Hacker News: bloovis

New comment by bloovis in "Text-based web browsers"

bloovis — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 12:18:52 +0000

> Why do you need to run the browser on the server? I can't think of a case where you would want to use a text browser there instead of a regular browser on your actual machine.

I've had to do that on my VPS a few times when I was debugging my Apache setup and needed to look at a web page that was only visible on the VPS, i.e., not available to the outside world.

New comment by bloovis in "Zen-C: Write like a high-level language, run like C"

bloovis — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 16:59:48 +0000

Crystal compiles directly to object code, using LLVM. It does provide the ability to interoperate with C code; as an example, I use this feature to call ncursesw functions from Crystal.

New comment by bloovis in "T-Ruby is Ruby with syntax for types"

bloovis — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 12:16:29 +0000

As others have mentioned, Crystal is close to Ruby in many ways, such that some simpler code will port straight over. I've managed to port a large Ruby application (the sup email client) to Crystal, and a lot of the code just worked, but I still had tweak just about everything else to get it to compile. The hardest bits were the places that used Ruby's dynamic nature, e.g., constructing method names at runtime and then calling them with send, or creating methods on the fly, or data structures that mixed up types freely.

Crystal's intent, as I see it, is very different from Ruby's. Because it compiles down to machine code in a single executable, it's good for making things that are fast and easy to deploy. I've used it to make small web services as well as the bigger thing I mentioned above.

New comment by bloovis in "I Am Mark Zuckerberg"

bloovis — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 10:46:43 +0000

My ex-wife had the same name as a woman in another state who had beaten up a cop and done jail time. So every time my wife's driver's license came up for renewal, the DMV decided she was that criminal, and refused to issue the license. This happened so often, she eventually was on a first-name basis with the DMV director, who had to intervene every time. I'm guessing this problem due to the DMV in our little state using an ancient computer system, perhaps written in COBOL in the 1960s. I can just see the code now, where it compares the name, but not state of residence or any other identifiers.