Hacker News: contextfree

New comment by contextfree in "Seattle City Council votes to ban surveillance pricing in sale of groceries"

contextfree — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 01:44:57 +0000

> the maximum that consumer can afford.

but isn't that less for consumers who can afford less?

New comment by contextfree in "A brief history of Windows scroll bar shortcuts"

contextfree — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:45:43 +0000

WPF has a datagrid control now, IIRC it was added in the second or third major version.

New comment by contextfree in "Audacity 4.0"

contextfree — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 17:07:59 +0000

"designed for an 8 note system"

*7 note system

It's called an "octave" because the 8th note is considered another instance of the 1st.

New comment by contextfree in "English ↔ Claudish Translator"

contextfree — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 20:49:51 +0000

https://bsky.app/profile/vgel.me calls it "Claudlish" which I prefer because it sounds funnier

New comment by contextfree in "The Road to MS-DOS 2.0"

contextfree — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 13:09:52 +0000

This isn't so much a cmd thing as a fundamental Windows API thing. CreateProcess takes in the entire command line as a single string.

Powershell is a completely different model where native commands run in-process, you can import commands and invoke APIs from arbitrary .NET assemblies, and then the PS runtime handles all argument parsing (and many other things). But it also lets you invoke and interop with arbitrary command-line executables and then those do their own parsing like they always have.

New comment by contextfree in "If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?"

contextfree — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 23:36:56 +0000

On Windows, UWP was supposed to solve this (by blocking apps from taking focus directly, but having the OS/shell create an app window immediately on launch and give focus to it) but most apps aren't UWP apps.

New comment by contextfree in "Terrence Tao's ChatGPT Conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture Counterexample"

contextfree — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 18:20:13 +0000

Yes, trying to communicate (or watching others try to communicate) about these topics is incredibly frustrating because it's pretty much impossible to make any progress without interrogating people's different definitions, but nobody wants to do that because it would mean being pedantic, splitting hairs, etc.

New comment by contextfree in "AI makes programming differently difficult"

contextfree — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 20:21:55 +0000

Yeah I've written some docs using the following process:

1. Throw some notes, PR links, etc. into copilot and ask for a first draft

2. Go back and forth for a while asking for revisions

3. Trash all of the AI-generated text and rewrite the whole thing myself from scratch, which I can do quickly in a typing frenzy because I now have a clear idea what I want, by way of seeing what I don't want.

New comment by contextfree in "AI makes programming differently difficult"

contextfree — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 19:57:53 +0000

But I feel like over the last ~10 years there's been a trend back towards learning more about them (e.g., with Rust and new C# features, or with C++ Win32 programming becoming a cool hipster thing somehow)? Or maybe that's just my own personal bubble.

New comment by contextfree in "Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?"

contextfree — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 18:41:04 +0000

I still take a lot of handwritten notes? Sometimes while using AI even

New comment by contextfree in "Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?"

contextfree — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 18:37:40 +0000

Yeah, I've always tried to train myself to do calculations in my head as much as reasonably possible when learning about mathematical objects, etc. Like when I was learning linear algebra I made myself invert 4x4 matrices in my head. (Pen and paper is also cheating!) Calculators and computers have been better than me at this sort of thing for my entire life, so in some sense this isn't a change?

New comment by contextfree in "Japan develops a method to recover up to 90% of lithium from used EV batteries"

contextfree — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 08:38:00 +0000

Metal Gear Solid 2 sort of

New comment by contextfree in "The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes"

contextfree — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 05:28:23 +0000

I guess the argument is that, while it's the same whether the user asks for "give me page 3" or "give me scrollbar Y coordinate 2160", the user is more likely to do the first or at least to care about the correctness of its result?

New comment by contextfree in "Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption is under 4.5%, only 1% use it weekly"

contextfree — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 04:29:05 +0000

That is about consumer copilot not M365 copilot

New comment by contextfree in "Automating AI Away"

contextfree — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 04:25:44 +0000

Roslyn API basically lets you plug in to the C# compiler or use parts of it so that you can get the same view of the abstract syntax tree, typechecking, flow analysis, etc. that the compiler does. So it's a way to work with C# code at that level rather than just via textual manipulation. I'm less familiar with other languages but I think many have compilers with analogous capabilities, I know Haskell has the GHC API and I think the LLVM-based Clang (C++) and Rust compilers let you do similar things

New comment by contextfree in "Automating AI Away"

contextfree — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 20:24:09 +0000

A dumber but related habit I've gotten into is that if I want to use AI to do some sort of refactoring on a C# codebase, instead of asking it to edit the code directly I ask it to write a code transformation using the Roslyn compiler API, then run that on the code. The result is less likely to have subtle bugs if it appears to work and gets through a light code review on the transformation (i.e., attempts to cheat with weird special-casing are more likely to stand out amongst the Roslyn API code, and if there isn't such weird special-casing but the code is wrong, the result is more likely to be completely broken rather than subtly broken)

New comment by contextfree in "If you're a button, you have one job"

contextfree — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 07:06:45 +0000

Seeing this makes me think of the controls from the original arcade version of Street Fighter 1.

New comment by contextfree in "Have you restarted your computer this week?"

contextfree — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 04:13:42 +0000

Windows has been gradually "undocking" more and more stuff from the main OS install into separately updatable/restartable/etc components for a while.

New comment by contextfree in "Microsoft Needs Windows Lite"

contextfree — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 22:54:34 +0000

The post doesn't really define the problem this is supposed to solve for "builders". FWIW, Microsoft's official attempt at solving this problem? seems to be "Windows developer configs" -> https://github.com/microsoft/WindowsDeveloperConfig

which is described as

A WinGet Configuration (DSC) file that sets up a clean, lightweight, distraction-free developer workstation. The goal is a PC state that devs actually love using: no clutter, no noise, just the tools you need. (...)

* A PC devs actually want to use. Clean Explorer, dark theme, no pop-ups, no recommendations, no widgets. Just your code and your tools. (...)

New comment by contextfree in "Microsoft Needs Windows Lite"

contextfree — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 22:43:12 +0000

Windows doesn't have any modern version of .NET installed by default though, only old .NET Framework versions