Hacker News: phil294

Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

phil294 — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 12:21:26 +0000

Article URL: https://essays.johnloeber.com/p/4-bring-back-idiomatic-design

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47738827

Points: 521

# Comments: 283

New comment by phil294 in "Show HN: Ez FFmpeg – Video editing in plain English"

phil294 — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 23:31:22 +0000

Things that definitely need interactive prompts before running or fail out of ambiguity otherwise. Let's not pretend these are impossible problems to overcome design-wise.

New comment by phil294 in "Show HN: Ez FFmpeg – Video editing in plain English"

phil294 — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 16:43:06 +0000

I like it and would like to see an entire Linux OS being done in a similar manner. Or shell / wrapper / whatever.

A sane homogeneous cli for once, that treats its user as a human instead of forcing them to remember the incompatible invocation options of `tar` and `dd` for absolutely no reason.

    zip my-folder into my-zip.tar with compression level 9
    write my-iso ./zip.zip onto external hard drive
    git delete commit 1a4db4c
    convert ./video.mp4 and ./audio.mp3 into ./out.mp4
    merge ./video.mp4 and ./audio.mp3 to ./out.mp4 without re-encoding

And add amazing autocomplete, while allowing as many wordings as possible. No need for LLMs.

One can dream.

New comment by phil294 in "JSDoc is TypeScript"

phil294 — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 22:21:19 +0000

Depends on your definition of "using" JavaScript. The main difference between common TypeScript and TS-based JSDoc is the need for an additional build step. Being able to ftp-upload your `.js` files and then be done with it is a remarkable advantage over Vite/Webpack/whatever in small to medium-sized projects. If editor based type support is sufficient to you (i.e. no headless checks), you won't need to install any TS packages at all, either. tsserver is still used in the background, but so are thousands of other binaries that keep your editor, OS and computer running, so I don't see that as an argument.

New comment by phil294 in "JSDoc is TypeScript"

phil294 — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 22:13:13 +0000

> So (TS)JSDoc support is a relic from when Microsoft was trying to get market share from Google.

> Today in 2025, TS offers so much more than the (TS)JSDoc implementation. Generics, Enums, Utility types, Type Testing in Vitest, typeguards, plus other stuff.

None of that is true! Please don't share misinformation without looking it up first.

DAVx⁵, Open Source CalDAV / CardDAV / WebDAV for Android

phil294 — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 15:51:05 +0000

Article URL: https://www.davx5.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45773445

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by phil294 in "Fluid Glass"

phil294 — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 18:59:15 +0000

I see where you're coming from, but "on a phone" hasn't been a valid qualifier for performance benchmarks for a long time. Phones and their GPUs are ridiculously powerful nowadays. We've been smoothly running 3D apps on GPUs with orders of magnitude less MFLOPS 20 years ago already. Apps and games with far more going on than blurry glassy alarm clock, albeit somewhat less beautiful. When I run Fluid Glass on a 10 year old laptop with an integrated GPU and move my cursor, I'm seeing less than 10 FPS. When will we finally start readjusting our expectations for "fast" software and stop blindly following Wirths law?

New comment by phil294 in "Getting AI to work in complex codebases"

phil294 — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 13:56:59 +0000

Neither are humans, so this argument doesn't really stand.

New comment by phil294 in "How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me"

phil294 — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 12:15:53 +0000

This is a nice idea, but looking back at how not only documentation, but also UX in general has not improved the slightest over the last decades, it's fair to say the only way we'll ever get close to anything like this is by leveraging personal LLM assistants, unfortunately.

New comment by phil294 in "You too can run malware from NPM (I mean without consequences)"

phil294 — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 17:19:06 +0000

What about complex SPAs? Database drivers? Polyfills? TypeScript?

New comment by phil294 in "How to Firefox"

phil294 — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 17:20:54 +0000

I ran some of these in comparison with Chrome, and Chrome was consistently faster, but only marginally (1-20%). I'm actually quite impressed, an integrated Intel HD 620 / 4x2.4 GHz (!) rendering 10,000 fishes at 30 FPS in a webbrowser.

Super Fast Reader Mode for the Entire Web, with Dillo Plus

phil294 — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 16:49:54 +0000

Article URL: https://duncanlock.net/blog/2024/01/04/super-fast-reader-mode-for-the-entire-web-with-dillo-plus

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43744908

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by phil294 in "Show HN: Feudle – A daily puzzle game built with AI"

phil294 — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 20:43:20 +0000

Great game idea. I'd suggest you limit the questions top international topics though. I got a suggestion for "name a hurricane" - this probably wouldn't generate very interesting responses outside of America.

New comment by phil294 in "GIMP 3.0"

phil294 — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 20:08:43 +0000

Pinta *IS* Paint.net, just forked at an earlier stage before the latter became closed source software.

Also, is "washed and bleak" really that big of a problem for an image editor? It just doesn't matter what it looks like as long as the UI is intuitive and has the features that you need. It should also be noted that Pinta very much looks just like your overall Desktop appearance on Unix. I'm on XFCE and it's so incredibly theme integrated it looks like it's part of the system.

Personally, I really like Pinta. Biggest problem is the bugs and crashes. Wish I could use actual Paint.net though, but there's no way to use it on Linux.

New comment by phil294 in "Microsoft begins turning off uBlock Origin and other extensions in Edge"

phil294 — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 11:37:08 +0000

In other words, a fork?

Or how does the semantics of patch/changes/update differ in any way from maintaining a fork? The packaging has nothing to do with this. It may not be a well-maintained fork, the maintainers might not see themselves capable of adding features and bugfixes on their own, but a fork is a fork.

New comment by phil294 in "Ask HN: Firefox may be selling our data. Can you recommend an alternative?"

phil294 — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 11:33:52 +0000

I agree with this - you need to change a few settings unless you're an absolute purist - but once you have done that, it's basically a nicer, well-maintained professional Firefox fork

Spoken Wikipedia Podcast RSS Feeds

phil294 — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 21:09:50 +0000

Article URL: https://wcast.me/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43177441

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Securing Web Sites Made Them Less Accessible

phil294 — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 21:47:23 +0000

Article URL: https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2018/08/07/securing-sites-made-them-less-accessible/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42627980

Points: 33

# Comments: 14

New comment by phil294 in "Web page annoyances that I don't inflict on you"

phil294 — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 21:46:31 +0000

It can have severe performance implications in some areas with very bad internet bandwidth. Also it makes instantiating a global cache more difficult. See: https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2018/08/07/securing-sites... Another POV: https://brr.fyi/posts/engineering-for-slow-internet And https://danluu.com/web-bloat/ also has some minor numbers

Hacker News: phil294

Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

New comment by phil294 in "Show HN: Ez FFmpeg – Video editing in plain English"

New comment by phil294 in "Show HN: Ez FFmpeg – Video editing in plain English"

New comment by phil294 in "JSDoc is TypeScript"

New comment by phil294 in "JSDoc is TypeScript"

DAVx⁵, Open Source CalDAV / CardDAV / WebDAV for Android

New comment by phil294 in "Fluid Glass"

New comment by phil294 in "Getting AI to work in complex codebases"

New comment by phil294 in "How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me"

New comment by phil294 in "You too can run malware from NPM (I mean without consequences)"

New comment by phil294 in "How to Firefox"

Super Fast Reader Mode for the Entire Web, with Dillo Plus

New comment by phil294 in "Show HN: Feudle – A daily puzzle game built with AI"

New comment by phil294 in "GIMP 3.0"

New comment by phil294 in "Microsoft begins turning off uBlock Origin and other extensions in Edge"

New comment by phil294 in "Ask HN: Firefox may be selling our data. Can you recommend an alternative?"

Spoken Wikipedia Podcast RSS Feeds

Securing Web Sites Made Them Less Accessible

New comment by phil294 in "Web page annoyances that I don't inflict on you"

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