Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | more andrehacker's commentslogin

Yes, kind of...

/path/to/firefox --window-size 1700 --headless -screenshot myfile.png file://myfile.html

Easy, right ?

Used this for many years... but beware:

- caveat 1: this is (or was) a more or less undocumented function and a few years ago it just disappeared only to come back in a later release.

- caveat 2: even though you can convert local files it does require internet access as any references to icons, style sheets, fonts and tracker pixels cause Firefox to attempt to retrieve them without any (sensible) timeout. So, running this on a server without internet access will make the process hang forever.


It.. depends.

Historically NFS has had many flaws on different O/S-es. Many of these issues appear to have been resolved over time and I have not seen it being referred to as "Nightmare File System" for decades.

However, depending on many factors NFS may still be a bad choice. In our setup, for example, using a large SQLite database through NFS turns out to be up to 10 times as slow as using a "real" disk.

The SQLite FAQs warn about bigger problems than slowness: https://www.sqlite.org/faq.html#q5


So there's nothing wrong with NFS: people just remember old, buggy implementations. Do you think TernFS is somehow with these old bugs?


It sounds like you're saying it use to be bad (fair enough) and there are use cases where it's bad (also fair enough). But I feel like that describes most software as it goes through growing pains and people figure out where it's useful.


That is an excellent recommendation. For Operating Systems anything Andy Tanenbaum did is world class.

This made me look up what he has been up to, there is a 2023 edition of "Modern Operating Systems" which covers cloud virtualization and Android along with everything that came before, hm, tempting.


We really need a Tech Writer Hall of Fame. W. Richard Stevens, Andrew Tanenbaum, P.J. Plauger. Others?


Kernighan!


And how can we leave out the OG of tech writers: Donald Knuth. He got a bit distracted by developing TeX but he got a well deserved Turing award for the series.


I thought the same but then I realized the post is from 2014, so maybe not at the time


As every other thread about LLMs here on HN points out: LLMs are stupid and useless as is. While I don't agree with that sentiment, no company has yet found a way to "do it right" to the extent that investments are justified in the long run. Apple has a history of "being late" and then obliterating the competition with products that are way ahead the early adopters (e.g. MP3 players, smart phones, smart watches).


Yes, Vision Pro has really solved VR.


It has saved the world from future attempts.


I agreed with that for a bit... and then out of nowhere came Apple Silicon, incredible specs, incredible backward compatibility, nah, Cook is no dummy.


He's obviously one of the smartest humans on the planet, but he does seem to lack the ability to force new technologies into existence. He's just cranking the dial on all the KPI's of existing products. Which is an incredibly powerful skill to have, it's just a different skill than what jobs had.


I agree. From what I have seen in corporate settings, using anything more than GET/POST takes the time to deploy the API to a different level. Using UPDATE, PATCH etc. typically involves firewall changes that may take weeks or months to get approved and deployed followed a never ending audit/re-justification process.


For those who experienced the short but intense “mashup” mania in the early 2000’s where web applications were supposed to be easily coupled and chained ? Will MCP ecosystems fail for the same reasons (too many changes in APIs, monetization and security barriers ?)


Sorry man, there never was a second “Matrix” nor a third.


what about the fourth with the gender bend twist? I guess the meme is older than the fourth movie, but I rarely see it even get mentioned let alone memefied. I guess less people would know tetralogy instead of trilogy, at least, I had to look up what a series of 4 would be.


The first film was groundbreaking. It matched "Star Wars" and "Lord of the Rings" in terms of its cultural penetration. Unfortunately the series failed to live past that strong debut. The second and third films were a total letdown, and The Animatrix only appealed to a niche audience and was itself a mixed bag.

The surprising and unsolicited fourth film had some promise in the first third of the film - I loved how it subverted expectations and was a meta deconstruction of the series itself. After the provocative and almost blasphemous setup, the film quickly devolved into poor action, weird pacing, and overall bad plot and character arcs. In a word, it felt senile. (The action shouldn't have been that bad with Keanu helming John Wick. It was just laziness.) The denouement was just same-y slop we see in every other dialed in action movie. Such a letdown for such a shocking cold open.

If you haven't seen the fourth film, it's a bit of a mind fuck. But turn it off the minute the reveal is over. That part is a treat, but it isn't worth your time otherwise.


>The first film was groundbreaking. It matched "Star Wars" and "Lord of the Rings" in terms of its cultural penetration. Unfortunately the series failed to live past that strong debut. The second and third films were a total letdown, and The Animatrix only appealed to a niche audience and was itself a mixed bag.

I dunno, I feel like people had erased the entire film up to the lobby scene. It has frontloaded pacing issues. The sequels were 100% studio, but they were solid films in their own right.


Star Wars and The Matrix anre great examples of over-explaining removing mystery and undermining your world building.


> over-explaining removing mystery and undermining your world building.

This! Spending too long in a fictional universe waters it down. The trimmings of imagination are best when used sparingly. If you reveal too much, the magic ceases to work.


yeah, telling me about midichlorians and using some scientology reading of them just killed it for me.


not just the midichlorians, but the fact that every little knob and lever in an x-wing or on your blaster has an explanation of what they do. every single alien you saw in Mos Eisley eventually got an official name and canonical backstory (not to mention the small-world effect where it just so happens that most of those backstories intersect with the same small handful of important people).

so it's no longer a world where your imagination can run wild, it's a world where pedantic nerds get to tell you "you're wrong. here's the actual answer". and it's not even that the "actual" answers are necessarily bad... it's just the fact there is an answer at all removes some of the magic


And that every extra gets their own story; the random slave that Jabba kills is mostly forgettable but apparently in the extended universe, she survives, is or becomes a jedi and becomes Luke Skywalker's wife ???

It really feels like they have absorbed fanfiction into the mainline series. The Star Wars sequels had potential after the first film, but since it seems they had no idea what they were doing the second and third were a waste. The very intentionally placed marketable plushies did not help.

The Hobbit could have been fine, but they botched the production, had to pull in Peter Jackson to try and save it, they made it a cynical cash grab with forcing it to become a trilogy with unrelated story and made-up plotlines put in. Rings of Power was completely unnecessary and I have zero intention to watch it.

In hindsight, the Matrix sequels were actually alright. For one thing they pushed the technology (and budgets) of filmmaking forwards, with the big gun suits vs the tentacle robots segment costing more than most films that had been made up until then.


That kind on detail can be great for the writers, because it can keep things in sync.

But for the enjoyers, most of it should only be “glimpses of mountains far-off”.


Though you have to admit this was funny...

Ponda Baba's bad day:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbSixPMrT2o


Much of the appeal of star wars is that things actually looked like they had purpose and function despite being a purely imaginative future.

> every single alien you saw in Mos Eisley eventually got an official name and canonical backstory (

This is such a weird meme. I suppose if you looked up every single story ever published referencing star wars you might be able to come up with names for most of them, but if you don't want to, why are you putting in the effort?

I'm not usually a fan of "don't engage with it!" defenses, but we're not talking abouy ignoring one movie out of a trilogy, we're talking about not deliberately searching out obscure fan fiction.

Beyond that, the people in the cantina should have names, because that's what "real people" have, and this is supposed to be a movie about a reality like ours that just happens to have spaceships and spacemagic.

In a universe with literally trillions of sentient beings, spaceships and literal magic, if your imagingation is lacking magic, I think that's on you.


The second/third ones never really captured the magic of the first - part of that is because of the refreshing world building.

The rest of the trilogy felt... a bit self-indulgent for lack of a better description. Everything from the "When Harry Met Sally scene" with the drink to the interminably long fight scene with every possible "martial arts" weapon - I found myself rolling my eyes even as a teenager.

I haven't seen the most recent one. Like Star Wars, I sort of lost interest with the whole franchise.


>subverted expectations ... meta deconstruction

Anytime these words are written or spoken it is time to run.


I suspect this is an age thing. The older I get the more I appreciate stories that surprise me.


I agree, but not just for the sake of it. Often it feels like a cheap "twist".

A well made craft still excels.


I feel like hardly anyone even know that a fourth exists, let alone seen it. Didn't it come out during COVID? I watched it because I had a home cinema at the time. The thing I hated the most was how it looked more like a YouTube video than a movie. Something just wasn't right and made it feel very much like fanfiction. I've completely forgotten the story but remember it was unsurprising given the more recent developments of the Wachowskis.


> I've completely forgotten the story but remember it was unsurprising given the more recent developments of the Wachowskis.

I think you mean recent developments at WB. The movie was a self-parody, describing in painful detail the demands from the studio for a sequel Matrix movi- er, "game", even when the creator was so over it.


Indeed. It was pretty much a parody — only not as funny as such usually are.

They should have went all the way and replaced Keanu Reeves with Charlie Sheen. At least Hot Shots had humor…


I'm totally going to watch the fifth one when it comes out but fully expect to be heavily disappointed.


There's going to be a fifth one?


Eh... I feel like they have aged better over time than a lot of 'trilogies'. They do not measure up to the original but they aren't truly terrible, at least if you're looking at them from a more philosophical standpoint.


Reloaded may have been passable as a standalone film (if not seen as a disappointing sequel by comparison to the original).

Revolutions was (IMO) terrible standalone or as a sequel. It felt like more of a CGI-heavy cash-in on the series than anything else.


I thought Reloaded was amazing at the time (I was a teenager). I saw it three times in the cinema. I was so excited for Revolutions. Had all these theories about what the architect said, why did the kid give him a spoon etc, are they still in another level of the Matrix? Then when it came out I saw it once and pretty much never talked about the Matrix again. Massive let down.


Sorry, they are as canon as the phantom menace even if you don’t like them (neither do I for that matter but hey, if these creators wanted to wreck their legacy who are we to stop them).


Reloaded is ok. It's not like Star Wars 1 (which btw isn't real), more like Star Wars 6.


Return of the Jedi (6) was perfectly fine. More like 7 which was ok as a nostalgic cameo vehicle, but resulted in throwing away the Rogue Squadron arc which should have always remained canon.

But not like that hadn't happened before. Anyone remember Splinter of the Mind's Eye, the original sequel to Star Wars?


Return of the Jedi was in fact the best of the original trilogy. It's weird to use it as a point of comparison like that's a diss.


It's not a diss, it was an ok movie. Most people consider it less great than 4 and 5, partially because they redid the big scene in 4.


It did feel derivative, but then they just did it again with one of the sequels because they could, except this time it's a death planet instead of star/moon. The Empire or whatever they called it had been reduced to a parody / comic relief.


And somehow the death planet also has a self-destruct. Well, parody is a good way to put it, the sequels are about as Star Wars as Spaceballs is.


GP's comment is probably a reference to this classic XKCD: https://xkcd.com/566/ (the last panel)


Compare this with Google trends for grokKED (to compare with the hacker news trend):

Google trend for grokKED: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=g...


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: