Hacker News: seniorThrowaway

New comment by seniorThrowaway in "Maine is about to become the first state to ban major new data centers"

seniorThrowaway — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:08:28 +0000

Don't know why people think Texas doesn't have natural beauty. It's a huge state.

New comment by seniorThrowaway in "Show HN: I built a Cargo-like build tool for C/C++"

seniorThrowaway — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 17:11:10 +0000

Having to work around a massive C++ software project daily, I wish you luck. We use conan2, and while it can be very challenging to use, I've yet to find something better that can handle incorporating as dependencies ancient projects that still use autoconf or even custom build tooling. It's also very good at detecting and enforcing ABI compatibility, although there are still some gaps. This problem space is incredibly hard and improving it is a prime driver for the creation of many of the languages that came after C/C++

New comment by seniorThrowaway in "Slop is not necessarily the future"

seniorThrowaway — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 16:53:47 +0000

this submission is basically an ad

New comment by seniorThrowaway in "Oracle slashes 30k jobs with a cold 6 a.m. email"

seniorThrowaway — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 15:35:22 +0000

That is really wild

New comment by seniorThrowaway in "How to turn anything into a router"

seniorThrowaway — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 14:06:02 +0000

>Part of the roadmap involved divorcing the routing from the wifi completely

This is the move. Let's you upgrade the different parts of the network separately. I have 3 components, an N150 router/fw/DNS/VPN box with 2.5GB NICs running OPNSense. A cheap but surprisingly good 2.5GB managed switch, and a cheap wifi 6 VLAN tag capable wifi access point.

New comment by seniorThrowaway in "How to turn anything into a router"

seniorThrowaway — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 17:57:40 +0000

SOHO toys don't do routing in a real sense at all

New comment by seniorThrowaway in "How to turn anything into a router"

seniorThrowaway — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 17:53:50 +0000

I feel almost exactly the same as you on the subject. When I was young and starry eyed I built my own router out of a PC running openBSD, all by hand. Nice learning experience, interesting OS, but definitely not maintenance free especially around system updates as back then openBSD packages and sys upgrades required recompiling everything. Now I do the same mini-PC thing as the OP's article but I just put OpnSense on it. Agree the UI can be maddening at times but the thing is rock solid, and has very polished update and upgrade mechanisms. Built-ins/plugins are great - unbound, wireguard, openvpn suricata, backups to git etc. Also I like that it is BSD based, my network experience was learned on Cisco's and Junipers in an ISP setting and Linux networking has always driven me crazy

New comment by seniorThrowaway in "An interactive map of Flock Cams"

seniorThrowaway — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 21:31:37 +0000

I think you overestimate the public.

New comment by seniorThrowaway in "Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS"

seniorThrowaway — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 20:16:31 +0000

Ok, I still don't see how that's "hostile to linux" and not just windows being crappy, which it is.

New comment by seniorThrowaway in "Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS"

seniorThrowaway — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 18:43:56 +0000

>I'm forced to use Microsoft products and they're actively hostile to Linux

How so? Powershell has openSSH built in now, and WSL2 basically works minus some annoying behavior and caveats. I have a Windows 11 laptop and I use it like you are saying as an ssh machine and web browser without much issue.

New comment by seniorThrowaway in "Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS"

seniorThrowaway — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 18:12:33 +0000

I'd say Macs have a far greater association with developers and tech nerds now, most code was being written for Windows and Unix back then. I was in a Computer Science University program in the 90's, and our labs were full of Unix workstations, things like SGI and Sun. When the iMac dropped, they put them in the non-CS labs. On a personal level, I've always felt the relatively current Mac==developer trend is driven in large part by fashion, but I've never been a fan of the Apple/Mac ecosystem even though I can respect what the Mac is on an engineering level. So maybe I'm biased.

New comment by seniorThrowaway in "Setting up OpenClaw on a cloud VM"

seniorThrowaway — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 18:51:01 +0000

It's really not that hard to run them in docker. Can give them a nestybox (with a little work) sidecar so they can run docker-in-docker. As far as permissions, the only mental model that makes sense to me is treating them like actual people. Bound their permissions in the other systems not on their own machines, basically zero trust. For instance for email, most mail apps have had delegated permissions for a while, executives use it to have their assistants read and write their mail. That's what is needed with these too.

New comment by seniorThrowaway in "Qwen3-Max-Thinking"

seniorThrowaway — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 21:47:17 +0000

>Private entities might have their own policies, but government censorship is fairly small.

It's a distinction without a difference when these "private" entities in the West are the actual power centers. Most regular people spend their waking days at work having to follow the rules of these entities, and these entities provide the basic necessities of life. What would happen if you got banned from all the grocery stores? Put on an unemployable list for having controversial outspoken opinions?

New comment by seniorThrowaway in "Vibe coding kills open source"

seniorThrowaway — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 18:58:17 +0000

I think this is a great analogy

New comment by seniorThrowaway in "Vibe coding kills open source"

seniorThrowaway — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 18:54:06 +0000

I've been doing this a long time too. The anti-patterns tend to come from the hype cycles of "xyz shiny tool/pattern will take away all the nasty human problems that end up creating bad software". Yes, LLMs will follow this cycle too, and, I agree we are in a kind of sweet spot moment for LLMs where they were able to ingest massive amounts of training material from the open web. That will not be the case going forward, as people seek to more tightly guard their IP. The (open) question is whether the training material that exists plus whatever the tools can self generate is good enough for them to improve themselves in a closed loop cycle. LLM generated code was the right tool for my job today; doesn't mean it's the right tool for everyone's job or that it always will be. One thing constant in this industry is change. Sold as revolutionary, which is the truth, in the sense of going in circles/cycles.

New comment by seniorThrowaway in "Vibe coding kills open source"

seniorThrowaway — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 16:36:31 +0000

Then it is new for everyone, no?

New comment by seniorThrowaway in "Vibe coding kills open source"

seniorThrowaway — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 16:30:12 +0000

While quality libraries do exist, let's not pretend that most people are validating and testing the libraries they pull in, that abandoned / unmaintained libraries aren't widely used, and that managing the dependency hell caused by libraries is free.

New comment by seniorThrowaway in "Vibe coding kills open source"

seniorThrowaway — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 16:26:00 +0000

AI's / LLM's have already been trained on best practices for most domains. I've recently faced this decision and I went the LLM custom app path, because the software I needed was a simple internal business type app. There is open source and COTS software packages available for this kind of thing, but they tend to be massive suites trying to solve a bunch of things I don't need and also a minefield of licensing, freemium feature gating, and subject to future abandonment or rug pulls into much higher costs. Something that has happened many times. Long story short, I decided it was less work to build the exact tool I need to solve my "right now" problem, architected for future additions. I do think this is the future.

New comment by seniorThrowaway in "State of the Fin 2026-01-06"

seniorThrowaway — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 18:04:45 +0000

You're being a bit obtuse here yourself. The original premise of Plex was to stream your own media on your own network. I was a very early user of it, before these additional "features" that were pushed more by the Plex team than by user demand were added. They made it so you had to hack the xml config file to be able to use it in the traditional no login way, that was a pretty hostile move in my opinion and was the first eyebrow raiser for me. They also made it so you had to have a paid account to use any of the mobile clients in a clear monetization move there is no technical reason why you can't open your plex server to the internet and connect a mobile app that way, that's what jellyfin allows. I worked around this for a while by connecting to my home network on a VPN and just using chrome mobile to stream but it was less than ideal, obviously. Yes then they offered the proxying service with dynamic TLS cert generation as another paid for service, I remember it, but having never had a plex account let alone a paid one it was no interest to me. Do you work for Plex? Because your post reads like you do, especially the attitude of people not knowing what features they want and needing Plex to tell (sell) them.

New comment by seniorThrowaway in "State of the Fin 2026-01-06"

seniorThrowaway — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 17:14:59 +0000

Agree with others it's not solely about cost. For me it was about the very clear monetization drive Plex started doing years ago, while remaining nominally free to use for your own media. At some point, and I've already switched off it so maybe it's already happened, they will monetize tracking/meta data about what is in your own collection.