Hacker News: conorbergin

New comment by conorbergin in "GitHub Monaspace Case Study"

conorbergin — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 02:25:45 +0000

Not a fan of “texture healing”, a very convoluted and unsatisfying way of fixing a minor problem with monospace fonts, I’d be more interested in seeing letterforms redesigned to be more optically balanced within the grid, another commenter points out ubuntu mono does this somewhat, but I imagine you could make some fairly radical alterations to certain letters and still be legible.

New comment by conorbergin in "DARPA’s new X-76"

conorbergin — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 21:12:16 +0000

The Osprey's accident rate is not that bad, and the US Army have ordered a new smaller tiltrotor, the v280.

New comment by conorbergin in "My “grand vision” for Rust"

conorbergin — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 04:57:46 +0000

I don’t think PL theory driven design produces good systems languages.

New comment by conorbergin in "My “grand vision” for Rust"

conorbergin — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 23:29:24 +0000

Thank God for Zig

New comment by conorbergin in "Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu"

conorbergin — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 19:50:30 +0000

Do you think Vulkan will become "nice" to use, could it ever be as ergonomic as Metal is supposed to be?

New comment by conorbergin in "Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu"

conorbergin — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 14:30:54 +0000

Is webgpu a good standard at this point? I am learning vulkan atm and 1.3 is significantly different to the previous APIs, and apparently webgpu is closer in behavior to 1.0. I am by no means an authority on the topic, I just see a lack of interest in targeting webgpu from people in game engines and scientific computing.

New comment by conorbergin in "Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux"

conorbergin — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 19:25:12 +0000

Having no CSD at all is unacceptable on small screens IMHO, far too much real estate is taken up by a title bar, you can be competitive with SSD by making them really thin, but then they are harder to click on and impossible with touch input. At the moment I have firefox setup with CSD and vertical tabs, only 7% of my vertical real estate is taken up by bars (inc. Gnome), which is pretty good for something that supports this many niceties.

New comment by conorbergin in "The C-Shaped Hole in Package Management"

conorbergin — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 16:00:31 +0000

I use a lot of obscure libraries for scientific computing and engineering. If I install it from pacman or manage to get an AUR build working, my life is pretty good. If I have to use a Python library the faff becomes unbearable, make a venv, delete the venv, change python version, use conda, use uv, try and install it globally, change python path, source .venv/bin/activate. This is less true for other languages with local package management, but none of them are as frictionless as C (or Zig which I use mostly). The other issue is .venvs, node_packages and equivalents take up huge amounts of disk and make it a pain to move folders around, and no I will not be using a git repo for every throwaway test.

New comment by conorbergin in "Size of Life"

conorbergin — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 17:47:46 +0000

>microns to inches

absolutely foul

New comment by conorbergin in "Resolution Dynamics: Deriving the Fine Structure Constant from Shannon Capacity"

conorbergin — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 15:13:48 +0000

crank check:

  - AI "collaboration" 
  - pure maths in a cosmology paper 
  - Zenodo 
  - small number of citations from a wide range of dates 
  - cosmology

One of my favourite youtube videos is Angela Collier's one on cranks, she makes the point that a motivated independent researcher can do science if they choose less ambitious problems, but these people always choose the deepest and most fundamental problems in maths and physics.

New comment by conorbergin in "Migrating the main Zig repository from GitHub to Codeberg"

conorbergin — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 04:41:40 +0000

>If you called Netanyahu a monkey because of his Gaza genocide, most people who are pro-palestine will try to cancel you! Not because they think highly of him, but because it hurts the cause more than it helps.

Your reading of the current political climate is very different to mine.

New comment by conorbergin in "µcad: New open source programming language that can generate 2D sketches and 3D"

conorbergin — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 19:09:19 +0000

Can it do fillets?

New comment by conorbergin in "Why effort scales superlinearly with the perceived quality of creative work"

conorbergin — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 13:11:23 +0000

Very funny to put a bibtex citation under such a small piece of work

New comment by conorbergin in "The rise of async AI programming"

conorbergin — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 15:31:54 +0000

Redefining commonly understood phrases to mean something else in your own little world make you look ignorant.

New comment by conorbergin in "What If OpenDocument Used SQLite?"

conorbergin — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 23:48:37 +0000

I've being trying out SQLite for a side project of mine, a virtual whiteboard, I haven't quite got my head around it, but it seems to be much less of a bother than interacting with file system APIs so far. The problem I haven't really solved is how sync and maybe collaboration is going to interact with it, so far I have:

1. Plaintext format (JSON or similar) or SQLite dump files versioned by git

2. Some sort of modern local first CRDT thing (Turso, libsql, Electric SQL)

3. Server/Client architecture that can also be run locally

Has anyone had any success in this department?

New comment by conorbergin in "Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead?"

conorbergin — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 13:11:24 +0000

If you are a hobbyist or small business in desktop manufacturing you are basically forced to buy Chinese products.

I have never owned a Prusa, but I have owned several Creality and Bambu Labs printers, because I could get the same utility at half the cost. The same goes for soldering irons, linear actuators, oscillscopes, etc. I still buy European hand tools (Knipex, Wera, etc) because I know they won't break in a year, so they are good value in the long run.

Often the choice is whether to buy a used, last generation tool of eBay, or a brand new next-gen tool from China. The choice depends on how flawed the Chinese implementation is and the gap in utility between the generations.

The main problem with Chinese products is the lack of accountability. The same product will be sold under multiple brands, or by dropshippers, and you have no idea who actually made it, there are some strong Chinese brands that buck this trend, i.e. Bambu Labs. When you buy western tools you are buying peace of mind, something I can't currently afford.

New comment by conorbergin in "Zig's Lovely Syntax"

conorbergin — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 18:04:58 +0000

I think everyone has this reaction until they start using it, then it makes perfect sense, especially when using editors that have multiple cursors and can operate on selections.

New comment by conorbergin in "Partially Matching Zig Enums"

conorbergin — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 15:25:49 +0000

I would rather rely on a bunch of sanitizers and static analysis because it is more representative of the core problem I am solving: Producing machine code. If I want Rust to solve these problems for me I now have to write code in the Rust model, which is a layer of indirection that I have found more trouble than it's worth.

New comment by conorbergin in "Partially Matching Zig Enums"

conorbergin — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 14:03:36 +0000

I think the problem with this attitude is the compiler becomes a middle manager you have to appease rather than a collaborator. Certainly there are advantages to having a manager, but if you go off the beaten track with Rust, you will not have a good time. I write most of my code in Zig these days and I think being able to segfault is a small price to pay to never have to see `Arc>>` again.

New comment by conorbergin in "You Don't Need Monads"

conorbergin — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 17:22:28 +0000

Monads are the poor man's early return.