Hacker News: hilti

New comment by hilti in "Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes"

hilti — Tue, 12 May 2026 15:55:39 +0000

Thank you so much for this link :-)

I'm studying old operating systems, because it's very interesting how we've been so productive with less screen pixels than we have today. It's basically mind blowing that 800x600 pixels have been a long time enough to get work done.

Currently I'm typing this on an iPhone 17 with a larger screen and after all the years there is nothing like a good charting, dashboarding or spreadsheet on it.

New comment by hilti in "Batteries Not Included, or Required, for These Smart Home Sensors"

hilti — Wed, 06 May 2026 09:08:04 +0000

If you are constantly looking at your smartphone and ignore the real world ... yes ;-)

New comment by hilti in "Show HN: I built a native macOS audio player and it changed my life"

hilti — Tue, 05 May 2026 20:25:43 +0000

Looks interesting, but missing notarization and source code gives me a headache in this world of vibe coded apps. But glad you enjoyed the afternoon with Claude and get a personal reincarnation of Winamp for your box.

New comment by hilti in "Why TUIs Are Back"

hilti — Sun, 03 May 2026 20:54:40 +0000

I totally agree with the author that Windows GUIs and MacOS GUIs are getting worse with every iteration. For my own side project I used ImGUI and it's working great for my purpose.

It's by far not as beautiful rendered as the native OS layers, but easy to navigate and a good foundation for cross platform GUI development. And I got it even approved for the MacOS app store. Here's my write up: https://marchildmann.com/blog/imgui-mac-app-store/

New comment by hilti in "Apple accidentally left Claude.md files Apple Support app"

hilti — Fri, 01 May 2026 11:34:44 +0000

Dozens of comments, but not a single "What was in their Claude.md"

New comment by hilti in "Ask HN: What are you building that's not AI related?"

hilti — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:40:49 +0000

Really cool - I love the retro look&feel of it. Like Photoshop 1.0

Is it a heavily customized SwiftUI app?

New comment by hilti in "How Pizza Tycoon simulated traffic on a 25 MHz CPU"

hilti — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 15:53:46 +0000

I love these posts, because I always wanted to get into game development and never found spare time. Thank you so much!

New comment by hilti in "If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos"

hilti — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 22:17:12 +0000

Oh - they didn't train silently already?! ;-) Going to move my repositories then next week.

New comment by hilti in "A Faster Alternative to Jq"

hilti — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 15:26:26 +0000

LOL ... I can absolutely feel your pain. That's exactly why I created for myself a graphical approach. I shared the first version with friends and it turned into "ColumnLens" (ImGUI on Mac) app. Here is a use case from the healthcare industry: https://columnlens.com/industries/medical

New comment by hilti in "A Faster Alternative to Jq"

hilti — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 15:21:43 +0000

I'm glad you adjusted the CSS while I was typing my comment. I needed to switch to dark mode to be able to read highlighted words.

Nice write up. I will try out your tool.

New comment by hilti in "How I got a Dear ImGui App Approved on the Mac App Store"

hilti — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 12:45:24 +0000

Author here. Happy to answer questions about the process. Hope this helps other developers to ship blazing fast ImGUI apps.

How I got a Dear ImGui App Approved on the Mac App Store

hilti — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 12:28:44 +0000

Article URL: https://marchildmann.com/blog/imgui-mac-app-store/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47488533

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by hilti in "Built a 1.3M-line agent-native OS in Rust while homeless. What now?"

hilti — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 21:38:46 +0000

Thank you! Totally agreed.

New comment by hilti in "Show HN: ColumnLens – Query millions of rows in milliseconds on your Mac"

hilti — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 14:08:12 +0000

Full disclosure: I’m a much better C++ developer than I am a marketer, so I asked Claude to help me write this post. Which is a bit ironic given that ColumnLens is literally about keeping your data local and off other people’s servers. Anyway — the app is real, the numbers are real, and the frustration with uploading CSVs to SaaS tools is very real. ;-)

Show HN: ColumnLens – Query millions of rows in milliseconds on your Mac

hilti — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 13:53:44 +0000

We keep shipping data to the cloud to analyze it, but modern Macs have enough horsepower to query millions of rows locally in milliseconds. Even an 8GB MacBook Neo.

I built ColumnLens because I wanted to stop uploading sensitive data to SaaS tools just to run a GROUP BY. It's a native C++ desktop app that opens 5GB+ CSV, JSONL, Parquet, and Excel files in about 3 seconds, then lets you query them with DuckDB's full SQL engine — JOINs, CTEs, window functions, all running on your machine.

The idea is simple: your laptop is a perfectly good analytics workstation. You shouldn't need a cloud pipeline to look at your data.

Some things I learned building it:

- DuckDB's columnar engine is absurdly efficient. 12M rows, sub-second queries, under 1 GB RAM. On hardware that fits in a backpack.

- ImGui + OpenGL is a great stack for data-heavy desktop apps. No DOM, no layout engine overhead — just raw GPU rendering. The data grid scrolls 12M rows without a single frame drop.

- I added a "3D City View" that maps rows to buildings (height = one column, color = another). Sounds gimmicky, but outliers and clusters are immediately visible in ways they aren't in tables or charts. Our brains are good at spotting the tall building in a skyline.

- Lua scripting turned out more useful than expected. People write small scripts to fetch data from APIs, run queries, and configure charts — repeatable analysis without leaving the app.

- Everything runs locally. Zero telemetry, zero network calls. The binary is 33MB, statically linked.

Free download at https://columnlens.com

Would love to hear from anyone else building local-first data tools — I think the "ship everything to the cloud" era is starting to swing back.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323284

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by hilti in "MacBook Neo"

hilti — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 14:39:09 +0000

This is a very smart move and I love it! Absolutely the best device I can get for my parents.

New comment by hilti in "Claude Code escapes its own denylist and sandbox"

hilti — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 21:42:10 +0000

Thank you for this write up. I am still lightyears behind this deep knowledge, but feel like I learned from your post the vocabulary to get started.

New comment by hilti in "Ask HN: Who Is Using XMPP?"

hilti — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 21:37:20 +0000

Sorry ... I read XAMPP! Now I know why I got downvoted

New comment by hilti in "Ask HN: Who Is Using XMPP?"

hilti — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 16:42:16 +0000

Favorite server is localhost

New comment by hilti in "Web Components: The Framework-Free Renaissance"

hilti — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 07:52:41 +0000

I started experimenting with custom HTML elements for my dashboard project THINK (live at https://think.iotdata.systems) and I’ve been really surprised by how much functionality you can get with just vanilla web components. The source is on my GitHub, and I’ve been documenting my other projects and work at https://marchildmann.com if anyone’s curious what else I’m building.