Hacker News: SanderSantema

New comment by SanderSantema in "Why I Stopped Arguing with People"

SanderSantema — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 15:19:37 +0000

Alternatively I’ve found it beneficial to try and clarify and further elaborate on your “opponents” reasoning. If you’re correct, then you should find the errors in their reasoning; without ever actually having to oppose them (your opponent and their arguments).

New comment by SanderSantema in "Managers given 200 characters to justify not firing nuclear regulators"

SanderSantema — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 12:29:09 +0000

If I am to believe the Corruption Perception Index, which I certainly would over your unsourced blanket statement, you’re wrong and Europe is actually doing rather well at having low rates of corruption. Anecdotally that has certainly been my experience. I don’t really understand the perceived competition anyhow, why not wish for everybody to do well?

New comment by SanderSantema in "Show HN: Advanced Tab Manager for Firefox"

SanderSantema — Tue, 29 Aug 2023 12:54:07 +0000

Given the required permissions I’d like to read the source code before using it, but that doesn’t seem to be available. Is this correct?

New comment by SanderSantema in "A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team"

SanderSantema — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 11:26:04 +0000

I think the point isn’t necessarily to not use chrome but to use something not based on chromium in general, which brave is, e.g. Firefox or Safari.

New comment by SanderSantema in "Servo, the parallel browser engine written in Rust"

SanderSantema — Sat, 27 May 2023 13:53:06 +0000

Lua wasn’t made for scripting video games but as a scripting language for a mining company if I remember correctly from this excellent paper[1]. I can highly recommend all the other ACM hopl papers too for those interested in the history of programming languages. The papers don’t seem to be open access but sci-hub might help with that if you’re so inclined.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3186277

New comment by SanderSantema in "Show HN: Doc Search – a research tool for finding PDFs on the web"

SanderSantema — Sat, 11 Feb 2023 19:09:14 +0000

> She lamented the disappearance of the option to show only PDFs in the search results

Nitpicking but this is still possible at least using ddg, google and possibly other search engines by appending `filetype:pdf`.

New comment by SanderSantema in "Wayflan: a from-scratch Wayland client for Common Lisp"

SanderSantema — Fri, 21 Oct 2022 20:36:36 +0000

Are you suggesting this person should’ve spent their time working on reimplementing wayland in rust instead? If so I suggest you drop all the projects you’re currently working on and do the same.

New comment by SanderSantema in "Ask HN: How do you keep marching?"

SanderSantema — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 10:03:55 +0000

If there’s no deadline there’s no problem I think to stop working on it for a while. Do you have any other projects or things to work on? Then work on those instead for a bit. Then return to your big project whenever you feel inspired to work on it again, I don’t think that’ll take long.

New comment by SanderSantema in "Actions rooted in open source culture can make a big impact"

SanderSantema — Tue, 24 May 2022 14:21:29 +0000

This doesn't seem viable in practice, determining how much polution a product causes for every product you tax is impractical and although not guaranteed I would think it likely that you'll simply export less when you start imposing the same taxes on the exported products.

I'd bet it would increase inequality as well, given that people with low incomes proportionally pay more taxes on bought goods and services than people with higher incomes (I'm quite certain that's the case but economics really isn't my strong suit).

New comment by SanderSantema in "What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space?"

SanderSantema — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 10:56:24 +0000

Either way, it’s easier if you’ve got the source code as well.

New comment by SanderSantema in "What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space?"

SanderSantema — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 10:54:01 +0000

Although you could make this argument in this context I don’t think it is valid. I’m quite certain that someone who’s trying to figure out what some obscure service is doing on their machine would be able to use `apt-get` perfectly fine and wouldn’t ignore any all-caps warnings.

New comment by SanderSantema in "What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space?"

SanderSantema — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 10:51:43 +0000

Whereas on closed source you’d have to do all of that and probably a good deal of reverse engineering on top of that. That’s unfortunately not something which it necessarily makes any easier, but rather a lot harder.

New comment by SanderSantema in "The Undocumented Microsoft “Rich” Header (2018)"

SanderSantema — Mon, 18 Oct 2021 10:54:26 +0000

Thanks for the interesting tidbits!

New comment by SanderSantema in "Ask HN: How to learn about Linux system internals?"

SanderSantema — Wed, 07 Apr 2021 12:51:14 +0000

Although I personally haven’t got any experience with linux internals (insofar not needed as a user) I’d think https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/ might be a good place to start. You might want to find out how much actually is about system internals instead of administration. I think system internals are a much broader subject than what is needed to be a very good linux administrator.

New comment by SanderSantema in "Essentials of Programming Languages"

SanderSantema — Sun, 30 Aug 2020 20:28:20 +0000

You might want to google for Library Genesis and see if you can find them there to compare these and buy one of them afterwards.

New comment by SanderSantema in "Mac keyboard shortcuts"

SanderSantema — Fri, 07 Aug 2020 14:09:53 +0000

I still accidentally try to use these on my linux machine, that’s one thing I really do miss. One consolation is that I can still use them in my shell :) Weirdly enough I never accidentally use these shortcuts while using vim. I’d guess my subconscious is somehow aware of the contexts in which I’d use these shortcuts and is able to differentiate between my browser, the commandline and vim but not between using a browser on a mac vs. a linux machine.

New comment by SanderSantema in "Learn Lua in 15 Minutes (2013)"

SanderSantema — Tue, 30 Jun 2020 22:13:18 +0000

I don’t think it’s influenced by js: http://www.lua.org/doc/hopl.pdf

New comment by SanderSantema in "Ask HN: Git alternatives that aren't so complicated?"

SanderSantema — Sun, 28 Jun 2020 18:43:59 +0000

At least trying three times seems like a very good thing to me. Although you might want to try a fourth time, Git really isn't that hard I think but rather quite opaque and easier when understood.

What made me understand is this picture: https://miro.medium.com/max/962/0*psCSE-BxW3zn4Ya1.png and the gittutorial manpage which is also available online: https://git-scm.com/docs/gittutorial

New comment by SanderSantema in "We Made One Gram Of Remdesivir"

SanderSantema — Sun, 05 Apr 2020 11:39:09 +0000

I'm no expert, but I believe it's indeed what they're already doing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_bacteria#...

But if I could make a guess I'd say that it in theory it might be relatively straightforward or easy to do but it's probably a lot harder in practice. That's often the case anyways.

New comment by SanderSantema in "Boids"

SanderSantema — Sat, 28 Mar 2020 13:08:24 +0000

That's right, currently reading it for my uni course :)