Hacker News: shrubble

New comment by shrubble in "America.gov"

shrubble — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 03:33:54 +0000

Any evidence that it is in a CDN? Some CDNs charge for the unique bytes/files stored only.

New comment by shrubble in "Where's the Beef?: The lab-grown-meat revolution that wasn't"

shrubble — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 15:51:47 +0000

It’s been going on since well before recorded human history :-)

New comment by shrubble in "Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop"

shrubble — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 13:07:34 +0000

I did back in the v2.1 days, but it suffered from needing a bit more RAM and CPU; by the time the Pentium was widespread I had already moved on to Linux. I think in the v3.0 version it got faster and better.

New comment by shrubble in "Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop"

shrubble — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 13:06:06 +0000

Yeah I have; it needs some polishing but it’s good.

New comment by shrubble in "Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop"

shrubble — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 10:51:29 +0000

Simply implementing the NeXTStep v3.3 look and feel would immediately solve most problems, I think.

I used an actual NeXT workstation for 8 months as my only desktop in the mid 1990s and it was the most integrated and best GUI I’ve ever used.

New comment by shrubble in "Where's the Beef?: The lab-grown-meat revolution that wasn't"

shrubble — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 10:36:05 +0000

Turns out that nature is a lot more efficient at producing meat; I don’t think this will change for a while, if ever.

Bugs for chickens, grasses/grains for cattle and omnivorous pigs are their own kind of bio-reactor…

New comment by shrubble in "Fujitsu launches made-in-Japan next-generation CPU FUJITSU-MONAKA"

shrubble — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 14:39:28 +0000

Interesting to note that Fujitsu did this when the SPARC architecture was popular: they enhanced/developed a CPU for the same ABI.

Seems they have decided they don’t want to create their own architecture, but take the popular architecture and build on it.

New comment by shrubble in "A 386 PC for Your RP2350"

shrubble — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 14:32:24 +0000

Technically you could run OS/2 on it, I think.

Or Plan9 for i386.

New comment by shrubble in "LG denies TV spying claims, says tracking and snooping concerns 'not true'"

shrubble — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 16:38:50 +0000

Every speaker can be used as a microphone if the circuitry is added to do so.

New comment by shrubble in "Object storage is all you need"

shrubble — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 17:24:41 +0000

"The main downside of this is the fact that object storage doesn't have transactions, so you can't make sure that both appending the event and updating the state of the world happen in one atomic unit. We write the state first and the event second, so a process dying in between leaves the state correct and the history missing an entry. Nothing detects that, because detecting it would mean something reads the log and compares it to state, and the entire point is that nothing does. So every entry in the log really happened. What you don't get is a guarantee that everything that happened is in it."

So, they built a thing that pretends to, but does not actually properly handle transactions?

I guess I should be glad they are not a fintech startup...

New comment by shrubble in "Iceland votes on whether to restart talks on joining EU"

shrubble — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 12:48:14 +0000

I think Iceland will find that compliance with the EU regulations would be very expensive and not practical, but that’s for them to decide.

New comment by shrubble in "Tracking Costco gas prices"

shrubble — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 04:49:30 +0000

They are selling 10000 gallons a day at some locations, so I find it hard to believe.

More like they don’t have a need to make a profit and they run the station in a barebones manner on real estate that they get as part of the larger site. So it would be a loss leader for anyone else.

New comment by shrubble in "Radiation damage to Hubble has been 4.3 years out of phase with the Solar cycle"

shrubble — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 14:50:41 +0000

One way is to take a “blank” picture which will then show just the noise; then use that as a reference for what can be removed from the image.

New comment by shrubble in "AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late"

shrubble — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 12:36:09 +0000

AI companies could certainly release the scans of any book that is no longer covered by copyright in the USA, for free download and get some positive publicity for a change.

I do wonder who is running PR at the major AI companies, as they seem rather insensate to how they are perceived...

New comment by shrubble in "Xorg-server 26.1.0 rc1"

shrubble — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 20:00:30 +0000

Note that Enrico Weigelt is the "XLibre" guy and some of his fixes made it into this release, you can search for his name in the message.

New comment by shrubble in "CIA funding helped keep NeXT afloat in the 80s"

shrubble — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 19:57:11 +0000

Sun Microsystems had hardware and a version of Unix that was POSIX-compliant. This passed the government openness/interoperability test in existence and anyone with authority and budget could buy Sun, and then buy approved applications and run them.

NeXT had a superior development environment, but, Steve Jobs didn't spend the 1 or 2 engineer-years it would have taken to make the OS be POSIX-compliant. Thus, in addition to authority and budget, a waiver needed to be signed off on, in order to buy NeXT hardware.

The "three letter agency" or "TLA" portion of the US government, didn't always need off the shelf apps, but they had to build their own; and they didn't have to pass scrutiny over a waiver for something with a national-security implication.

Thus the CIA, DIA, NSA etc. bought both Sun and NeXT hardware.

New comment by shrubble in "Anton Chekhov played at love most of his life"

shrubble — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 04:59:35 +0000

You liked “Roadside Picnic” by the Strugatsky brothers, I take it…

New comment by shrubble in "Three years after police raid on Kansas newspaper, reporter settles for $850K"

shrubble — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 16:03:47 +0000

I’m surprised that the death of the 98 year old mother, one day after the police raid, hasn’t been questioned; surely having police officers squabble with you is a much higher level of stress than normal?

New comment by shrubble in "Show HN: Woxi - Open-source Mathematica / Wolfram Language reimplementation"

shrubble — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 12:14:48 +0000

This really does seem wonderful - going to evaluate this some more (no pun intended)!

New comment by shrubble in "16GB EGPU for AI Inference, $699"

shrubble — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 04:18:20 +0000

If you could get 2x 16GB eGPU in external cases for $1398 vs the Intel B70 for $1199 to $1299 (MicroCenter pricing), some would choose the ease of use of getting the Nvidia solution up and running, over the lower price. Personally I'm rooting for Intel to be stronger in the GPU department.