Hacker News: nicoburns

New comment by nicoburns in "Microsoft new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly"

nicoburns — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 16:13:23 +0000

My main gripe with the Fastmail client is that it doesn't work offline. This is of course absolutely possible to do with a webapp, and IMO ought to be a priority for an email client.

Rust PNG crate gets even faster, used by GNOME and Chromium

nicoburns — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 16:09:50 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.image-rs.org/2026/06/18/png-adoption.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48587583

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by nicoburns in "Midjourney Medical"

nicoburns — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 11:31:35 +0000

If something like this became commonplace (and accurate enough), then it could be fantastic for research: enabling us to map out what variations are common and which aren't in a way that hasn't previously been feasible.

How memory safety CVEs differ between Rust and C/C++

nicoburns — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 16:11:02 +0000

Article URL: https://kobzol.github.io/rust/2026/06/15/how-memory-safety-cves-differ-between-rust-and-c-cpp.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48543392

Points: 141

# Comments: 247

New comment by nicoburns in "Stdx, Rust's extended standard library"

nicoburns — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 15:28:19 +0000

Personally I think this is the wrong solution. I want crowd-sourced auditing for the existing ecosystem, not forked/vibecoded alternatives.

New comment by nicoburns in "Stdx, Rust's extended standard library"

nicoburns — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 15:24:23 +0000

Seems like he forked a bunch of already-existing crates and then added some vibecoding on top.

New comment by nicoburns in "Windows 11 users are tired of MS account requirements creeping into everything"

nicoburns — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 14:37:51 +0000

> It's really about personal privacy. Your computer is likely to be stolen and sold. If you don't want others reading your email, viewing your pictures, seeing your tax returns, etc. then you should encrypt the drive.

There is a very real security vs. availability trade-off though. Is the average person more concerned with others reading their emails, viewing their pictures, seeing their tax returns, or are they more concerned with losing access to those things themselves?

Losing access to an encrypted drive is a very real possibility (people often forget their passwords, and are used to that being recoverable), and is the data loss is probably more impactful than privacy loss for many people.

New comment by nicoburns in "Leaving Mozilla"

nicoburns — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 11:28:33 +0000

Yes, Matrix. It all seems a bit overengineered, but it's open and has good clients, and all the modern features you'd expect.

New comment by nicoburns in "Solar generates more energy in US than coal for first time"

nicoburns — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 20:42:16 +0000

> in the winter you have cold evenings which requires base load or storage

If the energy is for heating then there is always the option of storing the energy as heat. Which is much simpler than storing electricity.

New comment by nicoburns in "Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't"

nicoburns — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 14:53:58 +0000

> There's some recent analysis that demonstrates how, despite a huge updraft in the quantity of apps released, the aggregate count of reviews and downloads remains static.

Isn't the likely explanation for this that the updraft is a huge number of sloppy AI-generated apps that nobody wants to use because they're just bad?

New comment by nicoburns in "CSS: Unavoidable Bad Parts"

nicoburns — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 12:13:21 +0000

There's nothing stopping you from defining those yourself for your own websites:

     grid { display: grid }

will work in every modern browser.

New comment by nicoburns in "CSS: Unavoidable Bad Parts"

nicoburns — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 12:11:48 +0000

20 years ago everyone was also sold OOP on the premise that inheritance was the best thing to ever happen to programming. Turns out people are wrong sometimes. And especially when they're being idealistic about things.

New comment by nicoburns in "CSS: Unavoidable Bad Parts"

nicoburns — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 12:10:39 +0000

> CSS isn't powerful enough by itself to create any layout you want without modifying the HTML.

This is true, but the better you are at CSS the fewer wrappers you'll likely have. It's also easier to manage styles with fewer wrappers, otherwise you often end up having to put things like height:100% on every wrapper to avoid messing up the layout.

New comment by nicoburns in "Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?"

nicoburns — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:29:55 +0000

In my experience, actual producing impact/value and being able to demonstrate that you've produced impact/value are pretty loosely coupled to each, and it is often possible to do one without the other (in both directions). And time spent on one often directly competes with time spent on another.

I'd imagine it's the people who are better at "demonstrating value" than actually producing it that are the target of the original post.

New comment by nicoburns in "A €0.01 bank transfer could compromise a banking AI agent"

nicoburns — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:57:07 +0000

It seems to me like it's a fundamentally unsolvable architectural issue with LLMs. Ultimately the only protection is to limit the powers we grant to any given LLM to reduce the fallout when (not if) things go wrong (much like we do with people).

Of all the "AI doomsday" scenarios, people failing to understand this (and treating AIs like deterministic computers) seem like to most likely to cause issues.

New comment by nicoburns in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

nicoburns — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 14:50:33 +0000

The cost difference between client-side and server-side rendering is pretty non-existent these days.

New comment by nicoburns in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

nicoburns — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 13:54:46 +0000

It's definitely possible to make slow server-rendered website. Most of the slow client-side apps are slow because they're waiting on slow network requests.

(I still very much support fast, simple HTML websites. The good ones are a fantastic user experience)

New comment by nicoburns in "AI is slowing down"

nicoburns — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 21:16:57 +0000

Android phones are also quite a bit more capable than iPhones in a number of ways due to being more open. Plenty of people just straight up prefer the experience (and plenty of others prefer the cheaper prices).

New comment by nicoburns in "Dopamine Fracking"

nicoburns — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 09:15:53 +0000

I used to work near a food market where there were dozens of independent good stalls that were setup to serve working people lunches. The food was still fast, but a lot healthier, and you could go to one place and have a wide choice of options.

New comment by nicoburns in "Cooldown Support for Ruby Bundler"

nicoburns — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 01:00:02 +0000

Yep! We ultimately need better tooling for crowd-sourced manual auditing, not just a delay.