Hacker News: mtnygard

New comment by mtnygard in "How good engineers write bad code at big companies"

mtnygard — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 22:43:17 +0000

Middle management gets reorged almost as frequently as the engineers. So they have little to no incentive for long term viability of the code either.

New comment by mtnygard in "YouTube Just Ate TV. It's Only Getting Started"

mtnygard — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 19:41:50 +0000

Seems like the medium is the message here. There's nothing interesting in the content of the article, but that The Hollywood Reporter is saying it is what matters. It's a signal to Hollywood types that it's now OK to talk about how Youtube is eating their lunch.

New comment by mtnygard in "Defold: cross-platform game engine"

mtnygard — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 16:47:31 +0000

AFAIK, King spun Defold back out as a foundation.

New comment by mtnygard in "Defold: cross-platform game engine"

mtnygard — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 16:46:51 +0000

It’s cool to see this mentioned. I worked on the editor back in the day. It’s actually the second IDE for Defold. The original one that we replaced was built on Eclipse.

A team of about 6 people replaced the IDE core and built a dozen tools over a year.

It was a fun project. Not many people can say they built a desktop gui with Clojure!

New comment by mtnygard in "Clay – UI Layout Library"

mtnygard — Sat, 21 Dec 2024 03:37:59 +0000

Both use immediate mode rendering. Both have the “single header” design. There doesn’t appear to be any shared implementation.

The examples use Raylib as a renderer behind the layout engine. I suppose it would be possible to use Dear Imgui as a renderer, but you might have to write some glue code.

New comment by mtnygard in "A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software"

mtnygard — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 18:16:18 +0000

I've long believed this to be the reason that component-oriented software never went anywhere back in the 90's. You could make _some_ money selling components. But you could make _tons_ of money selling a walled-off set of pre-integrated components as an office suite.

New comment by mtnygard in "Building a bare-metal bootable game for Raspberry Pi in C#"

mtnygard — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 19:45:54 +0000

The only RPi "thing" I could see was the tricolor triangle at the start of one of the videos.

New comment by mtnygard in "Building a bare-metal bootable game for Raspberry Pi in C#"

mtnygard — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 19:24:08 +0000

Did I miss a step in the article? The headline is about Raspberry Pi, but the example says x64 and uses UEFI. AFAIK the Pi doesn't use UEFI.

New comment by mtnygard in "Git Branches: Intuition and Reality"

mtnygard — Thu, 23 Nov 2023 15:25:33 +0000

I have found that git makes a lot more sense if you reverse the mental model of lineage. People think about a lineage going forward. But a more useful way to think is in terms of backward pointers.

A commit points to it's parent(s). Since a branch is just a commit ID, you can follow the parent links backwards to find the whole history of that branch.

So a "branch point" is just where two chains of parent links converge.

The special part are merge commits. Those have multiple parents, indicating that two histories fused into one.

New comment by mtnygard in "Bare Metal Emulation on the Raspberry Pi – Commodore 64"

mtnygard — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 17:38:10 +0000

It uses Circle.

New comment by mtnygard in "The boiling frog of digital freedom"

mtnygard — Sun, 03 Sep 2023 21:47:30 +0000

I don’t think the main point is that these are exactly the increments. Rather, that it _is_ a series of increments where each step builds on the ones before and enables the next ones. It’s also illustrating the iterative loop from tech vendor to government and the increase from “recommended” to “mandatory.”

We are well along this process already.

Larry Lessig wrote “Code and other laws of cyberspace” back in the 90s (I think). It’s scary how much of what he wrote now looks _optimistic_.

New comment by mtnygard in "Datomic is Free"

mtnygard — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 20:07:40 +0000

You can definitely use Datomic in the way you describe, in at least a few different ways. I haven't often seen queries stored in the database itself. It's more common to have the queries as data in the application. Since queries are ordinary Clojure data structures, it's even more common to see functions that build queries from inputs or functions that transform queries (e.g., adding a tenant-id filter clause).

Datomic also support rules, including recursive rules. I wrote a library to do OWL-style inference about classes of entities using rules. You can see an example here (https://github.com/cognitect-labs/onto/blob/master/src/onto/...). This is a rule that infers all the classes that apply to an entity from an attribute that assigns it one class.

I would also say that building an "entity type definition" system as entities in Datomic is almost the first thing every dev tries after the tutorial. It works... but you almost never _need_ it later.

New comment by mtnygard in "916 Days of Emacs"

mtnygard — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 16:00:07 +0000

They're the default keys because a lot of programs use the GNU readline package for line editing.

New comment by mtnygard in "I used GPT to build a search tool for my second brain note-taking system"

mtnygard — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 03:23:22 +0000

Not sure if this is still supported, but Roam used to have an in-app query interface. You could use the JS console to run Datomic style Datalog queries.

New comment by mtnygard in "Tell HN: Confluent laying off 8% of staff"

mtnygard — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 15:25:41 +0000

I can’t comment on whether this is blind following or not. But it’s a real fact that the market will punish you less for layoffs when others are doing it too. It’s like how the best time to reveal a scandal is after someone else has revealed a bigger scandal.

New comment by mtnygard in "Reverse Engineering TikTok's VM Obfuscation"

mtnygard — Sat, 24 Dec 2022 17:25:29 +0000

I read the GP a bit differently... I didn't read it as saying obfuscation is evil, just that it is ineffective. More like "obfuscation can't prevent reversing, therefore it's not a valid security practice since all it does is slow down the casual observer but does not stop the determined adversary." The statement that most use of obfuscation is nefarious is a corollary... since obfuscation doesn't protect IP it is mostly used to hide malicious activity.

New comment by mtnygard in "Researchers find that a simple “talking to strangers” intervention is effective"

mtnygard — Sat, 24 Dec 2022 17:17:17 +0000

"At its heart, our intervention is simple: it involves repeatedly approaching and talking to strangers."

So... the "intervention" to help people gain confidence talking to strangers was to have them talk to a bunch of strangers. What an odd thing to make an article about.

New comment by mtnygard in "Peep: The Network Auralizer"

mtnygard — Fri, 30 Sep 2022 11:25:50 +0000

I used to run this on my home network. It was pleasant and occasionally useful. The code was pretty unstable though, and the project looks totally unmaintained now. E.g., the “news” link redirects to a vacant domain. Sourceforge complains about the code being in CVS and suggests migrating to Subversion.

Perhaps some HN visibility will encourage someone to adopt and resurrect it.

New comment by mtnygard in "IKEA’s knowledge graph and why it has three layers"

mtnygard — Thu, 08 Sep 2022 22:10:11 +0000

Yes, you’re correct and that’s a reasonable interest. I also realize that I worded my comment in a needlessly obnoxious way.

New comment by mtnygard in "IKEA’s knowledge graph and why it has three layers"

mtnygard — Thu, 08 Sep 2022 21:05:49 +0000

I'm not with IKEA but I've been part of other ontology exercises. Off the top of my head, they are a retailer with physical stores and distribution centers--which could both be categories within the concept "location". They have associates (people), and customers (maybe just "people" again, but maybe a different concept.) I could also imagine transactions or loyalty accounts as other concepts. Depending on how far they go, they could include things like "region" (i.e., region-> has many -> location) or general ledger accounts.