Hacker News: b4ckup

New comment by b4ckup in "Does anybody like React?"

b4ckup — Wed, 27 May 2026 16:13:27 +0000

I actually do and my critique is directed at function components which seems to be the standard nowadays.

New comment by b4ckup in "Does anybody like React?"

b4ckup — Wed, 27 May 2026 16:08:54 +0000

So it makes sense because there's a fancy name for it? For a moment let's just imagine you are inventing a brand new UI framework. You obviously want to have components in it. So how do you represent a component in your new framework? A component needs state, logic and a way to render that state. Do you choose to represent the component as a class which naturally encapsulates state as properties and logic as methods or do you choose to represent components as functions which lack state so you bolt it on via an implicitly injected context that you access via abstractions?

New comment by b4ckup in "Does anybody like React?"

b4ckup — Tue, 26 May 2026 08:00:49 +0000

I never get this take. A react component is not just a function, it's a function plus a magically injected context that is accessed through hooks which requires all kinds of guarantees that you have to be aware of otherwise it will have hard to debug consequences. Imo it's anything but elegant. I did projects in all major frameworks and am building a huge angular web app currently. In angular a component is represented as a class plus template (plus styles). A event listener is mostly calling a method on the class. A state can be as simple as a property on the class. It's very natural and there are way less caveats (although not zero).

New comment by b4ckup in "The React2Shell Story"

b4ckup — Sat, 09 May 2026 17:55:21 +0000

Could you elaborate why you dislike lifecycle methods? I read this take a lot and I use mainly angular but did some smaller projects with react class components and with function components. I also think function components are very counter intuitive but I also never had anything against lifecycle methods.

New comment by b4ckup in "Ask HN: By what percentage has AI changed your output as a software engineer?"

b4ckup — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 09:47:35 +0000

I'd say on average about 50% faster but it really depends on the task at hand. On problems that can be isolated pretty well like a new feature that is relatively isolated (for example building a file export in a specific format) it's easily a 10x speed up. One thing that generally gets less talked about is exploration of the solution space during manual implementation. I work in a very small company and we build a custom ERP solution. Our development process is very stripped down (a good thing IMO). Often times when we get new requirements we brain storm and make a rough design. Then I try implement it and during that phase new questions and edge cases arise, and at any time this happens we adjust the design. In my opinion this is very productive as the details of the design are worked out when I already know the related code very well as I already got down to implementing. This leads to a better fitting design and implementation. Unfortunately this exploration workflow is incompatible with llms if you use them to do the implementation for you. Which means that you have put more effort in the design up front. From my experience that means the gain in speed in such task is nullified and also results in code that fits worse into the rest of the codebase.

New comment by b4ckup in "Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?"

b4ckup — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 08:38:26 +0000

That's awesome! I feel similar, I drew a lot back in the days because growing up in a small town I was bored so often. I did portrait art only but today I struggle because I just don't know what to draw and I'm just not good at doodling. Best of luck to you!

New comment by b4ckup in "The hardest program I've ever written (2015)"

b4ckup — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 21:03:50 +0000

I once wrote a formatter for powerquery that's still in use today. It's a much simpler language and I took a simpler approach. It was a really fun problem to solve.

New comment by b4ckup in "TOML [Tom's Obvious Minimal Language]"

b4ckup — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 13:21:07 +0000

Well since it's my own parser I support both inline and line ending comments. So I guess it's technically jsonc (json with comments) but whatever really.

Clarification: when speaking of json formatting I handle 2 distinct cases that make sense for me: inline objects and inline arrays (where all properties/ elements are on the same line) which make Configs more readable when the objects / arrays are small.

New comment by b4ckup in "TOML [Tom's Obvious Minimal Language]"

b4ckup — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 05:03:57 +0000

I tried to use toml in as config format for the app I am building at my day job. I ditched it for json because it's representation is not unambiguous, meaning the same object tree has many many different valid representations in toml. This makes it really hard to implement roundtripping of the config string to object tree and then back to config string without losing the specific toml representation chosen by the config author and no library that I've encountered supports it properly. For me this was a very important use case (config migrations). I implemented my own json parser that preserves json formatting and comments in half a day. Maybe json is harder to read and write but imo it's simplicity is a good feature.

New comment by b4ckup in "Psychedelic Graphics 0: Introduction"

b4ckup — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 11:32:08 +0000

Really interesting! I'm very much interested in pychedelic graphics. I played around with shadertoy a little bit maybe I should give it another go. For anyone interested I made some cool visuals by interpolating prompts in stable diffusion 1.5 like https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ajfMlJuDswc. I found that the older diffusion models are better for abstract graphics as it looks more "raw" and creative.

New comment by b4ckup in "All Lisp indentation schemes are ugly"

b4ckup — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:58:02 +0000

This is mostly how I indent my code. I don't know why so many people hate it. We have huge screens and spacing conveys structure so I use spacing when appropriate, like a ')' in its own line. I work in a *very* small team though and I write most of the code.

New comment by b4ckup in "Server-Sent Events (SSE) Are Underrated"

b4ckup — Fri, 27 Dec 2024 10:21:57 +0000

I disagree. You can just postMessage to communicate with the service worker and therefore I imagine the code using broadcast channel to be actually quite similar. About debugging, service workers are easily debuggable, though not on the main thread as you already mentioned.

New comment by b4ckup in "Server-Sent Events (SSE) Are Underrated"

b4ckup — Thu, 26 Dec 2024 17:16:47 +0000

This sounds like a good use case for using a service worker. All tabs talk to the service worker and the worker is the single instance that talks to the backend and can use only one connection. Maybe there are some trade offs for using SSE in web workers, I'm not sure.

New comment by b4ckup in "SSH Remoting"

b4ckup — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 11:56:49 +0000

I tried to use vscode c# devkit but it is horribly unstable and has severe bugs that make it unusable for my projects. But I'm really happy with vscode + omnisharp. I never used rider so I cannot really say which is better but I tend to not like jetbrains IDEs (from experience with IntelliJ and webstorm).

New comment by b4ckup in "SSH Remoting"

b4ckup — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 07:57:46 +0000

I use vscode (with omnisharp not c# devkit) for c# every day. Did you try it out?

New comment by b4ckup in "Why the CrowdStrike bug hit banks hard"

b4ckup — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 18:57:05 +0000

Didn't day say in their incident report that they have a batched rollout strategy for software updates but this was a config update and the update path for configs does not have such a mechanism in place.

New comment by b4ckup in "Windows File Explorer will be more powerful with version control and 7z"

b4ckup — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 04:44:40 +0000

There's a lot of things the file explorer needs. Git is not one of them.

New comment by b4ckup in "What is the most useful project you have worked on?"

b4ckup — Sat, 06 Apr 2024 22:57:42 +0000

Maybe not the most useful thing, but certainly useful and the coolest thing I built is a code formatter for the m language (also known as powerquery). At the time there was only daxformatter.com but no formatter for powerquery. So I wrote one and some people are using it. Imo it has a very nice ruleset to format code that I would prefer to formatters in other languages that I use myself. People reported issues and I took care of every single one of them. It's not much but it's honest work.

New comment by b4ckup in "GigaGPT: GPT-3 sized models in 565 lines of code"

b4ckup — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 19:05:01 +0000

Good to hear that I'm not the only one thinking that. I read a lot of their code for one of my pet projects and I thought that maybe it's me that doesn't get it because I don't write that much python.

New comment by b4ckup in "Microsoft is discontinuing Visual Studio for Mac after major overhaul"

b4ckup — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 19:33:51 +0000

I'm curious what are your use cases for which vs code is not suitable? I'm on windows and I work everyday in c# on the backend and I use vscode almost exclusively because I'm really sick of VS. I really dislike the button first Interface and I dislike it's input lag. In vscode keyboard focused workflow and extension interface is first class. You can set up your own extension and build custom stuff for your workflow in no time. It's truly empowering. The only time I start up VS is when I'm consolidating package versions of the solution, but maybe there is even an extension for that, I didn't look. People are shitting on vscode for electron but my experience is it uses less ram and it is far more responsive than VS (I did not use rider so I cannot compare).