Yeah, the clicky installer is pretty nice and smooth, but I mention in the article why the clicky installer is not good enough for me to install VMs — you cannot customize/pre-load it, and I want to minimize the manual steps.
SuSE Linux (around since the 90s) had such a single-layer-manages-everything approach, so yes, it’s not a new concept.
I used to think that you don’t need Nix to get most of the benefits that Nix/NixOS are known for. And to a certain extent, that’s true — you can achieve much in other scenarios. But by now, I think the reason why Nix/NixOS work well and deliver these powerful abstractions is because they are Nix all the way down, giving you an unparalleled level of integration/reach for your declarative layer.
I agree that through the lens of “how much time do you save?”, automating a NixOS installation is not worth it. As you describe, it’s just a few interactive commands in the upstream installer.
But from the perspective of “how much effort is it to spin up a new VM for this new project / task?”, spending the extra few minutes on building the fully automated installation path is well worth it. Also consider the perspective of “how many steps does it take to recover this VM in a disaster scenario?”, where reducing the manual steps to a minimum is very helpful.
BTW, the maintenance of the installer is virtually free: The configuration I show is the configuration I use in NixOS as well, so that needs to be updated anyway. Aside from that, to rebase my installer from NixOS 24.11 to NixOS 25.05, I just changed a number. When setting up a new machine, I can either download the upstream installer and write it to a USB stick, or I can change a number, rebuild (< 2 minutes) and write to a USB stick. Really not much difference.
> Almost none of the packages the author listed get used, including zsh
Just to clarify: the point of having packages like lshw and zsh available is not for the case of performing the automated installation (where, yes, they are not used), but for the case where I want to interactively poke around in a booted installer to inspect the target system.
That's fair, having a remote shell environment that you feel comfortable to poke around is pretty great.
For git, you commented "for checking out github.com/stapelberg/configfiles". I wonder if you sometimes install NixOS locally from the installer? If so, I can understand having those packages around can be very useful.
I don’t know who todsacerdoti is, but looking at their submission history, it looks like this account automatically cross-posts from other sites (maybe lobsters?)
> I don’t know who todsacerdoti is, but looking at their submission history, it looks like this account automatically cross-posts from other sites (maybe lobsters?)
That's a pretty serious allegation to make without evidence.
Luckily I have some evidence right here:
~ $ python3 repost3.py todsacerdoti 78.0 seconds earlier - michael.stapelberg.ch - I like to install NixOS (declaratively) 92.0 seconds earlier - southcla.ws - Structured Errors in Go 149.0 seconds earlier - home.expurple.me - Why Use Structured Errors in Rust Applications? 101.0 seconds earlier - www.sitongpeng.com - WebSockets guarantee order – so why are my messages scram... 142.0 seconds earlier - volution.ro - PunchCard Key Backup 74.0 seconds earlier - www.youtube.com - Configure Your Git [video] 79.0 seconds earlier - download.vusec.net - Half Spectre, Full Exploit: Hardening Rowhammer Attacks w... 53567.0 seconds earlier - standardcompletions.org - Standard Completions 67.0 seconds earlier - bitfehler.srht.site - FOSS Tools for Infrastructure Testing 97.0 seconds earlier - ratfactor.com - Implementing a Forth
...
I checked afterwards, most of those articles have different authors on Lobsters, so it doesn't seem to be one person just funding cool stuff and submitting to both.
edit: some stats -
1 posts where HN is earlier within ten minutes
135 posts where HN is after within ten minutes
Earliest instance within ten minutes: 2025-05-10T16:00:53Z
Average time to repost: 140 seconds
@dang - I know the anti-spam countermeasures are secret, and that there may be good reasons for cross-posting, but perhaps this might be a good thing to check for abuse of (even as a cronjob).
todsacerdoti is a real person, we've been in contact with him, and after mulling it over several years ago (not for several years, but several years ago!) we decided that HN is better off with these submissions than without them. He has contributed many constructive and fascinating threads to HN.
In fact, IIRC I asked him to stop at one point (which he was totally fine with) and then changed my mind after looking closer, because many of these articles are so good for HN. Of course, when the author of an article also posts it (as was the case with the OP), or when some less prolific submitter posts it, then we want that person's post to "win", but this doesn't always happen.
I wonder if we could write some code to catch this when it does happen, and then maybe we could have the best of both worlds or at least a chunk of it.
> > They likely have other bots that remain undetected.
> Why is this 'likely'?
Is it more likely that a person that didn’t make the first bot also has a second that they didn’t make, or less likely? Is it more likely that a known bot user who has a working successful bot might make multiple bots in order to arrive at the working one we see, or less likely? I don’t think it’s likely that fully formed organisms would appear, but it could happen. I think evolution is more likely.
Of course it’s possible that they have been detected, and the acts simply attributed to others, or allowed under the same reasoning as the first.
We don’t need further evidence of generalities to determine that there was a distinct negative impact in this specific case. OP posted their original content and the automated poster got the karma. We don’t even need to understand how we got here to see that where we are isn’t where we thought we were or where we’d intended to end up.
Where do we go from here? To continue doing this would be walking in circles. Surely the users of HN deserve better. Bot posters ought to mark their accounts or posts as such, and HN should expose that information to the community, when definitively known, as in this case. Anything less would be a disservice to the community, although I’m open to being convinced otherwise. I just felt for OP, and one silver lining is that this post at least came good.
I don’t think that HN is hurting for posts or posters. In the same vein of fairness, I’d rather 100 bots banned than a single human poster sidelined by an automated system. We’re talking about a specific post and poster being scooped by a bot, and it’s happened before, and apparently will happen again, from the same automated poster.
What is the problem with this exactly? Seems like karma arbitrage, which just like regular arbitrage may feel weird but in the end it provides a service. As long as there’s no voting ring it sounds fine, no?
Bots are an incarnation of coordinated unauthentic behavior. You could instead have meat puppets typing off a script that is auto-generated and known to be unique output to the best of anyone's or anything's ability, and that wouldn't make the output any more authentic.
The intent of your transmission matters, as well as the effects of it on the listener and the wider broadcast environment. Violate norms of airspace usage at your own discretion (and peril).
I'm sure he'd prefer that, but doing so would associate my email with my username (which I'd prefer to avoid), and it was demonstrably unnecessary, at least in this case.
Ah, good to know. I was asking on behalf of a hypothetical person that didn’t have one, if it were necessary. I appreciate that you did the work. The sad part is I think this discussion about this user came up before.
This whole situation feels like fake users on digg/reddit but on HN. What a sham. It’s all the more sad when the actual creator gets scooped/buried. Instead of moving comments and discussion to the actual OP’s thread, we favor the bot user.
As dang wrote in reply you, and echoing conversations I have had with him:
> Of course, when the author of an article also posts it (as was the case with the OP), or when some less prolific submitter posts it, then we want that person's post to "win", but this doesn't always happen.
> I wonder if we could write some code to catch this when it does happen, and then maybe we could have the best of both worlds or at least a chunk of it.
Why is anyone worried about the best of both worlds, if the worst of both worlds isn’t willing to be addressed vigorously, because that’s the reality we already find ourselves in?
If these posts are somehow better for HN than then alternative, then we should have some idea of what success or the ideal case looks like, or talk of what could be done to solve the negative externalities rings hollow when it still isn’t done years later, as this scripted behavior has been running for years now. Karma sharing still is DOA, and would be much less necessary to begin with if we didn’t have what are essentially karma front runners and karma police on behalf of capital (not directed at dang personally or HN specifically, but HN is backed by capital so let’s not beat around the bush).
It’s a matter of priorities, and how they translate into success of the community. When individuals are favored when doing things that would be disallowed if they became a norm, at the harm of the users doing the work, on a site run by capital investors, it becomes a bit silly to steelman the case for HN, but I hope you can see I’m doing my best here.
If HN is better with the posts than without, then allow users to mark their accounts or posts as bots, like on Twitter/X? Perhaps such markings should be mandatory under the guidelines? I’m sure there are other ways to balance the incentives here, and I’m sure others also have ideas. The status quo on HN apparently of allowing special good boy users to farm karma isn’t a good result when it leaves original content posted by the creator left out in the cold.
Generated comments are already against HN guidelines, and generated posts ought to be as well, for the same reasons. I come to HN to see posts made by humans, not bots. I can go literally anywhere else for bot slop. This situation is untenable.
We’re all bots with extra steps if all we care about is intent. Effects of human and bot actions matter arguably even more than intent for a site like HN.
If the intent is to allow the very large and very obvious karma farming that we know about to prevent the greater ill of karma farming we don’t know about, then dang should just come out and say that.
(We since merged the thread and re-upped your submission. We try to favor the author's own post if there is one, and otherwise the one that came first, but it's all pretty ad hoc and depends on what we happen to see.)
Not visible to me. Probably because of the Guidelines: „Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.“
> It isn't clear to me but is the author indicating that Linux kernel support for 2.5GbE is still early stages, would it be better to wait a while before getting a motherboard with 2.5?
If you want to play it safe, waiting longer before buying new hardware is always a good strategy. As I wrote, though, aside from needing a new firmware package, I did not notice any issues with the 2.5G support in the end.
> There's a diff being presented between two lshw outputs? How is that diff shown?
I ran lshw > lshw-intel-285k-asrock.txt when I used the ASRock board and lshw > lshw-intel-285k-asus.txt when I used the ASUS board. Then I ran diff -u lshw-intel-285k-asrock.txt lshw-intel-285k-asus.txt and copy&pasted (parts of) the output into the blog post.
Thanks for the advice. I try switching to Wayland every year, but it has never worked without heavy graphics artifacts / flickering / glitches on any of my machines (I use an nVidia GPU so that I can drive my Dell UP3218K monitor).
Meanwhile, X11 works really well for me. No tearing, no artifacts, no breakages on upgrades. Really can’t complain.
Yes, I didn’t want to analyze and compare different solutions, I just wanted to share the joy of finding a solution that works well for me.
Using hot keys is nice, but hot keys (intentionally) don’t work while my screen is locked. I contemplated mapping an xrandr call onto a smart button (Shelly Button 1, essentially triggering an HTTP request), but in the end grobi has the same effect and is even more convenient than having to press buttons.
