Hacker News: SebastianKra

New comment by SebastianKra in "Finder is so frustrating and has been since day one"

SebastianKra — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 07:02:45 +0000

Explorer has

- no columns view

- no quick look

- freezes for 5 seconds when you accidentally drag over a disconnected network location

- when opening a files, doesn't let you drag in an file to select it.

- no shortcut for toggling hidden files

- no tabs until Win 11

- no tags

- no sorting by "date added"

This was mostly a check for myself to see if I had Stockholm syndrome. But I keep finding more reasons to prefer Finder.

New comment by SebastianKra in "GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven"

SebastianKra — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 19:04:33 +0000

I agree, but it's not that easy.

All UI's should be tab-able, but that's still a miserable experience for keyboard users. A keyboard-centric UI must provide instantly discoverable shortcuts. Possible methods:

- Put all elements on a grid so that they can be navigable with the keyboard. This is a significant restriction for the designer.

- Put keyboard shortcuts next to every button. It's not enough to put them in tooltips (*cough* Raycast). Common in games, but wastes space.

- Add a Command Palette. This is the easiest, but it requires mirroring every action, and is suboptimal when you have the same action for each item in a set.

When designing for technical users: all of the above please. But for average users it's less clear. I think there's still room for innovation, both on the software architecture and the UI side.

New comment by SebastianKra in "As a Windows user, it's a surreal way to install a program"

SebastianKra — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 20:00:42 +0000

This may have been handwaved in the past, because config files don't take that much storage.

But Sequoia and up have strict management of background agents in "Settings / Login Items".

It fills up with so many broken references, duplicate entries, etc... I have no idea how a normal user is supposed to remove trash from that list. I pointed an agent at it, asking it to remove any broken references.

New comment by SebastianKra in "I don't recommend Tailwind CSS"

SebastianKra — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 11:00:40 +0000

We need to talk about two use-cases separately:

CSS for design systems is fine. You can define a .button[data-variant=”primary”]. It’s intuitive, performant, makes sense.

CSS for application code is terrible — specifically layout & typography. The different kinds of flex/grid layouts are tightly coupled to the dom structure. Tailwind is a great fit here:

  
    Title
    Subtitle

When you remove layouting concerns and maybe typography. You actually get close to the separation of concerns that CSS was initially aiming for. HTML determines arrangement and css determines the design system (colors, borders, shadows etc...).

I havent seen this discussed a lot. The old Radix team had a short note: https://www.radix-ui.com/blog/themes-3#the-best-of-both-worl...

New comment by SebastianKra in "I don't recommend Tailwind CSS"

SebastianKra — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 10:37:51 +0000

I agree that all of this is bikeshedding, but the cascade complaint is actually real.

It's so common, that there is an expensive runtime package, `tailwind-merge`, that is used by default in the most popular component library.

New comment by SebastianKra in "I don't recommend Tailwind CSS"

SebastianKra — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 10:25:45 +0000

Are you suggesting to style the tag name directly? Because that would create chaos in a codebase.

New comment by SebastianKra in "Advertise in ChatGPT"

SebastianKra — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 11:10:18 +0000

When I walk around my increasingly billboard-infested hometown. I observe that almost every ad actually nudges me in some way: whether I should switch internet providers, whether my financial strategy is fine, what kind of scam this tabloid newspaper is running, etc...

I believe most people are influenced by these constant micro-impressions far more than they realize.

My best defense is to build a resentment towards the companies being advertised.

New comment by SebastianKra in "If you want to create a button from scratch, you must first create the universe"

SebastianKra — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 08:10:39 +0000

Standard practice in every decent frontend framework has been to create a component, that wraps the

New comment by SebastianKra in "Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)"

SebastianKra — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 20:27:03 +0000

1. You can download & install PWAs for offline use too.

2. This isn't true for apps anymore. Server driven ui is a thing.

3. JS runs locally. You can inspect the network traffic more easily than you can with an app.

4. You can audit OSS websites too.

5. Your personal preferences have nothing to do with the fact that Apple makes tons of money from apps but not websites.

New comment by SebastianKra in "Show HN: Ant – A JavaScript runtime and ecosystem"

SebastianKra — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 08:42:57 +0000

Whenever I'm bored, I go to the ant-design site to see how long it takes to find the first gross accessibility violation. This time it was the dropdown just above the fold, which wasn't keyboard controllable.

New comment by SebastianKra in "Resetting Xbox"

SebastianKra — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 13:52:03 +0000

It's a combination of two things that never should have been normalized:

- Steam forces game updates, even for single player games.

- terrible delta updates. Baldurs Gate 3 had 8 patches in 3 Years. That's 800GB of updates.

If a patch drops on the afternoon you planned with your friends, you're not playing that night (actually happened to us). Both decisions should have caused outcries, but I guess people would rather overpay for fast internet contracts.

New comment by SebastianKra in "Parse, Don't Validate – In a Language That Doesn't Want You To"

SebastianKra — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 17:37:10 +0000

I wonder what you're doing that you need to type it so often. I almost never use it in application code (outside of tests and generic utilities).

There are some techniques that aren't immediately obvious. Look into...

- type guards

- pushing constraints up: `function print(i: Invoice & { issueDate: string })` is better than `assert(i.issueDate)`

- discriminated unions

New comment by SebastianKra in "What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000"

SebastianKra — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 10:55:17 +0000

Depends on the app, but mostly they're better than in the past.

New comment by SebastianKra in "What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000"

SebastianKra — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 22:52:39 +0000

> I would have no idea, but I could discover the answer with a little bit of exploration and a good understanding of how UIs are supposed to work.

I don't get this. Many things like changing the IP or audio devices were so unintuitive that I just memorized them. They're still burned into my brain. In Win 11, you just search for 'IP', click 'Ethernet-Settings', done.

Same for the signifiers: In the Win 11 Settings, give me an example of an element that is not obviously clickable. Everything has button shapes, or step-in indicators.

To be clear, I'm neutral towards that settings app. But UI back then was nowhere near as good as claimed here, and flat design (at least the current iteration) isn't to blame for Teams being bad.

New comment by SebastianKra in "Lettera: A Refined Markdown Document Editor"

SebastianKra — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 18:43:58 +0000

This is a side-project by the team behind Bear, a notes app with the least annoying ~~wysiwyg markdown editor~~. Least annoying rich text editor.

It took them ~4 years to ship this editor, and it shows. They managed to find the perfect balance between formatting markdown as you type and minimizing content shift. It's feature-rich while still providing the interoperability I expect from Markdown.

New comment by SebastianKra in "Siri AI"

SebastianKra — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 11:04:25 +0000

Thx, I'll switch to that. Somehow "everywhere" works on my phone but not my watch.

New comment by SebastianKra in "Siri AI"

SebastianKra — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 06:30:03 +0000

"Siri, lights out everywhere" - "okay, which room".

"Siri, start a stopwatch" - runs the App "Stopwatch" without starting it

Such errors happen maybe 50% of the time. You can never just ask something without double-checking afterwards.

New comment by SebastianKra in "Apple WWDC 2026"

SebastianKra — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 18:41:58 +0000

If you view it like that, any argument against openness could be made in the name of privacy. With that interpretation, the Mac is terrible for privacy as you could just chose to install an app that reads your hard drive.

"We can't bring Time Machine to Europe, because we would have to allow other backup solutions, and that would mean other backups would have unrestricted access to your data"

Maybe there's more to it, but I'm not giving Apple the benefit of the doubt after their hostile strategy regarding third-party app stores.

New comment by SebastianKra in "Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things"

SebastianKra — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 12:47:10 +0000

Whatever describes the change better. Sometimes the issue is easier to describe "fix: car steers in slalom". Where the solution would have been subtle interaction between 3 different components that only occurs in 3rd gear.

New comment by SebastianKra in "Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things"

SebastianKra — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:22:17 +0000

yep. I'm on the fence about types generally, but "fix:" saves/standardizes a bunch of phrases like "fix an issue where", "prevent" or having to invert the message by describing the solution instead.