Hacker News: downsplat

New comment by downsplat in "Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds"

downsplat — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 17:24:02 +0000

Yep, if you haven't lost the will to put a bit of curation work upfront, RSS never stopped being the right answer. Substack has been a pretty good addition to the landscape, bringing lots of people into blogging (without calling it that). But for the skimming/reading interface, RSS beats the app.

New comment by downsplat in "Claude Code as a Daily Driver: Claude.md, Skills, Subagents, Plugins, and MCPs"

downsplat — Wed, 27 May 2026 11:29:41 +0000

I've been using Claude to work on a medium-sized (100+kLoc) codebase, and it's a great productivity multiplier. Putting hours into creating a good AGENTS file is more improved results a lot. I find that over time it picks up the codebase quite well. Tedious tasks that would take a day are now a matter of a few prompts.

Still... I'm not ready to give it more autonomy. Even as it gets high-level things quite well, I still look at the code, give feedback, and have 3-4 rounds of tweaks until I'm happy with it, and also happy that I stil feel I have a good handle on the codebase.

New comment by downsplat in "Does anybody like React?"

downsplat — Tue, 26 May 2026 08:58:32 +0000

I basically skipped React. I went from jquery to Vue3, and use even that sparingly. When React got really popular, I read the docs and played with it, but I prefer the Vue model where the component runs once and sets up its reactive tree. Why would you want to recreate the component's inner functions every time it renders? And manually declare dependencies, when every other framework is doing them automatically?

My favourite front-end architecture is MPA actually mostly server-rendered, with Vue only on the pages that need high interactivity, and vanilla JS on the others.

New comment by downsplat in "Quack: The DuckDB Client-Server Protocol"

downsplat — Wed, 13 May 2026 10:38:18 +0000

If postgres is too heavyweight for you but you still want client-server, I'd consider MySql. It's an old classic, pretty fast and scalable, and has much better mainstream support and a bigger ecosystem than Firebird.

I'm not really sure what Firebird is for at this point in life really. It was pretty exciting when it was open sourced in the early 2000s, before postgres became the mature beast it is, before mysql acquired something as basic as transactions, and before sqlite became the default embedded db. But then it never really went anywhere.

New comment by downsplat in "The Mystery in the Medicine Cabinet"

downsplat — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 20:30:12 +0000

Well-researched article on the relative safety of acetaminophen and ibuprofen.

The Mystery in the Medicine Cabinet

downsplat — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 20:30:12 +0000

Article URL: https://asteriskmag.com/issues/14/the-mystery-in-the-medicine-cabinet

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47799088

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by downsplat in "Spanish legislation as a Git repo"

downsplat — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 15:01:03 +0000

It's called euthanasia. You can ask the medical system for an assisted suicide if your life situation is extra painful with no hope for recovery.

This case got heaps of media popularity because the christian right wing latched on it, and the father tried as hard as he could to impede the euthanasia. Ultimately got told that the lady unequivocally wants it and qualifies, and he can't override that.

New comment by downsplat in "I put all 8,642 Spanish laws in Git – every reform is a commit"

downsplat — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 13:18:24 +0000

https://www.boe.es/diario_boe/txt.php?id=BOE-A-2021-4628

New comment by downsplat in "Parallel Perl – Autoparallelizing interpreter with JIT"

downsplat — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 22:29:36 +0000

What kind of context has you deploying into old systems that don't ship a recent perl? If that is a legacy requirement for whatever reason, then at least I'd use docker or podman to get a recent runtime. Or would you also write Python 2 or Php 7?

New comment by downsplat in "Parallel Perl – Autoparallelizing interpreter with JIT"

downsplat — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 22:27:07 +0000

What are you using for parameter type checking? I switched to native function signatures, native try/catch and might look into the new class system soon, but I don't recall native type checking...

New comment by downsplat in "Parallel Perl – Autoparallelizing interpreter with JIT"

downsplat — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 20:31:50 +0000

This looks like a huge project, even with AI help... I have a sweet spot for perl but I'm honestly not sure if the current community has the bandwidth and interest to sustain an alternative implementation. At the very least it should be ported to MacOS too. Breaking with XS is a bold decision. Best of luck though!!

New comment by downsplat in "Games with loot boxes to get minimum 16 age rating across Europe"

downsplat — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 11:34:41 +0000

Alcohol has been deeply embedded in human culture for thousands+ years, that's why prohibition is a bad idea. Loot boxes are a new invention, if they're deemed too harmful we can just do without them.

New comment by downsplat in "Wired headphone sales are exploding"

downsplat — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 10:10:19 +0000

It's amazing how people will jump to something new just because it's there and it's being promoted.

When wireless headphones came out, I looked at my wired ones and asked the simple question: is a tangling cable worse than bluetoth pairing and having to keep yet another thing charged? My answer was no, so I kept using cheap wired ones.

A few years later, now that makes me look rich. Or something.

New comment by downsplat in "Show HN: Channel Surfer – Watch YouTube like it’s cable TV"

downsplat — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 19:03:22 +0000

I guess it's really not for me though. First thing I do is turn autoplay off, and I'd refuse to use a service that doesn't give me that option. OTOH, I do sometimes find it fun to hunt for good stuff among the recommendations.

New comment by downsplat in "Show HN: Channel Surfer – Watch YouTube like it’s cable TV"

downsplat — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 18:58:55 +0000

You've probably already done this, but first thing, turn off autoplay and make sure it stays off. Much easier to not get sucked into things when you have to actively click on them.

New comment by downsplat in "Show HN: Channel Surfer – Watch YouTube like it’s cable TV"

downsplat — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 16:41:16 +0000

Why would you want to do that? I'm so happy I can search exactly what I want among heaps of long tail stuff, I would never want to go back to a "live tv" interaction model.

New comment by downsplat in "Temporal: The 9-year journey to fix time in JavaScript"

downsplat — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 13:07:32 +0000

For most situations, I deal with this by keeping dates as strings throughout the app, not objects. They get read from the db as strings, passed around as strings. If I need datetime calculations, I use the language's datetime objects to do it and convert right back to string. Display formatting for users happens at the last moment, in the template.

No-one seems to like this style, but I find it much simpler than converting on db read/write and passing datetime objects around.

New comment by downsplat in "C# strings silently kill your SQL Server indexes in Dapper"

downsplat — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 12:52:06 +0000

It's not really a Linux vs MS thing though. When Unicode first came out, it was 16-bit, so all the early adopters went with that. That includes Java, Windows, JavaScript, the ICU lintaries, LibreOffice and its predecessors, .NET, the C language (remember wchar_t?), and probably a few more.

Utf8 turned out to be the better approach, and it's slowly taking over, but it was not only Linu/Unix that pushed it ahead, the entire networking world did, especially http. Props also to early perl for jumping straight to utf8.

Still... Utf8's superiority was clear enough by 2005 or so, MS could and should have seen it by then instead of waiting until 2019 to add utf8 collations to its database. Funny to see Sql Server falling behind good old Mysql on such a basic feature.

New comment by downsplat in "C# strings silently kill your SQL Server indexes in Dapper"

downsplat — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 12:18:43 +0000

The old defense of 16-bit chars, popping up in 2026 still! Utf8 is efficient enough for all general purpose uses.

If you're storing gigabytes of non-latin-alphabet text, and your systems are constrained enough that it makes a difference, 16-bit is always there. But I'd still recommend anyone starting a system today to not worry and use utf8 for everything.j

New comment by downsplat in "C# strings silently kill your SQL Server indexes in Dapper"

downsplat — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 10:02:37 +0000

Did this post come out of a freezer from 1998? Who on earth creates databases in Latin1 in 2026?

Nevermind, looks like Sql Server didn't add utf8 collations until 2019 (!) and for decades people had to choose column by column between the 16-bit overhead of "nvarchar" and latin1... And still do if they want a bit of backwards compatibility. Amazing.