Hacker News: ansgri

New comment by ansgri in "Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold"

ansgri — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 18:15:37 +0000

Which one? The classic QtWidgets, which implements consistent controls but sometimes talked about as deprecated (same as WinForms), or QML, which is "modern" and "actively developed" but does not provide native look and feel and requires (or at least used to require) a lot of manual work to support proper keyboard control and accessibility?

New comment by ansgri in "Data centers are transitioning from AC to DC"

ansgri — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 12:40:06 +0000

Would be more practical to have a single 50-300W AC-DC 24V PSU per room or group of rooms, then pull relatively short DC cables to each light. A multichannel light controller could also be placed nearby, and then if you need fully-featured brightness and color control, only a small PWM amplifier could be placed at each light if distance from controller to each light is too long to transmit PWM power directly.

New comment by ansgri in "//go:fix inline and the source-level inliner"

ansgri — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 22:35:04 +0000

Good illustration that a seemingly simple feature could require a ton of functionality under the hood. Would be nice to have this in Python.

New comment by ansgri in "Wired headphone sales are exploding"

ansgri — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 12:59:28 +0000

Isn’t it the only common variant of 4.4mm? Since portable balanced audio is audiophile-adjacent, no wonder it includes the common ground of dubious utility.

New comment by ansgri in "Wired headphone sales are exploding"

ansgri — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 05:12:40 +0000

What’s 1.44 mm connector in this context? Common sizes for headphones are 2.5, 3.5 and (lately) 4.4 mm

New comment by ansgri in "To the Polypropylene Makers"

ansgri — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 11:25:15 +0000

Rechecked now, PEX became way more accessible it seems. Rehau-style toolkits used to cost several hundreds.

New comment by ansgri in "To the Polypropylene Makers"

ansgri — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 11:06:31 +0000

No, PEX is different. PEX is flexible, sometimes more convenient but requires more specialized and expensive tools to install properly.

New comment by ansgri in "To the Polypropylene Makers"

ansgri — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 10:05:42 +0000

Polypropylene is great: it revolutionized residential plumbing, at least in countries that adopted it (apparently not the US). With PP tubes you can weld any complex plumbing with like $50 worth of tools and minimum skills. The only drawback is significant thermal expansion, but they’re flexible enough that they won’t break even if you forget to design around that.

New comment by ansgri in "Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs"

ansgri — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 14:46:15 +0000

I feel like half of junior programmers are susceptible to this.

New comment by ansgri in "iPhone 17e"

ansgri — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 22:49:40 +0000

Unfortunately yes. Some mobile games are 30+ GB (and this is probably the major reason for increasing minimum storage), high-res videos take any amount of space and are slow to sync with cloud, in-app downloaded data caches are routinely 2-5 GB each in addition to apps themselves.

New comment by ansgri in "The only moat left is money?"

ansgri — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 21:16:31 +0000

Absolutely. Design parametric families of patterns, 3d-scan the person, let customer adjust with live preview, laser cut, then fully automated or low-skill assembly. Probably not currently economical like many things involving physical world manipulation, but without obvious roadblocks.

New comment by ansgri in "Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place"

ansgri — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 09:13:36 +0000

Russian infra doesn’t suck that much, I guess it was overbuilt in soviet times. Armenian, on the oner hand… But they’re “societally prepared” in the sense that repairs are quick usually, and there are even some upgrades recently.

New comment by ansgri in "Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide"

ansgri — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 10:00:16 +0000

Gas-powered cars are indeed much cleaner, they are very popular in Armenia because of favorable pricing compared to petrol. And while air in cities here may not be very clean, it's generally not because of cars: people burn trash in winter and there are a lot of dust in the summer.

Thankfully many new cars are Chinese EVs and most people are installing solar panels, and it doesn't seem to be environmentally driven at all, just economics.

New comment by ansgri in "Kraków, Poland in top 5 worst air quality worldwide"

ansgri — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 09:51:42 +0000

Natural gas heating is not the problem in this case, it burns very cleanly with semi-modern heaters. The pollution is from coal, wood, and especially all kinds of trash (plastic, painted cardboard, pieces of various engineering wood products).

New comment by ansgri in "No knives, only cook knives"

ansgri — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 13:09:36 +0000

There are now inexpensive Japanese-style knives from China. I have a couple of surprisingly well-made Xinzuo-branded knives, each under $50.

New comment by ansgri in "You Can Just Buy Far-UVC"

ansgri — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 16:31:21 +0000

Do you have a recommendation for an inexpensive one? I’ve worked with OceanOptics Flame series, but they’re not exactly cheap, and their software was crap.

New comment by ansgri in "Worst of breed software"

ansgri — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 18:45:03 +0000

Best of breed design!

New comment by ansgri in "The Performance Revolution in JavaScript Tooling"

ansgri — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 09:01:47 +0000

There’s growing consensus that with uv python tooling finally became good enough in terms of both speed and functionality, no need to choose one or the other (like, poetry had functionality but was extra slow).

New comment by ansgri in "Pebble Round 2"

ansgri — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 23:51:51 +0000

The bezel is kinda functional on these watches, also they need it for huge water resistance. This Pebble is more comparable to traditional dress watches which don't have a prominent bezel.

New comment by ansgri in "Pebble Round 2"

ansgri — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 23:43:09 +0000

30m (3 bar) basically means splash-proof, not even your stated 1m (activity while submerged, I suppose). Like, 30m is IPX4-5, 50m is IPX6 (very rough equivalence), so 30m is the barest minimum expected from a watch.