Hacker News: proaralyst

New comment by proaralyst in "Gnome and Mozilla Discuss Proposal to Disable Middle Mouse Paste on Linux"

proaralyst — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 15:56:09 +0000

It's a feature of X (so works in any app running in X, not just FF and your terminal emulator). Wayland changed clipboard behaviour (along with many other things) and decided the selection clipboard was too large a security hole to keep. It's pretty useful though, so Gnome added it back, on top of Wayland. It's still a large security hole though!

Separately, PuTTY has a similar mechanism for copy, though this goes in the normal Windows clipboard.

New comment by proaralyst in "Instant database clones with PostgreSQL 18"

proaralyst — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 13:45:54 +0000

You could use LVM or btrfs snapshots (at the filesystem level) if you're ok restarting your database between runs

New comment by proaralyst in "US hits $38T in debt. Fastest accumulation of $1T outside pandemic"

proaralyst — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 15:38:56 +0000

US treasuries (bonds, notes and bills) are mostly considered as good as cash. They're used heavily in the international banking system (for payments, and as loan collateral themselves). They're also held to maturity by large institutional investors with predictable liabilities (ie payments) like pension and insurance funds. Banks will hold some of their assets (eg deposits) in treasuries too.

Also foreign governments and central banks will have holdings. Tether (the cryptocoin) is largely backed by US treasuries.

New comment by proaralyst in "New Firefox Add-On Policies"

proaralyst — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 15:37:02 +0000

> “Closed group” prohibition lifted

This is great: I've wanted a personal extension for a while (roughly to replace my userscripts but with more power and better sync) but was put off by it having to be public or manually installed. Now I can make this!

New comment by proaralyst in "Show HN: Roons – Mechanical Computer Kit"

proaralyst — Thu, 01 May 2025 16:29:59 +0000

This is cool! The simulator was useful for understanding what was going on, I hadn't realised until I watched a few that the roons can push marbles out in between squares.

New comment by proaralyst in "Why does Britain feel so poor?"

proaralyst — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 15:00:54 +0000

I don't see planning mentioned much in the article or comments. The Town and Country Planning act is a large cause of high development costs in the UK. Roads, rail, public works, nuclear power stations, onshore renewables and above all housing have all suffered significantly because getting things approved is so difficult.

Most other affluent nations have some form of zoning instead, which make planning much much easier. Most other affluent nations have more central control over planning too, which makes consensus over megaprojects easier to reach.

New comment by proaralyst in "LED's Efficiency Exceeds 100% (2012)"

proaralyst — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 16:56:28 +0000

This feels similar to heat pumps being >100% efficient though? Perhaps a less misleading headline would be 'Very low-power LEDs also convert heat to light'

New comment by proaralyst in "Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers"

proaralyst — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 10:41:21 +0000

Ukraine's drones are already partly automated because of the jamming environment: they can visually lock the drone onto a target from up to 10km away.[0][1] They're also using drones that trail a fibre optic over several kilometres to avoid jamming.[2]

[0] https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/03/12/... [1] https://www.csis.org/analysis/ukraines-future-vision-and-cur... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2024/11/07/ukrain...

New comment by proaralyst in "BYD says new fast-charging system could be as quick as filling up a tank"

proaralyst — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 10:35:14 +0000

Well, the chargers won't be pulling 1MW continuously, so you can smooth this out by installing batteries with the chargers. The grid demand becomes a more constant trickle into the batteries co-located with the charger

New comment by proaralyst in "Engineer eats efficiently for $2.50 a day (2016)"

proaralyst — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 15:37:06 +0000

This was a compelling idea, so I looked it up. Unfortunately it doesn't appear to be true: https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/253034146

New comment by proaralyst in "Ask HN: Has anyone tried adapting a court reporter keyboard for writing code?"

proaralyst — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 08:05:37 +0000

I've used my Kinesis Advantage 2 for years and am inseparable. I'd like to swap to the Kinesis 360 but my current keyboard is just fine and it feels like a small upgrade

New comment by proaralyst in "Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages"

proaralyst — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 10:25:01 +0000

What's your problem with UEFI? If your OEM wanted to install malicious firmware they can do that in BIOS no?

New comment by proaralyst in "Show HN: Cronexpr, a Rust library to parse and iter crontab expression"

proaralyst — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 16:52:11 +0000

Systemd timer units are usually two: one for the service you want to run, one for the timer file.

I think you're confusing systemd timer units with Cronie[0], a crond implementation that I think predates systemd? It's possible there's some systemd thing I don't know about though!

I think most distros at least have an installable crond

[0]: https://github.com/cronie-crond/cronie/

New comment by proaralyst in "Ask HN: What tools should I use to manage secrets from env files?"

proaralyst — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 15:51:30 +0000

If you're already using systemd, you can use its built-in credentials manager[0] which uses a combination of an on-disk key and the TPM2 to encrypt secrets at rest.

Probably annoying if you have more than one machine though

[0]: https://man.archlinux.org/man/systemd-creds.1

New comment by proaralyst in "The Slow, Painful Death of Agile and Jira"

proaralyst — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 15:40:28 +0000

I just don't think agile is designed for fixed-anything. Every project has unknowns: you can either spend effort to de-risk the project and increase your confidence in the time/cost estimates, then sell the job (ie waterfall/big plan first); or you can Just Try Stuff and adapt as you figure out that various things are easier or harder than you thought.

I think consultancies and corporations looked at vertically-integrated tech companies having lots of success with agile & decided they needed agile themselves, but didn't want to give up fixed-price. Probably correctly! But the key to those tech companies' success was the vertical integration, not the agile methodology

New comment by proaralyst in "Zen, a Arc-like open-source browser based on the Firefox engine"

proaralyst — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 10:30:51 +0000

Work make me use Chrome, and I have recently converted hard to tab groups. I've found two main uses: one for a collection of reference tabs that I mostly want open or closed together (specific API references that are normally spread out over a few pages); the other is to organise groups of tabs for different projects I'm working on.

Both of these make context switching easier as I can quickly hide all of the tabs I'm not currently using, knowing they'll be just as easy to reopen later. In Chrome, tab groups can be saved too, so they give you a bit of the persistence of bookmarks.

I'm still a Firefox user where I have a choice, and I'm really excited to hear they're working on first-class tab groups

New comment by proaralyst in "Dual action antibiotic could make bacterial resistance nearly impossible"

proaralyst — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 14:07:52 +0000

I'm not a biologist, but I'm guessing that having the concentrations of two antibiotics peak at the same time etc is much much trickier than having one molecule with two mechanisms of effect. Thus in actual (not perfect) use you end up with both effects active within a bacterium at one time, rather than potentially having some distance between the peaks.

From the article, it does look like they're smushing two antibiotic active sites into one molecule, so it seems a somewhat similar idea

New comment by proaralyst in "What's the point of std:monostate? You can't do anything with it"

proaralyst — Mon, 22 Jul 2024 16:15:31 +0000

I think it's not correct to say that void is a monotype in C++, because the compiler won't allow you to assign the result of a function marked void to a variable, and you cannot declare a variable of type void.

I'd accept that it's not the same as the empty type though, given that void* can be occupied and functions marked void can return. Probably someone with more type theory than me can name this properly

New comment by proaralyst in "What's the point of std:monostate? You can't do anything with it"

proaralyst — Mon, 22 Jul 2024 12:43:34 +0000

Void is different from this type though, as a variable of type void can't be occupied.

In ML and friends monostate is called unit (and gets used a lot because void returns aren't allowed by the languages). Some have empty types too, which can never be occupied. A function returning Empty can't return, for example, though there are other use cases

New comment by proaralyst in "Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico"

proaralyst — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 09:44:41 +0000

I strongly suspect the chances of Orion-style propulsion happening are close to zero. I think we're much more likely to see fission engines (where the heat from a conventional fission reactor is used to superheat water, which then goes through a conventional nozzle), or something a little more exotic like pulsed fusion (where little capsules of lithium containing deuterium go through a magnetic pinch and fuse, again in a more-or-less conventional nozzle) are more likely. They also have very high ISP but with much lower abuse risks (can you see any government agreeing to have a giant stockpile of nukes in space?)