Hacker News: doodpants

New comment by doodpants in "Half-Life 2 in a Browser"

doodpants — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 13:50:00 +0000

I visited this page in Firefox and was presented with a message that essentialy said (paraphrasing): "this site best viewed with browser X". Now, I'm not a professional web developer, and maybe there are legitimate reasons why this app is depending on new cutting edge browser features that aren't yet supported by Firefox, but it seems to me that this just shouldn't be a thing anymore.

New comment by doodpants in "Swift Package Index joins Apple"

doodpants — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 19:21:46 +0000

https://thehustle.co/sherlocking-explained

New comment by doodpants in "Show HN: Got sick of ads, so I made my own logic puzzle site"

doodpants — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 14:58:13 +0000

Because there's already another 6 on the same main diagonal. This is an "X Sudoku" puzzle, which means that each main diagonal must have all 9 different numbers.

The Rapture of the Programming Languages

doodpants — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 17:05:23 +0000

Article URL: https://fogknife.com/2026-06-19-the-rapture-of-the-programming-languages.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48600648

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by doodpants in "Go: Support for Generic Methods"

doodpants — Wed, 27 May 2026 15:22:13 +0000

I frankly don't buy into this trope that a lack of monetary cost should shield something from criticism. Anything created by humans for other humans, especially tools meant for getting work done, should certainly be open to evaluation/judgement/critcism, regardless of whether the creator chooses to charge for it.

And it's not like Golang is some freshman student's hobby project; it was created by one of the world's largest tech companies, by people with a strong pedigree in programming language design.

New comment by doodpants in "Go: Support for Generic Methods"

doodpants — Wed, 27 May 2026 15:12:57 +0000

I can't speak about Dart, but Carbon had just barely started development when it was first announced 4 years ago, and is currently presented as an experimental language that is not yet ready for use [0].

0: https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang#project-statu...

New comment by doodpants in "Zuckerberg Didn't Think He Was Robotic Enough So Now He's Using AI"

doodpants — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 20:46:11 +0000

It would be fiscally irresponsible to the shareholders for tech companies not to voluntarily do so.

New comment by doodpants in "ML promises to be profoundly weird"

doodpants — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 17:24:14 +0000

> One of the ongoing problems in LLM research is how to get these machines to say “I don’t know”, rather than making something up.

To be fair, I've known humans who are like this as well.

New comment by doodpants in "CodingFont: A game to help you pick a coding font"

doodpants — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 17:56:17 +0000

I can sympathize; I shudder to think of how many total hours of my life I've spent tweaking fonts in my text editors.

That said, these days I almost exclusively use Input Mono [0], specifically the "Narrow" variety. With an occasional sprinkling of either Iosevka Fixed or PragmataPro Mono.

0: https://input.djr.com/

New comment by doodpants in "Show HN: ANSI-Saver – A macOS Screensaver"

doodpants — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 22:28:10 +0000

Doesn't work for me either. I'm running Sequoia on an Intel Mac. When the saver runs, it says "No art sources configured. Open Screen Saver Options to add pack URLs or a local folder." I've added all 5 of the recommended pack URLs listed on the GitHub page, and even tried clicking the Refetch Packs button, but it won't show anything except that message.

New comment by doodpants in "Resizing windows on macOS Tahoe – the saga continues"

doodpants — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 14:19:46 +0000

Opinionated design was great back when Apple's Human Interface Guidelines were based on concrete user testing and accessibility principles. The farther we get from the Steve Jobs era, the more their UI design is based on whatever they think looks pretty, with usability concerns taking a back seat.

New comment by doodpants in "Why vampires live forever"

doodpants — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 18:22:52 +0000

The flaw in trying to detect AI by its use of particular idioms is that it would have learned these idioms from its training corpus, which consists of writings from actual human beings.

In other words, some people actually write like this.

New comment by doodpants in "AI on Australian travel company website sent tourists to nonexistent hot springs"

doodpants — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 14:02:56 +0000

“our AI has messed up completely.”

No, it worked as designed. Generative AI simply creates content of the type that you specify, but has no concept of truth or facts.

New comment by doodpants in "Doing the thing is doing the thing"

doodpants — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 14:25:50 +0000

Similarly, is ordering Zhu Li to "Do the thing!" doing the thing?

New comment by doodpants in "Drawing with zero-width characters"

doodpants — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:44:53 +0000

I do not miss the days of "This site best viewed with browser X".

New comment by doodpants in "VS Code deactivates IntelliCode in favor of the paid Copilot"

doodpants — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 14:18:47 +0000

I've often thought, "If AI is so great, how come all these tech companies are shoving AI features down our throats for free, instead of charging real money for them?" I'm actually glad that MS is doing this, and I hope it starts a trend of more companies gating their AI features behind paywalls, and a noticable reduction in the number of popups I encounter badgering me to use AI features that I never asked for.

New comment by doodpants in "Project Euler"

doodpants — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 22:25:22 +0000

So, I gather that you treated your solutions as throw-away code, rather than keeping them? Kind of surprising, considering that some problems build off of each other, or otherwise benefit from sharing code; you never know when the code for one solution could be useful later. For example, a prime number generator/tester is necessary for many of the problems.

(I have all my solution code, in source control no less, so if I ever lost my account, I could just run them all and re-enter the solutions.)

New comment by doodpants in "Drawing Text Isn't Simple: Benchmarking Console vs. Graphical Rendering"

doodpants — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 17:17:21 +0000

> who would think to focus the area first for scrolling???

Sadly, this problem is common enough that click-before-keyboard-scrolling has become second nature for me.

New comment by doodpants in "1973 implementation of Wordle was published by DEC (2022)"

doodpants — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 19:58:29 +0000

But Word Mastermind (like regular Mastermind) only tells you how many letters are in the correct spot, and how many are present but not in the correct spot. Whereas Wordle tells you specifically which letters fall into those categories. So it's not quite the same. (That's why Wordle only gives you 6 guesses, while Word Mastermind has 10 rows.)

New comment by doodpants in "Show HN: Bash Screensavers"

doodpants — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 14:48:05 +0000

After installing bash via MacPorts, it works for me. All except #3 cutesaver, which gives an infinite loop of:

  cutesaver.sh: line 55: shuf: command not found