Hacker News: mcepl

New comment by mcepl in "Ghostty is leaving GitHub"

mcepl — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 01:02:39 +0000

These are the super-engineers who created https://youtu.be/E3_95BZYIVs

New comment by mcepl in "Ghostty is leaving GitHub"

mcepl — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:55:55 +0000

By lowering cost and not investing profit to the company? Yes, short-term v long-term, but who in this world cares about anything after their next salary?

New comment by mcepl in "We need a federation of forges"

mcepl — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 17:20:44 +0000

Lovely, so yet another promise to federate which will never materialise! Still going with the Drew’s reply in https://is.gd/5wwQy2 (yes, two years old, and he slightly softened his stand since then):

> SourceHut is already federated via email. We have no intention of adding ActivityPub support at this time.

Federated repositories is something very similar to paperless office, distributed authentication (OpenID), and distributed computing … it has been promised since forever, and nobody has ever seen it in the real life, and even less supported by somebody who matters. And yes, those who matter don’t help by sabotaging any efforts towards it.

New comment by mcepl in "US special forces soldier arrested after allegedly winning $400k on Maduro raid"

mcepl — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 15:18:03 +0000

You said SHOULD. Yes, I absolutely agree that politicians (and I very intentionally do not call any names) should be criminally punished most harshly for abusing their position for personal enrichment or for some other egoistical goals. On the other hand, these are the people we, as totality of all voters, chose for their function. The main punishment for a politician in democracy should be the threat of losing next elections, not criminal prosecution. And of course, per definition, in every democracy every politician has a majority of citizens, who considers him stupid and in the hysterical environment of the current political life (hysterical for many more or less good reasons) such politician is not only opponent, but an enemy if not a traitor. There is an unfortunate tendency to convert this adversarial feeling into full blown hate and accusations of criminal misconduct.

New comment by mcepl in "Melvyn Bragg steps down from presenting In Our Time"

mcepl — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 13:28:11 +0000

I feel strangely offended that here in Czechia there are actually no ads on BBC podcasts …

New comment by mcepl in "Jujutsu for everyone"

mcepl — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 22:20:00 +0000

vim-fugitive

New comment by mcepl in "Jujutsu for everyone"

mcepl — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 16:12:39 +0000

I didn’t mean to be pedantic. My experience with Jujutsu was as bad as with Mercurial (and hg-git, I believe?) … after couple of hours working with my repo (https://git.sr.ht/~mcepl/m2crypto), looking at it with git, I got incomprehensible mess of destroyed multiple unmergeable heads (especially for Mercurial), and completely destroyed other branches, where I was not planning to work (Jujutsu). The only resolution in both case was export my work to plain patches, rm -r the checkout, clone again with git and forget anything about those other VCSes.

So, I claim that Jujutsu actually doesn’t work well with git repositories (and forges) very well, and I would like to see a native one.

New comment by mcepl in "Jujutsu for everyone"

mcepl — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 12:52:59 +0000

If you say that you can work only with JJ and never use git, you are delusional. For one, where is that JJ forge (i.e., the equivalent of Sourcehut)?

New comment by mcepl in "Ana Marie Cox on the Shaky Foundation of Substack as a Business"

mcepl — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 17:48:10 +0000

You cannot give millions of USD to potential authors if you are tiny webserver-running small business. That’s what the article was all about.

New comment by mcepl in "Jujutsu for busy devs"

mcepl — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 11:52:17 +0000

yes, I haven’t managed for a week, but I tried to Jujutsu and gave up. It is too complicated for no visible gain. Plus, there is no infrastructure supporting it (in the end, you store the stuff in the crippled git repositories). `git commit --amend` and `git rebase --update-refs` together with few scripts (e.g., https://git.sr.ht/~mcepl/git-fixup) does the same, and I am still with true git.

New comment by mcepl in "Matrix v1.15"

mcepl — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 11:35:01 +0000

Yeah, we are just paying customers, who cares about us, right?

New comment by mcepl in "I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it"

mcepl — Sat, 14 Jun 2025 18:19:20 +0000

I don’t think it is that simple. Itanium was for years supported for example by RHEL (including GCC working of course, if anybody cared enough they could invest into optimising that), it is not like the whole fiasco happened in one moment. No, Itanium was genuinely a bad design, which never got fixed, because it apparently couldn’t be.

New comment by mcepl in "The Tragedy of Google Books (2017)"

mcepl — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 19:14:54 +0000

> Copyright terms have been radically extended in this country largely to keep pace with Europe, where the standard has long been that copyrights last for the life of the author plus 50 years. But the European idea, “It’s based on natural law as opposed to positive law,” Lateef Mtima, a copyright scholar at Howard University Law School, said. “Their whole thought process is coming out of France and Hugo and those guys that like, you know, ‘My work is my enfant,’” he said, “and the state has absolutely no right to do anything with it—kind of a Lockean point of view.” As the world has flattened, copyright laws have converged, lest one country be at a disadvantage by freeing its intellectual products for exploitation by the others. And so the American idea of using copyright primarily as a vehicle, per the constitution, “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,” not to protect authors, has eroded to the point where today we’ve locked up nearly every book published after 1923.

This is disingenuous: the article doesn’t mention that the biggest proponent of the prolonging of the copyright terms were Americans (e.g., Walt Disney Corp and Jack Valenti, see “Mickey Mouse Protection Act” for more) not Europeans.

New comment by mcepl in "Amber: A code search and replace tool"

mcepl — Thu, 23 May 2024 15:27:41 +0000

https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep ???

New comment by mcepl in "Parseback: A pure-Lua introspection library for LuaJIT's FFI ctype objects"

mcepl — Wed, 15 May 2024 06:56:56 +0000

https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2013/03/09/python-ffi-with-cty...

New comment by mcepl in "Department of Justice says Boeing may be criminally liable in 737 MAX crashes"

mcepl — Wed, 15 May 2024 06:53:32 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Fuel_system_fires,_...

New comment by mcepl in "Pražský Orloj: Prague astronomical clock simulator. (2022)"

mcepl — Sun, 12 May 2024 20:36:38 +0000

Lived for some time five minutes walking from the Clock, and so I can heartily appreciate the old Prague joke:

“Daddy, why they call it the tourist season, when we cannot shoot them?”

New comment by mcepl in "The Good Soldier Švejk (2018)"

mcepl — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 22:05:14 +0000

I am a Czech as well, and although I know exactly what you are talking about, I have found my own way towards Švejk lately. I am afraid (all of them awesome artists, but too much pushing the novel in the humour direction) Lada, Hrušínský, and Trnka are guilty a lot for the feeling which is prevalent now. Contrary to that, I was fascinated a lot by listening to M.C.Putna’s discussion of Švejk in https://www.mujrozhlas.cz/putnuv-jihocesky-literarni-mistopi... and by listening to the novel in audio, where he understands basically Švejk as “Kafka by other means”, and there is a lot to it.

New comment by mcepl in "The Good Soldier Švejk (2018)"

mcepl — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 21:51:22 +0000

Švejk is too much slanted by the expectations of “just funny” and by (absolutely awesome, but too nice) illustrations by Josef Lada. When listening to the audio version of the book, I was shocked how actually horrific story it is. I have mentioned elsewhere in this thread a Czech literary historian (M. C. Putna) who called “The Good Solider Švejk” as “Kafka’s ‘Trial’ by other means”. I think he is quite correct.

New comment by mcepl in "The Good Soldier Švejk (2018)"

mcepl — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 21:48:30 +0000

Yes, they are only hilarious. Švejk on the other hand is in my opinion much more serious. One Czech literary critic call it even “Kafka by other means”. Yes, Hašek was a satiric writer, so that’s how he wrote, but Švejk is IMHO actually a serious book about the horror of a human being liquidated by the impersonal power of modern society.