Hacker News: Oreb

New comment by Oreb in "Bringing Clojure programming to Enterprise (2021)"

Oreb — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 13:07:06 +0000

> syntax is hard to read unless you spend a lot time getting used to it

That’s pretty much exactly the opposite of how I always felt. Perhaps because I’m not a programmer by education, I always struggle to remember the syntax of programming languages, unless I’m working in them all the time. After I return to a language after working in other languages for a while, I always have difficulties remembering the syntax, and I spend some time feeling very frustrated.

Clojure and Lisps more generally are the exception. There is very little syntax, and therefore nothing to remember. I can pick it up and feel at home immediately, no matter how long I’ve been away from the language.

New comment by Oreb in "GPT‑5.3 Instant"

Oreb — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 03:53:38 +0000

I’m not sure I’m representative of “most people” in this respect (I have always used both n and m dashes), but I personally find the difference between n and m dashes bigger and more noticeable than the difference between regular and n dashes.

New comment by Oreb in "The Windows 95 user interface: A case study in usability engineering (1996)"

Oreb — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 10:02:18 +0000

I agree, I always found the charging port location to be a total non-issue. The battery life is long, charging is fast, and you get warned that the battery level is low long before the mouse dies.

New comment by Oreb in "Switch to Claude without starting over"

Oreb — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 09:31:45 +0000

Does it depend on what type of programming you do? Doing Swift/SwiftUI work, I have exactly the opposite experience. I’ve been using both recently, and I want to use Claude alone (especially after the last week’s events), but Codex is just so much faster and better.

New comment by Oreb in "Block the “Upgrade to Tahoe” alerts"

Oreb — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 07:20:42 +0000

I honestly don’t understand why Liquid Glass provokes so strong reactions. To me it’s not that radically different from the old design. I don’t love it, and I don’t hate it. There is nothing new that in any way impacts how I use or experience my iPhone, my iPad or my Mac. My reaction to Liquid Glass was pretty much a neutral “looks a little bit different, I guess” before forgetting about it.

New comment by Oreb in "How far back in time can you understand English?"

Oreb — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 03:49:12 +0000

As a native speaker of Swedish and Norwegian, I can mostly understand spoken Faroese (if they speak slowly). In spoken Icelandic, I understand some words, but rarely a complete sentence.

New comment by Oreb in "How far back in time can you understand English?"

Oreb — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 03:34:05 +0000

Phonetic spelling would perhaps make the language easier to learn for native speakers, but it would make it harder to learn for foreigners, at least those of us who come from Europe. Most words in written English resemble words in Germanic or Romance languages. If English was spelled phonetically, the resemblance would be significantly smaller.

People often say that the English spelling is weird or illogical. As a non-native speaker, I disagree. The English spelling makes perfect sense. It’s the English pronunciation which is really strange and inconsistent.

New comment by Oreb in "How far back in time can you understand English?"

Oreb — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 03:25:26 +0000

> The Spanish I understand most easily is the heavily accented Spanish of non-native Spanish speakers.

Are you sure this is because of their accent? I have the same experience with French (the non-native speakers are easier to understand), but I always thought that was because they use fewer and simpler words.

New comment by Oreb in "OpenAI should build Slack"

Oreb — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 08:56:55 +0000

Why do people even use the app? I never understood it. I always just run Slack in my browser.

New comment by Oreb in "Don't fall into the anti-AI hype"

Oreb — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 22:47:25 +0000

I also find it hard to agree with that part. Perhaps it depends on what type of software you write, but in my experience finding good test cases is one of those things that often requires a deep level of domain knowledge. I haven’t had much luck making LLMs write interesting, non-trivial tests.

New comment by Oreb in "Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes"

Oreb — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 08:55:53 +0000

Why Sweden? Did you mean Norway, perhaps?

New comment by Oreb in "2025 was a disaster for Windows 11"

Oreb — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 18:51:27 +0000

I agree with your general complaints about the decline of Apple’s software quality, but what’s your problem with Safari? I’ve never found another macOS browser I like half as much.

New comment by Oreb in "Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools"

Oreb — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 08:17:33 +0000

“Emacs Makes Any Computer Slow” is another one I remember from back in the days.

New comment by Oreb in "Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools"

Oreb — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 08:06:52 +0000

And astrophysics has MACHOs and WIMPs.

New comment by Oreb in "Dark Mode Sucks"

Oreb — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 17:20:26 +0000

> Dark mode should be reserved for after sunset and before sunrise.

Isn’t that already how it works in all major operating systems?

New comment by Oreb in "From VS Code to Helix"

Oreb — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 07:49:25 +0000

The Helix mode in Zed is promising, but still nowhere near complete, and has a long way to go before it is as user-friendly as the Helix editor. For instance, the nice pop-up display of available commands. When I press “g” in Helix, I get a nice list of all the “goto” commands. This is very useful for discovering new features, and when you have forgotten something. This feature does not yet exist in Zed. And this is just one of many examples.

New comment by Oreb in "Space Elevator"

Oreb — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 11:47:12 +0000

How do we know how high pterodactyls were flying?

New comment by Oreb in "iPad Pro with M5 chip"

Oreb — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 13:37:37 +0000

This seems like one of those things some people are more sensitive to than others. To my eyes, an LCD or an OLED is just as good as e-ink for reading, except in very bright sunlight.

New comment by Oreb in "How to turn liquid glass into a solid interface"

Oreb — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 07:54:41 +0000

Me too. I honestly don’t understand why it provokes so strong reactions. In fact, I find all of the changes fairly minor. I expected something much more radical when Apple announced a major design overhaul. Things look slightly different, but work pretty much the same.

New comment by Oreb in "The Sagrada Família takes its final shape"

Oreb — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 05:18:34 +0000

Many churches were in construction for over a century, yes. Today? I’m not familiar with any examples other than Sagrada Familia, and even that one is almost finished. These multi-generation building projects seem to be a thing of the past.

Imagine trying to get funding today for a building project that is scheduled to be completed long after everyone alive today would be dead. I can’t imagine that being possible. It’s a pity: I wonder what wonders we could have built using modern technology over such a long timescale.