Hacker News: karolusrex

New comment by karolusrex in "Three Inverse Laws of AI"

karolusrex — Wed, 06 May 2026 07:42:35 +0000

If a person would lack consciousness, they couldn’t possibly know that though?

New comment by karolusrex in "Working on Products People Hate"

karolusrex — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 09:26:34 +0000

I work on a product that is so loved and hated at the same time. With some people it’s almost set off its own subculture, and they will roll with nostalgia if they ever used it.

On the other hand some other people will claim it’s the hallmark of enshittification, overchurned with features and a sinking mess.

I agree with both. It’s a strange situation and very difficult to move the needle towards more love at this point

New comment by karolusrex in "Willingness to look stupid"

karolusrex — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 08:10:54 +0000

There is sibling concept of the Nobel prize winner ending up doing less meaningful work after they received their price. In history there are countless examples of the underdog emerging from the shadows and the dominant empire collapsing under its own weight; a natural rotation of roles. It is explained in detail here: https://youtu.be/ybufqRY77PQ

New comment by karolusrex in "Doing Rails Wrong"

karolusrex — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 19:42:12 +0000

Production-grade web app without advanced build tools? Depends.

CSS classes not scoped and starting to leak? You hire more frontend developers and because there is no type system we get critical exceptions? And no automated testing to discover them?

Correctly handling hyphenation of user-generated content? Safari decided to handle audio differently in the latest version and you have no polyfills? iPhone decided to kill the tab because of memory pressure, because someone uploaded an image with exotic properties, and you have no cdn service like fastly image optimiser to handle that? Support for right to left languages such as Arabic? The backend returned a super cryptic response that actually originates from the users private firewall?

a11y requires you to use resizable browser text, and someone is using google translate chrome extension at the same time, and you can’t possibly know how the layout of the page will look like?

Some Samsung devices bypass browser detection completely and you don’t know if the user is on mobile or not? localStorage.setItem will throw an error when the device is low on memory, etc etc…

Once you get to a certain scale of users, even the simplest of tasks become littered with corner cases and odd situations. For smaller scale applications, it is not necessary to have a very wide tool arsenal. But if you are facing a large user-base, you need quite some heavy caliber tools to keep things in check.

New comment by karolusrex in "Web dev is still fun if you want it to be"

karolusrex — Sat, 31 May 2025 14:46:41 +0000

I understand that this is intended as a rant - but these types of “case studies”, where someone starts a personal hobby project as a solo developer without using modern frameworks - are not very convincing. It would be an entirely different argument to point to a blog post of a larger organisation justifying their tech stack than these types of sources, that seem to be more common these days. Often the author is a backend developer who lacks any detailed knowledge of the problem space, and the comments section is usually full of fact errors and confusion.

New comment by karolusrex in "Three.js Fundamentals"

karolusrex — Mon, 20 May 2019 08:21:07 +0000

Construction industry. I'm having an upcoming project with making a web based 3d editor now, and before that I had an open offer for another construction industry 3d app. I also have a close friend who just finished a gig in the same line

New comment by karolusrex in "About V, the language Volt is written in"

karolusrex — Thu, 07 Feb 2019 11:08:07 +0000

Usually you can find information about a new language pretty easily by adding "Lang", e.g. "go lang" etc

New comment by karolusrex in "If 5G Is So Important, Why Isn’t It Secure?"

karolusrex — Mon, 21 Jan 2019 17:49:47 +0000

I was expecting a discussion around the safety around 5G, as there is no scientific consensus around whether 5g is actually harmful to humans. https://www.jrseco.com/european-union-5g-appeal-scientists-w...

New comment by karolusrex in "Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?"

karolusrex — Thu, 20 Sep 2018 20:59:16 +0000

Really interesting to hear that my experience is shared by any. I wrote my master thesis on rdf and linked data and the more I got into it the more I realize how it's just a collection of people praising each other's ideas without any outward potential.

In theory the idea is brilliant but the execution is poor. In many cases the world of academia is way too detached from software development to be able to produce any real-world useful tooling beyond toy projects and proof-of-concepts.

New comment by karolusrex in "High performance state manager with network sync out of the box"

karolusrex — Wed, 04 Jul 2018 19:40:22 +0000

I get the picture, looks really useful. Maybe the tagline "Batteries included data structure / state manager." Could be something more like "minimal web socket synchronized state manager" or something like that.

New comment by karolusrex in "High performance state manager with network sync out of the box"

karolusrex — Wed, 04 Jul 2018 19:12:12 +0000

What are the applications/use cases for this library that weren't readily available before?