Hacker News: a022311

New comment by a022311 in "Teaching my kid to code with a modern MUD"

a022311 — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 13:02:56 +0000

I'd say Canon and Scratch are different tools with different purposes. Both are simple and interactive enough for children to love. The main difference I see is that Canon abstracts away a lot of the game state management logic and you get to focus on creating characters, items and having lots of fun. Scratch looks like it has a steeper learning curve and while it is a good introduction to programming, it gets pretty hard to navigate once project size increases. As someone who started programming with Scratch, I think that making a text adventure game like the ones Canon does in Scratch would be much more complicated and the end result wouldn't be half as nice.

New comment by a022311 in "A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”"

a022311 — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 08:11:56 +0000

One man's trash is another man's treasure. The mistake is being absolute and ignoring this fact.

This post reminded me of Engineering for Slow Internet (https://brr.fyi/posts/engineering-for-slow-internet), another case where careless assumptions by better-off people can have a huge impact on others.

New comment by a022311 in "Show HN: Needle2: 14MB agentic LLM for phones, wearables, smart home and robots"

a022311 — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:47:27 +0000

Looks incredibly cool, although it ran at ~4 tok/s on my browser (I assume because I've disabled V8). I believe your numbers though. I always wanted to try using something like this to create an AI assistant for my phone. If you try to create something without AI, you'll quickly run into the problem of using NLP to map input to the equivalent of AI tool calls. On the other hand, shelling out to a full-blown LLM for every input is slow, costly and if you want it local, greatly restricts its computing power and the number of devices it can run on. Needle and similar models solve this problem nicely: they're incredibly cheap and handle NLP (not in a predictable way of course, but with great success rates), so you can quickly run predefined actions or shell out to a proper LLM for more complicated tasks. You have the best of two worlds.

You may have inspired me to give it a try!

New comment by a022311 in "Android Developer Verification: Threat masquerading as protection"

a022311 — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 11:39:30 +0000

Not sure Jolla deserves to be trusted, you'd be much better off with GrapheneOS. In any case, try out SimpleX for a messenger. You can also take a look at https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/an-overview-of-privacy-focused-dec...

New comment by a022311 in "FUTO Swipe – A new swipe typing model"

a022311 — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 13:33:59 +0000

I agree, it's by far the best mobile keyboard I've ever tried. I especially love the shortcuts for copy/paste/select all/cut which send the actual Ctrl-C. I can finally use terminals! :-P

New comment by a022311 in "FUTO Swipe – A new swipe typing model"

a022311 — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 12:08:56 +0000

I can't see what's wrong with that (you choose whether to accept suggestions or not), but you can always blacklist predictions by long-pressing on them.

New comment by a022311 in "FUTO Swipe – A new swipe typing model"

a022311 — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 11:53:55 +0000

FUTO keyboard actually has an option for this (enabled by default) called "Smart key-hit detection". It adjusts hitboxes based on dictionary predictions for what you just typed.

New comment by a022311 in "FUTO Swipe – A new swipe typing model"

a022311 — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 11:49:07 +0000

I'm using Colemak on my phone, but can't get used to it on my desktop, so I'm stuck with QWERTY! :D

New comment by a022311 in "FUTO Swipe – A new swipe typing model"

a022311 — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 11:47:51 +0000

Back when I was using QWERTY with Microsoft SwiftKey, I used to swipe a bit, but it never really felt comfortable for me. I've tried swiping again after switching to Colemak on my phone and everything is so close together that the accuracy is very low. I wonder if this model will help improve accuracy on other layouts too (or even languages!).

I hope FUTO does start caring about language support, because for example their AI powered text prediction is only available for English. I'd happily train a model for them in my native language if they provided instructions on how to do so. And I'd help with swipe typing too.

New comment by a022311 in "How many of the 170k English words do you know?"

a022311 — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 22:48:33 +0000

I'm Greek too and I got 81 (well technically I misclicked one in a hurry, would've been 82). It did help a bit though. Surprisingly enough I've learnt many of the more advanced words from technical blogs!

New comment by a022311 in "GrapheneOS has been ported to Android 17"

a022311 — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 08:58:39 +0000

Yep, I've used both. Desktop mode isn't exactly there yet, but hopefully with the general availability it will get with Android 17, it'll smoothen out. As for the Linux terminal I ended up sticking with a fork which provides a few extra features (https://github.com/outlawsanzhang/koiTerminal)

New comment by a022311 in "Apple's weird anti-nausea dots cured my car sickness"

a022311 — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 07:49:58 +0000

Depends. One of the reasons I stopped using Spotify was because its offline mode refused to work when my device had all radios off (who even thought of this?). Once I turned on Wi-Fi, even without connecting to a network, it would load immediately.

New comment by a022311 in "Apple's weird anti-nausea dots cured my car sickness"

a022311 — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 07:47:33 +0000

Yes IPC is definitely a security hole, but because the two apps communicating need to both explicitly support it (I really doubt there'd be an exploitable vulnerability here of all places), it's a much smaller concern. Here I'd mainly worry about apps like Google Photos talking to Google Play Services. GrapheneOS has mentioned they'd like to implement IPC scopes to isolate apps, just like contact scopes and storage scopes.

New comment by a022311 in "Apple's weird anti-nausea dots cured my car sickness"

a022311 — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 07:42:32 +0000

Funnily enough, the Huawei P30 Pro I was using previously (back when these things could run Android with GMS) had network toggles for all apps. They weren't in the permissions menu, as they were meant for data saving purposes but you had the additional granularity of choosing if an app could access mobile data or Wi-Fi separately.

That solved the problem of ads in games much better than DNS :D

New comment by a022311 in "LittleSnitch for Linux"

a022311 — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 11:01:43 +0000

I guess that makes sense, since it's pretty new. OpenSnitch is great software in terms of functionality but I find the UI lacking. If LittleSnitch can keep the same functionality, while improving the UI, I'm switching. My other current concern here is that the LittleSnitch UI is just a Webview and I think it would be much better if there was a native option (ideally GTK-based for me, but Qt would also be acceptable). Webviews are slow and full of bloat.

The Pendulum of Taste

a022311 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 13:16:44 +0000

Article URL: https://constantinos.dev/blog/the-pendulum-of-taste/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47660512

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by a022311 in "Show HN: A game where you build a GPU"

a022311 — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 21:07:47 +0000

This is excellent, both educationally and from a UX standpoint! I've tried multiple times to read explanations on how transistors work and bounced off, but this time I think I've finally understood how to use them, at least practically. I feel like this is a great continuation of https://nandgame.com which taught me quite a bit about how small circuits combine to form something big (although I never finished it, I hope to finish this one at least). Another thing that I find interesting, is that while it is clearly developed primarily by AI, the result is exceptionally better than nearly every other AI-assisted project I've tried.

Some suggestions: - What I miss from NAND Game is the challenge of optimizing for efficiency. You'd build a component and it would let you know if it could be built with fewer NAND gates and you'd try to simplify the circuit. For example, while I did "NAND it" with 4 transistors, I did "The dual" with 5 and given the explanation I got afterwards I could have used one less. - This definitely needs to get better on mobile - The description for the first level using BitLine and BitLineBar (I think that was the Sense Amp?) doesn't really explain what it's supposed to do and I had to deduce it from the truth table.

New comment by a022311 in "Show HN: A game where you build a GPU"

a022311 — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 20:52:27 +0000

Yeah, my old MacBook got really laggy and the fans were spinning hard. Still worth it!

New comment by a022311 in "Iran-linked hackers breach FBI director's personal email"

a022311 — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 15:33:36 +0000

If that's what you call a democracy, sure... I don't think most people will agree with you though.

New comment by a022311 in "Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act"

a022311 — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 12:57:05 +0000

The same argument could be said for other age verification methods. Nothing stops a kid from getting their older cousin to verify their identity for something and it will never be possible to prevent this.