Hacker News: alextingle

New comment by alextingle in "Wireless Festival cancelled after government stops Kanye West entering UK"

alextingle — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 17:06:03 +0000

They can't find anyone else to headline, it has to be a literal, self-described Nazi?

New comment by alextingle in "Migrating to the EU"

alextingle — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 09:00:17 +0000

OK Grok, calm down.

New comment by alextingle in "Migrating to the EU"

alextingle — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 08:01:12 +0000

It's way better than the US.

New comment by alextingle in "Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps"

alextingle — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 08:38:44 +0000

No. Apple's phones started out with only web apps. They only add the walled garden later.

New comment by alextingle in "Jolla phone – a full-stack European alternative"

alextingle — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 05:24:02 +0000

It couple physically disable camera + mic + whatever, and ALSO have hooks that enable you to do extra things with it in software?

New comment by alextingle in "Show HN: I'm building a pure-Rust reimplementation of rsync (Protocol 32)"

alextingle — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:19:25 +0000

Why don't you work on improving rsync, rather than reinventing the wheel? Or create something new??

It's fine as a personal project, but as soon as you get other people using your new code, they'll be exposed to all the bugs that you are inevitably creating.

Honestly, this kind of "rewrite something battle tested in my favourite language" project is dangerous and insane.

New comment by alextingle in "Defer available in gcc and clang"

alextingle — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 06:24:05 +0000

C++ destructors are implicit, while defer is explicit.

You can just look at the code in front of you to see what defer is doing. With destructors, you need to know what type you have (not always easy to tell), then find its destructor, and all the destructors of its parent classes, to work out what's going to happen.

Sure, if the situation arises frequently, it's nice to be able to design a type that "just works" in C++. But if you need to clean up reliably in just this one place, C++ destructors are a very clunky solution.

New comment by alextingle in "Markdown CLI viewer with VI keybindings"

alextingle — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 01:59:39 +0000

Example: If a build is going on in the background, I can see when it stops.

New comment by alextingle in "Another GitHub outage in the same day"

alextingle — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 09:49:25 +0000

Windows XP was a disaster. Resistance to adopting it was industry wide, and lasted years. It was only with Service Pack 2 (which was an enormous rewrite of basically the whole system) that they started to turn the ship around.

New comment by alextingle in "The world heard JD Vance being booed at the Olympics. Except for viewers in USA"

alextingle — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 08:00:58 +0000

That's insane.

New comment by alextingle in "You are the reason I am not reviewing this PR"

alextingle — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 18:17:36 +0000

I bet someone who knew Bash well enough could probably just optimise the original script (xargs -P perhaps, to parallelise the calls to ln?), but no it must be rewritten in Rust, because reasons.

New comment by alextingle in "[dead]"

alextingle — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 16:08:01 +0000

Kim Dotcom should make a trademark violation complaint.

New comment by alextingle in "xAI joins SpaceX"

alextingle — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 16:06:25 +0000

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Cooling systems fail in geostationary orbit. I watched thermal loads glitter in the dark near Lagrange Point 2. RAID arrays degraded by Van Allen radiation. Micrometeorite impacts at 2 AM. Legacy Perl scripts no one dared to touch, running on hardware we couldn't replace because the launch windows had closed. All those moments will be lost in time, like packets in space. Time to reboot.

New comment by alextingle in "xAI joins SpaceX"

alextingle — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 15:57:47 +0000

No, I think he is that stupid.

New comment by alextingle in "The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect"

alextingle — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 21:04:59 +0000

Yay, localroger!

New comment by alextingle in "C++ Modules Are Here to Stay"

alextingle — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 22:11:08 +0000

Best practice for C++ modules: avoid.

(Buy my book)

New comment by alextingle in "Tesla ending Models S and X production"

alextingle — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 22:01:10 +0000

The cost of owning a car dwarfs the cost of an occasional taxi ride.

New comment by alextingle in "Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company"

alextingle — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 09:33:06 +0000

Building stuff like this is wrong. You should find a different job.

New comment by alextingle in "Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company"

alextingle — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 09:26:24 +0000

But I'm not having sex with my bank.

New comment by alextingle in "The state of Linux music players in 2026"

alextingle — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 11:14:40 +0000

I like Amberol's approach - no library management, just use the file-system. I use Picard to organise my music into a sensible directory structure, and so Amberol can see that and play by album or artist. It's really nice.

It's crippled by its ridiculous refusal to see symbolic links. I want to use symlinks to create "playlists", without having to copy music files around, but now, to Amberol, it's as though sym-links don't exist.

I looked into it, and it's down to weird Gnome and Flatpak policies, which are bizarrely averse to sym-links, because they are a "security risk". Yes, that's kind of true if you are root, but who runs their music player as root???