Hacker News: lpghatguy

New comment by lpghatguy in "We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag"

lpghatguy — Mon, 18 May 2026 16:57:52 +0000

It's the StackExchange model! This has bootstrapping issues, is hard to break into the community, and risks creating moderator cliques.

New comment by lpghatguy in "Typing and Keyboards"

lpghatguy — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 20:42:43 +0000

I bought the same keyboard when I was a teenager as my first "real" keyboard!

These days I have a ZSA Moonlander. I adore it! I love how easy it is to program it without any software installed and it's been phenomenal to customize it to fit me perfectly.

I just changed all the switches out (in order to be quieter than my stock Cherry MX Brown switches) and replaced them with a set of Gazzew U4 switches. I'm _shocked_ at how far mechanical switches have come along since the days of Cherry dominance. They're super quiet and still have an awesome tactile feel!

New comment by lpghatguy in "Avoid Mini-Frameworks"

lpghatguy — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 19:57:25 +0000

In my career, I've found that this problem crops up the most when a team is unable to make impactful changes to a system that they depend on. It's so much easier (and requires less collaboration and fewer approvals!) to build an abstraction over some core system than to actually fix the core system, even if fixing the core system is always the better choice.

I was very guilty of this as a young go-getter engineer! Why try to convince another team that something should be fixed if I can just paper over it?

New comment by lpghatguy in "Under the hood: Vec"

lpghatguy — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 13:19:59 +0000

Years ago, I introduced Flow gradual typing (JS) to a team. It has explicit annotations for type variance which came up when building bindings to JS libraries, especially in the early days.

I had a loose grasp on variance then, didn't teach it well, and the team didn't understand it either. Among other things, it made even very early and unsound TypeScript pretty attractive just because we didn't have to annotate type variance!

I'm happy with Rust's solution here! Lifetimes and Fn types (especially together) seem to be the main place where variance comes up as a concept that you have to explicitly think about.

New comment by lpghatguy in "A Guide Dog for the Face-Blind"

lpghatguy — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 21:13:05 +0000

I've long felt that I am face blind. I took the face blindness test with my girlfriend.

I scored right in the middle, but she scored better than nine out of every ten people. How about that!

New comment by lpghatguy in "Measuring the impact of AI on experienced open-source developer productivity"

lpghatguy — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 19:26:58 +0000

This is very disingenuous: we don't know how much spare time Sascha spent, and much of that time was likely spent learning, experimenting, and reporting issues to Slang.

New comment by lpghatguy in "SVGs that feel like GIFs"

lpghatguy — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 19:18:27 +0000

Once upon a time, Flash, Java, Silverlight, ActiveX, etc. ruled the web.

I think the world is _much_ better off today, with a common language and platform. I don't think those big third party runtimes could survive in the browser in today's threat environment.

New comment by lpghatguy in "What's Next for WebGPU"

lpghatguy — Sat, 23 Nov 2024 03:31:38 +0000

You might be getting “sampled textures in a single call” with “total textures loaded” mixed up. Sampled texture limits affect complexity of your shader and have nothing to do with loading content from elsewhere.

New comment by lpghatguy in "WebGPU now available for testing in Safari Technology Preview"

lpghatguy — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 21:56:46 +0000

gfx-rs hasn't been maintained for several years. The successors are definitely wgpu or Dawn, which are championed by browser vendors.

New comment by lpghatguy in "HashiCorp switching to BSL shows a need for open charter companies"

lpghatguy — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 01:26:26 +0000

It's very funny that you used Bower as an facetious example. It's been deprecated for almost 6 years!

New comment by lpghatguy in "Parsing time stamps faster with SIMD instructions"

lpghatguy — Sun, 02 Jul 2023 16:12:35 +0000

The CPU-specific intrinsic stabilized a little while ago for cases where you need SIMD on a specific platform at least. A lot of crates like glam seem to only support SIMD on x86/x86-64 for that reason.

I know that `wide`, `faster`, and `simdeez` are options for crates to do cross-platform SIMD in safe Rust. Eventually we'll have `std::simd`, but I don't know what the timeline is or what the blockers are.

New comment by lpghatguy in "Hurl, a terrible (but cute) idea for a language"

lpghatguy — Mon, 19 Jun 2023 18:15:43 +0000

This is incredibly funny and also brilliant: toss/return is an implementation of algebraic effects!

New comment by lpghatguy in "WingetUI – A better UI for package managers"

lpghatguy — Mon, 19 Jun 2023 18:03:35 +0000

This has nothing to do with scrolling. They're fixed CSS rules. They remind me of the tricks we used to have to use for vertically centering things.

It seems like these rules are from the site's page load animation. You can see it if you refresh the page part way down. It's not a great way to achieve that effect.

New comment by lpghatguy in "WingetUI – A better UI for package managers"

lpghatguy — Mon, 19 Jun 2023 17:25:39 +0000

There's nothing on this site using calc as part of scrolling the content. It looks like the background image is fixed in place with some JS, which is probably the source of the performance issues.

The questionable stuff is definitely that everything is a table and that the links on the bottom of the page are divs with onclick handlers... and that selection is turned off?

New comment by lpghatguy in "Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads"

lpghatguy — Fri, 21 Apr 2023 21:27:20 +0000

You can combine the approaches! KTX2, for example, supports "supercompressing" GPU block compressed formats with LZ4 or Zstandard. The project I have been working on ships BCn textures compressed with zstd and it has been pretty dang good.

New comment by lpghatguy in "On the experience of being dirt-poorish, for people who want to be"

lpghatguy — Wed, 05 Apr 2023 07:47:23 +0000

There are lots of places, including many national forests, where you can cut your own firewood for free.

If you live near the Flathead National Forest in Montana in the US, for example, you can cut firewood for a campsite without a permit. You can also get a free permit that allows you to cut 4 to 12 cords of wood per adult per year.

I don't know anything about firewood laws in Sweden or the rest of Europe. From first glance they look quite a bit more restrictive.

New comment by lpghatguy in "Unicode 15.0 Slide Show"

lpghatguy — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 00:41:40 +0000

I am a big fan of unicode.link[1] for inspecting existing strings, searching for codepoints, and comparing how strings get encoded.

[1] https://unicode.link/

New comment by lpghatguy in "Promotion of alternative social platforms policy"

lpghatguy — Sun, 18 Dec 2022 22:22:25 +0000

Requiring user sign-ins is a little bit different than banning all mention of other social media websites existing.

New comment by lpghatguy in "Whitest paint is now thin enough to coat cars and planes"

lpghatguy — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 20:25:21 +0000

Like... the sun?

New comment by lpghatguy in "Win32 Is the Only Stable ABI on Linux?"

lpghatguy — Mon, 15 Aug 2022 18:09:15 +0000

Containers are not a great solution for programs that need graphics drivers (games) or quick startup times (command line tools).

I've been wrestling with glibc versioning issues lately and it has been incredibly painful. All of my projects are either games or CLI tools for games, which means that "just use a snap/flatpak/appimage" is not a solution.