Hacker News: gommm

New comment by gommm in "Returning to Rails in 2026"

gommm — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 07:26:27 +0000

Personally I love rust for agents because of types. In the ruby world there's sorbet and rbs so would be interesting to try that.

New comment by gommm in "We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years"

gommm — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 01:56:26 +0000

When I was an exchange student at RIT and had just arrived from France a month before, one of the admin staff invited me and a friend in the same situation for thanksgiving because she didn't want to leave us by ourselves for a major holiday. I have fond memories of that kindness.

New comment by gommm in "You can't cURL a Border"

gommm — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 20:08:01 +0000

I've usually not been impressed in AI's implementation of math heavy rules so I wouldn't trust it much and I tend to find it easier for me to write them myself and then verify :) Yup, it's always interesting to see the different usages.

New comment by gommm in "You can't cURL a Border"

gommm — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 20:05:42 +0000

Oh yeah, that's why I added the parenthesis. I consider lisp macros to be a dsl and that's exactly what I tend to like using. Similarly with ruby and some meta programming tricks.

New comment by gommm in "You can't cURL a Border"

gommm — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 10:33:52 +0000

I tend to find that for things like this that are really math heavy, it's usually better to create a DSL (or create easily readable function calls, etc) that you can easily write yourself instead of relying on AI to understand math heavy rules. Bonus points, if the rules are in an easily editable format, you can change them easily when they need to. It seems that was the path the author took...

And yes this kind of use-case is exactly where unit tests shine...

New comment by gommm in "China intimidated UK university to ditch human rights research, documents show"

gommm — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 13:14:54 +0000

Oh I mean alternative would be a well regarded university/school in Germany or France... I'm French but we live in HK and most kids here (even the ones who go to the French International School or the German Swiss School) end up trying to go to UK or US universities. French and German international schools tend to not be that well ranked in the most well known rankings despite being very good technically (which is annoying when trying to get a visa to certain countries).

Part of my bias is that I was an exchange student at RIT and while I appreciated the experience, I was not impressed by the CS courses or the level of maths of the students going there.

New comment by gommm in "China intimidated UK university to ditch human rights research, documents show"

gommm — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 10:40:10 +0000

That's what the French government paid per year per student at my engineering school in the early 2000s. Tuition fees paid by the student were 540 euros a year, but the cost to the government was quite high.

New comment by gommm in "China intimidated UK university to ditch human rights research, documents show"

gommm — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 10:38:46 +0000

France is the same, the better universities are all public. But I know that the government spent an average of 35,000 euros per students at top public engineering schools in the early 2000s, not sure nowadays, so they do have funds it's just that the way of bringing money depends on actually being great academically.

New comment by gommm in "China intimidated UK university to ditch human rights research, documents show"

gommm — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 10:35:45 +0000

This is why when my son is old enough to choose a university, I'd probably try to advise him against doing undergrad in a UK or US university if he's studying STEM. Based on interviewing CS graduates, it doesn't seem that the level is that high in most UK/US universities compared to other countries (of course with the exclusion of the very top) and that seems partly due to a culture of pushing for profits over education and making it very hard to fail.

New comment by gommm in "JetKVM – Control any computer remotely"

gommm — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 17:46:31 +0000

I've been using it since I got it. It's been working great with one small issue that I haven't been able to solve. For some reason when I use plasma on Arch linux (but not ubuntu), the display outputs garbage. I'm guessing it's not detecting the EDID correctly and setting a weird resolution or refresh rate. It's not a major issue since other desktop work well so I haven't spent much time looking into it.

New comment by gommm in "Ultrasonic Chef's Knife"

gommm — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 03:24:52 +0000

Since you seem knowledgeable about knives, Do you know any great knives makers? And are those custom steels or carbide blades worth it?

So far, I mostly sharpen my knives on the back of a plate. So definitely could be doing more :)

New comment by gommm in "“No Tax on Tips” Includes Digital Creators, Too"

gommm — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 09:32:22 +0000

To be fair, tipping the cook makes more sense to me than the waiter. I come to a restaurant for the food, I don't particularly care about the service beyond a certain baseline. It never makes sense to me that waiters can earn more with tips than kitchen staff.

New comment by gommm in "Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated"

gommm — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 14:16:04 +0000

I end up using Perplexity a lot too, especially when I'm doing something unfamiliar. It's also a good way to quickly find out what are best practices for a given framework/language I'm not that familiar with (I usually ask it to link to examples in the wild and it find opensource projects illustrating those points)

New comment by gommm in "Blurry rendering of games on Mac"

gommm — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 11:03:05 +0000

> The notch has been around for 4 years now, and Apple still hasn't provided a solution for the problem they introduced.

As a lot of people told you, you can just disable it. I've been doing that for 4 years, just set your resolution to a 16:10 ratio and you're good to go. The resolution is exactly the same as it was before they introduced the notch

Personally I like the fact that Apple gives us the choice. I dislike the notch and prefer my menu bar below because I use apps like intellij. My wife likes the notch and keeps it. So, both of us can have what we want.

Maybe Apple could have made it slightly easier to disable it by having an option instead of choosing a 16:10 resolution but, to be honest, most of the people who dislike it tend to be power users who can figure it out.

New comment by gommm in "iPhone customers upset by Apple Wallet ad pushing F1 movie"

gommm — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 19:41:54 +0000

They pushed the U2 album a few years ago and had that blow over their face when they realized that people actually did mind. And when it comes to doing the analysis, how do they determine that users don't mind? Focus groups?

New comment by gommm in "Ask HN: What projects do you donate to?"

gommm — Sat, 31 May 2025 16:11:00 +0000

It still sees active development, they keep adding new engines regularly. One of the engine I'm excited about is Macromedia Director [1] which they added initial support for in 2.5.0. That's a big endeavour though so will take time until they add everything needed for full compatibilities with a lot of games.

They've also just added support for some of the Dynamix games like Willy Beamish and Heart of China[2] which I absolutely loved as a kid (despite their rather rough edges)

[1] https://obscuritory.com/essay/macromedia-director-in-scummvm... [2] https://www.filfre.net/2018/05/the-dynamic-interactive-narra...

New comment by gommm in "We Tested 7 Languages Under Extreme Load and Only One Didn't Crash"

gommm — Wed, 28 May 2025 09:40:26 +0000

This looks like LLM blog spam. To be taken seriously, they'd need to publish the implementation in each language of each benchmark which they didn't.

Instead they show pseudocode with very vague descriptions of failure mode that do not really make sense: "Under our error cascade simulation, some low-level failures in unsafe code regions propagated in ways that eventually caused deadlocks in resource management." That doesn't give any details nor does it sound like a realistic failure case to have "failures in unsafe code regions".

New comment by gommm in "Ask HN: What projects do you donate to?"

gommm — Tue, 27 May 2025 09:36:06 +0000

Outside of charities, I donate to a few projects: - Openbsd foundation (I use openssh all the time :))

- Corejs + babel (donated after reading this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34859766

- Magisk . I root my Android phone because I believe that if I buy a device I should actually own it.

- Scummvm I believe in preserving computing history and scummvm does great work making older games accessible

- MisterFPGA. Instead of giving my 3 years old son a tablet, I've decided to set up MisterFPGA for him with an Amiga core for him to do kidpix and scummvm to run Adibou and the humongous games. I like the idea of him having access to a relatively simple system like the amiga where he can learn how computer work without having access to internet and learning to passively consume.

- Valetudo. I love having a robot cleaning my house. I do not love having something with a camera that's not purely local. Thanks to valetudo, I can use it without worrying about my privacy.

- Not directly a donation but I buy a yearly license to crossover to support wine development

- Calibre

- Syncthing

- The developer of Karabiner

- Internet Archive

- Free Software Foundation

I used to give to the following:

- Wikipedia (but stopped when I realized that they have more than enough donations and that I should focus on other worthy causes)

- Mozilla (but stopped when I saw the CEO increase her salary while firing and stopping important projects. I do not want a repeat of the IE monopoly with Chrome and as such I want Firefox to succeed but I have completely lost trust in Mozilla's management)

New comment by gommm in "An Introduction to Solid Queue for Ruby on Rails"

gommm — Sun, 11 May 2025 16:36:14 +0000

Exactly, it's not an either/or situation. I've worked on a codebase that did 3-4k/s jobs through sidekiq and in this case sidekiq is obviously the best option (although we also used a go sidekiq client for certain tasks that didn't need the rails app context) but using sidekiq from the beginning is premature optimization. You can easily start with Solid Queue and switch over to sidekiq when you actually have data that tells you that it'll potentially become a bottleneck. Premature optimization is a complexity cost.

New comment by gommm in "Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness"

gommm — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 13:31:50 +0000

Fair point but I'd argue that self defense and knowing how to fight helps but I was a year younger than everyone else (skipped a grade) and was fairly small for my age until I hit a growth spurt (which coincided with when I changed school by graduating middle school and went to high school). I'm not sure I would have been half as successful when I first was bullied.

The thing too is that I'm also not convinced abstinence on something that's part of society and that your kid will have when they grow up is that useful anyway. Social media is unfortunately needed to function in society so learning to use it reasonably (and not in an addictive manner) has value too.

That said, yes I absolutely will teach my son to fight back, violence in some circumstances is a useful tool to have.