Hacker News: pikrzyszto

New comment by pikrzyszto in "Cursing the government does not fix potholes. Spray-painting them does"

pikrzyszto — Fri, 15 May 2026 16:44:01 +0000

It's interesting to see lack of tolerance towards potholes - the government has a lot of other issues to work on (healthcare, education, pollution) yet potholes, being a problem we are affected by daily seem more important to people than the "remote" problems caused by underfunding in other areas.

Even if this trick works, would it be ethical, knowing it draws money away from other areas? What would be the road SLO we would agree be acceptable?

New comment by pikrzyszto in "UK's hardware talent is being wasted"

pikrzyszto — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 07:26:12 +0000

zoning is still necessary, you don't want a pig farm (or anything equally stinky) next to people's houses.

New comment by pikrzyszto in "How to Train Yourself to Go to Sleep Earlier"

pikrzyszto — Sun, 03 Nov 2024 07:35:34 +0000

You may find it beneficial to workout some pelvic floor muscles. It's possible that your muscles got weaker and struggle with doing their job as well as they used to.

New comment by pikrzyszto in "Algorithms for Modern Hardware"

pikrzyszto — Sat, 16 Mar 2024 14:43:26 +0000

And then you get hit by Universal Scaling Law (or Universal Law of Computational Scalability) - see the section on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_J._Gunther

You can't throw more compute at a problem ad infinitum.

New comment by pikrzyszto in "Flattr is closing down (2023)"

pikrzyszto — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 13:00:37 +0000

I used Flattr for a while but struggled with:

- flattr support discovery: Instead of having a "Flattr" button on the webpage I visit I need to navigate to flattr website and search there... but I'm not going to do that. Maybe adblocker removed that button?

- ownership confirmations - I wanted to donate to person $PERSON and found them on flattr. But I had no idea whether this flattr account actually belongs to $PERSON. I reached to $PERSON about that and never heard back so I stopped donating.

New comment by pikrzyszto in "I'm sorry I bit you during my job interview (2011)"

pikrzyszto — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 16:19:07 +0000

I'm curious - why? Can you send some resources about that? Do you know if there is an alternative law I could support my claims with in UK or EU?

New comment by pikrzyszto in "I'm sorry I bit you during my job interview (2011)"

pikrzyszto — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 15:08:07 +0000

I think it was more about security/confidentiality - when you print and scan you exactly see what's that that you're sending. No hidden HTML elements, e-mail headers and stuff like that. And they blacked out some of the stuff I didn't need to see (again, with a permanent marker so hard to do it wrong).

New comment by pikrzyszto in "I'm sorry I bit you during my job interview (2011)"

pikrzyszto — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 15:02:38 +0000

The effort was zero - I copy-pasted an e-mail template from the internet and volia.

Yes, this is in Europe.

I think I learned quite a lot, namely:

- why I failed the interview (I struggled to produce correct code, the code wasn't very robust and I said it's ok to put it into production)

- why I haven't failed the interview (ex. no mention of my English language skills) - which was more valuable for me than the "why I failed"

- a fairly good confidence that there's little details omitted - when they submit you a voluntary feedback they may give just the most obvious information. Ofc I didn't get the data about what was said on internal meetings.

- some insight into their internal structure, opinions of individual interviews about me etc.

I probably burned bridges with that company but after the interview neither party was interested in cooperation so I decided to give it a shot and see what happens.

I had to wait exactly 30 (or 14?) days (GDPR deadline) for the feedback to get to my mailbox.

New comment by pikrzyszto in "I'm sorry I bit you during my job interview (2011)"

pikrzyszto — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 14:29:02 +0000

I once asked for a feedback, was told that they won't give any. Filed a GDPR request and got all of their e-mails and internal tickets about me and my application. Funnily, they printed this data, scanned to PDF and sent the PDF via e-mail.

New comment by pikrzyszto in "So you want to modify the text of a PDF by hand (2020)"

pikrzyszto — Mon, 04 Sep 2023 19:30:35 +0000

Poppler ( https://poppler.freedesktop.org/ ) handles this for you with pdftotext utility. It also ships with bunch of other utilities to work with PDFs

New comment by pikrzyszto in "mCaptcha: Open-source proof-of-work captcha for websites"

pikrzyszto — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 20:42:41 +0000

Other captchas also waste (your and captchas' provider) electricity. For example reCaptcha requires tons of resources to track your moves to ensuring you're "not a robot". Sure, the data is also used to serve you ads but resources are still wasted.

New comment by pikrzyszto in "Future ultra-precise timing links to geosynchronous satellites"

pikrzyszto — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 19:25:53 +0000

See also White Rabbit Project, i.e. how to synchronize clocks over the internet with sub-ns accuracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Rabbit_Project

New comment by pikrzyszto in "UN Human Rights Chief Urges UK to Reverse ‘Deeply Troubling’ Public Order Bill"

pikrzyszto — Tue, 09 May 2023 16:18:28 +0000

The monarch has a lot of power to vet many laws without the public even knowing it happened.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/08/royals-vette...

New comment by pikrzyszto in "Lithium-ion batteries a growing fire hazard in NYC garbage trucks"

pikrzyszto — Mon, 01 May 2023 16:11:28 +0000

In the UK every bigger grocery store has a bin for old batteries, disposing batteries is trivial.

New comment by pikrzyszto in "System D"

pikrzyszto — Sat, 22 Apr 2023 21:33:01 +0000

From https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/ :

> Because it's a system daemon, and under Unix/Linux those are in lower case, and get suffixed with a lower case d. And since systemd manages the system, it's called systemd.

> Système D is not an acceptable spelling and something completely different (though kinda fitting).

Wikipedia says that it somehow relates to Systeme D, but they don't have any good references for it.

New comment by pikrzyszto in "Sometimes it actually is a kernel bug: bind() in Linux 6.0.16"

pikrzyszto — Fri, 13 Jan 2023 17:34:58 +0000

See the following

https://kunit.dev/ - unit tests for kernel

https://docs.kernel.org/dev-tools/testing-overview.html - entire testing overview.

New comment by pikrzyszto in "Systemd.timer, an Alternative to Cron"

pikrzyszto — Thu, 08 Dec 2022 23:00:51 +0000

Why would it care about stracing? It was never too slow for me. A "bad" performance might be caused by ex. consistency checking. Benchmarks like these don't tell much - you can't reduce software performance to one number.

> It's DB implementation is utter garbage. It doesn't even organize files by time or really anything useful.

That sounds interesting, can you please elaborate on the internal structure of journald files or link to further documentation? And why would I care if journald handles it for me?

New comment by pikrzyszto in "Systemd.timer, an Alternative to Cron"

pikrzyszto — Thu, 08 Dec 2022 22:42:48 +0000

I'm happy we have special-purpose tools for dealing with logfiles. I don't want to craft one-liners for "give me logs around timestamp" or "give me logs about my service's first start after the boot" every other day.

New comment by pikrzyszto in "Systemd.timer, an Alternative to Cron"

pikrzyszto — Thu, 08 Dec 2022 21:06:13 +0000

"tail /var/log/nginx.log" is now "journalctl -fu nginx" or "jouranlctl -eu nginx". Not that much of a difference, it really depends what you grow up with. We could argue "tail" is ugly because you never know if it's "tail /var/log/nginx.log" or "tail /var/log/nginx/nginx.log".

A nice feature is that journald gives you flags like "--boot" to see logs only emitted during a specific boot, or "--since '5m ago'" which is not that straightforward to do with the approach you favor. (if there is a way to do it easily, please let me know!)

New comment by pikrzyszto in "Ask HN: Software with biggest potential for positive impact in 5 years?"

pikrzyszto — Mon, 28 Mar 2022 12:55:08 +0000

I'd recommend you to have a look at https://80000hours.org/ or at least their job boards: https://80000hours.org/job-board/

They focus on the very problem you're asking about.