Hacker News: faichai

New comment by faichai in "Used La Marzocco machines are coveted by cafe owners and collectors"

faichai — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 10:59:17 +0000

I have a Lelit Elizabeth. It’s a dual-boiler machine, so you can pull a shot and steam milk at the same time. If you want consistently good coffee without going too far down the espresso-nerd rabbit hole, it hits a nice sweet spot, especially if you’re into flat whites.

New comment by faichai in "How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry"

faichai — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 08:17:36 +0000

"think" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. Are the people really thinking? I don't think they are.

New comment by faichai in "Show HN: I built a web framework in C"

faichai — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 03:50:38 +0000

Some unsolicited feedback:

I think the appRoute macro obfuscates the types and signatures, and introduces some unnecessary indirection. I would get rid of it.

Related, the AppContext type could be renamed RequestContext or ControllerContext or something as its App + HTTP Request + DB and not just the App.

Otherwise, I agree with other commenters that this is some of the cleanest C code I’ve seen in a while! Great effort!

New comment by faichai in "My Deus Ex lipsyncing fix mod"

faichai — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 06:48:00 +0000

"I didn't ask for this!"

New comment by faichai in "In 2006, Hitachi developed a 0.15mm-sized RFID chip"

faichai — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 15:24:15 +0000

If you can shine lasers at them to etch out a chip trace, then you can shine lasers to carve up the chip. Just use stronger lasers.

New comment by faichai in "Abandoned villages of Hong Kong"

faichai — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 06:49:49 +0000

I’d be interested.

New comment by faichai in "OutRun – Open-source, privacy oriented, outdoor fitness tracker"

faichai — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 10:40:28 +0000

Typical watch based sleep trackers and even my Withings sleep pad can’t really track my sleep properly, particularly REM sleep. I think I move too much. I bought a Dreem2 EEG device that measures brain waves and it could detect my REM sleep correctly, and determined that my sleep is actually fine, not great, but good enough.

New comment by faichai in "Cursorless is alien magic from the future"

faichai — Fri, 10 Nov 2023 07:31:29 +0000

Flip side to this, is I’ve had Carpal Tunnel for a while now, had surgery 2 years ago. It’s somewhat better and I am now active at the gym and in general it has helped a lot but extreme gripping such as deadhangs, deadlifts and heavy rows actually aggravates my symptoms. I started using straps for any weight over 50kg and my hands have got a lot better.

I’ve found that when you’re going from (weak, sedentary) => (strong, active) it can sometimes be difficult to discern what activities are good or bad for your pain. Sometimes you need to work through pain to find relief and strength on the other side, but sometimes working through pain just leads to more pain. The boundaries aren’t always clear at the time.

New comment by faichai in "Life After “Calvin and Hobbes”"

faichai — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 06:54:20 +0000

I honestly find this quite sad. Dude should have lived his own life, but instead lived in the shadow of his father.

New comment by faichai in "Meta is banning people from advertising after running ads for Python and Pandas"

faichai — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 11:00:41 +0000

It seems the notions of accountability and responsibility have broken down when it comes to AI. Any given AI should have clear lines of delegated responsibility from an accountable flesh and bones human. Any decision made by an AI should be marked as such and provide a channel for the decision to be reviewed by said human or a human delegate thereof should scope (in Meta’s case) be large. If it’s too much work to manage the reviews, tough shit.

New comment by faichai in "Ask HN: When LLMs make stuff up, call it 'confabulating', not 'hallucinating'"

faichai — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 10:24:02 +0000

Hard disagree. I’m browsing the internet not surfing the Information Super Highway. Mainstream media needs to rely less on allegory once technology becomes mainstream.

New comment by faichai in "Replacing Engineering Managers with AI Agents"

faichai — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 21:51:11 +0000

100%. You can pry my people skills from my cold dead hands.

New comment by faichai in "Telemetry"

faichai — Thu, 21 Sep 2023 12:48:30 +0000

Storybook is one of those projects, like Postman, that has completely lost the plot. It's unclear what objectives they are pursuing but in terms of developer experience they seem increasingly developer hostile. The CSF format is an unreadable joke and doesn't play that well with TypeScript, the number of plugins you need to do anything sane is ridiculous, and this telemetry story is a farce - open source should not skim data by default.

I remember writing a super simple wrapper around Jasmine to do the same kind of thing, and was glad when I could ditch it for Storybook many moons ago. But if I was starting a project now I would probably rawdog it again, Storybook just causes too much pain.

Is anyone aware of any similar projects that are more developer friendly?

New comment by faichai in "Jim Keller and his pioneering work on chip design and architecture"

faichai — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 09:25:47 +0000

> that eventually disrupted the market leadership of Intel’s 64-bit Itanium chips

Erm, Itanium never had any kind of market leadership. It was a failure.

New comment by faichai in "The Webb telescope just offered a revelatory view of humanity’s distant past"

faichai — Fri, 14 Jul 2023 11:46:18 +0000

Whoah! I was just thinking "aren't these things all colourised by a human and largely fake", I was especially thinking about the starbusts and you just blew my mind. Thank you!

Do you know if the colourisation essentially just a frequency shift into visible light or is there some human artistic license involved?

New comment by faichai in "Show HN: Workout.lol – a web app to easily create a workout routine"

faichai — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 10:51:36 +0000

If you're new to lifting, your form is likely to be terrible, it's easy to do some damage to your lower back and knees.

New comment by faichai in "Hyperscale in your Homelab: The Compute Blade arrives"

faichai — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 12:39:50 +0000

Natalie Portman says yes, and instructs you to put some hot grits down your pants.

New comment by faichai in "Electrically heated clothing (2013)"

faichai — Thu, 22 Sep 2022 15:56:54 +0000

That's really interesting, re. ligaments. Can you point to any resources around that, so I can learn more?

New comment by faichai in "HypeScript: Simplified TypeScript type system in TypeScript's own type system"

faichai — Thu, 28 Jul 2022 11:53:42 +0000

I loved it to. I'd love to make a typed coffeescript variant, which transpiles to TypeScript rather than JavaScript. My pet name for this is `tycoscript`.

New comment by faichai in "Hg Init: A Mercurial Tutorial"

faichai — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 10:58:47 +0000

Off topic, but the drop-off in searches during pandemic seems to indicate how little work people actually did whilst working from home...it's quite surprising.