Hacker News: NIckGeek

New comment by NIckGeek in "The text mode lie: why modern TUIs are a nightmare for accessibility"

NIckGeek — Mon, 04 May 2026 00:32:15 +0000

I don't think the issue is using declarative UI frameworks, it's that the rendering engines these frameworks are outputting to are not taking accessibility into account.

New comment by NIckGeek in "Don't throw away your old PC–it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy"

NIckGeek — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 20:25:36 +0000

I feel like ARM wins over even a mobile x86 chip here, right? Like a base Mac Mini sounds ideal.

New comment by NIckGeek in "AsciiMath"

NIckGeek — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 03:42:38 +0000

I'm a big fan of AsciiMath and have been supporting it in my note taking program (MicroPad) since ~2016.

It was the key for me being able to write maths in a classroom/lecture theatre at the same speed (or faster) than those doing it by hand.

New comment by NIckGeek in "Unexpected productivity boost of Rust"

NIckGeek — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 20:49:21 +0000

Couldn't you just pass a reference to your value (i.e. `&T`)? If you absolutely _need_ ownership the function you call could return back the owned value or you could use one of the mechanisms for shared ownership like `Rc`. In a GC'd functional language, you're effectively getting the latter (although usually a different form of GC instead of reference counting)

New comment by NIckGeek in "How (memory) safe is Zig? (2021)"

NIckGeek — Wed, 14 May 2025 04:08:01 +0000

> but in practice fails, because of pervasive use of `unsafe`.

Yes, in `unsafe` code typically dynamic checks or careful manual review is needed. However, most code is not `unsafe` and `unsafe` code is wrapped in safe APIs.

I'm aware C already has a runtime, this adds to it.

New comment by NIckGeek in "How (memory) safe is Zig? (2021)"

NIckGeek — Wed, 14 May 2025 03:55:40 +0000

Fil-C is impressive and neat, but it does add a runtime to enforce memory safety which has a (in most cases acceptable) cost. That's a reasonable strategy, Java and many other langs took this approach. In research, languages like Dala are applying this approach to safe concurrency.

Rust attempts to enforce its guarantees statically which has the advantage of no runtime overhead but the disadvantage of no runtime knowledge.

New comment by NIckGeek in "Translating 10M lines of Java to Kotlin"

NIckGeek — Sun, 22 Dec 2024 02:35:37 +0000

fwiw in modern-Java they have data classes:

  record Foo(String theImplementationAndStyleOfDataClasses) {}

The string is final. While sadly there is no elvis operator, the Optional type helps:

  evlis.map(e->e.operator).map(e->e.chaining)

I still strongly dislike working in Java but Java 23 is a long way ahead of the Java 6 I first learnt Java with.

New comment by NIckGeek in "Traveling with Apple Vision Pro"

NIckGeek — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 08:19:41 +0000

You typically have to stop in LA, Singapore, or the UAE. The NZ -> Europe flights are brutal, and the trip back is typically even longer.

New comment by NIckGeek in "Zed, a collaborative code editor, is now open source"

NIckGeek — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 10:32:11 +0000

About 70% of the programming I'm doing right now is in my own language. But like, my full time work is programming language research so I accept that's an uncommon use-case.

New comment by NIckGeek in "Zed, a collaborative code editor, is now open source"

NIckGeek — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 02:41:19 +0000

I just tried Zed and it is definitely really pleasant to use. I'd need at least a Java LSP to use it for real (and preferably general LSP support so I can code in my own programming languages with it) but I can see a lot of promise. If they ship a Linux release so I could use it on my desktop too they could win me over from Sublime Text/IntelliJ.

New comment by NIckGeek in "An Open-Source Espresso"

NIckGeek — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 08:40:43 +0000

There's a machine called the Meticulous which is launching a kickstarter soon which is attempting to somewhat do this. It's a lot simpler mechanically because it's just an automated lever machine (i.e. no pump).

The downside is no steam wand but tbh if I didn't already have a Decent DE1Pro I'd probably get a Meticulous or a Flair 58 and that new nanofoamer pro for milk.

New comment by NIckGeek in "<3 Deno"

NIckGeek — Sun, 12 Feb 2023 23:16:35 +0000

Node.JS and Deno are both running with V8. fetch() isn't part of the JS standard library, it's a Web API. Deno just made (the good imo) design decision to support WebAPIs over something more custom despite the fact that it's not a runtime for web apps.

Server-side WASM is the future for FaaS imo, sandboxing built in and an effective object-capability approach to dependency safety is amazing.

New comment by NIckGeek in "Ask HN: What note taking websites/applcations do you use?"

NIckGeek — Fri, 14 Oct 2022 08:14:22 +0000

LaTeX inline maths is done inside ;;LaTeXCode;; or ''AsciiMathsCode''

More info on MicroPad Markdown is in the formatting guide in the help notebook.

New comment by NIckGeek in "Ask HN: What note taking websites/applcations do you use?"

NIckGeek — Fri, 14 Oct 2022 00:36:46 +0000

I made one called MicroPad a few years ago (https://getmicropad.com) and just launched v4 a few weeks ago.

It's pretty full of features and each note is an infinite whiteboard/canvas where you can embed elements anywhere (for example I go horizontally for tangents)

New comment by NIckGeek in "Next steps for Rust in the kernel"

NIckGeek — Wed, 21 Sep 2022 14:16:53 +0000

I'd recommend learning Rust because the way Rust pushes you into writing code will lead you to write better C code, etc.

People that learn C or C++ first often end up fighting the Rust compiler a bit until they adjust their mindset.

New comment by NIckGeek in "The case for bad coffee (2015)"

NIckGeek — Mon, 18 Jul 2022 04:02:50 +0000

There are many fair trade coffee's from local roasters where there is a minimum price for the green coffee for the farmers at the start of the chain.

New comment by NIckGeek in "Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang"

NIckGeek — Sat, 30 Apr 2022 00:06:51 +0000

Rust is a general purpose programming language. It can do low level systems programming but it's also highly capable of doing web backends, web frontends (wasm), game design, small utility scripts, etc.

A big thing people learning Rust do my mistake is to try and use all of the low level features straight away. Rust has tools like Rc, RefCell, Arc, and RwLock that let you have a garbage collected language (well, reference counted) and not worry about any of the low level memory management details.

See things like https://ggez.rs/ for games and https://www.arewewebyet.org/ for web stuff.

Although honestly I think if you're looking for a "hot" backend web language I'd say Elixir is the more well designed one than Go.

New comment by NIckGeek in "Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company"

NIckGeek — Fri, 15 Apr 2022 23:00:01 +0000

I admire Elon's accomplishments, especially with SpaceX but I wouldn't want him in charge of Twitter.

New comment by NIckGeek in "Show HN: Open source non-linear notepad app"

NIckGeek — Tue, 24 Jul 2018 03:36:11 +0000

Yeah, that's the big issue with Electron. The "Micro" came from my original plan for it, which was to have a super small python script generate static notepad pages for you to visit in your browser. Obviously that's no longer the case.

New comment by NIckGeek in "Show HN: Open source non-linear notepad app"

NIckGeek — Tue, 24 Jul 2018 03:34:22 +0000

Thanks!

1. That's totally possible, although file-size could quickly become an issue with syncing the videos (there's a 50MB cap)

2. Nope, All actual client functionality is (and always will be) free + open source. Even syncing is free (up to a point).