<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: tom_alexander</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tom_alexander</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Thu, 29 Oct 2026 08:20:35 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=tom_alexander" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tom_alexander in "Nixpkgs for the Front End Impaired"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Ask nixpkgs a question in a loop. Interrogate and explore nixpkgs in a REPL<p><pre><code>  nix repl --expr 'builtins.getFlake "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-unstable"'

  nix-repl> builtins.filter (name: lib.licenses."${name}" ? spdxId && lib.strings.hasPrefix "GPL" lib.licenses."${name}".spdxId) (builtins.attrNames lib.licenses)
  [
    "gpl1Only"
    "gpl1Plus"
    "gpl2"
    "gpl2Only"
    "gpl2Plus"
    "gpl3"
    "gpl3Only"
    "gpl3Plus"
  ]</code></pre></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 29 Oct 2026 04:05:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50284431</link><dc:creator>tom_alexander</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50284431</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50284431</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tom_alexander in "Here be monsters: What do you still need to know when agents do the work?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p><p><pre><code>  > Sorry, you have been blocked
  > You are unable to access hashnode.dev
</code></pre>
Well this is a first for something posted to HN. I'm not blocked anywhere else, so I don't know what you're doing different on your website.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 28 Oct 2026 02:11:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50268541</link><dc:creator>tom_alexander</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50268541</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50268541</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tom_alexander in "Show HN: Uberblok – an interactive museum of ZFS internals"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Everyone has mentioned the license, which is the reason ZFS isn't everywhere. I just wanted to add: Don't let the license scare you away. The CDDL is actually a nice compromise between copyleft (GPL) and copyfree (BSD). The CDDL is essentially the same as GPL except the GPL applies to everything it touches (include a single GPL *.c file in your project and now your entire project is subject to the GPL). Whereas the CDDL only applies to the CDDL-licensed files themselves. So you can include ZFS in your project without making your entire project subject to the CDDL.<p>The issue is, the GPL wants to spread to everything it touches (including the CDDL-licensed ZFS files), which would make the ZFS files subject to both the GPL and the CDDL. But the CDDL and the GPL are incompatible, which is why Linux can't include ZFS whereas more permissively licensed projects like the BSDs can.<p>So it's an unfortunate situation, but ZFS' license is not "bad". It's just the GPL and the CDDL are incompatible.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 23 Oct 2026 02:56:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50203982</link><dc:creator>tom_alexander</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50203982</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50203982</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tom_alexander in "NixOS is making me less afraid"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Admittedly I haven't been in the C++ space for about a decade, but back in the day I used to love premake for this exact reason. You wrote your build config in a completely standard real scripting language: lua.<p><a href="https://premake.github.io/docs/What-Is-Premake" rel="nofollow">https://premake.github.io/docs/What-Is-Premake</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 21 Oct 2026 02:06:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50175200</link><dc:creator>tom_alexander</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50175200</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50175200</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tom_alexander in "Tell HN: Remember to migrate away from .name domain"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Not just "could" but originally it was the only option.<p>> When the TLD name was first launched, only third-level registrations and forwarded e-mail addresses were available.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.name" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.name</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 17 Oct 2026 13:41:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50131108</link><dc:creator>tom_alexander</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50131108</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50131108</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tom_alexander in "Show HN: Llmspeed – feel how fast a local LLM runs before you buy the hardware"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is great. It solves two of my issues:<p><pre><code>  1. It is difficult to figure out if dropping $10k+ on hardware will make a meaningful difference for running local models.
  2. Downloading each model and each quantization of that model to see the speed seems rude to free services like hugging face, so now I can see things like "with my hardware, going to a Q8 only results in 3 more tokens per second"
</code></pre>
My one complaint is picking my hardware (9070XT) and Qwen3.6 27B FP16 results in the message:<p>> This combination won't run. Qwen 3.6/3.8 27B at FP16 needs 54.6 GB — the AMD RX 9070 XT 16GB has 14.9 GB usable. No quantization of this model fits; pick a smaller model or more memory.<p>While it is true that it won't fit in your GPU memory, it demonstrably does run on my hardware. Llama.cpp supports putting some layers on the GPU and running others on the CPU.<p>Also, that message says "No quantization of this model fits" but switching to a different quantization of that model (for example, Q8_0) makes the message go away?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 17 Oct 2026 13:17:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50130918</link><dc:creator>tom_alexander</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50130918</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50130918</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tom_alexander in "E Ink Kaleido 4"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Think it's also debatable what value colour brings unless you are regularly reading full colour magazines, PDFs etc.<p>A photo frame in your home that rotates through a set of photos. My grandmother had one to help her remember her family, but it was an LCD. A color e-ink one would be so much nicer.<p>Any sort of information panel/dashboard or even just graphs inside education books. There are e-ink screens with only a couple colors (like black, white, red, and yellow), which lets you do things like "make this graph red when my waterheater is broken" but a full-color display opens up the possibilities considerably! For example, having line graphs with multiple lines.<p>If it was high refresh rate, I would consider it for a computer display for coding. I could never give up syntax highlighting so I need color.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 16 Oct 2026 00:16:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50112111</link><dc:creator>tom_alexander</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50112111</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50112111</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tom_alexander in "Pixel 11 doesn't yet meet the GrapheneOS security standards and may be skipped"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>T-Mobile recently had a trade-in promotion where you could trade in any phone and get a pixel 10 for "free". The free is in quotes because what actually happens is you get signed up for device financing which spreads the cost of the phone over 2 years, and then they give your account a credit each month for the same amount charged by the device financing. So they'll end up charging you $33 per month and crediting you $33 per month, resulting in the phone actually being free. The catch is it locks you into 2 years on T-Mobile because if you cancel the account or pay off the phone early, you forfeit all the remaining credits.<p>Since it was free and I had no plans on leaving T-Mobile in the following 2 years, I went ahead and did the trade-in with an old Pixel 3a. What I didn't realize is since the phone is on a payment plan, the phone is not only carrier-locked (which would be fine) but also bootloader-locked until the end of those 2 years, so I cannot install GrapheneOS on it until ~2028. My free pixel 10 is sitting in its box gathering dust until 2028.<p>Here is a reddit thread discussing the trade-in promo as proof that it existed: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/tmobile/comments/1r0by30/pixel_10_free_with_any_condition_tradeins_is_this/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/tmobile/comments/1r0by30/pixel_10_f...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 05 Oct 2026 21:42:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49971258</link><dc:creator>tom_alexander</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49971258</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49971258</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tom_alexander in "Memory Companies Have Destroyed the Consumer Market"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You're suggesting gambling that Nvidia will start to fall within the next 3 months? That sounds like requiring perfect timing to me.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 29 Sep 2026 22:35:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49901734</link><dc:creator>tom_alexander</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49901734</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49901734</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tom_alexander in "Why do we need human mathematicians anymore?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> unless someone--a human--can verify and understand it, it doesn't count.<p>One counter-point: Humans have not figured out how general anesthesia works, but we use it every day to great effect.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theories_of_general_anaesthetic_action" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theories_of_general_anaestheti...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 21 Sep 2026 01:21:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49781957</link><dc:creator>tom_alexander</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49781957</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49781957</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tom_alexander in "Fuck it, make it anyway"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/twonks/posts/great-job-/1313065984315812/" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/twonks/posts/great-job-/13130659843...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 12 Sep 2026 23:31:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49678338</link><dc:creator>tom_alexander</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49678338</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49678338</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tom_alexander in "Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I use twine for the same reason. Dirt cheap. Lasts forever. Doesn't leave residue on your cables. The downside is I end up cutting the twine when I need to use the cable but a couple inches of twine in insignificant.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 10 Sep 2026 22:51:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49651204</link><dc:creator>tom_alexander</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49651204</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49651204</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tom_alexander in "Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Relevant comic expressing the same idea: <a href="https://www.facebook.com/twonks/posts/great-job-/1313065984315812/" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/twonks/posts/great-job-/13130659843...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 07 Sep 2026 03:09:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49593428</link><dc:creator>tom_alexander</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49593428</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49593428</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tom_alexander in "Don't Use a gmail.com Address"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Good suggestion! Fixed.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 06 Sep 2026 20:09:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49590373</link><dc:creator>tom_alexander</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49590373</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49590373</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tom_alexander in "Don't Use a gmail.com Address"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I have my own domain. I've been asked for my email, to which I replied "myname@foo.example" and they replied "myname@foo.example.com?".<p>edit: Changed domain based on ButlerianJihad's suggestion</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 06 Sep 2026 19:46:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49590146</link><dc:creator>tom_alexander</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49590146</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49590146</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tom_alexander in "Reflections on Americans' Net Worth"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> who the author is<p>The article has the author listed at the top. If you click on it, you'll see which university he works for. With his name and university, you can Google to find his wikipedia page.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Caplan" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Caplan</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:47:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49544613</link><dc:creator>tom_alexander</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49544613</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49544613</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tom_alexander in "Internet centralization and the original sin of NAT"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> If not for NAT, we'd all need a firewall<p>You still need a firewall regardless of NAT. Otherwise, every time you take your computer outside of your home, you're no longer protected. Any attacker or compromised device on your hotel, airport, or coffee shop wifi network would have direct access to your machine.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 31 Aug 2026 21:31:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49515064</link><dc:creator>tom_alexander</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49515064</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49515064</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tom_alexander in "Arbitrary code execution in QubesOS via copy-to-VM error reporting backchannel"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> being able to run different applications over Tor, VPN or plain internet simultaneously, the ability to isolate non-safe binaries and being able to backup your VMs easily.<p>These are all possible using light containers. For example, on FreeBSD I will spin up a jail which runs wireguard, and then I'll bridge that to another a jail. That 2nd jail is running entirely off wireguard without any other way to access the network. Since it is a jail, it is isolated. And backing up is as simple as a zfs snapshot and zfs send. I assume the same is possible on Linux.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 30 Aug 2026 13:42:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49498600</link><dc:creator>tom_alexander</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49498600</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49498600</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tom_alexander in "Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Because freedom isn't free!<p>But in all seriousness, "free as in freedom" seems fine to me but it is replacing the already unambiguous "free as in speech". You're still stuck with the sometimes-confusing "free as in beer" and they're still cumbersome compared to gratis/libre.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 25 Aug 2026 23:31:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49442155</link><dc:creator>tom_alexander</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49442155</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49442155</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tom_alexander in "What's new in Emacs 31.1"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> seeing how much of my old third-party config I can replace with builtins<p>There are projects that seek to do just that. I'd recommend taking a look at them to get an idea of whats possible with an almost-entirely-vanilla emacs setup.<p><pre><code>  Examples:
  https://codeberg.org/ashton314/emacs-bedrock
  https://github.com/LionyxML/emacs-solo</code></pre></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 25 Aug 2026 22:28:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49441559</link><dc:creator>tom_alexander</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49441559</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49441559</guid></item></channel></rss>