<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: snerbles</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=snerbles</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Thu, 09 Apr 2026 03:15:27 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=snerbles" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snerbles in "US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm reminded of prepper forum discussions. Where some do little more than hoard supplies, weapons and gadgets yet don't network and build communities. In an actual societal breakdown scenario these isolated individuals will become loot drops for others who actually band together.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 08 Apr 2026 18:10:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47694059</link><dc:creator>snerbles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47694059</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47694059</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snerbles in "The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Exactly. So many comments here about technical solutions are missing the underlying government/authority problem, or are actively a part of it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 23 Feb 2026 18:26:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47126521</link><dc:creator>snerbles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47126521</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47126521</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snerbles in "Keep Android Open"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Online anonymity makes it harder for TPTB to punish dissidents.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 21 Feb 2026 03:10:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47097105</link><dc:creator>snerbles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47097105</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47097105</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snerbles in "Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift adoption"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's by no means accurate, but the comparative histories of Ladybird vs. Servo sure has some parallels with Linux vs. GNU Hurd.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 19 Feb 2026 01:37:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47068848</link><dc:creator>snerbles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47068848</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47068848</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snerbles in "Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift adoption"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Mozilla laid off the Servo team years ago.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 18 Feb 2026 23:55:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47068077</link><dc:creator>snerbles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47068077</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47068077</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snerbles in "Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I upgraded a ~1992 Dell 486 DX2 to 36MB (original 4MB + 32MB...or was it a pair of 16MB sticks? hard to remember) around 1997 or so.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 28 Jan 2026 23:57:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46803563</link><dc:creator>snerbles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46803563</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46803563</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snerbles in "Show HN: I built a small browser engine from scratch in C++"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Just slap a new legally-distinct-but-still-confusing name on your client/server pair, and use it as a marketing tool to sucker in purchasing managers.<p>Like EtherNet/IP, where the IP somehow stands for "Industrial Protocol".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 28 Jan 2026 19:56:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46800708</link><dc:creator>snerbles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46800708</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46800708</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snerbles in "Amazon cuts 16k jobs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The company itself might not discriminate as a policy, but some hiring managers certainly have their preferences. Or exclusively pull talent from their overseas cousin's brother's spouse's college roommate's consulting firm that is most certainly not a grift.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 28 Jan 2026 16:42:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46797774</link><dc:creator>snerbles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46797774</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46797774</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snerbles in "How wolves became dogs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The <i>pelt</i> is what's harvested - the fur is not removed from the skin.<p>In some cases the animal's hair can be cut without harm, like how sheep are shorn for wool.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 11 Jan 2026 01:03:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46571694</link><dc:creator>snerbles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46571694</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46571694</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snerbles in "I rebooted my social life"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Finger-wag all you want, it's not going to make that Sisyphean boulder any lighter.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 01 Jan 2026 17:10:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46455793</link><dc:creator>snerbles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46455793</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46455793</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snerbles in "RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Forgot about Dell gimping Turbo Boost on that firmware.<p>Another route is the PowerEdge T440 (tower server), which does respect Broadwell-EP turbo logic without a reflash. Not quite as quiet as a workstation, though.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Dec 2025 15:51:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46162907</link><dc:creator>snerbles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46162907</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46162907</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snerbles in "RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Personally I use eBay and find the most barebones system I can, then populate the CPU+RAM with components salvaged from e-wasted servers. There are risks with this, as I've had to return more than one badly-bent workstation that was packed poorly.<p>---<p>So the Dell Precision T7920 runs dual Intel Scalable (Skylake) and has oodles of DIMM slots (24!), but you'll need to use a PCIe adapter to run an NVMe drive. FlexBays give you hot-swappable SATA, SAS too but only if you're lucky enough to find a system with an HBA (or add one yourself). But if you manage to salvage 24x 64GB DDR4 DIMMs, you'll have a system with a terabyte-and-a-half of ECC RAM - just expect to deal with a very long initial POST and a lot of blink codes when you encounter bad sticks. The power supply is proprietary, but can be swapped from the outside.<p>The T7820 is the single-CPU version, and has only 6 DIMM slots. But it is more amenable to gaming (one NUMA domain), and I have gifted a couple to friends.<p>If you're feeling cheap and are okay with the previous generation, the Haswell/Broadwell-based T7910 is also serviceable - but expect to rename the UEFI image to boot Linux from NVMe, and it's much less power efficient if you don't pick an E5 v4 revision CPU. I used a fully-loaded T7910 as a BYOD workstation at a previous job, worked great as a test environment.<p>Lenovo ThinkStation P920 Tower has fewer DIMM slots (16) than the T7920, but has on-motherboard m.2 NVMe connectors and three full 5.25" bays. I loaded one with Linux Mint for my mother's business, she runs the last non-cloud version QuickBooks in a beefy network-isolated Windows VM and it works great for that. Another friend runs one of these with Proxmox as a homelab-in-a-box.<p>The HP Z6 G4 is also a thing, though I personally haven't played with one yet. I do use a salvaged HP Z440 workstation with a modest 256GB RAM (don't forget the memory cooler!) and a 3090 as my ersatz kitchen table AI server.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Dec 2025 01:16:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46155702</link><dc:creator>snerbles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46155702</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46155702</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snerbles in "RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I too have a crippling dual CPU workstation hoarding habit. Single thread performance is usually worse than enthusiast consumer desktops, and gaming performance will suffer if the game isn't constrained to a single NUMA domain that also happens to have the GPU being used by that game.<p>On the other hand, seeing >1TiB RAM in htop always makes my day happier.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 04 Dec 2025 18:14:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46150837</link><dc:creator>snerbles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46150837</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46150837</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snerbles in "Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The incentive is less about morals and very much about self-preservation.<p>With online mobs, when the target shows any sort of regret there is blood in the water and the sharks feast. It sometimes turns into a very public form of struggle session for the person under scrutiny. Besides avoiding the faux pas in the first place, one well-tested mitigation is to be absolutely unapologetic and wait for the storm to blow over.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 03 Dec 2025 18:02:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46137763</link><dc:creator>snerbles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46137763</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46137763</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snerbles in "Homeschooling hits record numbers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Ah, yes. The "normal people" canard. It's very tiresome. I refer you to a prior comment of mine and the ensuing chain from the usual HN homeschooling merry-go-round a year ago [0].<p>--<p>>> You can also learn outside of school, too.<p>> As someone who spent time in all three, I felt that my academic time was utterly wasted in public school. Sure, "learning outside" is always available, but that doesn't regain the time served in government mandated kid-prison.<p>---<p>>> No it wasn't! You learned how to interact with normal people. That's a lifelong skill.<p>> It taught me the necessity of being as viciously crass as my new classmates in order to fit in. If you consider that normal, then let it be known that I'm perfectly fine sticking with abnormal people thank you very much. I am perfectly content learning the lessons of Lord of the Flies by reading, and not by getting thrown into a small re-enactment of it.<p>> Though I suppose public middle school psychology was useful when I was an internment camp guard in southern Iraq. I'll grant you that.<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=42249295">https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=42249295</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 24 Nov 2025 05:43:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46030742</link><dc:creator>snerbles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46030742</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46030742</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snerbles in "Homeschooling hits record numbers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It was the predominant notion when I was a homeschooled kid 30 years ago, and for most of them there is no argument or evidence that will convince them otherwise.<p>State-run education is their orthodoxy, and anything that challenges that is tantamount to heresy.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 21 Nov 2025 21:10:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46009028</link><dc:creator>snerbles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46009028</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46009028</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snerbles in "Verifying your Matrix devices is becoming mandatory"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Not only that, but it has been a poorly communicated and documented ride as many in this comment section can attest.<p>The guides are written for cryptographic infrastructure nerds and not <i>regular normal users</i> that have a habit of forgetting their own passwords after six months. Not to mention the fact that the Element UI tends to churn <i>a lot</i>.<p>I didn't even know that they deprecated creating new passphrases, and that's what I was telling my users to do!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 20 Nov 2025 16:55:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45994753</link><dc:creator>snerbles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45994753</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45994753</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snerbles in "Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Anecdata around SV: I've seen an uptick in urban night drivers with only their DRLs and no tail lights.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 18 Nov 2025 17:47:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45969575</link><dc:creator>snerbles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45969575</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45969575</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snerbles in "Zed is our office"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Often projects need a history of stable checkpoints, and source control is one way to provide that.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 13 Nov 2025 17:03:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45917329</link><dc:creator>snerbles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45917329</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45917329</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by snerbles in "Laptops with Stickers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>At a prior job, employees wearing the logo started getting a lot of unexpected targeted attention outside the office. This ranged from lots of questions from randos about future products, to desperate passers-by handing off resumes on the sidewalk and begging for jobs, to even stalking and targeted theft. OPSEC culture wasn't something practiced there, and it was quite the rude awakening for some.<p>I do sticker the everloving snot out of my (removable) laptop cover with memes vaguely opposing or otherwise orthogonal to the local culture. No references to my job or place of work. Any interactions have generally been amusing to all parties involved.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 12 Nov 2025 02:54:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45895912</link><dc:creator>snerbles</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45895912</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45895912</guid></item></channel></rss>