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Elis Hirwing
Personal blog · elis.nu/blog · on HN as etuprogrammingsystems
Elis Hirwing's personal blog at elis.nu covers programming and systems. Since 2019, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 21 times, most often “NixOS: Tmpfs as Root”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-19, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Commenters link his posts on running NixOS with a tmpfs root filesystem, which lets the system be reset on every reboot. One also links a post on dynamic CSS colour themes with similar contrasts.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- NixOS: Tmpfs as Root3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-09-15
- /blog/2020/06/nixos-tmpfs-as-home/2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-01-01
- Dynamic CSS color themes with similar contrasts2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-10-01
- Encrypted ZFS mirror with mirrored boot on NixOS2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-10-20
What Hacker News says?
A nice upgrade to that is to put root in a tmpfs RAM filesystem instead of ZFS: https://elis.nu/blog/2020/05/nixos-tmpfs-as-root/ That way it doesn't even need to bother with resetting to ZFS snapshots, instead it just wipes root on shutdown and reconstructs it in RAM on reboot. Then, optionally, with some extra work you can put /home in tmpfs too: https://elis.nu/blog/2020/06/nixos-tmpfs-as-home/ That setup uses Ho…
Comment linking /blog/2020/06/nixos-tmpfs-as-home/
on “Nix is a better Docker image builder than Docker's image builder”Submitted Dynamic CSS color themes with similar contrasts as a story · 13 points
HN discussionMy root filesystem is actually just in-memory for NixOS using tmpfs [1]. If you were to trash my root filesystem, I just reboot and it's restored. I know of no other operating system that allows something like that. To quote a friend: "A new car smell on every reboot." [1] https://elis.nu/blog/2020/05/nixos-tmpfs-as-root/
Comment linking /blog/2020/05/nixos-tmpfs-as-root/
on “Nix – Death by a Thousand Cuts”Submitted NixOS: Tmpfs as Root as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSo bear with me and hear me out on this. It's a fairly typical 1U HP Proliant server, which counts as "enterprise gear". I don't remember the model but it's somewhat unremarkable. It only has like six bays in the front, and I use one for a NixOS install, and two of them with SSDs for read and write cache. It has an old 10 gigabit ethernet card for connectivity. The server I bought used for around $150, the ethernet…
Comment linking /blog/2020/05/nixos-tmpfs-as-root/
on “A Return to Blu-ray as Streaming Value Evaporates”Submitted PHP Packaging in NixOS as a story · 4 points
HN discussionAs a (new) NixOS user too, I'd be interested to hear more about this. Have you tried setups like "Erase Your Darlings" and "NixOS: tmpfs as root" to explicitly persist and manage state? https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings https://elis.nu/blog/2020/05/nixos-tmpfs-as-root/
Comment linking /blog/2020/05/nixos-tmpfs-as-root/
on “Spectrum OS: a declarative, reproducible, compartmentalized Linux”Submitted First impressions of Purism Librem 5 as a story · 3 points
HN discussion>I really like the idea of NixOS, but there not being a single clear guide of how to set everything up (and the messy documentation) is the biggest thing holding me back. Yeah this part is messy, and why I always disclaim that I had a learning curve of several months to make the transition. However, my system setup is a little more complex than the standard install - mirrored ZFS root drives on dual m.2 drives, with…
Comment linking /blog/2019/08/encrypted-zfs-mirror-with-mirrored-boot-on-nixos/
on “NixOS and the Art of OS Configuration (2018)”Submitted First impressions of Purism Librem 5 as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> Ok, so like filesystem snapshots. Sort of, but only sort of. The filesystem is actually (mostly) unchanged for the backups. You have the /nix partition that can only really be touched by the nix program itself, and you have your root partition built based on the manifest defined in your configuration file. As such, every time you want to change anything about the system, you "rebuild" it, it stores a "copy" of the…
Comment linking /blog/2020/05/nixos-tmpfs-as-root/
on “Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu 24.10 Performance For Intel Core Ultra 7 Lunar Lake”Submitted Encrypted ZFS mirror with mirrored boot on NixOS as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSo... I made some notes a while back: https://elis.nu/drafts/health/ It's the story of how I've lost ~50kg in two years on my own, then I didn't stop there. No professional help or private training or things like that. It's all about diet and hard training. No magic.
Comment linking /drafts/health/
on “As an older guy I've finally figured out weight-loss”That's because HN's software now rewrites links to the canonical URL, and https://elis.nu/blog/2021/09/dynamic-css-color-themes-with-s... includes <link href="https://elis.nu/" rel="canonical"> I've put your intended URL back up there but you might want to fix that in your HTML :)
Comment linking /blog/2021/09/dynamic-css-color-themes-with-similar-contrasts/
on “Dynamic CSS color themes with similar contrasts”Not sure why it links to the startpage when I linked to this page: https://elis.nu/blog/2021/09/dynamic-css-color-themes-with-s...
Comment linking /blog/2021/09/dynamic-css-color-themes-with-similar-contrasts/
on “Dynamic CSS color themes with similar contrasts”Some people sort of run their NixOS configurations this way; the root filesystem is on tmpfs https://elis.nu/blog/2020/06/nixos-tmpfs-as-home/
Comment linking /blog/2020/06/nixos-tmpfs-as-home/
on “VanillaOS: Immutable Ubuntu-Based Linux”There’s an even better setup than Erase your Darlings. Instead of putting / on a zfs pool and erasing and rewriting it every reboot, just put tmpfs on / instead. With / all in memory it automatically gets wiped and recreated every reboot, without needing to actively erase a disk, and thus with much less drive wear (depending on how frequently you reboot). It’s also faster on some things when loading from RAM instead…
Comment linking /blog/2020/06/nixos-tmpfs-as-home/
on “NixOS Impermanence”https://elis.nu/blog/2020/05/nixos-tmpfs-as-root/ https://elis.nu/blog/2020/06/nixos-tmpfs-as-home/
Comment linking /blog/2020/06/nixos-tmpfs-as-home/
on “NixOS for the Impatient”
