Feel free to email me at hn [AT] clobberella [DOT] com
I occasionally blog at blog.tombert.com.
NOTE: While it's not too hard to find personal information about me, and I don't even have a problem with you doing that, I do ask that you refrain from posting anything about it in reply to my comments. I don't want a strong correlation between my real name and my HN content.
My opinions are my own and do not reflect any views or positions of my employer.
When I had appendicitis seven years ago, I went to the emergency room, found out I would need surgery, and was (I think understandably) scared.
I texted a friend about that while I was waiting and he, trying to make me feel better, said something like "Dude, appendectomies are pretty routine, there's probably like a 99% survival rate" for them.
That that did not make me feel better. If I asked you to guess a number between 1 and 100, and you guessed corrected, I would only be a little impressed. 1 in 100 things happen all the time!
Obviously, I didn't die, and it worked out pretty routinely, but I always think about that particular situation when I hear about things being "98% successful".
I think it is much simpler than what you’re describing.
Executive at BigCo does something bad. Normally people would report this to police and/or regulatory agency. Instead the company investigates itself to pretend they’re doing their due diligence so that there is a paper record, but with no intention of actually surfacing anything to the police.
I'd rather things like sexual assault get directly reported to the police instead of having people directly paid by the accused LARPing as investigators, yes.
I mean I don't think it's unfair to say that most of the battle-tested encryption is "uncrackable enough" for the consumer.
If you're working for the NSA you need to worry about these things being cracked, obviously, but for the "I don't want a scammer to buy my laptop and get my social security number" situation, I think that you really can just assume that LUKS is uncrackable.
That said, it takes like five minutes to boot a live Linux flash drive and run fdisk to delete the partitions and/or install Mint or something over the existing data, so I don't really see any reason not to do it, even if it's not strictly necessary.
I feel like that is exactly what happens for anything but the most serious crimes. Keep in mind, a lot of internal investigations are not reported to the public and we never hear about them. Part of the reason that they're "internal" is so that they stay internal; we only hear about ones that leak.
Even for very serious crimes (e.g. sexual harassment or assault) these internal investigations end up being "sufficient", and the police don't bother.
The issue is that an internal investigation is not an impartial source.
I agree, in this hypothetical if there's no evidence the that the CEO committed a crime he/she shouldn't go to jail. But considering that "internal investigators" are likely hired (directly or indirectly) by the CEO, are likely shareholders in the company, they have little incentive to fully investigate.
The police certainly aren't perfect, but they at least have less of an incentive to lie about this.
The only reason that I do the disk encryption is so that I don't have to worry about people going through my laptop to steal tax documents and/or credit card stuff when I sell the laptop. I of course also wipe the laptop too, but I figure that if the data is encrypted at the drive level then there's very little risk of anyone being able to use some kind of forensics tool and recover data.
I don't necessarily disagree, but I am curious as to why you think that? What makes NT a "better kernel for consumers". I have some opinions on that but I don't want to bias your answer.
I mean, sure. OR, we just treat the Win32/Win64 API as the standard ABI for cross-platform stuff (that can't easily be done in the web with WASM) and then use Wine/Proton. Then everything is FOSS and portable and free and doesn't have a bunch of tracking bullshit.
I feel like with gaming this is more or less becoming the reality. Disregarding online gaming [1], a lot of games are being written for "Windows" and being played on Linux. In reality, I think that a lot of newer games are kind of being written with Proton as the target, and the fact that they work on Windows is incidental.
[1] Which I know you can't fully "disregard" but I don't think it kills my point.
Yep, exactly the same experience as me. The fact that everything is declarative and revertible means that I'm much "braver" than I would be with virtually any other Linux.
An example I have given before, but there was a weird quirk with my ThinkPad with Linux, where with USB keyboards, if I hadn't been typing for more than a minute, it would have to "wake up" for about four seconds, so I'd lose the first couple words that I was typing.
Fixing this involved playing with a few boot parameters, which can be scary to play with on something like Ubuntu. The issue is annoying, but nothing I can't live with, so if I were on Ubuntu or something I probably would have just tried to live with it, but because it's NixOS, I realized that the worst case scenario is that I reboot and choose an older generation, so I did a few experiments with boot parameters and fixed it.
I really wanted the official Ubuntu phone to catch on. I gave to the IndieGoGo for it but sadly it wasn't funded, so I installed Ubuntu mobile on a different old phone (a OnePlus One I think?) like a decade ago.
I thought it was very cool. It felt a lot more like a "computer that I could use as a smartphone" than a "smartphone with some computer stuff". I thought the interface was clean and nice and it was fun to hack on.
I really should buy a compatible phone and play with it again...I'm sure they've done a lot of work on it.
Yeah, and I think they made it seem like it was going to be this revolutionary FPS, when it was basically a "B average" one. If you go in with basically no expectations to the PC version, I actually do think it can be a bit fun. It has a late-90s/early-2000's charm that I still find appealing.
The N64 version is irredeemably bad, but in 2026 I don't really see any reason to play the N64 version.
Agreed that the "John Romero is about to make you his bitch" was a pretty questionable marketing strategy. I guess it did get peoples' attention, but I don't think it was the attention that they wanted.
I also stalked Scott Miller from Apogee Software to ask him how accurate Masters of Doom was, and he told me to checkout the book "Shareware Heroes", as he claims it's more accurate [1]. I still haven't read it but that's the next thing I plan on reading.
I do find it amusing, since I really don't think Daikatana is that bad. It's not great, but at least with the PC version I think there's some fun to be had. It was just way over-budget and overhyped with an extremely questionable marketing campaign. Also, the GBC version is a legitimately pretty decent game.
Deus Ex is of course much better, but to be fair most games fall short of Deus Ex.
One of my favorite non-fiction books is Masters of Doom. I have no idea how accurate it is, but I did leave with the impression that John Carmack is an amazingly smart guy, who also has the potential to be a colossal asshole.
I was only five when Quake came out, so obviously I couldn't really have worked on it, but I'm pretty sure that (if Masters of Doom is to be believed) I would have probably told Carmack to go fuck himself about midway through the project. Quake is my favorite FPS from that era, and my favorite id game in general, but it sounded like a pain in the ass to work on.
> When using draw.io I’d suggest exporting to PDF instead of PNG so you keep it as vector graphics.
I had trouble getting that working (admittedly years ago) and as long as you have a high enough resolution people can't really tell a difference between it and SVG, though obviously it will make the filesize bigger.
Just tried the text nodes and indeed the arrows work. I guess I would also suggest doing the same for regular shapes.
Tangential, but how has the publishing process been for Typst?
I'm looking to write a paper on a recent project, but most of the places I've seen to submit has asked for TeX. I greatly prefer Typst because of the ridiculously fast compilation times but I haven't used it for anything outside of school assignments do to that restriction.
I know people like it, but I hate writing TikZ manually, to the point that I've mostly moved most of my technical-ish drawings to draw.io/diagrams.net, and then just export to a PNG. I feel like it's inelegant, but it works well enough and it's easy to make something that looks ok. Generally I'm all for text-defined stuff.
I have moved some of my stuff to Mermaid when I know my stuff is going to live in Markdown but I've not tried to get that working in TeX.
That said, I would like to use TikZ just because it's kind of the idiomatic way of doing diagrams in LaTeX, so a WYSIWYG might be useful.
One suggestion, I would like the arrows to be able to "attach" to the boxes, as in the arrow endpoints can move when you move the boxes. That's how draw.io does it.
Feel free to email me at hn [AT] clobberella [DOT] com
I occasionally blog at blog.tombert.com.
NOTE: While it's not too hard to find personal information about me, and I don't even have a problem with you doing that, I do ask that you refrain from posting anything about it in reply to my comments. I don't want a strong correlation between my real name and my HN content.
My opinions are my own and do not reflect any views or positions of my employer.
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