Hacker News: dejawu

New comment by dejawu in "Running local models is good now"

dejawu — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 16:28:42 +0000

If vibe-coding is hopping into a self-driving car and telling it to take you anywhere you can get a coffee, then I use coding agents more like a bicycle - they let me get further faster than if I'd walked, but I still have to decide where to go and how to get there, and I still have to pedal.

I don't vibe-code, but I do decide what to implement and what patterns to use (perhaps asking the model to analyze and give advice on this first), then I have it handle the nitty-gritty of the implementation itself. For this usage style, the latest local models are as good as having Claude at home.

I won't say it's been _easy_ (I ended up implementing my own harness to accommodate the idiosyncrasies of local models), but I will say that for the effort, having a coding agent that's essentially free to query as much as I want has been life-changing as a dev, especially when it comes to working on side projects. Knowing that my agent will never get worse in quality, suddenly cost more than it does now, or be suddenly made unavailable by external factors, was absolutely worth the trouble. And on top of all that, I can't believe it's as good as it is.

New comment by dejawu in "Apple reveals new AI architecture built around Google Gemini models"

dejawu — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 20:06:25 +0000

It's strange to me that Apple would choose to disadvantage themselves by selecting Google as their provider as opposed to, say, Anthropic or even OpenAI. Doesn't this mean they'll struggle more to differentiate themselves from the assistant on Android phones? Thinking more cynically, couldn't Google, if they wanted, feed Apple an inferior version of Gemini, ensuring they stay ahead?

As the consumer, this just sucks because it means no matter which phone platform you choose, you're getting the same thing underneath, and there's no way to avoid it (besides not using an assistant entirely, which I recognize a lot of people do, myself included).

New comment by dejawu in "To my students"

dejawu — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 01:51:31 +0000

My Computer Engineering degree had an "ethics" course (really a course on "engineering communications", but it was considered to satisfy the ethics requirement for graduation). It was a semester on how to file memos, cargo-cult your resume, and tell recruiters what they wanted to hear. Not a word was said about considering the implications of the things you're hired to build. When defense contractors took over the entire ground floor of the engineering building to hold a recruiting fair, we were encouraged to go.

The only time ethics in engineering was ever mentioned to me was in a class on applied number theory (cryptography), taught by a professor who had previously worked for the EFF. He went off-topic to tell us that many problems, like how to hit a target with a missile, may fascinate and compel us as engineers, but we shouldn't let that distract us into building instruments of death.

That course was an elective, and it was entirely possible to complete my degree without hearing a single mention of ethics.

There are many reasons I look back on my academic experience with disdain, but this one stands out to me.

New comment by dejawu in "The happiest I've ever been"

dejawu — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 01:39:43 +0000

This is exactly why, as someone who thought I'd be an IC with my head buried in code my whole life, I accepted a role as a tech lead last year. Humans will always need other humans to be human for them. I love working with computers, but supporting, teaching, and mentoring junior engineers has been rewarding for me in ways that writing code never could be. There is no social substitute for concrete relationships with specific people that grow in visible ways. Maybe they can automate away the part of me that's good with logic and reason, but empathy can't be simulated.

New comment by dejawu in "The borrowchecker is what I like the least about Rust"

dejawu — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 20:23:01 +0000

I've similarly thought about building a language that compiles to Rust, but handles everything around references and borrowing and abstracts that away from the user. Then you get a language where you don't have to think about memory at all, but the resulting code "should" still be fairly fast because Rust is fast (kind of ending up in the same place as Go).

I haven't written a ton of Rust so maybe my assumptions of what's possible are wrong, but it is an idea I've come back to a few times.

New comment by dejawu in "Ask HN: What projects do you donate to?"

dejawu — Tue, 27 May 2025 05:43:59 +0000

Every so often, YouTube changes something on their site that causes NewPipe to stop working. Usually within a few days, NewPipe pushes an update that fixes this, and we're back in business. Every time this happens, I donate to their Liberapay.

https://newpipe.net/donate/

New comment by dejawu in "Running Pong in 240 browser tabs"

dejawu — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 06:11:26 +0000

A similar exploration by Matthew Rayfield using the URL bar instead of tab favicons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7GtCLwTmV4

New comment by dejawu in "Goodbye, Slopify"

dejawu — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 02:28:09 +0000

It's astonishing just how awful Spotify's software is. Everything it does, it does poorly, even down to things like playback and playlists that were figured out by other media players decades ago. Just this week, it started randomly playing music on its own when I open it. The fact that this thread has over a hundred comments within an hour speaks to just how despised it is.

Spotify truly isn't a software company the same way your health insurance company has a web portal but isn't a software company either.

New comment by dejawu in "Disposable vapes to be banned in England and Wales"

dejawu — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 17:05:55 +0000

Looks like one of them is Pyne Pod: https://www.pynepod.com/uploads/bd58c18e.png

The Geek Bar Pulse has the custom multi-segment on the side: https://oss.geekbar.com/products/meloso-ultra/2/Orange%20Cre...

New comment by dejawu in "Disposable vapes to be banned in England and Wales"

dejawu — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 16:27:41 +0000

An ex of mine used disposable vapes and I was shocked by how beautifully designed some of them are - transparent covers with visible inner workings reminiscent of the Nothing phones; custom multi-segment displays for battery and temperature status; original artwork printed in vibrant color on the side. It made me even angrier that these things are meant to just be used once and then thrown out. Of course putting all this e-waste into the environment is a disaster, but to then also treat art and design as similarly disposable feels heartbreakingly cynical on another level entirely.

I collected a few that she was going to throw out, someday™ I'll build some driver boards for the displays and make a little art piece out of them.

New comment by dejawu in "Toasts are bad UX"

dejawu — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 18:14:28 +0000

The worst toast I've seen is on Android Auto (itself already a veritable petri dish of awful UX) where, when the on-screen keyboard appears, a toast helpfully pops up informing you that a keyboard is also available on your phone... Thus blocking the on-screen keyboard from being used until the toast fades (and no, tapping it does not dismiss it).

List of Lishes

dejawu — Fri, 10 May 2024 16:31:57 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lishes

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40320890

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by dejawu in "Show HN: DualShock calibration in the browser using WebHID"

dejawu — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 22:49:02 +0000

Add to that list QMK VIA, which allows reprogramming a keyboard running the QMK firmware from the browser!

https://www.caniusevia.com/

New comment by dejawu in "HTML, the Programming Language"

dejawu — Mon, 04 Dec 2023 20:51:55 +0000

This almost reads like a deconstruction of my favorite explanation of Lisp: https://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html

The explanation basically uses an AST that's apparent to the user to explain the language - and this is a language built on an AST whose structure is apparent to the user. I love it and will definitely be turning the idea over in my head for the next few days.

New comment by dejawu in "Ways to Make Sand (2020) [video]"

dejawu — Sat, 28 Oct 2023 02:36:47 +0000

I had the pleasure of encountering them in-person at Strange Loop 2023! They gave us an impromptu demo of some of their experiments in the hallway after the last talks had ended and we were cheering wildly with everything they showed us. It was a delight!

New comment by dejawu in "In search of the least viewed article on Wikipedia (2022)"

dejawu — Fri, 20 Oct 2023 15:30:01 +0000

Re: your edit - I've always thought it'd make for a fun pet project to take the hyper-engagement-driven approach that social media apps take but apply it to Wikipedia. Like a Tiktok-style vertical feed of articles that tries to find the ones you'll engage with most (WikiScroll [0] is already part of the way there). Or a chatroom corresponding to each article that people can banter in, kind of like you described. Or a DM feature but you can only send Wikipedia links. The idea of Wikipedia as a social catalyst is super interesting to me.

[0]: https://wikiscroll.blankenship.io/

New comment by dejawu in "Microsoft is using malware-like pop-ups in Win11 to get people to ditch Chrome"

dejawu — Wed, 30 Aug 2023 16:17:44 +0000

I wonder how it must feel to be on a team at Microsoft working on actually useful features like WSL and then having all your work be thrown away by shit like this driving users off your platform anyway.

New comment by dejawu in "Unlocking Discord Nitro features for free"

dejawu — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 05:37:13 +0000

It's also possible to see the names, topics, and timestamp of the last message of hidden channels through their API. The channels are only hidden on the client-side. (To be clear, it's still not possible to view the contents of these channels.)

New comment by dejawu in "TypeScript is surprisingly ok for compilers"

dejawu — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 07:36:38 +0000

I'm quite fond of this library for pattern matching; it's a staple in all my new projects.

https://github.com/gvergnaud/ts-pattern

New comment by dejawu in "A search for technosignatures around nearby stars"

dejawu — Thu, 17 Aug 2023 15:45:17 +0000

> We have evidence that points to life forming basically immediately once the conditions are right.

What's the evidence for this? Not asking rhetorically, I'm curious and want to read more.