Hacker News: zeruch

New comment by zeruch in "American capitalism is run by millionaires, not billionaires"

zeruch — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:52:28 +0000

" It's so boring the kids are still complaining about people who have more money than them" That's not what they are complaining about; they are complaining about them rigging the system further in their favor to the detriment of everyone else.

There is a crucial difference there, and history easily explains why if one bothers.

New comment by zeruch in "Italy's Bending Spoons, owner of AOL and Vimeo, files for Nasdaq IPO"

zeruch — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 20:48:07 +0000

I worked at SugarCRM for years. It's often easier than one suspects once you figured out what a customer pain points are and show them a less burdensome solve. Most businesses do not need the kitchen sink approach of SFDC or SAP, they just have rarely had that demo'd to them.

New comment by zeruch in "Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training"

zeruch — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 19:41:00 +0000

"Companies have shown us that IP going to AI providers is acceptable" This is where I'm expecting future collision; you can't both value IP for it's training value, and yet devalue it for the actual sources of IP (people owning their own likenesses or orgs collecting data from their own activity)

It's going to cause a major break at some point, probably sooner than later.

New comment by zeruch in "Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training"

zeruch — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 19:39:43 +0000

This is....ridiculous. Does Meta also capture it's CEOs movements with such fidelity?

New comment by zeruch in "Fixing a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16"

zeruch — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 03:55:06 +0000

I still have my Sony Vaio from that period. Its on a shelf covered in stickers and signatures (e.g. Illiad, ESR, Commander Taco/Hemos, etc) as a kind of keepsake, since I suspect it wouldn't even boot up after so many years of not being used.

What an utterly strange epoch.

New comment by zeruch in "Fixing a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16"

zeruch — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 03:52:12 +0000

"It's a delicious irony that E is now a super-lightweight system compared with the mainstream environments" Absolutely.

New comment by zeruch in "Fixing a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16"

zeruch — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 06:31:19 +0000

The amount of abuse I hurled at Carsten Haitzler (Raster) during our time at VA Linux (where he worked on E as well as other stuff) was a complete sitcom unto itself; at one point he debated making a "zeruch insult generator" just to streamline the verbal abuse process.

I loved using the environment but would regularly harangue him for being glib on resource usage. It really was otherwise very ahead of the curve.

New comment by zeruch in "Got kicked out of uni and had the cops called for a social media website I made"

zeruch — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 02:22:13 +0000

"A society unable to tolerate deviance from the norm, is a society that will fail to adapt to inevitable changes to the norm" I feel the same way about societies that continue to fail lessons of history and repeat the same damaging (and often easily avoided) idiocy.

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

zeruch — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 01:51:55 +0000

Nobody of a certain age. If you are over 35 you'll remember when they were known as a Chinese firm buying up all of the IBM Thinkpad business...

New comment by zeruch in "GNU Hurd Is "Almost There" with x86_64, SMP and ~75% of Debian Packages Building"

zeruch — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 23:36:42 +0000

Hurd is long past ever being anything but a pet project of RMS and his familiars.

New comment by zeruch in "The last supported version of HP-UX is no more"

zeruch — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 20:33:58 +0000

Xenix was worse, but only a little. Both it and HPUS were atrocities.

New comment by zeruch in "The last supported version of HP-UX is no more"

zeruch — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 20:33:26 +0000

Good riddance. Of all the Unix variants I tried over the years, HP-UX was the second worst (that dishonor goes to Xenix).

I remember giving a talk at Chico State University back in the dotcom era, and got a tour of the CS dept; they had various systems running on Solaris, AIX, etc, all with "normal" naming conventions. But anything with HPUX was named after diseases (e.g. Typhus, Malaria) and the feeling in the dept was not subtle.

New comment by zeruch in "Ask HN: Why isn't there competition to LinkedIn yet?"

zeruch — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 23:42:58 +0000

Network effects and an as-yet insufficient friction to leave en masse has kept LI in a semi-moated space.

There have been competitors, but they are either niche (Zerply) or more regionally specific (Xing, with its focus on following EU data sovereignty laws) or the latest trend, AI-enabled agentic recruitment, which as yet has no real track record.

New comment by zeruch in "VA Linux: The biggest dotcom IPO"

zeruch — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 02:23:05 +0000

Which college?

New comment by zeruch in "VA Linux: The biggest dotcom IPO"

zeruch — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 02:22:40 +0000

Vera-Augustin, the two founders.

New comment by zeruch in "VA Linux: The biggest dotcom IPO"

zeruch — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 02:21:45 +0000

"but I got the impression that their server line was just as important."

They were far more important for the business.

New comment by zeruch in "VA Linux: The biggest dotcom IPO"

zeruch — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 02:21:23 +0000

They did. I actually worked on a few of those projects (e.g. Stampede Linux)

One of these days I should blog about how we ended up hosting Python for years...

New comment by zeruch in "VA Linux: The biggest dotcom IPO"

zeruch — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 02:20:22 +0000

1. I have some serious biases against Penguin at the time (for...reasons) and frankly was never impressed with their product. 2. Without getting into a bunch of weird minutiae, we got big enough to be a threat to people who could afford to bleed us; case in point, we started doing incredibly well in HPC clusters, and big vendors like IBM and Dell started to offer severely below cost hardware packaged with their full services that completely undercut a business that already had thin margins.

IMHO, we made better gear at the time, but we were not in a market as wide and deep for linux optimized machines as it is now. It's not an unusual story in the valley. We did have a deep talent bench that ended up in key roles in a bunch of firms that are doing well: Google, Apple, et al.

New comment by zeruch in "VA Linux: The biggest dotcom IPO"

zeruch — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 02:15:53 +0000

Reddit was contemporary to Digg, it just survived 'better'

New comment by zeruch in "VA Linux: The biggest dotcom IPO"

zeruch — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 07:22:31 +0000

They didn't evolve into SF; SF was a project inside of VA that eventually became the flagship of what remained after the hardware and related services were excised. When they started (1998/99), Git wasn't a viable option (the first version of it wasn't released until 2005, by which point SF had ballooned to an enormous scale at the time, with it's own product inertia, and it would be a few more years before Git would become a major VCS itself, which is when Github started, and by then VA/SF was in decline and had changed hands several times.

(disclosure: I was on the "Ignition team" for SF)