Hacker News: benrbray

New comment by benrbray in "No Skill. No Taste"

benrbray — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 16:59:57 +0000

Presentation matters. Good documentation is evidence of a library that has been carefully thought through. Slop in the readme suggests slop in the code.

New comment by benrbray in "Implementing a Foil Sticker Effect"

benrbray — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 01:22:59 +0000

Really cool! Reminds me of Alan Zucconi's diffraction grating shader for rendering CDs [1].

[1] https://www.alanzucconi.com/2017/07/15/cd-rom-shader-1/

New comment by benrbray in "Figma will IPO on July 31"

benrbray — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 02:34:52 +0000

> upset people who decided to pay for it for the first time in their life

It also upset paying customers. It's no longer possible to _own_ Adobe software, and so I don't anymore. Up until just a couple years ago I was still using the copy of Photoshop CS4 I paid for (as part of the Master Collection CS4, Student Edition) in 2008.

A monthly subscription is a complete non-starter for me.

New comment by benrbray in "Knowledge-based society, my ass"

benrbray — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 06:36:01 +0000

Eastern Europe it looks like, but this story is remarkably similar to my experience as a graduate student / technical staff at public research institutions in both the United States and Japan.

New comment by benrbray in "Knowledge-based society, my ass"

benrbray — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 06:31:16 +0000

I'm sorry, but your reply suggests an incredible disdain for both technical expertise and for educators. There is value in depth&breadth of knowledge, and it takes great skill to craft a good curriculum.

From a US perspective, students paying $50,000+ per year in tuition deserve better than an overworked PI who has crammed C++ over the weekend.

New comment by benrbray in "A Computational Proof of the Highest-Scoring Boggle Board"

benrbray — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 05:08:29 +0000

Somewhat related, I used minisat.js to generate Boggle boards that contain a given list of words!

[0] https://benrbray.com/projects/unboggler

New comment by benrbray in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (March 2025)"

benrbray — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 05:29:37 +0000

Location: Tokyo, Japan

Remote: Yes

Willing to Relocate: No

Technologies: TypeScript, Rust, Haskell, Scala, C#

Résumé/CV: https://benrbray.com/about

Email: benrbray [at] gmail [dot] com

I'm an American software engineer living in Tokyo with 5+ years of professional experience (plus an additional 15+ years of hobbyist experience!). I got my start in high school uploading Flash games to Newgrounds, and learned early on to love the work that I do.

I'm a strong believer in local-first, interoperable, configurable software. I'm seeking to work on a product built to empower users, not lock them in.

I'm particularly interested in working on: rich document editors, programming languages & developer tools, game dev & simulation.

Please visit the about page on my website to learn more about my past work!

https://benrbray.com/about

New comment by benrbray in "I spent 2 years building my own game engine (Rust, WASM, WebGPU)"

benrbray — Sun, 18 Aug 2024 16:26:02 +0000

fwiw Chrome on Linux has no WebGPU support or hardware acceleration, so I often use Firefox for e.g. playing Ruffle content. The story is different on different platforms, and will slowly improve.

Ask HN: Tech Jobs with Minimal Screen Time?

benrbray — Mon, 22 Jul 2024 16:22:42 +0000

Writing software brings me a lot of joy, but now five years out of school, I'm starting to worry that I've made a huge mistake choosing a career that will keep me chained to a desk, staring at a screen, mostly not speaking with anyone all day.

For me, remote work has made the situation even more unbearable -- all human interaction at work is now through Zoom calls and GitHub issues. It's like pulling teeth getting coworkers to stop by the office.

What tech or tech-adjacent careers are out there that involve a better balance of screen time / physical activity / in-person interactions / impact on my local community?

If you have such a job I'd love to hear more about your experiences :)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41036205

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by benrbray in "VSCodium – Open-source binaries of VSCode"

benrbray — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 06:44:39 +0000

Most (all?) vscode extensions are hosted on GitHub, is it not possible to reuse them with a custom build?

New comment by benrbray in "The Resilience of Costco (2018)"

benrbray — Sat, 29 Jul 2023 09:48:13 +0000

I live in Tokyo which arguably is one of the most transit friendly cities, and still bus to the nearby Costco to load up every month or two. Sometimes you just need a suitcase full of mozzarella sticks, no questions asked.

New comment by benrbray in "Show HN: Thoughts on Flash in 2023, in Flash, in 2023"

benrbray — Fri, 21 Apr 2023 09:32:38 +0000

Howdy Elfman, fancy meeting you here all these years after the Game Trailer Collab! Thanks for the nostalgia trip :)

New comment by benrbray in "Tag Systems"

benrbray — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 09:22:55 +0000

I think something like datalog queries would be perfect for refactoring and searching tags. Would also let you declare relationships between tags, like "tagged(x, calculus) -> tagged(x, math)"

New comment by benrbray in "Tesla now factors late night driving into their safety score"

benrbray — Sat, 25 Mar 2023 15:08:27 +0000

Driving without insurance is illegal in virtually every state, and the supreme court has ruled that driving is a "virtual necessity" [1] to American life. I am normally very r/fuckcars but this sort of thing affects everyone and as surveillance becomes cheaper and cheaper we may not have a choice.

(if cars are dangerous, which they of course are, the way to fix it is to build walkable cities, not to charge higher rates for the graveyard shift workers who have no say in the matter)

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/430/705

New comment by benrbray in "The rise of universities’ diversity bureaucrats (2018)"

benrbray — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 01:02:04 +0000

As a simple example: I wouldn't want to work with ten copies of myself. It would magnify my strengths but also my weaknesses. It's much better if a team is comprised by people with different backgrounds, different strengths, different weaknesses. Of course, it is helpful if everyone has some common ground, to facilitate better communication. Diversity in college admissions is one way to create an environment where these sorts of teams can form organically.

Of course, the devil is in the details. I tend not to agree with how most diversity programs are implemented, despite agreeing with the mission.

New comment by benrbray in "Marp: Markdown Presentation Ecosystem"

benrbray — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 12:57:48 +0000

For me it's the ability to type math in LaTeX notation on the slides. Google slides doesn't support this and neither did PowerPoint last time I used it many years ago.

When I was a TA I used a plugin to let me display Jupyter notebooks as a slideshow, that was really handy. Much better editing experience than ppt plus you have readable diffs with git.

New comment by benrbray in "U.S. gov't announces intent to slash citizenship renunciation fee by four-fifths"

benrbray — Sun, 08 Jan 2023 05:30:08 +0000

One side effect of this inane policy is that it is becomes very difficult for US citizens living abroad to invest their money, due to the tax consequences of holding foreign stocks, as well as the fact that very few US exchanges are willing to open accounts for expats.

I live in Japan, and holding Japanese stocks will get me in trouble with the US government, while holding US stocks can dramatically complicate my Japanese taxes. Because I reside outside the US, I cannot have a 401k or Roth IRA, but it is also impractical for me to take advantage of the Japanese equivalent (NISA) due to the prohibitive cost of correctly reporting my holdings to the US. In some cases there is also double taxation.

New comment by benrbray in "U.S. moves to bar noncompete agreements in labor contracts"

benrbray — Thu, 05 Jan 2023 16:11:22 +0000

They should be legal, but expensive. If it is so valuable to companies that their workers not leave to work for competitors, they should be required to pay 100% salary for the non-compete period.

New comment by benrbray in "Interest in heat pumps has increased dramatically in recent years"

benrbray — Mon, 05 Sep 2022 01:02:57 +0000

Meanwhile houses here have no insulation or double-paned windows so it's still not cool enough and my electric bill is through the roof!

New comment by benrbray in "Why Haskell Is Interesting? (2005)"

benrbray — Sun, 04 Sep 2022 14:41:53 +0000

I've come to appreciate function application / composition syntax and think it allows for much more clear and readable code, compared to e.g. Scala which can be quite verbose and obscure the compositional structure of functional code.

On the other hand, I agree that lack of a good solution for record syntax is a huge wart on the language that regularly gets in the way.