Hacker News: chrchr

New comment by chrchr in "Passkeys are not a trap"

chrchr — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 19:23:12 +0000

I'm not an expert, but it's frustrating to read these threads about passkeys. The common objection I see here is "But if I lose my device I'm locked out!"

A lost passkey should be treated the same as a lost password.

Sites that implement passkeys need to have an account recovery mechanism. Granted, not every site does this correctly. Don't use passkeys on sites that don't have a recovery mechanism!

Secondly, the site you're authenticating to must allow you to have multiple passkeys. You either have a cloud-synced password manager so that all of your devices get the same passkey, or you have a passkey per device that you use to access the site. Again, not every site allows multiple passkeys. Don't use passkeys on sites that don't allow you to have multiple passkeys.

For a site implements both of these properties correctly, if you lose your device, you just connect to the site with your new device, perform whatever account recovery procedure (TOTP, email verification, phone verification, ...), create a new passkey, and, ideally, disable the passkey from your lost device.

Show HN: Clanking – Turn your coding agents' activity into a subtle soundscape

chrchr — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 23:40:47 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/chrchr/clanking

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50027932

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by chrchr in "Why Common Lisp is now the best programming language"

chrchr — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 04:54:15 +0000

Test driven developmet practitioners in Smalltalk used to (still do?) write the test before writing the implementation, run the test, and, when the "method not implemented" error shows up in the debugger, type the implementation and continue the execution. Common Lisp can do that too.

So, in practice, it might look like you hit any kind of runtime failure, and then the LLM writes some code to fix it, and the user's request completes successfully with no errors.

New comment by chrchr in "Make Tmux the OS"

chrchr — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:13:41 +0000

This is Noctalia 5. It's a complete, standalone shell with no Quickshell dependency.

New comment by chrchr in "Ollaya – Ollama for open-source, Jev-style decision models"

chrchr — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 06:58:45 +0000

I don't think people even read the blog post, because the blog post pretty clearly explains that Laya isn't really comparable to Jev.

New comment by chrchr in "Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage"

chrchr — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 05:49:51 +0000

I vividly remember the months after AMD64 came out when tech companies were dumping their specialty RISC server hardware (mostly Sun, but some other stuff too) and replacing them with commodity AMD boxes. It was felt like a monumental shift.

New comment by chrchr in "Ploopy Bean: a trackpoint for every computer"

chrchr — Sat, 16 May 2026 08:53:43 +0000

Interestingly, this device uses a totally different mechanism than classic trackpoints. Where true trackpoints use a network of strain gauges on the PCB, this is a 3D hall effect sensor and a spring. A trackpoint has only an imperceptible amount of travel, and this is designed to physically move. I really wonder how it feels in practice. It might feel more like a thumb stick from a game controller than a trackpoint.

New comment by chrchr in "Saying goodbye to Agile"

chrchr — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 06:56:12 +0000

Yes, but on the other hand, there's https://www.reddit.com/r/ididnthaveeggs/, which collects cases of home cooks making inadvisable recipe substitutions and then complaining to the recipe creators that the resulting dish tasted bad. Sometimes there are essential ingredients and skipping them or replacing them with something else makes success impossible.

New comment by chrchr in "How Reverse Game Theory Could Solve the Housing Shortage"

chrchr — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 16:21:52 +0000

It's funny that they call it "reverse game theory", like it's a new thing, when it's actually just regular game theory.

New comment by chrchr in "Minions – Stripe's Coding Agents Part 2"

chrchr — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 19:20:50 +0000

Amazon developers use similar devboxes. I think it is mostly so that developers can use a production-like Linux environment with integrated Amazon dev tooling. You're not required to use a devbox, but it can be easier and more convenient than running stuff on your laptop.

New comment by chrchr in "Tao Te Ching – Translated by Ursula K. Le Guin"

chrchr — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 18:01:43 +0000

"Everybody on earth knowing that beauty is beautiful makes ugliness."

That resonates with so much of the discussion on this site. We're all trying to make good technology that helps people! Why does it so often fall short?

New comment by chrchr in "Google is dead. Where do we go now?"

chrchr — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 23:12:54 +0000

But your friend is wrong. She does know at least one person who comments on online forums. I bet she knows more too.

The AI History That Explains Fears of a Bubble

chrchr — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 05:47:13 +0000

Article URL: https://time.com/7340901/ai-history-bubble-benchmarks/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46362774

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by chrchr in "DankLinux Repository"

chrchr — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 00:20:41 +0000

DankLinux provides packages for the Niri scrolling Wayland compositor and related tools, targeting popular mainstream distros: Fedora, openSUSE, Debian, and Ubuntu. Niri and related tools are still too bleeding-edge to appear in Debian or Ubuntu's official repos, so if you're interested in Niri and don't want to assemble the long list of prerequisites to compile everything yourself, this is an easy way to try it out.

While it pains me as a normie Gen-Xer to recommend anything "dank", using Niri along with DankMaterialShell [1] for configuration and launching apps lets you quickly put together a reasonably complete desktop using this repo. I've been building my own Niri binaries for a few months now, and I'm very happy that I can finally retire my build environment.

[1] https://danklinux.com/docs/dankmaterialshell/installation

DankLinux Repository

chrchr — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 00:20:41 +0000

Article URL: https://danklinux.com/docs/danklinux/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46177986

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by chrchr in "I see a future in jj"

chrchr — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 03:44:00 +0000

There's more than one way to do it, but the very normal UX is that you can just scroll through the diff file-by-file and stage/stash/drop each hunk individually by placing your cursor over it and issuing the appropriate command. You can do the same with files, staging/stashing/dropping changes to a file by placing the cursor on its name and issuing a command.

New comment by chrchr in "Show HN: I'm making a detective game built on Wikipedia"

chrchr — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 14:52:41 +0000

I played the map mode and got a map, with labels!

New comment by chrchr in "The zipper is getting its first major upgrade in 100 years"

chrchr — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 18:29:17 +0000

Anyone interested in zippers, or, more significantly for this website, how new technologies are invented, adopted, and mature, should read "Zipper: An Exploration in Novelty" by Robert D. Friedel [1]

YKK is kind of one of the heroes of the story. The zipper was pioneered by the U.S. company Talon Fastener, which was acquired and parted out in the 1970s. YKK bought the legacy machining for manufacturing zippers and went on to dominate the global market.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Zipper-Exploration-Robert-D-Friedel/d...

New comment by chrchr in "JSON River – Parse JSON incrementally as it streams in"

chrchr — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 19:01:48 +0000

I did something like this for Python [1]. The application I worked on at the time had a feature allowing users to import and export their data as a JSON document, and users often had enough data to make this cumbersome, especially with serialization and deserialization overhead. My implementation can also generate JSON documents as they stream out, from Python generators. The incremental JSON parsing was a little difficult to use, but incremental generation was an immediate win. We generated JSON documents from database results row-by-row and streamed the output to the web server, never producing the entire document in memory.

[1] https://github.com/chrchr/flojay

New comment by chrchr in "ProofOfThought: LLM-based reasoning using Z3 theorem proving"

chrchr — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 20:57:22 +0000

I had a surprising interaction with Gemini 2.5 Pro that this project reminds me of. I was asking the LLM for help using an online CAS system to solve a system of equations, and the CAS system wasn't working as I expected. After a couple back and forths with Gemini about the CAS system, Gemini just gave me the solution. I was surprised because it's the kind of thing I don't expect LLMs to be good at. It said it used Python's sympy symbolic computation package to arrive at the solution. So, yes, the marriage of fuzzy LLMs with more rigorous tools can have powerful effects.