Hacker News: pianoben

New comment by pianoben in "Triple-A Minesweeper"

pianoben — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 20:51:27 +0000

I need to sweep these mines!

New comment by pianoben in "Apple Copland D11E4 Booting in the Browser"

pianoben — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 20:14:12 +0000

Oof, that hit me right in the nostalgia - I grew up with that style of Macintosh UI and miss it quite a lot.

(and also, how cool is it that we can run whole computers in our web browsers, just like that!)

New comment by pianoben in "Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'"

pianoben — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 16:25:52 +0000

As if the transatlantic slave trade wasn't a thing. What a perfect illustration of our industry's self-absorption and self-regard.

New comment by pianoben in "I don't like passkeys"

pianoben — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 16:23:36 +0000

Low risk of lockout, but about as high-severity as one can imagine. Yes in theory sites should offer a password fallback, but how many actually do? And of those that attempt it, how many get it right?

Not even Google reliably lets you fall back to a password, according to the comments in this article. Losing access to your google is anywhere from major inconvenience to professional disaster.

Expecting every user (site using passkeys) to implement complicated flows is a time-tested recipe for disaster, and it's a bummer to see that unfolding yet again with passkeys.

New comment by pianoben in "BeanShell3 in Development"

pianoben — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 16:03:39 +0000

Hell yeah, I loved beanshell! We used to use it in Android development to give our apps a debug repl, telnet-style. It was so nice, if antiquated even back then. Excited to see this worthy project continue.

New comment by pianoben in "[dead]"

pianoben — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 19:56:54 +0000

slop slop slop, tastes delicious

New comment by pianoben in "Autistici/Inventati's main .org domain goes dark after US terrorism designation"

pianoben — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 19:18:10 +0000

Not since the venerable Joe McCarthy has America taken this threat with the seriousness it merits. I can only count the days until we get a proper House Antifa Terrorism and Extremism committee.

NSA, if you're reading, please relay this to Mike Johnson post-haste. America is so close to being great again!

New comment by pianoben in "typ.ing"

pianoben — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 02:40:28 +0000

96.5% accuracy at 85 WPM. Would've been better except that they had _one_ space after periods and I'm still used to two - the UI didn't really indicate it very well for me.

Full stops should mean something dammit! (/s)

New comment by pianoben in "RayforceDB – a pure C analytics database with a Lisp-like syntax"

pianoben — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 17:44:24 +0000

Just like you can recognize Hemingway's prose voice from a few sentences. After dozens-to-hundreds of hours with Claude, you can tell.

New comment by pianoben in "Kubernetes on Oxide: How customer needs shaped our integrations"

pianoben — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 03:28:36 +0000

Oh, that's awesome, thanks for making it! I'll take a look.

New comment by pianoben in "Kubernetes on Oxide: How customer needs shaped our integrations"

pianoben — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 03:13:27 +0000

> Homelab tinkerers are essentially a non-market.

Sadly, I agree.

> They barely want to pay [...]

Not so! I've conservatively dropped $10k on my homelab so far, and have cobbled together a passable VM host/network/home-auto system in a half-rack. I would happily have paid more for an integrated (hypothetical) MicroOx! As fun as it is to play with cage nuts and to crimp cables, I love doinking around with a functional system even more.

There must be literally dozens of us out there...

New comment by pianoben in "Kubernetes on Oxide: How customer needs shaped our integrations"

pianoben — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 15:48:01 +0000

I have seldom wanted anything as much as I want an Oxide rack at home. Maybe in 40 years we'll start to see the first ones show up in surplus auctions...

New comment by pianoben in "Kraid is a now a real compiler"

pianoben — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 20:16:34 +0000

So Panfrost is an OpenGL ES implementation for Mali-type GPUs then? Thank you for that. Still confused about the role of a compiler here because I'm uninformed. So Kraid is a GLSL compiler that is specific to those GPUs? Neat.

New comment by pianoben in "Bonsai: Janestreet's UI Library"

pianoben — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 20:13:29 +0000

Windows and especially Macintosh UIs from the late 90s/early 00s were by far the most functional UIs we've ever had since the dawn of the desktop era - user research was a serious discipline, accessibility was baked in to the frameworks, and the HID guidelines that devs adhered to gave us uniform conventions that we users could rely on.

If the biggest criticism of Bonsai is "it ain't pretty but it works", then long life to Bonsai - give me more, please!

New comment by pianoben in "Kraid is a now a real compiler"

pianoben — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 16:57:50 +0000

I'm very confused as to what Kraid actually does and who it's for. It's a compiler of some sort, but for what? GLSL? What's significant about it beyond the target backends?

New comment by pianoben in "The Second Life of Sanskrit"

pianoben — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 04:13:28 +0000

Sanskrit is an amazing language - it is so BIG! Because of its extensive case system (10 different cases, IIRC), word order is highly flexible. The formalized rules of how spelling changes based on word adjacency (sandhi), and the ambiguity of interpreting long compounds, combined with the free word order, are so rich with poetic possibility that English seems baby-talk in comparison.

It's hard to describe just how cool this language is. Even the alphabet! The way we learned it, it is arranged in a grid with all of the letters in a row corresponding to one sound, and each column based on where in the mouth you make the sound.

I wish I could do it justice, but words fail. IMO it is absolutely, intrinsically, worthwhile to study.

New comment by pianoben in "Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down"

pianoben — Tue, 26 May 2026 22:14:12 +0000

> I'm surprised how few competitors there are in the Dropbox space.

There used to be many more - Sugarsync, AeroFS, Syncplicity, just to name a few - all bit the dust. Box.com found a niche serving business document flows; Gdrive, iCloud, OneDrive, all survived thanks to being features in a broader Big Tech suite. Everybody else? Outcompeted, plain and simple. Dropbox was just a cut above.

(I used to work at one of the companies named above, so although it's just one person's opinion, it's at least as informed as anyone else's here :) )

New comment by pianoben in "U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators"

pianoben — Fri, 22 May 2026 18:05:16 +0000

Right! Naturally, our Congress is full of technical and administrative expertise and totally has the time, patience, and will to cleanly and carefully craft the wide body of regulation we've grown to require for a smooth and healthy and productive society. No reason for those awful technocrats to usurp such authority when we've got a capable and knowledgable legislative branch capable of doing the work just as well.

New comment by pianoben in "SpaceX S-1"

pianoben — Wed, 20 May 2026 22:27:53 +0000

Nobody pays MSRP at that scale

New comment by pianoben in "OpenWarp"

pianoben — Fri, 01 May 2026 04:25:22 +0000

Gotcha, I must have encountered them later on then - thanks for posting the receipts!

I was a happy user for a while, but eventually some bugs drove me back to iTerm2 (in my case, hanging forever after certain terraform commands finished). Ghostty has filled my need for a better terminal since then.