Hacker News: gregwebs

New comment by gregwebs in "Understanding the Go Compiler: The Linker"

gregwebs — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 12:12:25 +0000

The difference is that Go has its own linker rather than using a system linker. Another article could explain the benefits of tighter integration and the drawbacks of this approach. Having its own toolchain I assume is part of what enables the easy cross compilation of Go.

New comment by gregwebs in "We chose OCaml to write Stategraph"

gregwebs — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 13:39:41 +0000

Functional programming is immutable by default. TypeScript and many other typed languages don't really stop you from clobbering things, particularly with concurrency. Rust does. But immutability with GC is a lot easier to use than Rust if you don't need the performance of Rust.

New comment by gregwebs in "America Is Sliding Toward Illiteracy"

gregwebs — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 21:25:08 +0000

The recent move away from phonics has been disastrous, and states that are using phonics now are seeing better results.

> Some have called it the “Mississippi miracle” ...

> A clear policy story is behind these improvements: imposing high standards while also giving schools the resources they needed to meet them. In 2013, Mississippi enacted a law requiring that third graders pass a literacy exam to be promoted to the next grade. It didn’t just issue a mandate, though; it began screening kids for reading deficiencies, training instructors in how to teach reading better (by, among other things, emphasizing phonics), and hiring literacy coaches to work in the lowest-performing schools. Louisiana’s improvements came about after a similar policy cocktail was administered, starting in 2021.

I would be interested to know more about the approach with literacy coaches. I donate to a charity that does 1 on 1 reading tutoring: https://readingpowerinc.org/

If we cannot as a society teach our children how to read, something is very wrong and we need to invest heavily in fixing it.

New comment by gregwebs in "Meta Ray-Ban Display"

gregwebs — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 06:23:31 +0000

Is there a way to just use this as a computer monitor? That’s what the Viture glasses are and it’s great to have a portable monitor that focuses at a longer distance.

New comment by gregwebs in "I ditched Spotify and set up my own music stack"

gregwebs — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 23:54:26 +0000

Navidrome looks nice but it looks like it is Desktop only. I am using Plexamp as well. I tried some alternatives but couldn't get them to work reliably. People miss Plexamp as an option because they try the regular Plex app and not the simplified Plexamp.

New comment by gregwebs in "60% of medal of honor recipients are Irish or Irish-American"

gregwebs — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 17:22:16 +0000

The book Born Fighting by Jim Webb explains the historical and cultural background of the Scotch Irish including how they value bravery and have been ready to fight for their freedom and beliefs.

New comment by gregwebs in "Bits 0x02: switching to orion as a browser"

gregwebs — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 12:19:44 +0000

I like Orion on iOS- it’s Safari without all the ads showing up. I can run the DarkReader extension at night just like Safari. Unfortunately it’s the most unstable software on my phone- at times regularly freezing up and then I switch back to Safari.

New comment by gregwebs in "Speeding up my ZSH shell"

gregwebs — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 00:44:36 +0000

I switched from Oh My Zsh to ZimFW because they have benchmarks showing it is faster: https://github.com/zimfw/zimfw

New comment by gregwebs in "How renewables are saving Texans billions"

gregwebs — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 05:21:36 +0000

Texas is one of the best climates in the US for renewables but in locations with less sun and wind the math will be different. That math includes batteries for load shifting of which Texas is installing a lot.

As renewable generation increases past a certain level grid stability does require additional effort and that’s a lot more difficult to price in. In Texas their grid is isolated from the rest of the US. This may create a lower ceiling on renewables since they can’t send excess generation anywhere other than their own batteries .

New comment by gregwebs in "Show HN: Workout.cool – Open-source fitness coaching platform"

gregwebs — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 10:51:11 +0000

Liftosaur is an interesting project in this space that I use for tracking my weight lifting. The lifting routine is programmable and shareable. They have a database of exercises that are based around linking to YouTube videos.

https://www.liftosaur.com/

New comment by gregwebs in "Weaponizing Dependabot: Pwn Request at its finest"

gregwebs — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 10:19:08 +0000

I passed SOC2 with dependabot set to only perform security updates

New comment by gregwebs in "Structured Errors in Go (2022)"

gregwebs — Sun, 01 Jun 2025 11:26:08 +0000

There are several existing Go error libraries with a similar approach sans context.

The approach I ended up taking is to use slog attributes. It allows for reuse of existing logging attributes.

This is explained here (skip to the “adding metadata” portion). https://blog.gregweber.info/blog/go-errors-library/

Go package: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/gregwebs/errors/slogerr

New comment by gregwebs in "Pure vs. Impure Iterators in Go"

gregwebs — Sat, 31 May 2025 18:34:59 +0000

Not all impure iterators can be resumed. But any pure iterator can be converted to a resumable iterator with a generic conversion function.

New comment by gregwebs in "The great displacement is already well underway?"

gregwebs — Wed, 14 May 2025 09:20:55 +0000

Have you tried working with recruiters? I don’t have recommendations for how to find them, but they find me on LinkedIn and it has lead to my last 2 job opportunities and most of my interviews.

New comment by gregwebs in "How to avoid P hacking"

gregwebs — Tue, 13 May 2025 01:58:50 +0000

This is one of the most disturbing articles I have seen related to reproducibility because it seems to imply that scientists don’t already know this.

New comment by gregwebs in "AI code is legacy code?"

gregwebs — Sun, 04 May 2025 19:40:20 +0000

One definition of legacy code I have seen is code without tests. I don't fully agree with that, but it is likely that your untested code is going to become legacy code quickly.

Everyone should be asking AI to write lots of tests- to me that's what AI is best at. Similarly you can ask it to make plans for changes and write documentation. Ensuring that high quality code is being created is where we really need to spend our effort, but its easier when AI can crank out tests quickly.

New comment by gregwebs in "The number of new apartments is at a 50-year high, but states expect a slowdown"

gregwebs — Sat, 03 May 2025 13:36:46 +0000

Luxury apartments prevent gentrification.

Unoccupied housing or otherwise housing purely for investment is certainly a problem. If they aren’t renting at least with AirBnB they would actually be better served by holding gold in many cases.

New comment by gregwebs in "Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal"

gregwebs — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 10:42:25 +0000

There’s an explanation that earth’s magnetic field is now so weak that a normal solar wind ended up breaking through a vulnerable spot.

Very poorly explained right now by Space Weather News. I am waiting for an updated explanation.

New comment by gregwebs in "TmuxAI: AI-Powered, Non-Intrusive Terminal Assistant"

gregwebs — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 01:56:11 +0000

I love warp but I always turned the AI off- the GUI improvements were enough for me. I have maintained a general rule for a long time now that when manual commands are run on production, someone else must be watching what’s going on and approving commands or approve them ahead of time.

New comment by gregwebs in "New Vulnerability in GitHub Copilot, Cursor: Hackers Can Weaponize Code Agents"

gregwebs — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 10:31:11 +0000

Is there a proactive way to defend against invisible Unicode attacks?