Hacker News: gt0

New comment by gt0 in "Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold"

gt0 — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 01:29:04 +0000

Agree, and this is my point. Apple absolutely has a very clear message on how developers should make software, but as you say, developers often do not care.

I am a desktop app "believer" I like desktop apps, I like native desktop apps, but I also have to make software that makes economic sense, and following Apple's guidelines just doesn't make any sense for me, and a lot of other companies too.

New comment by gt0 in "Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold"

gt0 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 08:59:26 +0000

When a platform can’t answer “how should I build a UI?” in under ten seconds, it has failed its developers. Full stop.

That's fine, except no platform answers this.

Obviously Linux doesn't, but the Mac doesn't either. Apple of course has it's recommendation, but most developers do not take Apple's recommended path because of course, it's Apple-only, most developers make cross-platform apps these days.

Even if Microsoft decreed the one-and-one Windows development path, most developers are not taking that path.

It used to be the case that Mac developers used Apple tools, Windows developers used Microsoft tools, but those days are gone. Developers want to use Electron, or Qt, or some other system to support multiple platforms in one codebase.

Microsoft has less to do with this than the article makes out. I'm a desktop developer. I don't care what Microsoft recommends, or what Apple recommends, because neither work in the real world where supporting only their platform just isn't realistic.

New comment by gt0 in "Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari"

gt0 — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 04:41:25 +0000

Safari is a monopoly on iOS and iPadOS, that's a problem if you want to make a bleeding-edge PWA app, in that it's probably not going to work very well on iPad and iPhone and there is no web alternative on those platforms.

Firefox is entirely optional, not a monopoly anywhere.

The problem for me isn't making bad web browsers, it's enforcing those bad browsers as the only option on a computer platform.

New comment by gt0 in "RISC-V Is Sloooow"

gt0 — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:29:19 +0000

Perhaps not single thread, but Rock was a dead end a while before Oracle pulled the plug, and Sun/Oracle's core market of course was always servers not workstations. We used Niagara machines at my work around the T2 era, a long time ago, but they were very competitive if you could saturate the cores and had the RAM to back it up.

New comment by gt0 in "A new Oracle Solaris Common Build Environment (CBE) release"

gt0 — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 22:14:20 +0000

I haven't used Solaris since the last time I used it for work over 10 years ago. Agree ZFS and Zones are both exceptional, I would still use Solaris now where it made sense.

New comment by gt0 in "RISC-V Is Sloooow"

gt0 — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 21:23:47 +0000

I don't think anybody suggests Oracle couldn't make faster SPARC processors, it's just that development of SPARC ended almost 10 years ago. At the time SPARC was abandoned, it was very competitive.

New comment by gt0 in "RISC-V Is Sloooow"

gt0 — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 20:32:38 +0000

I was really surprised by the s390x performance, but I also don't really understand why there are build time listed by architecture, not the actual processors.

New comment by gt0 in "IBM Mainframe Business Jumps 67%"

gt0 — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 02:56:55 +0000

Neither were mainframes though, Watson and Deep Blue were both POWER systems.

New comment by gt0 in "30 Years of ReactOS"

gt0 — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 23:02:13 +0000

I tried ReactOS a little while ago, in some ways it's closer than it feels to being acceptable as a daily driver, in others it's quite far away.

I like the idea of there being more alternatives Operating Systems that aren't just a Linux distro. Operating Systems like Haiku and ReactOS I think are great for being a direction that isn't Linux. It's not that Linux is bad, but it's a slow moving change-resistant juggernaut that isn't going to be a place where innovation will thrive.

New comment by gt0 in "Threat actors expand abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code"

gt0 — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 07:23:56 +0000

It's free, it has support for loads of languages, and it's kind of fashionable.

Personally I'm kind of lukewarm on VS Code, it's fine, but CLion, Visual Studio Proper, and RustRover are better for me.

I see why people use it though, it's not a bad editor at all.

For Java, I'm all over IntelliJ.

New comment by gt0 in "Ask HN: How locked down are your work machines?"

gt0 — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 01:09:50 +0000

Small company, < 50 people, industrial automation.

Machine not locked down at all, I could install OS/2 and nobody would care.

New comment by gt0 in "What is Plan 9?"

gt0 — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 10:24:51 +0000

That's why it's a research OS, a lot of people (or at least some) think that the current range of mainstream OS are not very well designed, and we can do better.

I'm not saying Plan 9 is the alternative, but it is kind of amazing how un-networked modern Operating Systems are, and we just rely on disparate apps and protocols to make it feel like the OS is integrated into networks, but they only semi-are.

New comment by gt0 in "PauseOS: Distraction-Free Phone OS"

gt0 — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 03:38:23 +0000

Agree, this is absurd, I have plenty of websites I use that are productive or mindful or otherwise tick the boxes this company wants ticked, but the idea that I can't view them on my phone just immediately rules it out.

No app store means I can't do any 2FA not approved by the supplier of my phone... I mean come on.

New comment by gt0 in "Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS"

gt0 — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 10:24:22 +0000

I thought this too. At the end of the day, it's CSS, this isn't a large project needing a ton of resources.

New comment by gt0 in "Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs"

gt0 — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 06:34:00 +0000

Would that be ideal though? Adding enormous complexity to solve a trivial problem which would work I'm sure 99.999% of the time, but not 100% of the time.

Ideally, in my view, is that the browser asks you if you are sure regardless of content.

I use LLMs, but that browser "are you sure" type of integration is adding a massive amount of work to do something that ultimately isn't useful in any real way.

New comment by gt0 in "QNX Self-Hosted Developer Desktop"

gt0 — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 10:22:45 +0000

Swift is probably less than 1% of the what it takes to run iPhone apps, you can get Swift for Windows too, but it is nowhere near able to run iPhone apps. The problem is all the libraries an iPhone app expects to be available on the host OS, all the multimedia stuff and so on, those libraries on iPhone are large and advanced, and not available for porting to any OS outside of Apple.

New comment by gt0 in "If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?"

gt0 — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 08:00:33 +0000

In loads of projects you can't just pick a language and it's fine.

If I'm making a C#/WPF app, I can't just decide to make part of it C.

I get it's just a generalised criticism of vibe coding, but "why not use a harder language then" doesn't seem to make any sense.

New comment by gt0 in "Thoughts on Go vs. Rust vs. Zig"

gt0 — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 04:21:24 +0000

I think it overstates the complexity and difficulty of Rust. It has some hard concepts, but the toolchain/compiler is so good that it practically guides you through using them.

New comment by gt0 in "C100 Developer Terminal"

gt0 — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 10:50:30 +0000

I've been following this for a while, great looking hardware, but the target market knows how to buy a computer, they don't need custom boxes.

For me this is a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist. I like the look, but it wouldn't even really suit my desk, I like to have my keyboard push quite far forward, and the back of this C100 would prevent that.

Really nice, might even buy one, but there is no way this succeeds long term.

New comment by gt0 in "The Great SaaS Gaslight"

gt0 — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 08:01:15 +0000

Agree, I never used Windows 2000, but I used NT4 in the late nineties and it was rock solid, no less reliable than Windows 11, and of course, snappier on vastly lesser hardware, I think I used it on a Pentium III.