Hacker News: creshal

New comment by creshal in "Direct Win32 API, weird-shaped windows, and why they mostly disappeared"

creshal — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 10:44:06 +0000

> The point was usually not usability. It was identity.

And we're not even getting usability out of it! Each of those bland react-angles is subtly inconsistent with the OS, with each other, and very often, itself. And in 6 months everything will move around again, for no reason other than to keep the responsible managers employed, without improving UX. And a11y is crying in a corner somewhere, forgotten.

New comment by creshal in "Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan"

creshal — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 08:18:32 +0000

Don't be silly, this is the JS ecosystem. Why use your brain for a minute and come up with a 50 byte helper function, if you can instead import a library with 3912726 dependencies and let the compiler spend 90 seconds on every build to tree shake 3912723 out again and give you a highly optimized bundle that's only 3 megabytes small?

New comment by creshal in "Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps"

creshal — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 08:56:28 +0000

Scammers have no problem waiting 24 hours, so this doesn't protect incompetent people at all.

New comment by creshal in "Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps"

creshal — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 08:52:53 +0000

To be blunt: I don't care. Don't make their incompetence my problem.

New comment by creshal in "Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps"

creshal — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 08:48:37 +0000

> But putting my design hat on here: couldn't this be the whole approach?

No, because protecting users is just an excuse. The overreach is the goal.

New comment by creshal in "“This is not the computer for you”"

creshal — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 11:48:17 +0000

That includes school-issued Macs, so I don't see how that's an argument against Chromebooks.

New comment by creshal in "“This is not the computer for you”"

creshal — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 11:28:06 +0000

Yeah, you'd find out about it all in the newspapers a few hours later, and none if it was "clap to yourself in an empty room" impressive anyway. I was around back then and I didn't feel the need to act like a drug addict whenever Steve Jobs opened his mouth.

New comment by creshal in "“This is not the computer for you”"

creshal — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 09:30:40 +0000

And faking being sick so he could clap at Apple marketing events. He kinda lost me there.

New comment by creshal in "The MacBook Neo"

creshal — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 08:30:46 +0000

OTOH, client Windows is the smallest and least important building block in it. Microsoft is helpfully also setting all their native apps on fire too and replacing them with webslop that runs equally poorly on MacOS, ChromeOS and Linux as it does on Windows 11, so the biggest concern is (A)AD integration and centralized management… and all three are decently manageable these days. If Microsoft didn't throw in the Windows licenses for free, more orgs would already be looking at ditching Windows 11, and if it keeps getting worse, even that won't look like a good deal any more.

New comment by creshal in "15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram"

creshal — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 09:56:33 +0000

> Maybe what bothers you is that you have a branch for tags, yeah, that's an extra level of indirection, but this lets you separate between user facing information in the master branch commits and developer facing information in the release branches commits.

That's such a marginal niche use case to build your entire organization around… why would you make this the default approach?

New comment by creshal in "MessageFormat: Unicode standard for localizable message strings"

creshal — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 12:32:00 +0000

The standard is, for better or worse, gettext; it's good enough that any attempt to replace it runs into the problem that people can't agree on how much better an alternative needs to be to be worth migrating to; so you get a constant churn that so far hasn't seen any clear winner.

New comment by creshal in "xAI joins SpaceX"

creshal — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 11:02:18 +0000

Depends on a lot of factors. LEO has high drag, but good radiation shielding, so if you've got a low enough orbit you can use most embedded hardware but need to compensate with bigger thrusters and bigger fuel tanks if you want it to survive "any length of time" without burning up from atmospheric drag.

New comment by creshal in "Apt-bundle: brew bundle for apt"

creshal — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 18:10:35 +0000

apt-mark manual has allowed the same functionality in apt since forever and probably inspired apk's copy of it :)

New comment by creshal in "ICE and Palantir: US agents using health data to hunt illegal immigrants"

creshal — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 14:10:24 +0000

They're unsure because a lot depends on the legal status of children born to non-citizen parents in the US after a executive order tried to revoke birthright citizenship: https://www.bmj.com/content/390/bmj.r1538

If that EO was legal, then sharing the data is, too. If it wasn't, then it's probably a privacy violation, but the CMS isn't allowed to make that call themselves, they have to rely on court decisions for it. And challenging EOs is not trivial.

New comment by creshal in "People who know the formula for WD-40"

creshal — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 12:21:00 +0000

Since they're operating in Europe it's trivial to split manufacturing into 3+ places that are within an hour drive but also in 3+ distinct jurisdictions that are part of the same free trade zone, so no tax authority can have a full picture either. And you'll never get, say, French and German tax authorities to voluntarily talk to each other.

New comment by creshal in "JuiceSSH – Give me my pro features back"

creshal — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 09:54:58 +0000

No, it's a generic android keyboard and works with all apps. But you need a keyboard like it (arrow keys, ctrl, etc.) for termux to not be a total PITA to use.

(Android has full physical keyboard support, so with it you can use Ctrl+A/Ctrl+X/Ctrl+V in all input fields. Usually a lot faster than fumbling with the touch equivalents that keep randomly bugging out…)

New comment by creshal in "How do I make $10k (What are you guys doing?)"

creshal — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 16:49:52 +0000

> People will say "small marketing websites are dead with SS or Wix about", but it's not true. Most small businesses just don't want to learn how!

Even if they want to, they have approximately 500 other problems to deal with that are more urgent.

Just figure out how you handle support after the initial project phase: It's a lot easier to get a small business to spend $1000 on a website than to get them to spend $100/year for the constant trickle of small changes they'll inevitable need later.

New comment by creshal in "A 26,000-year astronomical monument hidden in plain sight (2019)"

creshal — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 16:53:34 +0000

A few pharaos remain only known for being so poor architects that their hastily built temples needed renovations after only 2-3 generations.

New comment by creshal in "I was a top 0.01% Cursor user, then switched to Claude Code 2.0"

creshal — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 11:56:49 +0000

> Just that what it means to be a good engineer has changed again.

And not even by much, 1/2/4 have always been signs of good engineers.

New comment by creshal in "200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop"

creshal — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 10:51:59 +0000

Openbox isn't limiting me, Wayland still has no advantages for what I do with desktops.