Hacker News: gardaani

New comment by gardaani in "Show HN: Audiomass – a free, open-source multitrack audio editor for the web"

gardaani — Mon, 25 May 2026 04:08:14 +0000

Is bassoontracker too old-school? https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/

New comment by gardaani in "The woes of sanitizing SVGs"

gardaani — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 07:42:31 +0000

W3C has been defining SVG Native, but it hasn't progressed much lately — mostly because there hasn't been any interest in it. SVG Native is a small subset of SVG 2.0 which doesn't support scripting, animations or any external references. https://svgwg.org/specs/svg-native/

New comment by gardaani in "GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry"

gardaani — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 13:00:21 +0000

It isn't only corporate development teams — open source development teams want to spy on their users, too. For instance, Homebrew: "Anonymous analytics allow us to prioritise fixes and features based on how, where and when people use Homebrew." [1]

[1] https://docs.brew.sh/Analytics

New comment by gardaani in "Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989"

gardaani — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 15:00:29 +0000

Linux kernel version 7.1 will drop support for 486: "Linux devs think even one second spent on 486 support is a second too many." https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/04/linux-kernel-maintai...

App Store sees 84% surge in new apps as AI coding tools take off

gardaani — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 03:51:41 +0000

Article URL: https://9to5mac.com/2026/04/06/app-store-sees-84-surge-in-new-apps-as-ai-coding-tools-take-off/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47699086

Points: 66

# Comments: 74

New comment by gardaani in "AIs can't stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations"

gardaani — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 06:52:58 +0000

The movie was made in 1983 and it already uses the word "hallucination": "what you see on these screens up here is a fantasy; a computer-enhanced hallucination" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/quotes/?item=qt0453841&...

New comment by gardaani in "Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift adoption"

gardaani — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 06:30:53 +0000

Here's Andreas Kling's general thoughts on Rust:

- Excellent for short-lived programs that transform input A to output B

- Clunky for long-lived programs that maintain large complex object graphs

- Really impressive ecosystem

- Toxic community

https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1822241531501162806

New comment by gardaani in "Debian 13 arrives with major updates for Linux users – what's new in 'Trixie'"

gardaani — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 07:20:31 +0000

Debian Trixie drops 32-bit x86 support. Ubuntu dropped 32-bit support already earlier, which meant that lightweight Lubuntu and Xubuntu don't support it either. It's sad to see old hardware support getting dropped like that. They are still good machines as servers and desktop terminals.

Are there any good Linux distros left with 32-bit x86 support? Do I have to switch to NetBSD?

New comment by gardaani in "HyAB k-means for color quantization"

gardaani — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 05:11:05 +0000

> Oklab is a nightmare in practice - it's not linked to any perceptual color space, but it has the sheen of such in colloquial discussion. It's a singular matmul that is supposed to emulate CAM16 as best as it can.

Oklab is perceptually uniform and addresses issues such as unexpected hue and lightness changes in blue colors present in the CIELAB color space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklab_color_space

Oklab is used in CSS because it creates smoother gradients and better gamut mapping of out-of-gamut colors than Lab. Here's a picture how Oklch (on the left) creates smoother gamut mapping than CIE Lch (on the right) ("Explore OKLab gamut mapping in oklch"): https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/9449#issuecomment...

New comment by gardaani in "Container: Apple's Linux-Container Runtime"

gardaani — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 05:32:56 +0000

I have been using lima to run Linux VMs on macOS. This new Apple tool looks very similar and I might replace lima with it.

New comment by gardaani in "Show HN: We made a photo search engine for homes for sale"

gardaani — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 16:03:27 +0000

Does your crawler respect robots.txt? Does it request pages with nice delays so that it doesn't bring down servers? Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43422413

New comment by gardaani in "Recommendations for designing magic numbers of binary file formats"

gardaani — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 17:42:34 +0000

Many modern file formats are based on generic container formats (zip, riff, json, toml, xml without namespaces, ..). Identifying those files requires reading the entire file and then guessing the format from the contents. Magic numbers are becoming rare, which is a shame.

New comment by gardaani in "Recommendations for designing magic numbers of binary file formats"

gardaani — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 17:05:55 +0000

Wikipedia has a good explanation why the PNG magic number is 89 50 4e 47 0d 0a 1a 0a. It has some good features, such as the end-of-file character for DOS and detection of line ending conversions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PNG#File_header

New comment by gardaani in "Apple's Software Quality Crisis"

gardaani — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 07:57:44 +0000

Bluetooth is also turned on after every OS update. I don't understand why macOS does these. They can't be bugs because they have been around for years.

New comment by gardaani in "Gooey rubber that's slowly ruining old hard drives"

gardaani — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 05:59:46 +0000

That's why I've decided that my next mouse won't have any rubber in it, but it's difficult to find a good mouse without rubber. I'm still looking for one.

Generally, I try to avoid buying anything with rubber. It is usually the first part that goes bad. Either it gets sticky and starts melting or it gets hard and dry and breaks up. Also, I avoid using rubber bands. They usually end up damaging objects they hold together.

Here's a good page about conservation of rubbers and plastics for those who like to preserve their vintage stuff for a long time. https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute/services/con...

New comment by gardaani in "Xcode Constantly Phones Home"

gardaani — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 07:05:00 +0000

Another annoying Xcode feature is that building a macOS app with Xcode command line tools (xcodebuild) sometimes complains that my iPhone is locked:

"An error occurred whilst preparing device for development -- Failed to prepare the device for development. Domain: com.apple.dtdevicekit Code: 806 Recovery Suggestion: Please unlock and reconnect the device. The device is locked. Domain: com.apple.dt.MobileDeviceErrorDomain"

New comment by gardaani in "No-Panic Rust: A Nice Technique for Systems Programming"

gardaani — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 09:08:37 +0000

> Ideally, you can constrain the set of inputs to only valid ones by leveraging types. But if that's not possible and a truly invalid input is passed, then you should panic.

But how can the caller know what is "a truly invalid input"? The article has an example: "we unfortunately cannot rely on panic annotations in API documentation to determine a priori whether some Rust code is no-panic or not."

It means that calling a function is like a lottery: some input values may panic and some may not panic. The only way to ensure that it doesn't panic is to test it with all possible input values, but that is impossible for complex functions.

It would be better to always return an error and let the caller decide how to handle it. Many Rust libraries have a policy that if the library panics, then it is a bug in the library. It's sad that the Rust standard library doesn't take the same approach. For println!(), it would mean returning an error instead of panicking.

New comment by gardaani in "Blackmagic Debuts $30K 3D Camera for Capturing Video for Vision Pro"

gardaani — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 11:15:17 +0000

Which open format can handle this kind of video? The Cineform video codec can store stereo video, but I don't know if it would be suitable for this.

New comment by gardaani in "M4 MacBook Pro Uses Quantum Dot Display Technology"

gardaani — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 11:51:54 +0000

There's few new 5K monitors: ASUS ProArt Display 5K PA27JCV (already sold for $799) and Benq DesignVue PD2730S.

New comment by gardaani in "Show HN: Nova JavaScript Engine"

gardaani — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 11:39:35 +0000

Is this an experimental only JS engine or do you aim to implement the entire ECMAscript specification?

I have been following the Rust Boa project, but I think that it isn't production ready, yet. https://github.com/boa-dev/boa