Hacker News: augustk

New comment by augustk in "Show HN: Brutalist Concrete Laptop Stand (2024)"

augustk — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 16:08:31 +0000

Isn't the manufacturer to blame if I get neck problems then?

New comment by augustk in "Show HN: Brutalist Concrete Laptop Stand (2024)"

augustk — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:59:46 +0000

Something that would be useful in my case is a monitor stand stand. Does anyone know why almost no current monitor can be raised so that the upper edge is at eye level? Is it due to incompetence among the current breed of designers? Quite a few of my colleges have a stack of books beneath the monitor stand.

New comment by augustk in "C++26 is done: ISO C++ standards meeting Trip Report"

augustk — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 08:41:16 +0000

Postconditions are in conflict with programmers' love of early returns.

New comment by augustk in "On the Design of Programming Languages (1974) [pdf]"

augustk — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 16:08:50 +0000

The argument in the article was that the for loop is (potentially) "lying" and that is still true in my example. Niklaus Wirth's Modula-2 had a LOOP statement in which an EXIT statement could occur anywhere. That statement was at least not misleading. In Wirth's last revision of his last programming language Oberon the loop statement is removed and return is no longer a statement but a clause at the end of a function procedure. This makes Oberon a purely structured language.

https://miasap.se/obnc/oberon-report.html

New comment by augustk in "On the Design of Programming Languages (1974) [pdf]"

augustk — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 12:59:41 +0000

It's also worth noting that statements like

  for (i = 1; i <= 100; i++) {
    S;
    if (P) {
      break;
    }
  }

are just as bad since `break' (and `continue' and early `return') are a just gotos in disguise.

New comment by augustk in "First Website (1992)"

augustk — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 21:40:30 +0000

"universal access to a large universe of documents"

It's a sad fact that a large part of the web doesn't work without Javascript, a technology which enables privacy-invasive practices (and surveillance capitalism). It wasn't as bad when progressive enhancement was the norm.

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

New comment by augustk in "Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use"

augustk — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 23:23:09 +0000

With so many ready meals to choose from I don't understand why anyone nowadays would cook anything from scratch.

New comment by augustk in "Xfce is great"

augustk — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 09:48:49 +0000

Should be easy to correct the default behavior for the next release if the issue is reported.

New comment by augustk in "You can't design software you don't work on"

augustk — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 10:24:08 +0000

It's also worth noting that a customer is not necessarily a user. As a developer I don't care so much about the customer but I care wholeheartedly about the users.

New comment by augustk in "You can't design software you don't work on"

augustk — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 15:30:56 +0000

In the best scenario the developers are also active users of the software they produce. Then a design flaw or an error that affects the users will also affect the developers and will (hopefully) motivate the latter to correct it.

New comment by augustk in "Replacing JavaScript with Just HTML"

augustk — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 11:46:46 +0000

Progressive enhancement is the way to go if you care about technical excellence. For some reason it fell out of fashion.

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

New comment by augustk in "Maybe the default settings are too high"

augustk — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 19:07:26 +0000

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

New comment by augustk in "Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS"

augustk — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 18:36:26 +0000

And also bring back progressive enhancement.

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

New comment by augustk in "GPT Image 1.5"

augustk — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 13:27:38 +0000

Or create the family

New comment by augustk in "The fix wasn't easy, or C precedence bites"

augustk — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 23:07:56 +0000

If the input parameters are invalid there is an error in the program so it makes more sense to use the assert function. Why would you need to undo something due to the restriction of a single point of exit?

New comment by augustk in "The fix wasn't easy, or C precedence bites"

augustk — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 12:27:12 +0000

Better stick to a single point of exit.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20311080

New comment by augustk in "The Beauty of Programming (2001)"

augustk — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 19:17:51 +0000

Then there is the joy of making the program source code as easy as possible to comprehend. This motivation seems to be rather unusual among programmers unfortunately.

New comment by augustk in "The future of 32-bit support in the kernel"

augustk — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 11:09:30 +0000

> Now just UTF-16 and non '\n' newline types remaining to go

Also ISO 8601 (YYYY-MM-DD) should be the default date format.

New comment by augustk in "Modern CI is too complex and misdirected (2021)"

augustk — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 16:41:59 +0000

Just tech bros being tech bros.

https://blog.mitchjlee.com/2020/your-writing-style-is-costly

New comment by augustk in "uBlock Origin Lite now available for Safari"

augustk — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 20:21:51 +0000

After installation you need to enable it in Settings -> Apps -> Safari -> Extensions -> uBlock Origin Lite.

I also uninstalled my previous advertising blocker AdBlock Pro by selecting "Delete App" in Settings -> General -> iPhone Storage -> AdBlock Pro.