Hacker News: kaathewise

Clypi ― all-in-one for beautiful, prod-ready CLIs (Python)

kaathewise — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 14:12:28 +0000

Article URL: https://danimelchor.github.io/clypi/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47730795

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by kaathewise in "Open source security at Astral"

kaathewise — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 14:11:29 +0000

StageX does reproducible builds, so they are signed independently and can also be verified locally. I don't think it applies to Astral, but it's useful for packages with a single maintainer or a vulnerable CI, where there is only one point of failure.

But I also think it'd be nice if projects provided a first-party StageX build, like many do with a Dockerfile or a Nix flake.

New comment by kaathewise in "Look Out for Bugs"

kaathewise — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 13:17:39 +0000

The first programming language I learned was Java. And for us non-native speakers who didn't know English very well at that point public static void did indeed sound like a magic spell. It was behind both an understanding and a language barriers

Minifeed – a curated blog reader and search engine

kaathewise — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 14:47:30 +0000

Article URL: https://minifeed.net/welcome

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44855562

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by kaathewise in "I prefer human-readable file formats"

kaathewise — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 18:23:15 +0000

Totally. A good chuck of the formats are just TSV files with some metadata in header. Setting aside the drawbacks, this approach is both straightforward and flexible.

I think we're seeing some change in that regard, though. VCF got BCF and SAM and got BAM

New comment by kaathewise in "I prefer human-readable file formats"

kaathewise — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 15:15:29 +0000

One of the problems is that a lot of bioinformatics formats nowadays have to hold so much data that most text editors stop working properly. For example, FASTA splits DNA data into lines of 50-80 characters for readability. But in FASTQ, where the '>' and '+' characters collide with the quality scores, as far as I know, DNA and the quality data are always put into one line each. Trying to find a location in a 10k long line gets very awkward. And I'm sure some people can eyeball Phred scores from ASCII, but I think they are a minority, even among researchers.

Similarly, NEXUS files are also human-readable, but it'd be tough to discern the shape of inlined 200 node Newick trees.

When I was asking people who did actual bioinformatics (well, genomics) what some of their annoyances when working with the bioinf software were, having to do a bunch of busywork on files in-between pipeline steps (compressing/uncompressing, indexing) was one of the complaints mentioned.

I think there's a place in bioinformatics for a unified binary format which can take care of compression, indexing, and metadata. But with that list of requirements it'd have to be binary. Data analysis moved from CSVs and Excel files to Parquet, and I think there's a similar transition waiting to happen here

New comment by kaathewise in "Why Use Structured Errors in Rust Applications?"

kaathewise — Sun, 01 Jun 2025 17:18:29 +0000

Yeah, I found `anyhow`'s `Contex` to be a great way of annotating bubbled up errors. The only problem is that using the lazy `with_context` can get somewhat unwieldy. For all the grief people give to Go's `if err != nil` Rust's method chaining can get out of hand too. One particular offender I wrote:

   match operator.propose(py).with_context(|| {
    anyhow!(
   "Operator {} failed while generating a proposal",
   operator.repr(py).unwrap()
  )
   })? {

Which is a combination of `rustfmt` giving up on long lines and also not formatting macros as well as functions

New comment by kaathewise in "Undergraduate shows that searches within hash tables can be much faster"

kaathewise — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 13:09:07 +0000

Yeah, I presume so. At least that's what Swiss Tables do. The paper is focused more on the asymptotics rather than the real-world hardware performance, so I can see why they chose not to handle such edge cases

New comment by kaathewise in "Undergraduate shows that searches within hash tables can be much faster"

kaathewise — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 11:10:49 +0000

The dereference table allows allocations to fail:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.02305#:~:text=If%20both%20buckets...

(the text fragment doesn't seem to work in a PDF, it's the 12th page, first paragraph)

New comment by kaathewise in "IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine"

kaathewise — Sat, 09 Nov 2024 20:45:19 +0000

Ah, I see. Best of luck with that!

There are a few projects where I'd love to see a modern spreadsheet implementation. CryptPad comes to mind. They use OnlyOffice, which is quite featurefull, but takes awhile to load and isn't as responsive.

New comment by kaathewise in "IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine"

kaathewise — Sat, 09 Nov 2024 20:20:47 +0000

Yep, I've misunderstood, realized it after seeing mdaniel's comment.

Thanks for making this in the first place! I saw IronCalc in the list of projects supported by NLnet and it grabbed my attention.

By the way, if You don't mind me asking, how'd Tuta end up sponsoring IronCalc? It seems that lately they and Proton have been trying to expand their business away from just email. The fact that Tuta is interested in IronCalc makes me think they want to have an office-like offering.

New comment by kaathewise in "IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine"

kaathewise — Sat, 09 Nov 2024 20:11:58 +0000

Right, I've made a mistake! I keep getting surprised by the fact it's possible to simply compile a Rust crate with a WASM target and run it in the browser.

New comment by kaathewise in "IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine"

kaathewise — Sat, 09 Nov 2024 16:39:36 +0000

A spreadsheet engine. It's a React app with a Rust backend, but it impressed me how snappy it was[0]. Of course, it's not nearly as feature rich as Google Sheets, not to mention Excel.

[0]: https://app.ironcalc.com/

IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine

kaathewise — Sat, 09 Nov 2024 16:36:19 +0000

Article URL: https://www.ironcalc.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42095292

Points: 726

# Comments: 227

Altcha – free, open-source Captcha alternative

kaathewise — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 14:48:21 +0000

Article URL: https://altcha.org/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41870185

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

So, do you want to write?

kaathewise — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 15:24:52 +0000

Article URL: https://artemis.sh/2024/06/19/do-you-really-want-to-write.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41069775

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by kaathewise in "VeryGoodGraphics – vector graphics cross-platform UI framework"

kaathewise — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 15:32:09 +0000

Contrary to the name, I don't think that it's very good. The whole thing is a canvas via WASM, so scrolling isn't smooth, selection doesn't work, and accessibility is seemingly non-existent.

But I think the technology itself is interesting. While most modern UI toolkits use HTML or React-like components, this uses a set of JSONs, which describe the page.

VeryGoodGraphics – vector graphics cross-platform UI framework

kaathewise — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 15:31:35 +0000

Article URL: https://verygoodgraphics.com

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40750639

Points: 2

# Comments: 3

New comment by kaathewise in "Stop Using Discord"

kaathewise — Fri, 31 May 2024 12:20:31 +0000

I haven't self-hosted any, but I enjoy using Flarum [0] forums. They load faster than Discourse ones and feel snappy.

[0]: https://flarum.org/

Iroh – a toolkit for building distributed apps

kaathewise — Wed, 29 May 2024 15:17:02 +0000

Article URL: https://iroh.computer/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40512849

Points: 2

# Comments: 0