Hacker News: augustk

New comment by augustk in "uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook"

augustk — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 14:06:45 +0000

Bill Hicks on Marketing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0

New comment by augustk in "Delphi 13 Community Edition Is Now Available"

augustk — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 14:18:07 +0000

After Pascal Niklaus Wirth designed Modula-2 and then Oberon which is even tidier. Oberon is both smaller and more capable than both of its predecessors.

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

New comment by augustk in "Ten Steps Towards Happiness (2015)"

augustk — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 07:27:21 +0000

"Accept everything"

New comment by augustk in "The bottleneck was never the code"

augustk — Wed, 06 May 2026 13:12:28 +0000

Turning off Javascript made the dot go away.

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

augustk — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 07:17:27 +0000

That sounds like shoulder pain.

New comment by augustk in "The economics of software teams: Why most engineering orgs are flying blind"

augustk — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 07:57:15 +0000

The hospital information system Millenium from Oracle was bought by two regions in south of Sweden for around 400 million USD. It turned out to be unusable for Swedish healthcare and had to be shut down after just three days. Actual users of the software (doctors and nurses) were not involved in the procurement.

New comment by augustk in "Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)"

augustk — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:57:33 +0000

And knowing how to get the version of an application (which used to be in Help -> About).

New comment by augustk in "Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)"

augustk — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:53:11 +0000

For group chats in Microsoft Teams with more than seven participants, if you click on "View and add participants" (an icon with two people and a plus sign) you see a list of seven participants. At first I didn't know that you could scroll in this list.

New comment by augustk in "AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing"

augustk — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:26:13 +0000

Then it turns out that the book was written by an LLM.

New comment by augustk in "The economics of software teams: Why most engineering orgs are flying blind"

augustk — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 13:21:26 +0000

Why don't we instead focus our energies on the user. For some very important software applications the customer is not the user. Let the sales department focus on the customer.

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.