely notice the cost of the mortgage, and if the intrest rate is low enough they may choose to deliberately not pay it off as they invest their current cash elsewhere. For things like a credit card, no the inflation doesn't really help anyhing.

If deflation were expected, rich people really would just leave money in a bank account (as long as investing gave smaller returns, or seemed too risky.) The inflation is an incentive for cash-rich people to put that cash to use instead of sitting on it. This can be a huge driver for the economy.

New comment by nrdvana in "Trump wins presidency for second time"

nrdvana — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 20:40:04 +0000

I think every single thing Trump did during the last 3 months hurt his campaign, actually. It had just already gotten to the point where nothing he said mattered, because people were choosing him based on their experience in 2019

New comment by nrdvana in "Do you need Redis? PostgreSQL does queuing, locking, and pub/sub (2021)"

nrdvana — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 13:54:08 +0000

The most common design for a Web app on Linux in the last 20 years is to have a pool of worker processes, each single-threaded and ready to serve one request. The processes might be apache ready to invoke PHP, or mod-perl, or a pool of ruby-on-rails or perl or python processes receiving the requests directly. Java tends to be threads instead of processes. I've personally never needed to go past about 100 workers, but I've talked to people who scale up to thousands, and they happen to be using MySQL. I've never used pgbouncer, but understand that's the tool to reach for rather than configuring Pg to allow thousands of connections.

New comment by nrdvana in "Do you need Redis? PostgreSQL does queuing, locking, and pub/sub (2021)"

nrdvana — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 05:15:11 +0000

I might not be understanding what you're pointing out here. It sounds to me like sqlalchemy is talking about a pool of connections within one process, in which case releasing back to that pool does not close the connection by that process to the database. Parent comment is talking about one connection per process with 50k processes. My comment was that you don't need that many processes if each process can handle hundreds of web requests asynchronously.

If you are saying that a connection pool can be shared between processes without pgbouncer, that is news to me.

New comment by nrdvana in "Why systemd is a problem for embedded Linux"

nrdvana — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 04:57:58 +0000

Try s6 or runit, and mdev from busybox. Mdev is not a "full featured" udev replacement, but that's sort of the point. It does just enough to get the job done and is extensible with scripts.

If you want to do the size of embedded where this matters, you also probably want a smaller libc like musl, and then buildroot and busybox are your friends.

New comment by nrdvana in "Do you need Redis? PostgreSQL does queuing, locking, and pub/sub"

nrdvana — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 04:17:18 +0000

Actually pub/sub works best when you can commit it in a transaction along with your data changes. When they are separate systems, you get a race condition where you could commit the change but crash before the event gets published.