Hacker News: t90fan

New comment by t90fan in "Fedora: Open-source repository for long-term digital preservation"

t90fan — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 14:39:03 +0000

> associated with open source software for digital object repository systems and that Red Hat could use the name when it was clearly associated with open source computer operating systems.'

If it's as worded, I'm surprised Fedora Directory Server didn't end up being a problem for RedHat, as its not an OS, and you could call it a digital object repository system, I guess.

Or maybe thats why they re-branded it as 389 Directory Server?

New comment by t90fan in "Testing DVD-R and CD-R 25 years later: optical disks from Japan"

t90fan — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 01:33:02 +0000

Things like RDX backup cartridges have a physical write protect lever on them

A few years ago (before affordable cloud backup offerings) this was fairly common for Small Businesses to use, for this reason.

New comment by t90fan in "Ask HN: Has anyone scaled Postgres to over a billion rows?"

t90fan — Sun, 15 Sep 2024 20:23:02 +0000

we had a 20 TB ballpark (so I would guess many tens or even hundreds of billions of rows for sure) postgres database at a place I worked in ~2015, hosted on-prem, I don't recall it causing them too much hassle, main thing I remember was the server had an very large amount of RAM (512GB which was loads and loads back then), and lots (for the time) of cores, something like 16, but was otherwise a fairly standard ~£50k ballpark piece of HP kit.

New comment by t90fan in "You'll regret using natural keys"

t90fan — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 05:04:04 +0000

ntl?

me too!

New comment by t90fan in "Finding that lead emissions from aircraft engines contribute to air pollution"

t90fan — Fri, 27 Oct 2023 16:57:39 +0000

> wasn’t leaded gas banned in the 70s?

Don't know about the US, but we had leaded petrol (gas) for cars much later here in the UK, ~2000 at least. I remember my mum's Austin Metro (which was from the early 90s/late 80s) ran on it, and we only replaced that car once I was in high school (and that was in 2001)

New comment by t90fan in "Ask HN: Without searching, can you name a historic event before the year 1000?"

t90fan — Fri, 06 Oct 2023 12:51:21 +0000

The sacking of Rome by the Goths in 410

New comment by t90fan in "50TB IBM tape drive more than doubles LTO-9 capacity"

t90fan — Fri, 25 Aug 2023 15:59:12 +0000

thats great for tape

only marginally slower than your average SSD

New comment by t90fan in "Kellogg’s is going to war over Mexico’s nutrition label rules"

t90fan — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 16:00:42 +0000

similar to what we have had in the UK for a good while too, there is one with a sad limp looking cigarette and SMOKING CAUSES IMPOTENCE which I find very effective, more so than the ones of tumours even.

New comment by t90fan in "Ask HN: What's the compile time of your project?"

t90fan — Sat, 19 Aug 2023 07:40:28 +0000

15-40 minutes depending on what tests are run/skipped (the integration tests are pretty numerous/slow)

New comment by t90fan in "Ask HN: Is anyone using PyPy for real work?"

t90fan — Mon, 31 Jul 2023 12:03:48 +0000

I can't remember exactly what the use case was but we used at my old work (Start up providing a Web CDN/WAF type service, think the kind of stuff CloudFlare does nowadays) in ~2013 for some sort of batch processing analytics/billing type job, using MRJob and AWS Elastic Map Reduce over a seriously large data set.

The performance of PyPy over CPython saved us loads and loads time and thus $$$s, from what I can recall.

New comment by t90fan in "How to make cheese at home"

t90fan — Sun, 23 Jul 2023 09:21:23 +0000

The latter, UHT isn't popular at all here in the UK, unlike on the continent.

New comment by t90fan in "Yelp rebuilds corrupted Cassandra cluster using its data streaming architecture"

t90fan — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 06:04:41 +0000

Running regular incremental repairs is the norm, as nodes will from time to time have trouble talking to each other due to real world network reasons, or will go down, for things like OS patching. We had a (daily) cron job for it. I come from the software side not the DBA side of things but my main advice from running Cassandra at scale in production (it was part of an Apigee stack) is don't basically! It was very not realisable, would consume huge volumes of memory (especially during repairs), bandwidth (doing a repair is very chatty as it has to sync lots of data) and disk space (tombstoning meant deleted records take up space until compaction runs), and was generally not much fun to manage, and it was difficult to hire people who knew much about it to do so. I would not build a solution myself using it going forward. We also had to periodically (weekly) do "full" repairs to work around Cassandra bugs, silent data corruption etc...

New comment by t90fan in "Google restricting internet access to some employees for security"

t90fan — Wed, 19 Jul 2023 00:50:26 +0000

probably?

Every tech company I've ever worked at, normal devs have had administrator access on their own Mac or Linux workstations, its only usually the sales/product folks who have locked down Windows machines.

And most SRE folks have sudo access on production VMs too

New comment by t90fan in "Qt 5.15 Standard Support for Legacy License Holders Ends Today"

t90fan — Fri, 26 May 2023 17:46:36 +0000

QT is used a lot in Embedded systems.

Years ago, I used to write software for medical devices which used QT, and those were supported in the wild for 10 years.

I think its also popular in cars and stuff nowadays.

New comment by t90fan in "Windows 95 – How Does It Look Today?"

t90fan — Sat, 03 Apr 2021 12:27:39 +0000

> Aside from the whole, well... lack of HTTPS support in any browser you could possibly use on that OS. Also in Win95. And Win98. But regardless...

Use a proxy running on your LAN.

The proxy connects to the site over modern HTTPS (i.e. TLS 1.2 or whatever) and you connect to the proxy over plain HTTP, or whatever old version of HTTPS your client supports (NT4 sp6 with IE6 supports TLS1.0 or SSL3, as the latest, dunno about win 98), if you make sure to trust its cert.

New comment by t90fan in "Is that ship still stuck?"

t90fan — Fri, 26 Mar 2021 16:50:35 +0000

Containers are 2 (20ft) or 4 (40ft) tonnes (roughly) unloaded.

And they can (if I remember right) contain 20 tonnes or so, of cargo.

Our current chinooks can handle 10 tonnes, and the old models could carry 4, if I recall.

And probably less in desert heat.

So helicopters will not be moving any containers

New comment by t90fan in "Plan 9 from Bell Labs in Cyberspace"

t90fan — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 15:35:15 +0000

Lenovo make Android One phones.

I got a new Moto G Pro from them this year. Very good phone for the price.

New comment by t90fan in "HM Prison – A Survival Guide (2015)"

t90fan — Thu, 05 Oct 2017 15:15:24 +0000

thats more an artefact of the fact that most of our prisons were built in the 1800s.

2 in a cell is common.

Until the 90s they never had indoor plumbing either, only buckets in the cells. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slopping_out

New comment by t90fan in "Boeing 787 In Flight Entertainment System Security fun"

t90fan — Wed, 06 Sep 2017 14:02:22 +0000

Scanning can lead to arrest in some places.

In the UK for example, the computer misuse act says that using any tool with the intent of accessing a system (without actually doing so, let alone doing so successfully) is an offence.

New comment by t90fan in "ReactOS 0.4.6 released"

t90fan — Tue, 05 Sep 2017 13:46:38 +0000

MS windows ships with a lot more drivers, and translations, or one.