Hacker News: pverheggen

New comment by pverheggen in "Show HN: React hooks that predict text height before render, using font metrics"

pverheggen — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 22:16:12 +0000

FYI, useLayoutEffect gets you what you're looking for. Since it fires before repaint, you can take measurements and modify the DOM without the user seeing any layout shift.

It's a creative solution though! I always like seeing out of the box thinking on front end problems.

New comment by pverheggen in "Subscription bombing and how to mitigate it"

pverheggen — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 06:00:10 +0000

I wouldn't call this "known security issues", it's an inherent problem with any signup or forgot password page.

Also, I doubt this is going to be pissing users off since they added Turnstile in invisible mode, and selectively to certain pages in the auth flow. Already signed in users will not be affected, even if the service is down. This is way different from sites like Reddit who use their site-wide bot protection, which creates those interstitial captcha pages.

New comment by pverheggen in "CSS is DOOMed"

pverheggen — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 23:05:01 +0000

Seriously impressive, especially the viewport culling trick, not seen that one before.

FYI if you want to use inspect element, the viewport div consumes mouse elements, you can get rid of this with

  #viewport {
    pointer-events: none;
  }
  #viewport * {
    pointer-events: initial;
  }

New comment by pverheggen in "If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos"

pverheggen — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 22:49:46 +0000

Isn't this pretty standard, using your interaction data for training and making it opt-out? Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity etc. all do the same. Private repo doesn't make a difference as they have a local copy to work from.

New comment by pverheggen in "Node.js needs a virtual file system"

pverheggen — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 18:19:53 +0000

Oh it's a workaround for sure, didn't mean to suggest otherwise.

New comment by pverheggen in "Node.js needs a virtual file system"

pverheggen — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 17:21:17 +0000

You can always use virtualized Linux to avoid the NTFS penalty (WSL2, VS Code dev containers, etc.)

New comment by pverheggen in "Technical Excellence Is Not Enough"

pverheggen — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 14:55:28 +0000

Their direct complaint is the "just get better soft skills bro" advice, but it's dismissed indirectly:

> The "soft skills" framing is wild. You're supposed to learn to communicate your way out of a structural problem. Like taking a public speaking class to fix a broken org chart.

If learning to communicate well wouldn't fix a structural problem, then communicating well wouldn't fix it either.

New comment by pverheggen in "Technical Excellence Is Not Enough"

pverheggen — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 13:53:40 +0000

OP's dismissiveness of soft skills is a big red flag. Unless you're a solo dev, software development is a social activity, and understanding the social dynamics is key to effecting change.

Your efforts to improve quality could be vetoed by your coworkers for a variety of reasons: they don't care, they don't trust your judgement, they see other things as a higher priority... the list goes on and on. Some of these things can't be changed by you, but some can, and that's where the soft skills come into play.

New comment by pverheggen in "Never buy a .online domain"

pverheggen — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 14:50:06 +0000

I wonder if Radix has unknowingly created a negative feedback loop here. From Google's perspective, the DNS records disappear shortly after being flagged by Safe Browsing, which their heuristics may interpret as scammy behavior.

New comment by pverheggen in "Show HN: 3D Mahjong, Built in CSS"

pverheggen — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 16:45:37 +0000

There's some CSS properties specifically for doing 3D, yeah. You use perspective and perspective-origin to create the view frustum, and then CSS transforms to place your elements in 3D space.

New comment by pverheggen in "Show HN: CEL by Example"

pverheggen — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 21:04:38 +0000

Query DSLs are designed to simplify query planning by intentionally avoiding certain language features. You have many different choices on how to execute a query - in SQL for example, there's table scans, index seeks/scans, joins, etc. and you can execute them in different order. By being able to analyze the query upfront you can estimate the relative costs of different plans and choose the best one. Less powerful languages result in more predictable estimates because they're simpler to analyze.

New comment by pverheggen in "Descent, ported to the web"

pverheggen — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 20:15:42 +0000

Mr. Doob has been doing experiments like this for at least a decade, glad to see that he's still at it.

He's the creator of three.js, and it looks like this uses that for rendering instead of being a straight port.

New comment by pverheggen in "AI is killing B2B SaaS"

pverheggen — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 22:34:26 +0000

I think you can avoid the pain by thoughtfully designing it to avoid lock-in. You want it so that if needed, a dev can vibe-code a migration tool to the equivalent SaaS offering. AI lowers the barrier for creating these in-house replacements, but it also lowers the barrier for scrapping them too.

New comment by pverheggen in "Buttered Crumpet, a custom typeface for Wallace and Gromit"

pverheggen — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 16:29:06 +0000

Nice find! That looks like Cooper Black, which the article cites as inspiration.

New comment by pverheggen in "Ask HN: COBOL devs, how are AI coding affecting your work?"

pverheggen — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 16:43:32 +0000

In the US, there are several thousands of banks and credit unions, and the smaller ones use a patchwork of different vendor software. They likely don't have to write COBOL directly, but some of those components are still running it.

From the vendor's perspective, it doesn't make sense to do a complete rewrite and risk creating hairy financial issues for potentially hundreds of clients.

New comment by pverheggen in "Gas Town Decoded"

pverheggen — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 09:13:08 +0000

You're probably thinking of the Himba tribe color experiment - which as it turns out, was mostly fabricated by a BBC documentary:

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=17970

New comment by pverheggen in "JavaScript Demos in 140 Characters"

pverheggen — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 21:29:19 +0000

Cool site! Reminds me of tsubuyaki processing, which is a similar "code golf that fits in a xeet" type of challenge.

https://xcancel.com/search?q=%23%E3%81%A4%E3%81%B6%E3%82%84%...

New comment by pverheggen in "You can make up HTML tags"

pverheggen — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 16:42:18 +0000

Well technically you can still use Flash via Ruffle, a WebAssembly-based emulator:

https://ruffle.rs/

Sites like Kongregate amd albinoblacksheep are using it to revive their old catalog.

New comment by pverheggen in "Toys with the highest play-time and lowest clean-up-time"

pverheggen — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 21:43:39 +0000

The toy with the most longevity from my childhood were those cardboard bricks. Could be used for anything from forts, towers, hamster mazes, throwable weapons...

Not the quickest toy to clean up, but still fun since it's a building activity of its own, stacking them against a wall or something.

New comment by pverheggen in "I sell onions on the Internet (2019)"

pverheggen — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 20:13:26 +0000

It's similar to French wines and cheese. News to me that we have this in the US but it totally makes sense. We have a few of these in the PNW, like Hermiston melons and Walla Walla onions.