Hacker News: bgrainger

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

bgrainger — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 15:09:30 +0000

The promise was that WPF would use hardware-accelerated libraries such as DirectWrite to put text on the screen even faster than GDI+ (using the CPU) could do. The reality turned out to be quite different: multiple layers of abstraction and just plain inefficient WPF code [1] meant that users needed powerful CPUs and GPUs just to get reasonable performance.

[1] https://faithlife.codes/blog/2019/06/improving-wpf-text-disp...

New comment by bgrainger in "GitHub Monaspace Case Study"

bgrainger — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 21:19:16 +0000

I first encountered this in Bjarne Stroustrup's 2000 book, _The C++ Programming Language_. As he notes in the introductory material:

> In code examples, a proportional-width font is used for identifiers. … At first glance, this presentation style will seem “unnatural” to programmers accustomed to seeing code in constant-width fonts. However, proportional-width fonts are generally regarded as better than constant-width fonts for presentation of text. Using a proportional-width font also allows me to present code with fewer illogical line breaks.

I switched years ago and would never go back to monospace.

Planning Center is the newest Rails Foundation Contributing member

bgrainger — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 22:35:33 +0000

Article URL: https://rubyonrails.org/2026/3/3/planning-center-newest-contributing-member

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47240076

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by bgrainger in "Claude Opus 4.5"

bgrainger — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 21:13:08 +0000

This feels like a dumb question, but why doesn't Cursor implement that tool?

I built my own simple coding agent six months ago, and I implemented str_replace_based_edit_tool (https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agents-and-tools/tool-us...) for Claude to use; it wasn't hard to do.

New comment by bgrainger in "Google Antigravity"

bgrainger — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 17:37:48 +0000

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45968731

  Why can I not authenticate into Google Antigravity?
  Google Antigravity is currently available for non-Workspace personal Google accounts in approved geographies. Please try using an @gmail.com email address if having challenges with Workspace Google accounts (even if used for personal purposes).

https://antigravity.google/docs/faq

New comment by bgrainger in "AI can code, but it can't build software"

bgrainger — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 03:21:38 +0000

Completely agree, and I've started writing more Roslyn analyzers to provide quick feedback to the LLM (assuming you're using it in something like VS Code that exposes the `problems` tool to the model).

I also want C# semantics even more closely integrated with the LLM. I'm imagining a stronger version of Structured Model Outputs that knows all the valid tokens that could be generated following a "." (including instance methods, extension properties, etc.) and prevents invalid code from even being generated in the first place, rather than needing a roundtrip through a Roslyn analyzer or the compiler to feed more text back to the model. (Perhaps there's some leeway to allow calls to not-yet-written methods to be generated.) Or maybe this idea is just a crutch I'm inventing for current frontier models and future models will be smart enough that they don't need it?

New comment by bgrainger in "Beads: A coding agent memory system"

bgrainger — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 17:17:39 +0000

Storing issues in a local SQLite database reminded me of Fossil SCM, which natively supports "tickets" as a source code artifact (and which uses a SQLite database under the hood): https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/bugtheory.wiki.

New comment by bgrainger in "GitHub MCP Server"

bgrainger — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 21:06:02 +0000

One interesting thing about this repo is that the "Contributors" view shows "Copilot" as the #6 contributor: https://github.com/github/github-mcp-server/graphs/contribut...

It looks like that primarily comes from code review suggestions it's made on PRs, e.g., https://github.com/github/github-mcp-server/commit/031dd741a....

Open Source Maintenance Fee

bgrainger — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 22:58:48 +0000

Article URL: https://opensourcemaintenancefee.org/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43189258

Points: 3

# Comments: 8

Docker Announces Don Johnson as New CEO, Succeeding Scott Johnston

bgrainger — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 22:17:02 +0000

Article URL: https://www.docker.com/press-release/docker-announces-don-johnson-as-new-ceo-succeeding-scott-johnston/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43062942

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by bgrainger in "GitHub Git Operations Are Down"

bgrainger — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 04:13:24 +0000

We self-host GitHub using GitHub Enterprise Server. It is a mature product that requires next-to-no maintenance and is remarkably stable. (We did have a period of downtime caused by running it on an underprovisioned VM for our needs, but since resolving that it hasn't had problems.)

Of course we have a small and mostly unchanging number of users, don't have to deal with DDoS attacks, and can schedule the fairly-infrequent updates during maintenance windows that are convenient for us (since we don't need 100% availability outside of US working hours).

I don't have the metrics in front of me, but I would say we've easily exceeded github.com's uptime in the last 12 months.

New comment by bgrainger in "UnitedHealthcare executive fatally shot in Manhattan"

bgrainger — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 15:54:19 +0000

Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42317968

New comment by bgrainger in "Worldtimeapp.com Easy Timezone Converter"

bgrainger — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 03:02:32 +0000

I couldn't add "Sydney", "Auckland", "Johannesburg", or "Buenos Aires". Is the entire Southern Hemisphere missing?

More than a quarter of all new code at Google is generated by AI

bgrainger — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 23:10:05 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/AndrewCurran_/status/1851374530998256126

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41990377

Points: 23

# Comments: 31

New comment by bgrainger in "US startup charging couples to 'screen embryos for IQ'"

bgrainger — Fri, 18 Oct 2024 21:59:05 +0000

> [Dr. Jonathan] Anomaly is a well-known figure in a growing transatlantic movement that promotes development of genetic selection and enhancement tools.

Nominative determinism is real.

New comment by bgrainger in "[dead]"

bgrainger — Sun, 18 Aug 2024 23:20:05 +0000

There's an ongoing issue with ranking in Google Search that's affecting a large number of search results. We've identified the root cause and this issue is unrelated to the ongoing core update rollout.

Silicon Valley's False Prophet

bgrainger — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 17:25:13 +0000

Article URL: https://www.wheresyoured.at/false-prophet/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40649018

Points: 41

# Comments: 3

New comment by bgrainger in "What we've learned from a year of building with LLMs"

bgrainger — Sun, 02 Jun 2024 02:37:06 +0000

Are you sure? The article says "cite this as Yan et al. (May 2024)" and published-time in the metadata is 2024-05-12.

Weird: I just refreshed the page and it now redirects to a different domain (than the originally-submitted URL) and has a date of June 8, 2023. It still cites articles and blog posts from 2024, though.

The People Deliberately Killing Facebook

bgrainger — Mon, 20 May 2024 16:44:10 +0000

Article URL: https://www.wheresyoured.at/killingfacebook/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40417345

Points: 127

# Comments: 42

New comment by bgrainger in "British engineering giant Arup revealed as $25M deepfake scam victim"

bgrainger — Mon, 20 May 2024 14:02:59 +0000

Previous discussion (from when it happened but before the victim company was named): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39248649