Hacker News: cpmsmith

New comment by cpmsmith in "The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday"

cpmsmith — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 20:27:51 +0000

One thing that stuck out to me about this is that there have only been 32 years since 1993. That is, if it's happened 6 times, this threshold is breached roughly once every five years. Doesn't sound that historic put that way.

New comment by cpmsmith in "Date is out, Temporal is in"

cpmsmith — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 21:25:37 +0000

Temporal does have PlainDate, which is the Date primitive you're describing (by a different name, presumably to not collide with the old Date type).

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

New comment by cpmsmith in "Orion 1.0"

cpmsmith — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 17:08:03 +0000

Yes, but Orion uses WebKit intentionally on desktop as well, unlike Chrome or Firefox which use their own engines on desktop but WebKit on iOS, so it's a bit different in this case.

New comment by cpmsmith in "I Test Drove a Flying Car. Get Ready, They're Here"

cpmsmith — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 16:52:52 +0000

If we assume this means "in the next 50 years", they wouldn't be totally wrong. You could make the case airplanes were only on the cusp of being "a meaning[ful] part of life in America" by 1953 – planes only overtook trains for domestic US travel in 1955, and 1957 for trans-Atlantic.

https://airandspace.si.edu/explore/stories/commercial-aviati...

New comment by cpmsmith in "Bcachefs removed from the mainline kernel"

cpmsmith — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 16:34:26 +0000

I don't think any of that means the benchmarks shouldn't be taken seriously. GP didn't say they expect Bcachefs to perform like EXT4/XFS, they said they expected more like Btrfs or ZFS, to which it has more similar features.

On the the configuration stuff, these benchmarks intentionally only ever use the default configuration – they're not interested in the limits of what's possible with the filesystems, just what they do "out of the box", since that's what the overwhelming majority of users will experience.

New comment by cpmsmith in "Bcachefs removed from the mainline kernel"

cpmsmith — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 16:12:23 +0000

I think it has improvements that were never upstreamed to the kernel, based on the developer's comments elsewhere[0].

[0]: https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/software/general-linux...

New comment by cpmsmith in "Bookmarks.txt is a concept of keeping URLs in plain text files"

cpmsmith — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 18:54:53 +0000

Firefox's implementation of "Copy link to highlight" isn't enabled on stable yet, but can be enabled manually. The ticket to enable it is here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1948471

New comment by cpmsmith in "Bookmarks.txt is a concept of keeping URLs in plain text files"

cpmsmith — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 18:44:43 +0000

For what it's worth, you can drag a tab onto your bookmark bar, at least in Firefox.

New comment by cpmsmith in "D2 (text to diagram tool) now supports ASCII renders"

cpmsmith — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 15:10:25 +0000

By the way, it looks like the MermaidJS implementation of the WiiU example is broken due to subgraphs not creating namespaces. That is, the `rom` node in the `amd` subgraph is overwriting the one in the `ibm` subgraph.

New comment by cpmsmith in "FFmpeg 8.0 adds Whisper support"

cpmsmith — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 23:18:23 +0000

I'm just getting "invalid response." in a 500 response from the `anubis/api/pass-challenge` endpoint – weirdly, when I added breakpoints and stepped through the code myself, it worked, but if I load again, I get the error. Maybe there's a timing component? (Firefox stable)

New comment by cpmsmith in "Don't animate height"

cpmsmith — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 14:32:16 +0000

You might be surprised at the CPU usage of rendering a GIF. I'm not sure why, but I've previously noticed Slack takes noticeably more CPU when there's an animated emoji on screen.

New comment by cpmsmith in "Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails"

cpmsmith — Mon, 26 May 2025 19:09:03 +0000

Surely those things entail reading books and talking to people.

New comment by cpmsmith in "But what if I want a faster horse?"

cpmsmith — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 16:45:46 +0000

Apple Music's library features much more closely mirror the iTunes style, i.e. you have a library you can browse outside of just the "liked songs" pseudo-playlist. For instance, in Spotify (AFAICT) there's no way to browse all the songs in your library by artist; you can only list the artists you've followed, which is unrelated to whose songs you've liked, and go to their general artist page.

Personally, this is the top contender for a reason for me to switch away from Spotify.

New comment by cpmsmith in "Smarter Than 'Ctrl+F': Linking Directly to Web Page Content"

cpmsmith — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 13:54:54 +0000

The "press again to fall back to the browser's key binding" solution many sites use for ^F isn't perfect, and won't work for all scenarios, but it definitely helps.

New comment by cpmsmith in "Thunderbird.net Has a New Look"

cpmsmith — Fri, 17 May 2024 15:18:49 +0000

I believe account sync is among their higher priorities: https://blog.thunderbird.net/tag/thunderbird-sync/

New comment by cpmsmith in "Color for the color-challenged"

cpmsmith — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 21:33:55 +0000

This article mentions a notable limitation of the HSL colour model:

> Perceived brightness is not at all uniform at equal starting points, it depends on the hue, as well as the saturation.

…but it doesn't mention an (under-discussed) solution available: using a better colour model. OKLCH uses similarly understandable coordinates, "chroma" being roughly the same concept as "saturation", but is designed to avoid just this kind of problem. That is, if you change the "hue" coordinate, you can reasonably expect the perceived lightness and chroma of the resulting colour not to change. Where such a colour does not exist, e.g. a blue with the same lightness and chroma as #FFFF00 yellow, it's simply out of gamut.

There's a colour picker web app[0] that shows the boundaries of the space along with smaller spaces like sRGB, and it's helpful for getting a feel for it. It also links to a post[1] laying out the reasons to use OKLCH in web projects (it's now supported by all three major engines), and the post[2] introducing OKLAB (same space, different coordinate system) is heavy on technical details.

[0]: https://oklch.com/

[1]: https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/oklch-in-css-why-quit-rg...

[2]: https://bottosson.github.io/posts/oklab/

New comment by cpmsmith in "Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned"

cpmsmith — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 23:54:00 +0000

I think your point is that bad PR affects your decision not to use Intuit's products, but I'd argue they're a perfect example of bad PR not being a problem. They have sensationally bad PR, yet they're worth >$100B, one of the 100 most valuable companies in the world, and they dominate their category.

New comment by cpmsmith in "Firefox 118"

cpmsmith — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 17:59:33 +0000

Is 1278 enough for you? They don't list every single bug in the release notes; that would be a full time job on its own.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?f1=cf_status_firefo...

New comment by cpmsmith in "Firefox 118"

cpmsmith — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 17:49:06 +0000

Sidebery's wiki describes[0] a method using a window "title preface" API, then using that preface in CSS selectors.

https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery/wiki/Firefox-Styles-Snipp...

New comment by cpmsmith in "Organic Maps"

cpmsmith — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 21:40:14 +0000

I know that OsmAnd has fairly granular routing preferences, including a "preferred terrain" setting with "hilly", "less hilly", and "flat" options (as well as a "use elevation data" option which I don't quite understand).