Hacker News: dathanb82

New comment by dathanb82 in "Introduction to Obsidian"

dathanb82 — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 02:00:26 +0000

Vimwiki?

New comment by dathanb82 in "GitHub Stacked PRs"

dathanb82 — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:24:19 +0000

Unless you have a “every commit must build” rule, why would you review commits independently? The entire PR is the change set - what’s problematic about reviewing it as such?

New comment by dathanb82 in "Welcome to FastMCP"

dathanb82 — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 21:06:07 +0000

Skills are part of the repo, and CLIs are installed locally. In both cases it's up to you to keep them updated. MCP servers can be exposed and consumed over HTTPS, which means the MCP server owner can keep them updated for you.

Better sandboxing. Accessing an MCP server doesn't require you to give an agent permissions on your local machine.

MCP servers can expose tools, resources, and prompts. If you're using a skill, you can "install" it from a remote source by exposing it on the MCP server as a "prompt". That helps solve the "keep it updated" problem for skills - it gets updated by interrogating the MCP server again.

Or if your agentic workflow needs some data file to run, you can tell the agent to grab that from the MCP server as a resource. And since it's not a static file, the content can update dynamically -- you could read stocks or the latest state of a JIRA ticket or etc. It's like an AI-first, dynamic content filesystem.

New comment by dathanb82 in "TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool"

dathanb82 — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 20:20:22 +0000

Oh man, Turbo Pascal was my first "real" programming language -- it was all various flavors of BASIC before, and mostly toy projects. The developer experience with Turbo Pascal (by which I guess I mostly mean Turbo Vision) was honestly pretty great

New comment by dathanb82 in "Why XML tags are so fundamental to Claude"

dathanb82 — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 21:59:01 +0000

The use of XML as a data serialization format was always a bad choice. It was designed as a document _markup_ language (it’s in the name), which is exactly the way it’s being used for Claude, and is actually a good use case.

New comment by dathanb82 in "The wonder of modern drywall"

dathanb82 — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 05:54:20 +0000

And do what? Leave the ducting, pipes, and electrical lines exposed for the one time in 20 years you need to do something with them?

In addition to being much more attractive than exposed infrastructure, drywall and the insulation that gets put behind it help make your house much more energy efficient.

New comment by dathanb82 in "Guinea worm on track to be 2nd eradicated human disease; only 10 cases in 2025"

dathanb82 — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 00:41:13 +0000

As you might expect from the description -- largely passed on via contaminated water -- the guinea worm is mostly present in areas of extreme poverty. Even if such a treatment were feasible, it would be inaccessible to most of the relevant population.

New comment by dathanb82 in "Aging muscle stem cells shift from rapid repair to long-term survival"

dathanb82 — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 22:26:40 +0000

It’s probably even more pronounced, since it’s unlikely that someone is going to _average_ 180bpm for their entire workout, especially as they get older.

New comment by dathanb82 in "Stepping down as Mockito maintainer after ten years"

dathanb82 — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 21:23:01 +0000

The auto-attach flag isn’t a huge deal, since it’s a one-liner that can be statically documented and the fix works in all cases. The bigger issue is the JDK / runtime team’s stance that libraries should not be able to dynamically attach agents, and that the auto-attach flag might be removed in the future. You can still enable mockito’s agent with the —javaagent flag, but you have to provide the path to the mockito jar, and getting that path right is highly build-system-dependent and not something the mockito team can document in a way that minimizes the entry threshold for newcomers.

New comment by dathanb82 in "Ask HN: Laid off folks, are you getting hired?"

dathanb82 — Fri, 10 Feb 2023 20:09:12 +0000

Just shy of $600K in 2022, based on data from IRS and BLS: https://smartasset.com/data-studies/what-it-takes-to-be-in-t...

New comment by dathanb82 in "Following the Unix philosophy without getting left-pad (2021)"

dathanb82 — Thu, 10 Nov 2022 20:03:50 +0000

It's available (usually as an optional feature) in lots of languages where dependencies are linked statically. The most standard terminology I'm aware of for it is "dead code elimination"

In Javascript, webpack (as well as other module bundlers) supports it, though they call their dead code elimination mechanism "tree shaking".

New comment by dathanb82 in "Differential Datalog: a programming language for incremental computation"

dathanb82 — Tue, 08 Nov 2022 18:58:38 +0000

Lets you define queries over some data set declaratively, and instead of recomputing the query over the entire data set every time you want an updated answer, it uses Differential Dataflow <https://github.com/frankmcsherry/differential-dataflow> to efficiently(^1) calculate the new results by updating the results of the previous query execution in response to new updates to the data set.

^1: I'm not an expert on Differential Dataflow, so I don't know what "efficiently" means in this context, other than "should be faster than running the query from scratch."

New comment by dathanb82 in "Helix: Post-Modern Text Editor"

dathanb82 — Sun, 06 Nov 2022 19:23:47 +0000

Every time I see a "X: a [new/better/best/modern/postmodern/blazingly fast] Y" post on HN, I just know it's going to be written in Rust

New comment by dathanb82 in "What’s wrong with medieval pigs in videogames"

dathanb82 — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 18:11:18 +0000

"I wouldn't use a gun that sounded like that" - me to my wife just about every time we watch an action movie

New comment by dathanb82 in "What’s wrong with medieval pigs in videogames"

dathanb82 — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 18:10:00 +0000

Unless the purpose of the game is educational, I don't think it's incumbent on them to educate their players about anything. Just like I don't expect everyone who sells something at the Renaissance Faire to use medieval furnaces for their blacksmithing or to eschew lathes for turning wood bowls. It's not their responsibility.

New comment by dathanb82 in "Kill Bill – Open-Source Subscription Billing and Payments Platform"

dathanb82 — Wed, 19 Oct 2022 23:57:49 +0000

At a basic level, yeah. It gets hairy when you dive into timeout handling and dealing with errors in reconciliation, across multiple gateways.

tl;dr: there is no easy part

New comment by dathanb82 in "“Privacy”.com–Yeah Right"

dathanb82 — Mon, 03 Oct 2022 17:35:44 +0000

> They also moved all of my recurring charges to my new card (somehow.)

If you're curious about how this works, read up on "Visa Account Updater".

New comment by dathanb82 in "Photopea: A Photoshop clone web app"

dathanb82 — Fri, 02 Sep 2022 18:48:31 +0000

The most impressive part to me is how much snappier it is than Photoshop running locally on my machine.

New comment by dathanb82 in "My Contribution to Markdown"

dathanb82 — Fri, 02 Sep 2022 18:27:06 +0000

But also > You can paste source code directly into your Markdown document without any changes, and it will appear as expected in the rendered HTML. That’s my doing.

In that sentence, it kinda does sound like they're trying to take credit for it.

New comment by dathanb82 in "I have complicated feelings about TDD"

dathanb82 — Thu, 18 Aug 2022 21:59:43 +0000

I can't remember the last time the speed at which I could physically produce code was the bottleneck in a project. It's all about design and thinking through and documenting the edge cases, and coming up with new edge cases and going back to the design. By the time we know what we're going to write, writing the code isn't the bottleneck, and even if it takes twice as long, that's fine, especially since I generally end up designing a more usable interface as a result of using it (in my tests) as it's being built.