Hacker News: JohnDeHope

New comment by JohnDeHope in "Modern Front end Complexity: essential or accidental?"

JohnDeHope — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 21:38:52 +0000

I'd really like to see some FE folks kicking around what sorts of new form elements they'd put into HTML 6. I miss WinForms, component libraries, Silverlight, WPF, that sort of thing. Browsing the sea of components somebody like Telerik or Infragistics or DevExpress give you brings so many ideas to my mind. The web has nothing to show for decades of being in the limelight. We have buttons, textboxes, checkboxes, drop down lists... the end. Oh I guess we have date pickers now, and reasonable large text areas. I mean we build apps this way so it's not impossible to live like this. I'm just jealous of folks with Blazor and a component library license.

New comment by JohnDeHope in "Stdwin: Standard window interface by Guido Van Rossum [pdf]"

JohnDeHope — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 11:43:15 +0000

> cross platform GUIs are ugly by default, compared to fully native desktop apps, because they don't entirely replicate the affordances or the style of the platform;

I think this is an implementation detail. It's up to the software stack whether it leaves off before drawing the UI elements on screen, or goes ahead and takes on that responsibility too. The wxWidgets toolkit uses the runtime platform's UI, so it does not draw the widgets themselves. Java Swing took on the task of drawing the UI elements on the screen in its own style.

New comment by JohnDeHope in "Should we drain the Everglades?"

JohnDeHope — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 01:04:46 +0000

It’s true. I was more expressing a sentiment than suggesting a course of political or legislative action. I await my punishment.

New comment by JohnDeHope in "Should we drain the Everglades?"

JohnDeHope — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 20:29:24 +0000

As a Pasco county alumni, I think we should drop the people who want to drain the everglades off in the everglades and leave them in there until they gain an appreciation for the scenery.

New comment by JohnDeHope in "Two Slice, a font that's only 2px tall"

JohnDeHope — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 02:47:04 +0000

I’m not a hacker but I really appreciate their ethos. It’s like punk. I’m not punk either. But I will defend it all with my dying breathe.

New comment by JohnDeHope in "Nokia’s legendary font makes for a great user interface font"

JohnDeHope — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 17:00:41 +0000

God bless a capital I with crossbars.

New comment by JohnDeHope in "The Great Illusion: When We Believed BeOS Would Save the World"

JohnDeHope — Sat, 28 Jun 2025 22:29:03 +0000

I think it has the prettiest UI of the era, including Apple’s.

New comment by JohnDeHope in "MUMPS"

JohnDeHope — Sat, 14 Jun 2025 12:08:25 +0000

This was the first programming language I got paid to code in. It really did look like line noise. Good times.

New comment by JohnDeHope in "Higher education is shockingly right-wing"

JohnDeHope — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 00:03:59 +0000

> If "left" and "right" have any meaning at all, "right" describes a worldview under which civilized society depends upon legitimate hierarchy, and a key object of politics is properly defining and protecting that hierarchy.

I've never heard anyone describe left and right this way, and I don't think anybody but the author thinks like this.

New comment by JohnDeHope in "Mark Zuckerberg announces mind-control"

JohnDeHope — Thu, 08 May 2025 14:58:22 +0000

> I've long maintained that the threat from AI to workers isn't that AI can do your job – it's that an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job:

This post is on to something.

New comment by JohnDeHope in "Old Timey Code and Old Timey Mono Fonts"

JohnDeHope — Wed, 07 May 2025 15:29:08 +0000

I can't tell if you're aiming for a faithful reproduction of the original font, or to make the coding font modern and most useful to today's developer. But... Can the code variant have the asterisk used to represent multiplication be on the same line as other math operators like plus, minus, and tilde? +-~* I always like the asterisk to be in line with the others. Maybe I am just weird. Also for the code variant I think the pound or hash mark # could be reduced in drama a little, to fit in with the other punctuation marks. Thanks for listening to my two cents.

New comment by JohnDeHope in "U.S.-born American citizen under ICE hold in Florida after driving from Georgia"

JohnDeHope — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 23:04:30 +0000

Well, law alone hasn't stopped presidents from bombing citizens, so I don't see how it'd stop them from deporting them, either.

New comment by JohnDeHope in "Why Is Africa Poor? Economic unfreedom, not slavery or colonialism"

JohnDeHope — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 21:25:34 +0000

I found this video to be very educational. How Africa’s Geography Traps it in Endless Poverty https://youtu.be/Y8m95sCDEf0?si=vA5u5DEnFBzP5s1E

New comment by JohnDeHope in "What if we made advertising illegal?"

JohnDeHope — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 15:09:12 +0000

What goes into your sense organs is just as meaningful, and capable of causing unwanted and lasting change or trauma, than what somebody does to your physical body. Intellectual force is no less force than physical force is.

Harassment is just a mild precursor to outright force. Advertising is just a mild precursor to intellectual force. Advertising is to indoctrination as physical harassment is to physical force.

New comment by JohnDeHope in "Ask HN: Is Hacker News avoiding criticism of Trump?"

JohnDeHope — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 12:01:14 +0000

There's too much overtly political content on HN, and it trends towards liberal, anti-Trump, etc. I agree with it about half the time. But the other half of the time it's like some mainstream leftist media stream got randomly interspersed into HN. I have a ton of places to go to find out how awful the regime is, no matter if it's 2020 or 2024 or whatever. They're all equally awful. Please get them all out of HN!

New comment by JohnDeHope in "They Might Be Giants Flood EPK Promo (1990) [video]"

JohnDeHope — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 18:20:16 +0000

Pff. HN has rebranded to become the DOGE News Network. If you want a more curated technical experience, I recommend https://lobste.rs. There's much less latitude for non-technical stuff.

New comment by JohnDeHope in "They Might Be Giants Flood EPK Promo (1990) [video]"

JohnDeHope — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 18:14:46 +0000

> I'm interested in things

This song, and this particular line, are a part of my religion.

New comment by JohnDeHope in "Framework's first desktop is a strange–but unique–mini ITX gaming PC"

JohnDeHope — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 19:57:29 +0000

I hate to be a hater, but having built myriad gaming PCs in my time, this doesn't really seem like much of a step forward. I'm hoping it's just the beginning. I'd love a modular plug-and-play PC parts ecosystem. This doesn't seem like that, yet.

New comment by JohnDeHope in "Do you want to be doing this when you're 50? (2012)"

JohnDeHope — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 14:00:01 +0000

I'm 50. Yes. "It's about trying to come up with a working solution in a problem domain that you don't fully understand and don't have time to understand." This has been my trick for staying engaged and excited about my work. Do try to understand the problem domain. It makes a world of difference in what you code, how you're perceived, the kinds of roles you can be promoted in to, etc.

New comment by JohnDeHope in "DC Mid Air Collision Reconstruction Using Public Data [video]"

JohnDeHope — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 19:18:53 +0000

Honest question, what is the point of this? I think it's cool that you can reproduce "what the pilots saw". But what pilots see is, to us laymen, really super boring. And there is no actual crash here. It's just video reconstruction of the flight path. I'm missing the point. Can somebody set me straight?