Hacker News: nobleach

New comment by nobleach in "Artemis II Launch Day Updates"

nobleach — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 21:39:57 +0000

80 miles for me! I was a Space Shuttle era kid though. Saw the Challenger disaster during my lunchtime. And then on perpetual replay for the rest of the week on WESH/WCPX/WFTV most likely. Even still, just knowing we were launching all those people into space was awe-inspiring.

New comment by nobleach in "What came after the 486?"

nobleach — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 12:43:16 +0000

Yeah, I was all about recording music/running the first iteration of software synths. I was a Graphic Design major at that time so Photoshop/Illustrator/QuarkXpress were my jam. Those suprisingly didn't run that bad - in real Graphic Design, no one used Eyecandy (the reason everything on the web in 1998 had drop shadows, outter glows, lens flares) so rendering "3D" rarely came into play.

New comment by nobleach in "What came after the 486?"

nobleach — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 12:13:05 +0000

I was a poor kid building computers in the mid to late 90's. I tried everything I could NOT to use a true Pentium. My first build (coming from an upgraded Compaq 386DX) was an AMD 486 "DX4". I had a Diamond Stealth PCI VGA card and 16mb of DRAM. After that I tried a 233Mhz Cyrix 6x86. That chip was garbage. I had to run some software pentium emulation to get Cubase to run. I went 300Mhz Celeron after that. That was my first time trying the new SDRAM! After that I FINALLY got a legit Pentium III 400Mhz! I could go on and on as this is a lovely walk down memory lane and there's been some fun dips back into AMD Athlon/Ryzen/etc.

New comment by nobleach in "Microsoft's "fix" for Windows 11"

nobleach — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 14:21:42 +0000

As a VERY long-time Linux user, I agree. Multi-monitor setups, where you can unplug the monitor and have your windows gather back onto your laptop screen requires WAY too much configuration. Having your audio switch back to internal laptop speakers requires homebrewing a script. On my 2020 Dell XPS, I still haven't figured out how to enable the subwoofers - so I'm stuck with ThinkPad quality audio. I have 3 ThinkPads (one with straight ArchLinux, 2 with CachyOS) and there's always some little piece I'm annoyed with. The X1C has good battery life, the T480 and P14s are meh. I JUST bought my first HiDPI Lenovo laptop this weekend. Getting that to be a decent tradeoff between readable text and mongo-duplo-massive UI has been "fun". (Yoga 15.3" Aura edition - I really like it) But running apps in Wine is darn near impossible - the text is for ants!

All of these issues go away with Mac and Windows. I'm not giving up on Linux, I'm just a realist.

New comment by nobleach in "TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool"

nobleach — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 16:42:10 +0000

Have you ever watched someone USE those COBOL TUIs? Everyone from airline ticket agents, to local governments, to folks at Home Depot while looking up inventory. They could fly through menus and accomplish things. I remember when Best Buy switched to a Windows-based experience. It was terrible. Simply adding a mouse+windowing experience slowed everything way down. I saw it first hand at Target too. They went from an OS/2-based TUI to Windows NT. I know there'll always be those folks that think we're all just trying to play "leet Haxorz", but there's just something about those systems that people deeply connected with.

New comment by nobleach in "Vite 8.0 Is Out"

nobleach — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 12:35:21 +0000

While Astro does indeed have its own type of components, it also supports React, Solid and a host of others. So transplanting your current tree of components in, adding the React plugin and saying "GO" is likely a fairly straight-forward project. I moved a previous static site into an older verison of Astro with very little trouble.

New comment by nobleach in "Why Going to Mars Would Be Bad for Your Health"

nobleach — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 15:17:20 +0000

What would you call a person who, when presented with new information, refuses to change their mind? Dogmatic? Religious? An Idiot? I'm sure there's some self-serving reason the guy wants to go to the moon. What we don't know is if he's had that in mind the entire time.

New comment by nobleach in "RE#: how we built the fastest regex engine in F#"

nobleach — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 21:00:23 +0000

I convinced one boss to let me spike out a project with it. I was in love with OCaml at the time. OCaml's docs are... I'm just going to say it, they're terrible. F# on the other hand, has fantastic docs. In the end, the only real gripe I had was the significant whitespace. I'm just not a fan.

New comment by nobleach in "Nobody gets promoted for simplicity"

nobleach — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 14:58:41 +0000

Way back when I was in IT Admin, I used to have this problem all the time. Some non-tech person emails a spreadsheet, another non-tech person edits it, and saves it. The original person complains that they can't see the changes. Yeah, because it's saved in some MS Windows Profile location that no sane human would ever visit. My solution was to ONLY email links to shared files on a shared resource. The LAST thing I'd ever think of is writing software to solve this problem!

These days if I were interviewing someone and they said, "I'd use the simple solution that is fairly ubiquitous", I'd say, "yes! you've now saved yourself tons of engineering hours - and you've saved the company eng money".

New comment by nobleach in "MacBook Neo"

nobleach — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 14:49:52 +0000

8GB of "unified" memory. That means it's also shared by the GPU. I realize these things aren't meant to be gaming rigs, or CAD workstations, but I do agree that this isn't very forward thinking.

New comment by nobleach in "Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)"

nobleach — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 13:56:35 +0000

Even though Pushing Daisies ended too abruptly, I thought he was GREAT in that series as well.

New comment by nobleach in "Using go fix to modernize Go code"

nobleach — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 20:33:26 +0000

But Go culture promulgates this practice of repeating boilerplate. In fact this is one of the biggest confusion points of new gophers. "I want to do a thing that seems common enough, what library are you all using to do X?". Everyone scoffs, pushes up their glasses and says, "well actually, you should just use the standard library, it's always worked just fine for me". And the new gopher is confused because they really believe that reinventing the wheel is an acceptable practice. This is what leads to using LLMs to write all that code (admittedly, it's a fine use of an LLM).

New comment by nobleach in "How not to answer the salary question"

nobleach — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 20:31:56 +0000

I've used this as a chance to turn things back around on the recruiters. "That's a great question and I noticed you didn't mention a salary range on the posting". Allow for an uncomfortable silence as now they're either forced to give a range, or try to say something like, "it's flexible for the right candidate". The latter is my opportunity to agree, "Of course, let's concentrate on that question then, I'd sure like if we could get to the bottom of this 'right candidate' question".

New comment by nobleach in "Vouch"

nobleach — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 15:01:40 +0000

We can see this effect from Mitchell's own release of his terminal emulator (Ghostty). It was invite-only. The in-crowd on YouTube/Twitter lorded it over others as a status symbol. None of it was based on actual engineering prowess. It was more like, "hey, you speak at conferences and people follow you on social media... you must be amazing".

New comment by nobleach in "Why I don't have fun with Claude Code"

nobleach — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 14:35:45 +0000

I think I can get on board with this view. In the earlier LLM days, I was working on a project that had me building models of different CSV's we'd receive from clients. I needed to build classes that represented all the fields. I asked AI to do it for me and I was very pleased with the results. It saved me an hour-long slog of copying the header rows, pasting into a class, ensuring that everything was camel-cased, etc. But the key thing here is that that work was never going to be the "hard part". That was the slog. The real dopamine hit was from solving the actual problem at hand - parsing many different variants of a file, and unifying the output in a homogenous way.

Now, if I had just said, "Dear Claude, make it so I can read files from any client and figure out how to represent the results in the same way, no matter what the input is". I can agree, I _might_ be stepping into "you're not gonna understand the software"-land. That's where responsibility comes into play. Reading the code that's produced is vital. I however, am still not at the point where I'm giivng feature work to LLMs. I make a plan for what I want to do, and give the mundane stuff to the AI.

New comment by nobleach in "The Overcomplexity of the Shadcn Radio Button"

nobleach — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 13:24:44 +0000

Yup, agents LOVE Tailwind+ShadCN. Even when I've explicitly told them not to use it, it still creeps in. There's a lot of prior art out on GitHub and LLMs can't help themselves. FWIW, the result does tend to look nice enough. For a POC I can't complain. If I'm really going to roll up my sleeves and get into the code though? I don't think I'd enjoy all of it.

New comment by nobleach in "The Overcomplexity of the Shadcn Radio Button"

nobleach — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 13:20:01 +0000

They hype-train on all of this stuff is unreal. React+NextJS+Tailwind+ShadCN is just a mess. It's complexity piled on deeper complexity - for little gain! But suggest any of that in many circles and you'll get the standard, "skill issu bro" comebacks. Say what you want about Remix/ReactRouter 7 (there are plenty of issues to talk about there) but at least those guys _tried_ to stay closer to existing web standards. I could go on and on about the disaster of NextJS caching. I could point out RSCs being one way to solve a problem that could already be solved by loaders in other frameworks....

Tailwind was my moment of saying, "Nope, I'm gonna sit this one out". I have a few trusted friends that assure me I'm missing out. I've told them to come back to me after they've done their first major refactor. If they tell me it was a pleasant experience, I'll have another look.

New comment by nobleach in "JavaScript's For-Of Loops Are Fast"

nobleach — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 16:04:15 +0000

AirBnB doesn't use this config and you probably shouldn't either. Much of this was based on Jordan Harband's opinions in 2016. He's likely changed his mind since then. Perhaps not. But I bet he'd tell you to do your own profiling and consider your own targets before blindly accepting a one-size-fits-all configuration for your linter.

New comment by nobleach in "JavaScript's For-Of Loops Are Fast"

nobleach — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 15:57:36 +0000

>new language construct

This was added to the language 10 years ago. So while it's "newer" than a plain old for-loop, it's definitely not "new". It was designed to work with Symbol.iterator. This is the mechanism whereby one can iterate anything that implements the Symbol.iterator interface.

As far as why folks won't just do simple for-loops, it's the same reasining every language tends to implement a "foreach", because there are annoying off-by-one errors lurking in the < vs <=. Of course one could argue that developers should be smart enough to handle this. But that's an argument even older than for-loops.

New comment by nobleach in "Show HN: Terminal UI for AWS"

nobleach — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 15:57:02 +0000

I can give an anecdote if that's helpful. Imagine you're wanting to download an object from S3. You start to type out the command in your CLI. You hit enter, only to realize, see that the object is not found. You have a typo somewhere... but where? The bucket is huge so, you resort to listing the contents and passing the results through grep. Then you copy the object to the clipboard so that you can edit your original command.

I see one of the other comments mentions K9s. The exact same use cases manifest with that tool. YES, if it's just a one-shot, nothing beats the CLI. Many things where you need to investigate the resources a bit more, lend themselves to a TUI (or GUI if that's your thing).

I come from an era where folks could fly through tasks on dumb terminals. (AS/400 apps). The moment we gave them "better" gui tools, they slowed way down. No matter how many times we told them, "you can still use your TAB and ENTER keys!" TUIs were just a sweet spot.