Hacker News: dblohm7

New comment by dblohm7 in "Adobe modifies hosts file to detect whether Creative Cloud is installed"

dblohm7 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 22:10:33 +0000

I don't know whether is still does this, but 8-9 years ago I discovered that Acrobat overwrites the COM registry entries for Microsoft Active Accessibility (oleacc.dll) such that any application attempting to instantiate MSAA gets the Adobe DLL instead of the system DLL. This actually broke the stuff I was working on and had to override it in my app manifest to forcibly use the system version.

I inquired about it and got some BS about how they absolutely _had_ to do this to intercept MSAA instantiations across the system, when in reality they were using a global solution to solve a local problem.

New comment by dblohm7 in "Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)"

dblohm7 — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 15:22:40 +0000

And if I may add a corollary: Measurement doesn't need to be held off until the end of the project! Start doing it as soon as you can!

New comment by dblohm7 in "Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)"

dblohm7 — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 15:20:50 +0000

I too learned this the hard way, via a supposedly concurrent priority queue that did quadratic-time work while holding a lock over the entire thing. I was told that "premature optimization is the root of all evil."

Sorry, folks, but that's just an excuse to make dumb choices. Premature _micro_optimization is the root of all evil.

EDIT: It was great training for when I started working on browser performance, though!

New comment by dblohm7 in "The Cost of Indirection in Rust"

dblohm7 — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 18:48:04 +0000

Agreed. Nitpicking about indirection is definitely a "premature micro-optimization is the root of all evil" moment.

When I worked on Firefox, we eventually had to remove a bunch of indirection (the interested can actually search bugzilla.mozilla.org for deCOMtamination for some instances of this), but that project wasn't a thing until there was clear evidence that there were problems with virtual function calls on hot paths.

New comment by dblohm7 in "Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available"

dblohm7 — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 17:06:01 +0000

Essentially, yeah, but of course you wouldn't want to use any Tailscale trademarks.

Tailscale is engineered under the assumption that any client connected to our control plane could potentially differ from our canonical OSS codebase.

New comment by dblohm7 in "Old School Visual Effects: The Cloud Tank (2010)"

dblohm7 — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 16:36:38 +0000

I really love VFX in the period between Star Wars and Jurassic Park. To me it will always be the "golden age" of VFX.

New comment by dblohm7 in "Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available"

dblohm7 — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 16:29:38 +0000

Essentially this: OSS operating systems get OSS GUIs.

New comment by dblohm7 in "Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available"

dblohm7 — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:16:13 +0000

(Tailscalar here) To be clear: it's only the GUIs that are closed source on selected platforms.

New comment by dblohm7 in "Windows: Prefer the Native API over Win32"

dblohm7 — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 17:45:23 +0000

This is a terrible idea! _Maybe_, _maybe_ using only the documented APIs with only the documented parameters.

Unfortunately it makes too many false assumptions about interoperability between Win32 and the underlying native API that aren't true.

For example (and the Go runtime does this, much to my chagrin), querying the OS version via the native API always gives you "accurate" version information without needing to link a manifest into your application. Unfortunately that lack of manifest will still cause many Win32 APIs above the native layer to drop into a compatibility mode, creating a fundamental inconsistency between what the application thinks the OS capabilities are versus which Win32 subsystem behaviours the OS thinks it should be offering.

New comment by dblohm7 in "Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu"

dblohm7 — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 22:29:07 +0000

I'm not trying to troll here, asking seriously: are there any immediate-mode GUI APIs with good a11y?

New comment by dblohm7 in "Why is Singapore no longer "cool"?"

dblohm7 — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 16:53:17 +0000

> Well, it's not. It's barbaric and primitive. A warning is no justification.

It's actually Singapore that turned me against the death penalty. I saw a photo on a news site one day showing a casket in Singapore, with some kind of placard showing the decedent's name, DOB, and then the date that they "died."

They didn't die due to illness or injury; they died because Singapore executed them. That was it for me.

New comment by dblohm7 in "Product and design are the new bottlenecks"

dblohm7 — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 15:33:29 +0000

Citation needed.

New comment by dblohm7 in "Company as Code"

dblohm7 — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 15:28:20 +0000

Similarly, I've seen this in enterprise IAM software, but again as data, not as code.

Imagine a very large company that has a heterogeneous setup: say it has plain LDAP for *nix machines and AD for Windows. The IAM stuff has connectors for both, and encoding the org chart into that product enables it to synchronize that structure into both systems.

New comment by dblohm7 in "Apple testing new App Store design that blurs the line between ads and results"

dblohm7 — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 20:15:55 +0000

> For the desktop Mac, the base OS is essentially UNIX. It is much more secure by default than Microsoft Windows

Citation needed.

New comment by dblohm7 in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

dblohm7 — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 18:43:48 +0000

https://dblohm7.ca

New comment by dblohm7 in "Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features"

dblohm7 — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 19:32:45 +0000

> If it gets taken seriously it would ship with an enable-AI button, not the other way round.

Like the one described in the subsequent toot?

> All AI features will also be opt-in. I think there are some grey areas in what 'opt-in' means to different people (e.g. is a new toolbar button opt-in?)...

https://mastodon.social/@firefoxwebdevs/115740500918701463

New comment by dblohm7 in "Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo"

dblohm7 — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 04:30:04 +0000

They do that for Thunderbird now.

New comment by dblohm7 in "Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo"

dblohm7 — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 04:27:04 +0000

> There is a market share costs that pocket had on Firefox.

I don’t think you have any evidence of this.

New comment by dblohm7 in "The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work"

dblohm7 — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 16:28:23 +0000

I'd love to see the original source for that one! Kind of ironic given RTO+bullpen approach we're seeing now.

New comment by dblohm7 in "Show HN: Glasses to detect smart-glasses that have cameras"

dblohm7 — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 16:19:39 +0000

> Apple is the privacy company already .. that's their brand and a brand that the public trusts.

...for now. What happens if they end up with a future CEO who is more like Zuck?