Hacker News: pmarreck

New comment by pmarreck in "Wayland desktop for Linux with skeuomorphic design"

pmarreck — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 01:24:13 +0000

Now where's the Metro-inspired one?

New comment by pmarreck in "Character.ai has initiated voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy"

pmarreck — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 20:20:53 +0000

I'm fairly nerdy (or rather, a reformed nerd?) and I haven't met a single "supposedly socially awkward weirdo" person who doesn't have a spark in their eye or who can't ever say anything funny or who can't make a very astute observation that only they end up being qualified to make. Recognize that you are a universe unto yourself and that SOMEone else will notice that.

New comment by pmarreck in "Character.ai has initiated voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy"

pmarreck — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 20:18:35 +0000

> It ought to be the case that sheer technical skills can carry you. It is the case that they can't.

I'd adjust this and say that they can carry you, but not as far as if you did both well.

New comment by pmarreck in "Character.ai has initiated voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy"

pmarreck — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 20:17:36 +0000

my best friend grew up in westchester and married a woman who went to Stanford who makes an obscene amount of money, so... I get this

New comment by pmarreck in "11 year old unsoundness bugs found in Rust borrow checker"

pmarreck — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 14:45:33 +0000

Rust has no formal spec? Really?

New comment by pmarreck in "Nix wrote half of my debugger"

pmarreck — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 13:44:33 +0000

I went into Nix thinking I would understand the whole thing and then distill a very simplified version, but as it turns out, a significant amount of the complexity is basically required for it to work like it’s supposed to, given how builds and runtimes and dependencies across various languages work, which is unfortunate

New comment by pmarreck in "Nix wrote half of my debugger"

pmarreck — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 13:43:19 +0000

there is a legitimate reason why this is the case; it is probably instructive to have you look it up or ask an LLM

New comment by pmarreck in "Nix wrote half of my debugger"

pmarreck — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 13:41:17 +0000

The problem is that an immutable build architecture really requires a functional language to be aligned with it

New comment by pmarreck in "Nix wrote half of my debugger"

pmarreck — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 13:40:18 +0000

most of us are not interested in doing extra unnecessary manual work to maintain these things or synchronize them across different computers or resurrect them after a certain amount of time not touching them

but you go with your time wasting self

New comment by pmarreck in "11 year old unsoundness bugs found in Rust borrow checker"

pmarreck — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 13:15:13 +0000

The UB goes all the way down!

New comment by pmarreck in "Character.ai has initiated voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy"

pmarreck — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 13:07:40 +0000

They were clearly in it for the investor perks and not the product, spending away like that.

If you want an unsustainable joyride, then you too can work for a startup headed for chapter 11 (like 8 out of 10 startups).

Also, knowing people in general has never not been valuable. It's arguably the main thing holding most engineers back from success. Plenty of evidence backs this up: Type fewer keys, press more palms.

New comment by pmarreck in "Whatever became of holography? (2011)"

pmarreck — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 03:28:07 +0000

I remember seeing an article in OMNI Magazine decades ago about "holographic data storage" which would have been incredibly high-density.

Not sure what became of it.

NYC also used to have the "Museum of Holography" which I was fortunately able to visit but may not exist anymore.

3D stuff, in general, seems to not do well. Not sure why! (as I dust off my Vision Pro)

New comment by pmarreck in "Shipping JPEG XL in Chrome"

pmarreck — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 05:08:40 +0000

Well, it doesn't matter since all the AI harnesses are using it, which means it will be markdown whether people like it or not

New comment by pmarreck in "Nix wrote half of my debugger"

pmarreck — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 05:07:07 +0000

No.

it's more like, it definitively solves a problem forever, like nothing else.

It's like when you have immutable data and it permanently solves a class of problems that can result from mutable data.

It's sort of like that.

New comment by pmarreck in "Nix wrote half of my debugger"

pmarreck — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 05:06:07 +0000

I promise you that it will be worth it. Try again.

New comment by pmarreck in "Nix wrote half of my debugger"

pmarreck — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 05:05:20 +0000

And I understand because it took me TEN YEARS to come around.

I worked with a very forward-thinking functional programmer around 2012 and even back then she was raving about it. And of course, people thought she was a raving lunatic.

I give her credit to this day. It took me having one too many problems caused by NOT using Nix, to cause me to finally dive in.

And there's no going back. Which is what happens with the best technologies.

New comment by pmarreck in "Apple/macOS removed from official Unix registry"

pmarreck — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 22:48:32 +0000

An account created 5 hours ago might not buy my hopefully-very-useful software, I am shaking in my booties

New comment by pmarreck in "Nix wrote half of my debugger"

pmarreck — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 22:43:52 +0000

There is likely a mass of devs that is probably, hmmm, 10x the number of Nix devs from over a year ago, who know exactly what Nix offers and why it is cool, but couldn't be bothered to master it until AI came along and basically "solved the problem".

So I'd expect AI to rapidly accelerate Nix adoption. Hopefully, because it is amazing.

New comment by pmarreck in "Apple/macOS removed from official Unix registry"

pmarreck — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 17:03:08 +0000

While it may simply acknowledge reality, I’ve already moved my main development off macOS to a NixOS workstation months ago. Too much friction in an OS that is clearly trying to be more “consumer” than “creative” at this point.

Which is a damn shame, because AI dev is going to result in a massive influx of new software right when Apple makes it ever more difficult to do so on its platform.

I still make Mac builds, but it is more of an afterthought on a secondary Mac build machine now.

You know something has peaked when they become less open and more “clawbacky”; that is basically collecting interest on an investment (marketshare) instead of remaining more open (at the cost of some things). “Increased security” is always the rationale.

New comment by pmarreck in "Apple/macOS silently removed from official Unix registry"

pmarreck — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 17:00:22 +0000

Maybe it’s time to come out with a new standard that supersedes POSIX and Unix cert?

Standards are useful and the fact that these have lasted this long is IMHO evidence of that