Hacker News: frou_dh

New comment by frou_dh in "Ask HN: What do you use to host side projects?"

frou_dh — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 21:53:58 +0000

Back in the day I used an old laptop sitting in my house running with its lid closed and free dynamic-DNS :)

New comment by frou_dh in "Stop Making TUIs"

frou_dh — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 19:55:20 +0000

You can't dismiss typography as irrelevant and trivial aesthetics. It's a whole field encompassing many things including legibility to humans. There's nothing more "functional" than principled crafting of legibility for each UI element. And no, a crude "Just use the same font in a single size for everything" approach is not the endgame for legibility.

Just because there have been some crappy industry trends doesn't mean the answer is to turn away and permanently regress to the confines of a terminal emulator.

New comment by frou_dh in "Stop Making TUIs"

frou_dh — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 07:46:49 +0000

The typical TUI fan is a nerd with no clue about typography so therefore they don't notice any problem with being shown elements that have no reason to be monospaced in monospace.

i.e. ignorance is bliss in the world of typography.

New comment by frou_dh in "An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail"

frou_dh — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 22:19:17 +0000

I like Fastmail but I'm starting to feel that the subscription cost is a bit overpriced for the way I use it (just IMAP email - not using the app, calendars, contacts, file hosting, ...). I've researched and found some other independent paid email providers that are significantly cheaper, although I suspect most of having a low bus factor with just 1 or 2 people operating them.

New comment by frou_dh in "Incident with Github.com"

frou_dh — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 19:41:35 +0000

Ideally they'd grandfather in accounts that were created long before the spammer days :)

New comment by frou_dh in "Best code editor without AI?"

frou_dh — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 19:33:57 +0000

Live preview of what?

New comment by frou_dh in "old.reddit.com Now Requires a Login"

frou_dh — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 10:29:51 +0000

Completely pointless smug comment, given that there are thousands of subcommunities of wildly varying quality.

New comment by frou_dh in "Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386"

frou_dh — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 11:00:02 +0000

I'm sure it is a learning exercise in OS development to some extent, just a lightweight exercise compared to doing it 'properly'.

FWIW I don't upvote submissions like this though, because it contributes to a climate of cheap superficial fame.

New comment by frou_dh in "Let's all meet up in the Y2K"

frou_dh — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 10:56:49 +0000

I badgered my parents into getting 64k ISDN installed at home in ~2000. Whatever the pitch was, IIRC my true motivation was to get double-digit ping times for Quake etc.

Playing from the north of Scotland on typical UK servers, that went from 200+ ms unstable on a normal modem, to 70ms stable. LPB† status, wahoo!

† http://lpb.urbanup.com/36431

New comment by frou_dh in "Rio-vt and librio: Rio's terminal engine, now embeddable"

frou_dh — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 10:00:24 +0000

I noticed someone has already adapted libghostty for Swift/SwiftUI: https://github.com/Lakr233/libghostty-spm

EDIT: Apparently an official version is actually coming soon: https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2072724957902381319

New comment by frou_dh in "In Memory of My Wife, Elise Cawley, with Thanks for 36 Wonderful Years"

frou_dh — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 20:14:14 +0000

That's neat that she designed their house. When I've seen photos of Wolfram in his house I've always thought it looked an awesome high-class place.

New comment by frou_dh in "Why some people mow a lawn better than others"

frou_dh — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 19:48:07 +0000

We get it, you're really proud that you choose to disable JavaScript, and need to let everyone know about it

New comment by frou_dh in "Just Let Me Write Digits"

frou_dh — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 12:34:17 +0000

I've always found it weird when a form admonishes you for writing spaces or dashes in e.g. a phone number or credit card number. Hey, implementation, you're a computer! Strip them out automatically on the backend if you don't like them!

New comment by frou_dh in "Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke"

frou_dh — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 10:29:36 +0000

Great point. It is simply lame impatient clout-chasing when someone goes out and promotes their project that is approximately as new to them as it is to the people they're promoting it to.

New comment by frou_dh in "The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes"

frou_dh — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 10:06:28 +0000

Talking of heavy-handed confirmation dialogs, there's a good example of this in Apple's Preview.app (PDF viewer). They made an unconfigurable change a few years ago, such that every single time you click any web link in a PDF, you have to confirm with a dialog that you want to open the link. You used to be able to just click links!

One engine, many tools – Introducing Rubydex

frou_dh — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 13:55:53 +0000

Article URL: https://railsatscale.com/2026-05-12-one-engine-many-tools/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48785432

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by frou_dh in "My favorite keyboards"

frou_dh — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 09:24:29 +0000

IMHO the persistence of Model M (now Unicomp) worship is a meme. Yes a chunky Buckling Spring mechanism is a very unique and "fun" feel, but that doesn't mean it's actually good to do a lot of typing on in terms of ergonomics or speed. So what of it? It's a novelty item, not the ultimate keyboard.

New comment by frou_dh in "Regular expressions that work “everywhere”"

frou_dh — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 08:25:25 +0000

Grasping at straws, it's kinda convenient that ( and ) match literally if the text being searched is Elisp code!

New comment by frou_dh in "Om"

frou_dh — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 10:08:29 +0000

I remember these guys from the glory days of the CrankyGeeks video podcast. John C. Dvorak and Sebastian Rupley had a great double-act hosting that show.

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

frou_dh — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 19:04:45 +0000

Back when I was following Swift, I was a bit confused by there being 2 distinct sites that seemed to be pretty much the same thing:

- https://swiftpackageregistry.com

- https://swiftpackageindex.com