cyphax (u/cyphax) - Readit News

cyphax commented on Easily run Windows software on Linux with Bottles usebottles.com/... · Posted by u/doener

> Run Windows in a Bottle. Easily run Windows software on Linux with Bottles!

What does it even mean?

Is it somehow related to Gnome Boxes?

cyphax · 24 days ago

It's not related to Gnome Boxes. It is an application that makes using Wine easier and more robust. The statement means to say that it allows you to run Windows applications inside an isolated environment (a "bottle").

cyphax commented on .NET 10 Preview 6 brings JIT improvements, one-shot tool execution infoworld.com/article/402... · Posted by u/breve

sergiotapia · a month ago

I haven't used C#/.NET since .NET 4 - I remember it was great, yet heavily tied into Visual Studio, and forget about using CLI for things like most other languages. It was all GUI or nothing. Insurmountable XML files.

How are things these days with .NET 10! Jesus, 10!

Dudes who use it daily, what is your favorite feature you think?

cyphax · a month ago

My favorite feature, especially considering the past of "heavily tied into Visual Studio" is the platform independent nature of (most of) "modern" dotnet. That is to say, I run Fedora on my laptop, and I do not want Windows, yet I don't feel like a second class citizen and dotnet runs well and is available from repositories that Microsoft provides for various Linux distributions (it just hit me how strange this is, for _Microsoft_ to offer official repositories for Linux operating systems...).

I also really like that its development is fairly open (it's on github). From a more technical point of view, I think C# is a slightly better Java. A pretty nice language overall. It's not gui-or-nothing with dotnet core so it's not too difficult to create workflows for ci/cd pipelines, although the .net framework solutions we still have aren't too much harder to script: msbuild is pretty capable.

cyphax commented on Ask HN: Is your company forcing use of AI? · Posted by u/ciwolex

cyphax · 2 months ago

I work at a small web company (.net based, Netherlands) and we're just experimenting with it. We have a paid copilot subscription, but nothing about it is mandatory in any way. But this place is conservative in the sense that self hosting is the norm and cloud services like Azure or even github (we self host Gitea) are not, other than MS 365 for Teams and e-mail.

cyphax commented on XSLT – Native, zero-config build system for the Web github.com/pacocoursey/xs... · Posted by u/_kush

cyphax · 2 months ago

In my first job, when .net didn't yet exist, xml + xslt was the templating engine we used for html and (html) e-mail and sometimes csv. I'd write queries in sql server using "for xml" and it would output all data needed for a page and feed it to an xsl template (all server side) which would output html. Microsoft had a caching xsl parser that would result in less than 10ms to load such a page. Up until we though "hey, let's start using xml namespaces, that sounds like a good idea!". Was a bit less fun after that! Looking back it was a pretty good stack, and it would still work fine today imho. I never started disliking it, but after leaving that job I never wrote another stylesheet.

cyphax commented on A kernel developer plays with Home Assistant lwn.net/SubscriberLink/10... · Posted by u/pabs3

rurban · 4 months ago

I tried to install it on a raspi 4 with touchscreen for my wife. The raspi worked fine with Debian, esp. it's installer asks for the wifi and ssh keys, and therefore you can trivially connect to it.

Not so with the homeassistant installer. No wifi setup, no ssh access at all. You really need to cable it, nmap the new IP, and then I got stuck because the web server doesn't show up. Attaching the keyboard brought me into a restricted ha> prompt, where I cannot fix anything.

So far it's horrible

cyphax · 4 months ago

If you type "login" at the ha> prompt, you'll get a root shell.

This is something I also had to accept about HA. It runs in a VM in my case so it worked out-of-the-box, but you don't just ssh to it after installing it, and the ha> prompt is just a bit different. So far, it hasn't been in the way, although it occasionally takes time to find out how to do things.

It's very flexible though, and apart from devices in your house there are many outside sources of data to use, like weather data, sun elevation or trash pickup dates. The HA app on your phone gives you many sensors usable in a flow. The time spent on it usually results in something worthy of that time, in my experience.

cyphax commented on Can Earth's rotation generate power? Physicists divided over controversial claim nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/qnleigh

nyc111 · 5 months ago

No, it was a serious question. Does anything that rotates create a magnetic field even if it is not an electrical material?

cyphax · 5 months ago

In case of Earth, Wikipedia describes [1] it as being "[..] generated by electric currents due to the motion of convection currents of a mixture of molten iron and nickel in Earth's outer core". This makes Earth a geodynamo [2]. (The aforementioned Wikipedia page is actually really long and detailed, a lot more than I would have thought)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_magnetic_field [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamo_theory

cyphax commented on My new POWER Indigo 2 thejpster.org.uk/blog/blo... · Posted by u/ingve

porcoda · 9 months ago

One thing I miss from that era of machines was just the way they looked: at the time, most machines were grey or black boxes, but the SGIs had some degree of personality to them. The O2's were fun little curvy boxes. One of my favorites were the large rack systems - one of my jobs had us working with the Origin 2000 and PowerChallenge machines. Compared to some of the generic clusters of rack mounted Alpha systems that we had around the same time, the SGIs just had a cool look to them.

cyphax · 9 months ago

They had their own startup sounds, too (at least the machines I have). And it wasn't just the machines; peripherals (mouse, keyboard, monitor) had this nice looking texture on them as well. They were definitely cool back in the days!

cyphax commented on Ask HN: Why is .NET never talked about as an option for solo/small team dev? · Posted by u/mnk47

jinushaun · a year ago

I used to work at a .NET shop. The reason I wouldn’t personally use .NET is MS lock-in. Open source is basically non-existent. Documentation is really bad for getting anything done in a headless way. I don’t enjoy Remote Desktop or running Windows in the cloud.

And while .NET is batteries included like Rails, I just don’t enjoy using it. The docs and frameworks aren’t written for nimble startups, but slow-moving enterprise companies. I know modern C# allows me to code like Ruby/Python/JS, but all the docs are written like 1990s Java. And the frameworks are designed that way too.

cyphax · a year ago

.Net has been (_almost_) entirely open source for years now. The whole closed source and Windows-bound .Net Framework is a legacy thing of the past now, since .Net Core (which is now named .Net) everything but the debugger is open source. It's all on GitHub. You can do all your C# development on Linux nowadays, too, with VSCode or Rider.

cyphax commented on Silicon Graphics Indigo 2 Workstation [video] youtube.com/watch?v=1PP--... · Posted by u/doener

cyphax · a year ago

I love these work stations. Many (15+) years ago I used an Indy like a sort of dumb terminal, using X forwarding. It was very cool to use an application like a modern Firefox on such an old Unix installation even if it really ran remotely. It worked quite well remoting from a modern Ubuntu computer. I still have the Indy (and a small assortment of other old SGI machines, including 2 Indigo 2s), reviving these machines is on my bucket/todo list. This video sure makes me want to grab one (the Indigo mostly) and get all nerdy. Would love to see more!

cyphax commented on Oracle Java license teams set to begin targeting unknowing Oracle users theregister.com/2024/06/2... · Posted by u/cempaka

cess11 · a year ago

The only thing that comes close is .NET, and that's MICROS~1. On the timescales in my business that's not an option, they can't be trusted to not act like Oracle does and they are deeply ingrained into important libraries in that "ecosystem".

Rumour has it that there is some PDF/A capable library for .NET, but I would have to put in quite some time to figure out if it is low level enough for the control I need and whether there are additional libraries suited for layout and typography. Since I might have to ditch it within five years, that's not an option.

Some people claim .NET developer ergonomics on Linux are fine now, but those I know personally that tells me this are using VSCode, which I consider a rather shoddy piece of software. Am I going to take the time and see if it's the case? Fiddle around with IntelliJ plugins and try to setup a LSP for vim and whatnot? Nope, I won't, because there is no revenue in that, and I might suddenly have to do the great rewrite several times at once further down the line.

Maven is a turd, but a very solid one when you've figured out the XML incantation you need. I'm not sure what the alternatives are in .NET-land, or whether I can feel that I trust that they will work fine in ten years, like fifteen year old Maven projects tend to do. GraalVM allows me to output neat executables too.

Java has Wildfly. What's the equivalent in .NET? Running a MICROS~1 Windows Server with IIS? That's not an option.

And so on and so on.

cyphax · a year ago

> The only thing that comes close is .NET, and that's MICROS~1. On the timescales in my business that's not an option, they can't be trusted to not act like Oracle does and they are deeply ingrained into important libraries in that "ecosystem".

Many libraries and/or frameworks come from companies you could argue cannot be trusted (Meta, Google...) but do you shy away from anything they produce and stick to something developed independently somehow? In the case of .Net: it has been around for a long time, and it has changed drastically. It was closed source, Windows-only and it wasn't sleek. Then they rebooted the whole thing into .Net Core. Open source, platform independent, much thinner, development in the open.

> Some people claim .NET developer ergonomics on Linux are fine now, but those I know personally that tells me this are using VSCode, which I consider a rather shoddy piece of software.

My personal experiences with VSCode and the recent C# extensions have been fine for small projects, but if that's not your thing, there's also JetBrains' Rider, which I have very good experiences with as well.

> Maven is a turd, but a very solid one when you've figured out the XML incantation you need. I'm not sure what the alternatives are in .NET-land, or whether I can feel that I trust that they will work fine in ten years, like fifteen year old Maven projects tend to do.

The package manager aspect is Nuget in the .Net ecosystem. It's easier than Maven in the sense that you can control it from your IDE or from the command line, instead of having to edit your pom.xml or the .Net equivalent (which has one extra layer when compared to Maven; solutions containing projects).

> Java has Wildfly. What's the equivalent in .NET? Running a MICROS~1 Windows Server with IIS? That's not an option. The equivalent in .Net is Kestrel, which is part of ASP.Net, and can run on Linux. It's a little less work to setup than Wildfly (which is not a lot of work either) because it's bundled.

> And so on and so on. It's surely not for everyone but I think Microsoft has taken a great turn with it after the "reset". Is it going to be like this forever? I don't know, but looking at the past, at the direction Microsoft has taken it, I think it's gotten much better.

Of course, I wouldn't advocate rewriting your Java-based softwarescape into .Net (or the other way around) lightly, way too expensive and Java will probably get the job done.