Hacker News: felipeccastro

New comment by felipeccastro in "Any application that can be written in a system language, eventually will be"

felipeccastro — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 03:34:36 +0000

It might be the opposite. Python apps still get written despite the performance hit, because understandability matters more than raw performance in many cases. Now that we’re all code reviewers, that quality should matter more, not less. Programmer time is still more expensive than machine time in many cases.

New comment by felipeccastro in "KDE is now my favorite desktop"

felipeccastro — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 13:28:28 +0000

I've used XFCE for a 2011 laptop, it was about as fast as LXDE but better polished. Windows was unusable there, and XFCE made the computer feel brand new. Only the modern websites that would still cause slowness, but the OS was great.

New comment by felipeccastro in "Type checking is a symptom, not a solution"

felipeccastro — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 20:34:21 +0000

I have noticed that static type checking often enables people to build systems more over-engineered than they could without it. It's not a coincidence that factory-factory-impl happened in Java, not Ruby.

New comment by felipeccastro in "Next.js is infuriating"

felipeccastro — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 13:12:45 +0000

The train of thought is “what is everyone using? I’ll use that too”

New comment by felipeccastro in "Why Nim?"

felipeccastro — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 15:04:07 +0000

It's not just small typos, it's the ability to explore apis, the standard library, go to definition, quickly catch any error at the location it happens, not having to memorize large models and their field names, the list goes on.

I can work without an LSP, but when I'm searching for a new language that would be used by a team (including Junior devs) it's hard to justify something missing the basics of good DX. I haven't tried it with Cursor though, it might be less of a dealbreaker at this point.

New comment by felipeccastro in "Why Nim?"

felipeccastro — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 11:05:24 +0000

I agree with all your points but last I tried, the VS Code LSP was terrible. It’s hard to justify a new language when even the basics of autocomplete, inline errors and go to definition don’t work well. Part of the reason was that any function can be called on anything, which pollutes the autocomplete list.

Has the LSP situation improved yet? Similar issue with Crystal lang, which I enjoy even more than Nim.

New comment by felipeccastro in "Web apps in a single, portable, self-updating, vanilla HTML file"

felipeccastro — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 11:01:10 +0000

And if keeping in local storage a list of all pages, you can create an index html automatically in a predefined format which makes it more of a database rather than loose documents.

New comment by felipeccastro in "Poor Man's Back End-as-a-Service (BaaS), Similar to Firebase/Supabase/Pocketbase"

felipeccastro — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 15:01:08 +0000

Not sure why this was downvoted, but I’d be very interested in learning how well does pglite compares to SQLite (pros and cons of each, maturity, etc)

New comment by felipeccastro in "Rust compiler performance"

felipeccastro — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 18:54:16 +0000

It is ironic how “rewrite it in Rust” is the solution to make any program fast, except the Rust compiler.

New comment by felipeccastro in "Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps"

felipeccastro — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 17:18:00 +0000

This. Making something super customizable is a lot harder to implement (code being too generic, hard to reason about and debug) and often presents a worse UX ("why are there so many options??"). Having the UX design team interview and consider the needs of each user role interacting with the application, and ensuring the app displays/asks only the appropriate info for each user, hiding the rest and adopting smart defaults (instead of requiring everything), is easier to implement, safer and produces more intuitive interfaces than highly customizable ones, in many cases.

New comment by felipeccastro in "Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps"

felipeccastro — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 17:11:50 +0000

https://anvil.works/ uses Python

New comment by felipeccastro in "What do I think about Lua after shipping a project with 60k lines of code?"

felipeccastro — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 22:22:12 +0000

Yes, but in practice, is the difference significant enough to matter? I’m genuinely looking to see if I’m missing anything when favoring Python type system over Go’s.

New comment by felipeccastro in "What do I think about Lua after shipping a project with 60k lines of code?"

felipeccastro — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 17:44:32 +0000

I’m assuming that Python code base didn’t have thorough type hints. What if it had? Would Go still feel safer? I know these aren’t checked in runtime, but Python type system seems more thorough than Go’s, so shouldn’t a Python code base fully typed be even safer than Go? If so, why not?

(I know Python type checks aren’t mandatory, but for this question assume that the type checker is running in CI)

New comment by felipeccastro in "AI is turning us into glue"

felipeccastro — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 23:26:18 +0000

I’ve been having a different experience. Asking Claude to fix the bug again and again is annoying, so I’m still working on “pull pieces at a time, understanding each” so I do fix the bug myself when it’s faster to do so. In fact, the majority of times I’ve been using the LLM to build tiny libraries for me to avoid the need for the LLM in the running app. Kind of like StackOverflow on steroids. I don’t feel as the glue, but only having a superior tooling to get info I need fast.

New comment by felipeccastro in "Ask HN: What less-popular systems programming language are you using?"

felipeccastro — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 15:52:08 +0000

The language and stdlib feel like a more polished Ruby, though I haven't explored it in deep. The tooling, last I checked, is what's behind - the interpreter didn't work for simple apps, and the LSP is slow and full of bugs.

New comment by felipeccastro in "Ask HN: What less-popular systems programming language are you using?"

felipeccastro — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 17:04:17 +0000

Yes, I believe so because it uses global type inference. I would gladly add explicit types everywhere instead of this to use Crystal if it had decent tooling, because everything else about the language is really perfect.

New comment by felipeccastro in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2025)"

felipeccastro — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 16:56:04 +0000

Hey, just a shoutout that I love this platform, had a lot of fun playing several games with my nephews, high quality games with almost zero ads, kudos!

New comment by felipeccastro in "Render raises $80M in Series C financing"

felipeccastro — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 02:46:56 +0000

Our team considered Render but dropped for the same reason. We’re looking into Aptible right now, not as well known but seems focused on HIPAA compliance.

New comment by felipeccastro in "Show HN: A better way of writing HTML via JavaScript?"

felipeccastro — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 22:02:13 +0000

I like it. It’s an elegant solution and you can easily make higher order components from this.

New comment by felipeccastro in "What is the Fourth Dimension? (1884)"

felipeccastro — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 19:49:06 +0000

That's not pedantry, that's clarifying, haven't thought like that before. Thank you.