Hacker News: j1elo

New comment by j1elo in "Phone-free bars and restaurants on the rise across the U.S."

j1elo — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 21:40:10 +0000

We don't need to be communicative at all times. But don't romanticize it either; we did what you say because we had to, whether we wanted or not. Not having any chance of correcting course or being more flexible is not a cool thing of the past, it's a limitation of how things were. That you find confort on it, is a different thing than it being better or worse... it just was.

New comment by j1elo in "DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market"

j1elo — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 07:48:38 +0000

As if it would make sense that spending 2hrs relaxing on the beach or gardening your orchids would cost $400 to you. Money not made is not money spent. If you were doing a hobby project for learning, you were not going to be working during that time anyways, so your hourly rate doesn't matter.

New comment by j1elo in "Ninja is a small build system with a focus on speed"

j1elo — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 13:47:25 +0000

What a messy and frankly, absurd situation to be left in. To fork a project in order to provide a tool through Pypi, only to then stop updating it on a broken version. That's more a disservice than a service for the community... If you're going to stay stuck, better to drop the broken release and stay stuck on the previous working one.

New comment by j1elo in "C++26 is done: ISO C++ standards meeting Trip Report"

j1elo — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 07:58:35 +0000

A nitpick to your nitpick: they said "memory location". And yes, a pointer always points to a memory location. Notwithstanding that each particular region of memory locations could be mapped either to real physical memory or any other assortment of hardware.

New comment by j1elo in "A Faster Alternative to Jq"

j1elo — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 14:17:34 +0000

Well obviously that would happen mostly only on the biggest business scales or maybe academic research; one example from Nvidia, which showcases Apache Spark with GPU acceleration to process "tens of terabytes of JSON data":

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/accelerating-json-processi...

New comment by j1elo in "A Faster Alternative to Jq"

j1elo — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 10:52:14 +0000

Whenever you have this kind of impressions on some development, here are my 2 cents: just think "I'm not the target audience". And that's fine.

The difference between 2ms and 0.2ms might sound unneeded, or even silly to you. But somebody, somewhere, is doing stream processing of TB-sized JSON objects, and they will care. These news are for them.

New comment by j1elo in "The Future of Version Control"

j1elo — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 19:54:59 +0000

For that you need a very centralized VCS, not a decentralized one. Perforce allows you to lock a file so everybody else cannot make edits to it. If they implemented more fine-grained locking within files, or added warnings to other users trying to check them out for edits, they'd be just where you want a VCS to be.

How, or better yet, why would Git warn you about a potential conflict beforehand, when the use case is that everyone has a local clone of the repo and might be driving it towards different directions? You are just supposed to pull commits from someone's local branch or push towards one, hence the wording. The fact that it makes sense to cooperate and work on the same direction, to avoid friction and pain, is just a natural accident that grows from the humans using it, but is not something ingrained in the design of the tool.

We're collectively just using Git for the silliest and simplest subset of its possibilities -a VCS with a central source of truth-, while bearing the burden of complexity that comes with a tool designed for distributed workloads.

New comment by j1elo in "Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers"

j1elo — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 20:00:19 +0000

It's fully caused by management mindset. There are companies that are investing hard on the AI trend, but the message is clear: all code pushed is your ultimate responsonsibility, and if it lacks quality or causes problems, you're on the hook for it; using AI hasn't changed that.

So if Spotify had a modicum of AI usage hygiene, plus accountability expectations for code quality, this would still mean a bad performance review for whoever introduced this issue (person or team; poor results and mistakes are never something that come from a single source)

New comment by j1elo in "Kagi Small Web"

j1elo — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 19:10:27 +0000

Well, thanks. That small web just taught me in a very concise way a thing or two about bicicle braking technique!

New comment by j1elo in "Fixfest is a global gathering of repairers, tinkerers, and activists"

j1elo — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 23:08:24 +0000

I would enjoy this so much. Always keeping electronic parts around home, "just in case". It feels so profoundly satisfying when you finally get to put some switch or random piece to use for a repair, after having kept it stored for 13 years in a drawer (and through moving houses 3 times!)

New comment by j1elo in "Plasma Bigscreen – 10-foot interface for KDE plasma"

j1elo — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:01:13 +0000

As a Kodi user, I must say it is very good on its core, and very bad on the addons side (which arguably is the part for which it gets recommended mostly)

It forces its limited model of text-based folders-with-files to everything. Also it's all Python, and I don't know if it's me but I always find quality issues first in Python projects than anything else. Error control is usually very lacking, and it's so frequent to see error pop-ups showing on here and there. You enter a menu and the first entry selected is ".." which is to go back to the previous menu (poor UX). All in all, Kodi for me has always been a player with good tech (it all basically works, surround sound, codecs, integration with hardware, etc), exposed as very amateurish UI experiences.

New comment by j1elo in "I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project"

j1elo — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 18:29:16 +0000

Depends on the needs of the licensor. AGPLv3 solves the problem of other players taking the code, improving it privately, and not sharing those improvements. But AGPLv3 is not a silver bullet for people who write Open Source code and pretend to make a living from it. "Open Source is not a business plan".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45095581

New comment by j1elo in "Cognitive Debt: When Velocity Exceeds Comprehension"

j1elo — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 18:40:57 +0000

I know the topic won't probably be about this -and I'll be reading the article next-, just wanted to share that this title perfectly reminded me the feeling of attempting the speed reading technique explained in this old gem of a video (minute 20:15)

BOOKSTORES: How to Read More Books in the Golden Age of Content

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lIW5jBrrsS0&t=1215s

New comment by j1elo in "Twitch: "Hey, come back! This commercial break can't play while you're away.""

j1elo — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 19:08:38 +0000

Why does the Window Manager have to provide focus and even visibility info to the application? I could foresee an evolution of runtime controls where "Is Focused" is a user-selectable permission for apps, just like how the browser requires user approval to allow web notifications or PeerConnection access to network or webcams.

New comment by j1elo in "Instagram's URL Blackhole"

j1elo — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 13:42:27 +0000

With default uBlock Origin filters on mobile Firefox, all Medium blogs show up as a blank page. Which in this day and age is akin to saying that the page is utterly broken.

New comment by j1elo in "MinIO repository is no longer maintained"

j1elo — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 11:37:02 +0000

Obviously no, if you trust that foundation; hence my

> few exceptions apply, e.g. the FSF in the past

New comment by j1elo in "MinIO repository is no longer maintained"

j1elo — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 18:18:16 +0000

Was I, really? Maybe, if you feel so... but I'd have to say that I had no idea.

What I'm suggesting is that a FOSS project without CLAs and a healthy variety of contributors does belong to the broad open source community that forms around it, while a FOSS project with such CLA is just open to a bait-and-switch scheme because the ownership stays in a single hand that can change course at a moments notice.

Whether the project stops receiving updates or not, is an orthogonal matter.

New comment by j1elo in "MinIO repository is no longer maintained"

j1elo — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 12:59:26 +0000

The only meaningful informed decision, but sadly much less known (and I think we should talk and insist more on it), is to be wary if you see a CLA. Not all do, but most perform Copyright Assignment, and that's detrimental to the long-term robustness of Open Source.

Having a FOSS license is NOT enough. Idealy the copyright should be distributed across all contributors. That's the only way to make overall consensus a required step before relicensing (except for reimplementation).

Pick FOSS projects without CLAs that perform Copyright Assignment to an untrusted entity (few exceptions apply, e.g. the FSF in the past)

New comment by j1elo in "Skip the Tips: A game to select "No Tip" but dark patterns try to stop you"

j1elo — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 12:44:35 +0000

Little known (apparently) thing from Spain is that our tips are not proportional. I see percentages everywhere when going out... 10% here, 15% there, so the quantities seem outrageous to me. In Spain if you want you leave a 1€ or 2€ coin, maybe 3 or 4€ plus some other smaller coins if you are more than 2 people. But that's it.

I've never seen a tip reaching 10€ in a restaurant, even in tables of 5+ people.

New comment by j1elo in "Major European payment processor can't send email to Google Workspace users"

j1elo — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 18:51:20 +0000

> For viva.com's engineering team, in case this reaches you: [...]

That's too kind of you, but on the other hand it really doesn't solve the issue of bad priorities and lack of overall Quality. Some engineer might log a couple hours fixing a Level 3 severity bug, emails will start working better, but the poor (or at the least, dubious) backwards technical stewardship (or lack of it) will keep going on inside the company, unnoticed from outside (until something bad eventually happens to some client)