Hacker News: Zarel

New comment by Zarel in "Turning a MacBook into a touchscreen with $1 of hardware (2018)"

Zarel — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 08:58:00 +0000

Ctrl+Fn+F?

New comment by Zarel in "Apple introduces new AirTag with longer range and improved findability"

Zarel — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 04:53:08 +0000

To me, the bigger problem is the lack of ability for Android phones to register an AirTag as recognized. They've never done anything to address the problem of "drive your wife's car and her AirTag is beeping at you and your Android phone is beeping at you and there's no way to tell either one to stop".

New comment by Zarel in "Oh My Zsh adds bloat"

Zarel — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 10:15:01 +0000

Every preset with powerlevel10k-style segments don't support hiding empty segments. Look at Pastel Powerline, Tokyo Night, Gruvbox Rainbow, Catppucin Powerline...

https://starship.rs/presets/#pastel-powerline

I tried making my own and the config TOML syntax isn't expressive enough to support hiding empty segments.

You're right that it's the thing with the Unicode character as separator, which all the alternatives handle just fine: powerlevel10k, tide, oh-my-posh... it's just everyone seems to love Starship, and that's what confuses me.

New comment by Zarel in "Oh My Zsh adds bloat"

Zarel — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 08:41:52 +0000

I'm surprised Starship is so popular. It's missing really basic powerlevel10k features like empty segments. If you look at some examples:

https://starship.rs/presets/gruvbox-rainbow

You can see that when the segments are empty, they still appear as a 1-width segment, rather than entirely disappearing.

It also makes you configure many things by hand. powerlevel10k has an interactive wizard that lets you design your prompt one option at a time (do you want a nerd font? do you want it one line or two? etc) but Starship makes you manually write escape codes if your preferences don't match one of the presets.

No judgment, but I do wonder what people like about Starship that makes up for these things.

New comment by Zarel in "Selfish reasons for building accessible UIs"

Zarel — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 16:59:32 +0000

is famously really flawed and not worth using even if what you want is semantically a number and not just numeric:

https://stackoverflow.blog/2022/12/26/why-the-number-input-i...

Tables have a whole bunch of flaws, like not letting you turn an entire row or cell into a link. (Some things are semantically tabular data!)

New comment by Zarel in "We fell out of love with Next.js and back in love with Ruby on Rails"

Zarel — Sun, 04 May 2025 15:05:06 +0000

While this is mostly true, there were similar techniques even before XMLHttpRequest. iframes could communicate with parents, and also JSONP. I think JSONP was mostly pioneered as a technique after XMLHttpRequest, but the iframe trick did work (I even used it! just a tiny 16x16 iframe communicating with the parent element by calling functions on window.parent, worked great on IE5).

New comment by Zarel in "Leaving Neovim for Zed"

Zarel — Sun, 18 Aug 2024 21:31:30 +0000

Heh, I saw this thread just recently:

https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1euwht3/webstorm_is...

Most discussions I've seen, including that one, say that VS Code is slower than most lightweight text editors but faster than most IDEs (including WebStorm which is IntelliJ). I don't personally have experience with IntelliJ, but in my experience VS Code is very noticeably faster than Eclipse.

That linked thread also mentions that compared to IntelliJ, VS Code has better remote development, a less cluttered UI, better support for multiple languages in one project. And _many_ people mention the better performance.

Personally, running an open-source project with a lot of contributors who are young or from third-world countries, it also matters a lot that VS Code is free.

New comment by Zarel in "Waymo outperforms comparable human benchmarks over 7M+ miles"

Zarel — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 18:34:04 +0000

I feel like accusing someone of lying is a bit of a leap. I would just guess the guy you're replying to lives somewhere easier to drive than SF.

New comment by Zarel in "Claude 2.1"

Zarel — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:15:18 +0000

My friend's been learning programming with Github Copilot and gets refusals there sometimes, for seemingly no reason; so here's an example for you:

https://d.pr/i/XSiepe

New comment by Zarel in "Why every microwave sucks these days"

Zarel — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 16:15:17 +0000

Yes, most microwaves with dials do in fact work like this.

Compare the the distance between 0 and 1 with the distance between 5 and 6 on this microwave:

https://www.amazon.com/Panasonic-NE-1025F-Silver-Commercial-...

New comment by Zarel in "Woman wins 12-year legal battle against Google"

Zarel — Mon, 23 Oct 2023 14:05:55 +0000

You're misinterpreting that sentence. This overview of the case was posted:

https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/cases/duffy-v...

And in it, it talks about Google's defenses (innocent dissemination, qualified privilege, and justification), so clearly Google did show up.

New comment by Zarel in "Don't use custom CSS scrollbars"

Zarel — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 10:54:43 +0000

You don't have to write good UX from scratch to get non-OS scrollbars, there are CSS rules that let you style scrollbars while keeping most system scrollbar features and accessibility.

No comment on whether or not that's a good idea, though.

New comment by Zarel in "Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise"

Zarel — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 18:50:59 +0000

I suppose "nobody used that product anyway" is way more true of Microsoft's dropped projects than Google's, and that's important.

Everyone here can name Google products they loved which they can't use anymore. For me, the big ones are Google Reader (RSS), Google Inbox (bundles, and the Travel and Shopping email categories), Google Now (flight information), and Google Hangouts (SMS integration).

For other companies, not so much. I can name minor things, like I miss macOS's old 2D virtual desktop grid. And an AirPort router would have been nice. And I'm sad Amazon Go is being shut down. But nothing on the level of those Google shutdowns.

New comment by Zarel in "SBF posting 1 letter tweets to evade delete detection bots?"

Zarel — Tue, 15 Nov 2022 13:50:30 +0000

I'm pretty sure Caroline deleted her Tumblr accounts because a Twitter mob was digging through them and doxxing her friends (many of my friends were scrambling to hide their connections to her).

New comment by Zarel in "GitHub is adding web cookies for enterprise users"

Zarel — Wed, 03 Aug 2022 03:17:53 +0000

There's a sense in which cookies can't do any harms besides tracking, while a browser extension can do much worse.

New comment by Zarel in "GitHub is adding web cookies for enterprise users"

Zarel — Wed, 03 Aug 2022 03:15:27 +0000

The EU laws require the banners to be shown to all EU citizens regardless of the country they're in, right? I think the only way to be absolutely safe is to show cookie banners everywhere.

New comment by Zarel in "AirPods don't “just work”"

Zarel — Thu, 27 Jan 2022 11:28:55 +0000

Yeah, I like my AirPods Pro precisely because I don't need to disconnect them from the previous device to connect to them from the next device. Bose NC 700s and Sony XM4s both have the problem where I need to disconnect from them on an old device before I can connect to them on a new device.

New comment by Zarel in "My Experience as a SWE Intern at Goldman Sachs"

Zarel — Sat, 08 Jan 2022 22:33:53 +0000

Equilateral triangles can fall in. You have three dimensions: the height of the triangle is less than the side length of the triangle, so it fits in near the sides of the hole.

The OP mentions curves of constant width:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curve_of_constant_width

Which includes circles and Reuleaux triangles, which are much more difficult to manufacture than circles. I think this can be rounded off to "circles are the only well-known shape that can't fall into a similarly-sized hole".

New comment by Zarel in "Against 3x Speed"

Zarel — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 23:25:52 +0000

I also have this problem (it might be related to my ADHD). 2x speed (with occasional pauses/rewinds) works much better for my retention; I've often explicitly noticed myself not paying attention and learning nothing at 1x.

New comment by Zarel in "What will enter the public domain in 2022"

Zarel — Fri, 03 Dec 2021 02:29:02 +0000

That seems really low. The point of copyright is to incentivize people to create more art, so We The People can experience more art. If you're not going to sell your art, why are we enforcing your rights at all? I'm not saying you don't have a legitimate reason to share your art with all except one person you hate, or to keep it locked where no one can see it, but I am saying that there's no need for Us The People to use our government apparatus to help you with that.