Hacker News: mook

New comment by mook in "Caddy compatibility for zeroserve: 3x throughput and 70% lower latency"

mook — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 16:48:13 +0000

That's because the client certificate interface in browsers is supremely dumb. It always just lists all certificates you have, with very little context in the UI, and hopes that's good enough. I believe that's part of the reason client certificates are not poplar; having actual users deal with that is terrible, and the browsers (in practice, Chrome because of its overwhelming market share) isn't incentivized to fix it.

New comment by mook in "The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt"

mook — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 20:15:05 +0000

There's the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideographic_Description_Charac... that kind of does that. The problem is that there's character divergence (see all the brouhaha about Unicode Han unification), so there needs to be something else to select variants too.

As a reference, I don't believe any of the pre-Unicode CJK&c encodings attempted that.

New comment by mook in "The Future of Email"

mook — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 20:04:13 +0000

Isn't the post office heroics normally when it's not deliverable? If the sender wrote down 744 Evergreen Terrace but they meant 742, that mail will be delivered to your neighbor and hopefully they'll redirect it to you.

New comment by mook in "Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things"

mook — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 07:38:48 +0000

I haven't used EDN, but I know YAML has an equivalent feature, and that had been a security issue in some instances because it deserialized into objects the system wasn't expecting. Perhaps their deserializer had learned from that doesn't have that issue?

New comment by mook in "Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?"

mook — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 07:31:42 +0000

I think there's definitely groups on both sides, and I feel like it's similar to cryptocurrency a few years back. There's people really into it, and in response there's people really against it. On a smaller scale, see for example rust. In contrast there isn't as much vitriol against, say, world hunger because there isn't people very obviously pro-that to push against.

New comment by mook in "Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses"

mook — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 04:26:38 +0000

Since people cannot work from prison, corporations should be equivalent: they may not conduct any business. But since people in prison are still responsible for things like rent, corporations should keep paying rent and salary too. Not sure if it's possible to get a friend corporation to do that for you though…

New comment by mook in "Local Git remotes"

mook — Fri, 29 May 2026 17:24:28 +0000

Would git worktrees be useful in that use case? It just adds a new checkout in a different directory without duplicating the git data (blob storage).

New comment by mook in "GitHub bans security researcher who posted zero-day Windows exploits"

mook — Fri, 29 May 2026 06:35:01 +0000

I believe Hyper-V supports emulating TPM these days, so doing things to a VM and recording the desktop with the VM window _may_ work. In this case though it'd look very boring because you couldn't tell from the recording that anything happened.

New comment by mook in "Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore"

mook — Tue, 26 May 2026 05:19:00 +0000

I've never programmed before good compilers existed, but I still know some assembly. For what I currently do it's used rarely, but it's still quite valuable on occasion. I don't see any reason LLM-assisted programming wouldn't be like that; for sure the various C compilers sure seem like they're trying just as hard to produce results you don't want.

New comment by mook in "Migrating from Go to Rust"

mook — Mon, 25 May 2026 03:44:33 +0000

Doesn't Rust already have that solved via editions? If anything, that's the language that's especially well positioned here.

New comment by mook in "Don't answer the first question"

mook — Mon, 18 May 2026 19:30:32 +0000

People who really don't have a clue ignores the added context and answers the question that wasn't asked anyway, because they've answered that particular question before.

New comment by mook in "Plex's price hikes prove I was right to switch to Jellyfin"

mook — Sun, 10 May 2026 23:34:44 +0000

Is there anything around that does _not_ force a management system? I really just want a thing that primarily just tracks if I've seen a particular file, secondarily maybe let me control playback from a different device. Actually figuring out what media those files map to is a distant third.

New comment by mook in "Agents can now create Cloudflare accounts, buy domains, and deploy"

mook — Wed, 06 May 2026 07:37:33 +0000

> People making cooking websites, websites for their garden, etc usually have nowhere to go.

You know, I kind of miss Geocities too.

New comment by mook in "Why most product tours get skipped"

mook — Wed, 06 May 2026 04:32:10 +0000

I actually went through the Word 97 menus at some point to see what features it had. Unfortunately these days things no longer come with comprehensive menu bars.

New comment by mook in "Tar Files Created on macOS Display Errors When Extracting on Linux (2024)"

mook — Mon, 04 May 2026 04:07:42 +0000

In the particular case of thumbs.db, storing them in NTFS alternate data streams would have been a good idea; they're essentially caches for the main data stream, so if they fail to copy to different filesystems it's totally fine. Of course, that wasn't viable because 1) IIRC that was before the widespread adoption of NTFS, and 2) they probably still need the cache somewhere for vFAT USB drives.

New comment by mook in "We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git"

mook — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 06:52:27 +0000

I'd like to pretend that inability to render large diffs is a feature. Nobody is going to actually read the multi-thousand line diff; you need to make smaller PRs, or just admit that the diff in that particular view isn't helpful. I doubt that's the actual reasoning, but I can live with it.

New comment by mook in "Firm boosts H.264 streaming license fees from $100k up to staggering $4.5M"

mook — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 19:40:08 +0000

The funny thing about patent licensing alliances is that there's no guarantee that nobody else outside of the bloc will pop up and start suing people.

Basically, you can consider AOM to be a licensing alliances, where the fee is zero.

New comment by mook in "TDF ejects its core developers"

mook — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 19:37:06 +0000

I believe OpenOffice is so dead that the name is available again? That would be kind of hilarious, though probably untenable.

New comment by mook in "Anthropic: Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected'"

mook — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 14:46:15 +0000

That is a summary and a picture of https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1s7mkn3/psa_claud... it looks like?

New comment by mook in "Honda is killing its EVs"

mook — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 04:27:54 +0000

> At a societal level, cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment to have the car serviced.

Experience with boxed versus updatable software, particularly video games, says otherwise. When it costs a lot for the manufacturer to fix defects, they put more emphasis on not having them in the first place. Otherwise we just just a parade of defects all the time. Even if it's minor things and never fixed, the user can adapt; that's not possible in the face of continuous updates.