Hacker News: pathartl

New comment by pathartl in "GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven"

pathartl — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 02:55:54 +0000

Tons of built in winui3 stuff is still very accessible by the keyboard, metro era though what pretty rough.

New comment by pathartl in "GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven"

pathartl — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 16:32:35 +0000

Funny that you bring macOS, because for _decades_ I've struggled with navigating it without a keyboard. Windows components however, especially old ones, are incredibly accessible

New comment by pathartl in "Best Buy 'Repaired' a 64GB Laptop by Making It 32GB"

pathartl — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 20:35:59 +0000

Clickbait title. They removed a faulty 32GB module from a 2x32GB machine and shipped the laptop back with the removed module.

New comment by pathartl in "R/Gamedev Policy on AI Use"

pathartl — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 16:29:10 +0000

/r/selfhosted enacted a policy where any post gets auto deleted by a bot and an automated comment is generated. You must reply to that comment disclosing how you use AI. Then the post will be made public.

What ends up happening is anyone that has any positive sentiment towards AI gets downvote bombed and their post never gets attention. Of course this ends up breeding posters that claim they have made absolutely 100% no use of AI, and then their repo README is full of emojis and emdashes.

New comment by pathartl in "As a Windows user, it's a surreal way to install a program"

pathartl — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 22:22:03 +0000

In Windows this is currently being transformed with MSIX... Whenever that gets a foothold that is. But this is also why it was expected that you were to bundle an uninstaller with your application. It was expected that the developer was to handle cleanup. Obviously too many developers cut corners. The only way around this really is to have a system-wide hook that tracks what files an executable touches, and then have that executable registered to an overall application definition.

It's never going to be perfect. You can be really anal about it where you end up with iOS where, yes, you can sleep pretty well knowing that when you delete an app it has cleaned up after itself. The obvious tradeoff being that it's inherently limiting the scope of what you can do with the app.

I think it's gotten much better in recent years for the Windows crowd. I've been running the same install of 11 for about two years now. Back in the XP days I'd be lucky to be able to make it 6 months without feeling like everything was incredibly bogged down with no way out.

New comment by pathartl in "Desktop Linux just cracked 10% market share – and Windows 11 is mostly to blame"

pathartl — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 20:36:32 +0000

The numbers were from Cloudflare when you filter out "non-human users"

New comment by pathartl in "Even Microsoft couldn't make Windows 11 work well on 8GB of RAM"

pathartl — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 07:46:00 +0000

"basically NT 3.1" is an incredible over exaggeration. Total RAM capacity has stagnated over the years and subsequent generations of DDR have backed speed instead.

8GB in a computer was considered good in a consumer performance machine in 2010. 16 years before that was 6-8MB.

New comment by pathartl in "Command and Conquer Generals natively ported to macOS, iPhone, iPad using Fable"

pathartl — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 01:43:04 +0000

I have a port of BuildGDX in the project backlog that was basically just throwing Claude at it to go from Java to .NET. The only thing it really got hung up on was Java's byte being signed.

What I ended up with was a port of Duke 3D that uses half the allocated RAM as DukeGDX.

New comment by pathartl in "Windows 1.0 and the WinAPI, 40 Years Later"

pathartl — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 22:35:17 +0000

We regularly play Dark Messiah at our LAN, and I got that working straight off the disc. The only issue I've had with Source is SDK 2007 mods, but only because it's _extremely_ hard coded to have the SDK in a specific location.

But yeah, games that do outright crash are pretty easily patchable and most likely already have been.

New comment by pathartl in "Windows 1.0 and the WinAPI, 40 Years Later"

pathartl — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 14:33:37 +0000

I'd like to know which ones you've had issues with. I've compiled a collection of hundreds of Windows games from ~96-2006 and I've only run into one that's required an appcompat flag (carmageddon 2).

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

pathartl — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 07:28:34 +0000

It's also worth noting that semantic markup is not a feature of CSS, it is a feature of HTML. CSS has almost no power if something like a scraper or a reader mode chooses to ignore it. Of course that would be pandemonium and we would never get good results.

I feel like something in the CSS camp that could be highlighted in a "great idea, okay implementation, poor reception" that the OP is going for is print stylesheets. Those are incredibly underused.

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

pathartl — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 07:22:05 +0000

To call a CSS pixel not an actual pixel but a measurement of an angle at a reading distance is... technically correct... but isn't really representative of how it's actually rendered. On a non Hi-DPI display at 100% scaling in the browser and OS, a px is a device pixel. An css inch is considered 96px, with the assumption that a CSS inch is an imperial inch on a 96 DPI display.

Yes, it's a bit fuzzy now with modern displays (especially when display scaling is not at a whole number haha) but it just kinda feels like searching for something to complain about. If your browser and OS doesn't get in the way you can get exact measurement. This also applies to almost any UI framework that has some integration with the OS.

Show HN: LANCommander v2.1.0 – New Avalonia-based launcher

pathartl — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 20:17:10 +0000

Article URL: https://lancommander.app/Releases/2.1.0/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48467068

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

New comment by pathartl in "Microsoft builds MacBook Pro rival with NVIDIA-powered Surface Laptop Ultra"

pathartl — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 14:19:09 +0000

They were only suffering and had great battery life because they were kneecapping their own machines with improper cooling. It's pretty obvious their last few Intel laptops were intentionally designed so that the M1 would look better in almost every way. It was still an incredible chip, but I personally didn't believe that it was a fair comparison.

New comment by pathartl in "Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)"

pathartl — Mon, 25 May 2026 17:24:57 +0000

It's about 15 miles north. Microsoft is already building a data center on some of the land that Foxconn didn't use

New comment by pathartl in "GitHub confirms breach of 3,800 repos via malicious VSCode extension"

pathartl — Wed, 20 May 2026 22:48:39 +0000

No, it's had an increasingly difficult time keeping itself ever since they fixed their uptime metric collection, added Actions, and exploded in users.

New comment by pathartl in "Tesla Solar Roof is on life support as it pivot to panels"

pathartl — Sun, 17 May 2026 22:09:11 +0000

Yeah, there's some tubers out there that have absolutely scathing reviews for their customer ervice.

New comment by pathartl in "Higher usage limits for Claude and a compute deal with SpaceX"

pathartl — Thu, 07 May 2026 15:25:16 +0000

We have similar issues here in Wisconsin. Especially when it comes to solar and battery storage facilities. I absolutely think there needs to be more regulations carved out for data centers, just as there is for any other industrial building, but yeah the great mongering is incredible to see. Especially when the argument of "save our beautiful farmlands" is brought up. Do you even know how nasty agricultural runoff is?

New comment by pathartl in "GitHub Is Down"

pathartl — Mon, 04 May 2026 17:54:10 +0000

I think this is minimizing the Xbox platform. They are also a massive digital distribution platform where almost every game is a digital download now.

That being said, you are correct. It is absolutely no surprise to me that Actions has the worst uptime.

New comment by pathartl in "1.4 GW: battery storage at former Grohnde nuclear power plant"

pathartl — Fri, 01 May 2026 08:52:46 +0000

The argument is only fair if they provide some valid information to back up their claims. There's a project to put in a BESS near my rural hometown and every anti argument is based on non-LiFEpo cells and self-inflicted confused overlap with the data center water use arguments. This is while completely supporting "beautiful farmlands" that leech pesticides and phosphates into the water table