Hacker News: dimes

New comment by dimes in "Lessons from building multiplayer browsers"

dimes — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 01:54:13 +0000

I also built a canvas-based, multiplayer product during the pandemic (ohyay).

The product was social-event focused (classes, festivals, etc.) so we focused on multiplayer audio-video experiences rather than general purpose browsing.

One of my favorite memories was when someone used our collaborative YouTube playback to set up a karaoke room. WebRTC added a little latency, but it was close enough to work.

New comment by dimes in "Work with the garage door up (2024)"

dimes — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 19:56:38 +0000

> Doesn't feel particularly different to me

> The effort required to adapt them has dropped

AI is an entirely different situation because the effort required to copy has dropped by multiple orders of magnitude. You used to be able to build in the open without worrying about copycats because the vast majority of people didn’t want to spend the effort. Now (with AI), even someone with the slightest, most fleeting whim can copy your work.

It’s great that you’re open to being adapted. There’s nothing wrong with that. But if you’re not open to having your ideas outright taken, then it’s not safe to build in the open any longer.

New comment by dimes in "US Department of Justice has officially reclassified cannabis as less dangerous"

dimes — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:32:29 +0000

Correlation doesn’t imply causation. The US has one of the most relaxed opiate policies imaginable until about 10 years ago. You could walk into many doctors and walk out with an opiate script. It didn’t end well.

New comment by dimes in "Work with the garage door up (2024)"

dimes — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 15:11:03 +0000

It’s not a fear. It’s reality. It’s literally happening on HN right now.

Take this game, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47698455

Within an hour, someone had cloned the game with addition mechanics that multiple people mentioned they like more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47729573

New comment by dimes in "Connie Converse was a folk-music genius. Then she vanished"

dimes — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 18:14:40 +0000

The private equity company that scooped up her music rights, most likely.

New comment by dimes in "Porting Go's strings package to C"

dimes — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 01:08:21 +0000

I could be wrong, but I don't think the initial Go implementation was a C transpiler. It was written in C, but it did its own compilation.

New comment by dimes in "Ask HN: Cool side projects you have written using Golang"

dimes — Fri, 03 Feb 2023 02:08:00 +0000

I wrote Dihedral, a compile-time dependency injection framework for Go [0]. It was inspired by the Java framework Dagger. It worked pretty well, but was a little clunky with Go's syntax. Ultimately, decided it wasn't worth it given the simplicity of manually constructing Go objects in a service setting.

0: https://github.com/dimes/dihedral

New comment by dimes in "On the evilness of feature branching"

dimes — Fri, 16 Jul 2021 01:25:54 +0000

Yes, totally agree. Any code that has complicated logic with few / no dependencies benefits from unit testing.

New comment by dimes in "On the evilness of feature branching"

dimes — Thu, 15 Jul 2021 22:19:26 +0000

I rewrote the backend on a team I used to work on. The service had a ton of unit tests. Given that this was a full rewrite, those unit test were useless. I spent the first few days writing a comprehensive suite of integration tests I could run against the existing service. These tests directly mimicked client calls, so the same tests should be just as valid for the rewritten service. Using these tests, I was able to catch 90%+ of potential issues before cutting over to the new service.

Personally, I find unit tests to be mostly useless. Every time I touch code with a unit test, I also need to change the unit test. Rather than testing, it feels like writing the same code twice.

New comment by dimes in "WebAssembly from Scratch: From FizzBuzz to DooM"

dimes — Wed, 14 Jul 2021 15:14:46 +0000

You probably have resist fingerprinting turned on

New comment by dimes in "Show HN: Hetchr, a Developer's Homepage"

dimes — Fri, 02 Jul 2021 16:34:27 +0000

Will one be able to embed a Hetchr ATOM into Hetchr in the future?

New comment by dimes in "Concrete: The material that's 'too vast to imagine'"

dimes — Tue, 29 Jun 2021 23:17:39 +0000

Modern bridges made from concrete are not designed to last more than a century. I believe the expected usefulness of something like a cable stayed bridge is around 100 years. Compare that to a suspension bridge which can be used almost indefinitely.

New comment by dimes in "Building Permanent and Censorship-Resistant Blog with Ethereum ENS and IPFS"

dimes — Tue, 29 Jun 2021 12:22:32 +0000

It would be much better to store the blog content directly on the blockchain. This is very expensive to do on Ethereum, but should hopefully get cheaper over time.

Is IPFS really resistant to censorship? It seems like any state-based actor could easily block access to IPFS nodes if they were serving a specific CID.

New comment by dimes in "Renting Is Cheaper Than Buying in All 50 Major Metro Areas in the United States"

dimes — Mon, 14 Jun 2021 17:20:14 +0000

Yes, fees were included for selling the house, but I did not include capitol gains taxes in the investment calculation.

New comment by dimes in "Renting Is Cheaper Than Buying in All 50 Major Metro Areas in the United States"

dimes — Mon, 14 Jun 2021 16:50:55 +0000

I made a spread sheet comparing renting to buying a few years ago. The premise was that I wanted to compare my investment in my home vs. paying less to rent and investing the difference in the stock market. The assumptions were something like a 3.5% mortgage rate (30y) and 4% appreciation on my home, vs. a 7% appreciation in the market.

What I found is that on a time horizon of ~7 years, it absolutely makes sense to buy a home. The reason is that when you have a mortgage, you're making a highly leveraged investment. If you buy a house for 100k and put 20k down, then you're 5x leveraged. If you're able to sell the house for 110k. The price has increased 10%, but your ROI is 50%.

There was a definite inflection point after 7 years, however, where the amount of leverage decreases to the point that the higher gains in the market begin to dominate the modest increase in home value.

New comment by dimes in "TC Energy scraps Keystone XL pipeline project after Biden revokes key permit"

dimes — Wed, 09 Jun 2021 22:08:25 +0000

The alternative methods of transport will be more expensive, which will lead to a decrease in demand.

New comment by dimes in "Snowflake CEO Says Worker Merit Should Outweigh Diversity Goals"

dimes — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 21:02:28 +0000

Why is it statistically impossible? Where one chooses to live is likely highly correlated with the job market for their skillset in that region.

New comment by dimes in "The Need for Slimmer Containers"

dimes — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 11:44:48 +0000

Genuinely curious about alternatives. I have a simple node application that all I really need to do is run npm install and node index.js. Even with such a simple setup, provisioning hosts was a huge pain. Each one needed node installed on it, and I had to deploy the app to each new host. With k8s, I just change the number of hosts I want in a config file and everything just works.

New comment by dimes in "Minsk Family of Computers (2001)"

dimes — Sat, 08 May 2021 17:24:41 +0000

Almost free apartment... I think you mean almost free room for a family of four, inside a three bedroom apartment with two other families.

It’s easy to look back now and say: “They had free health care, everything was great!” But that doesn’t explain why they had to build a wall and use exit visas to keep people in.

New comment by dimes in "Mugo, a toy compiler for a subset of Go that can compile itself"

dimes — Mon, 12 Apr 2021 12:24:39 +0000

That’s amazing! Congrats. One question: why is var only supported for top level declarations? I’m not a compiler or programming language expert by any means, but I thought the general approach was to define a grammar and write a parser for it. I’m curious how global and local declarations diverged so significantly.