Hacker News: qubidt

New comment by qubidt in "Your ePub Is fine"

qubidt — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 12:16:00 +0000

The issue the author is explaining is relevant for the Kobo devices currently being sold

New comment by qubidt in "Your ePub Is fine"

qubidt — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 11:59:40 +0000

Yes. sometimes specs are badly designed. Targeting a constantly moving goalpost for a spec mainly implemented by embedded devices seems to me like, best case, questionable judgement

New comment by qubidt in "I Am Not A Number. In memory of the more than 72,000 Palestinians killed"

qubidt — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 13:47:41 +0000

yeah I'm sure all those children were "terrorists". what a ghoulish thing to say

New comment by qubidt in "Apple removes iPhone vibe coding app from app store"

qubidt — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 16:39:20 +0000

My ideal software: buggy in ways you can't diagnose, for reasons you can't intuit, reproducible by literally no one in the world, and with no one to file a bug report to

New comment by qubidt in "Trust signals as sparklines for Hacker News"

qubidt — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 23:16:17 +0000

I've found many developers having switched to non-github forges (e.g. forgejo/gitlab/sourcehut or what have you), but particularly self-hosted instances, to sort of opt-out of the culture around mpdern-day open source. My sense is the barrier of entry is a social signal that they'd like to opt out of being assigned community manager+tech support+moderator for anonymous users. typically there isn't a functional issue here, but I guess avoiding the town square is a good way to avoid having to interact with the town drunk/crank/large language model

New comment by qubidt in "Rebasing in Magit"

qubidt — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 21:03:56 +0000

An inane point. Obviously it's a "preference" rather than a "requirement" that my text editor boot in less than 30 seconds. But it's also not a functional requirement that Home Depot's POS terminals take a long time to start. If you could do the same checks and caching in a few hundred milliseconds it would only improve the usability for the cashier. You haven't made a case for why some user interfaces shouldn't start instantly, only that their slow start-up _might_ be justified

New comment by qubidt in "Rendezvous with Rama"

qubidt — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 22:59:34 +0000

> They would have been reasonable scifi books (for their time) if they hadn't attempted to follow up the classics.

I agree with everything except this. The sequels are by far the worst books I've read this decade. The memories of reading them actively causes me psychic damage. I wish I could Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind myself just to extract the distaste from my brain

New comment by qubidt in "Moss is a pixel canvas where every brush is a tiny program"

qubidt — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 14:34:09 +0000

Do you have a link to the youtube channel? "SWEet" isn't really searchable

New comment by qubidt in "An interactive map of Flock Cams"

qubidt — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 23:56:18 +0000

This implies that the harm caused by this broad surveillance technology is "hypothetical/theoretical", when there is long history in this country's government using private companies to launder otherwise illegal surveillance of political activists[1].

And even if you ignore the historical parallels, there are already cases of: officers using Flock systems to stalk dating partners[2][3], immigration enforcement using Flock data to track targets[4], and ICE/CBP bypassing the systems in place that let local jurisdictions choose not to share with federal agencies[5].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Goals_Foundation

[2]: https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/crime/2026/01/12/menasha...

[3]: https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/crime/2026/02/24/mpd-off...

[4]: https://www.404media.co/ice-taps-into-nationwide-ai-enabled-...

[5]: https://jsis.washington.edu/humanrights/2025/10/21/leaving-t...

New comment by qubidt in "The future of large files in Git is Git"

qubidt — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 09:00:13 +0000

This is relatively niche, but that's a thing for anime fan-encodes. Some groups publish their vapoursynth scripts, allow you to produce the same re-encoding (given you have the same source video). e.g.:

* https://github.com/LightArrowsEXE/Encoding-Projects

* https://github.com/Beatrice-Raws/encode-scripts

New comment by qubidt in "Show HN: PyApp – runtime installer for Python applications"

qubidt — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 19:23:30 +0000

How does this compare to shiv? https://github.com/linkedin/shiv

New comment by qubidt in "Why do ships use “port” and “starboard” instead of “left” and “right?”"

qubidt — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 11:21:00 +0000

The assertion that it is possible or the attribution to Feynman? Scientific American [1] references Feynman's 4th Messenger lecture at Cornell: "Symmetry in Physical Law" (1964) [2] [3]

[1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/degrees-of-freedom/gala...

[2] https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/messenger.html

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7K1kXeK-tY

New comment by qubidt in "I regret using Ionic for app development"

qubidt — Sun, 09 Apr 2023 01:03:28 +0000

I'm still salty over them stealing the name of a totally different, open source cross platform UI kit. Classic Microsoft

New comment by qubidt in "C Strings and my slow descent to madness"

qubidt — Sun, 09 Apr 2023 00:47:51 +0000

You're being silly. Nothing they said was FUD, it was just a (not particularly controversial) anecdote

New comment by qubidt in "Weka Violates MinIO's Open Source Licenses"

qubidt — Sat, 25 Mar 2023 19:13:15 +0000

did you just learn about copyleft? It's not a new concept

New comment by qubidt in "Challenge: Pixel perfect design"

qubidt — Sun, 12 Jun 2022 18:17:44 +0000

Modern pixel artists far from "misunderstand" the legacy of pixel art. They're specifically designing for a sensibility and context that didn't exist when pixel art was originally made. Actually talk to pixel artists and they'll explain this to you themselves perfectly fine

New comment by qubidt in "If OpenSSL were a GUI"

qubidt — Sat, 11 Jun 2022 01:18:44 +0000

That covers a tiny fraction of ffmpeg's actual interface

New comment by qubidt in "Please don't unofficially ship Bottles in distribution repositories"

qubidt — Wed, 08 Jun 2022 02:28:24 +0000

> don't keep up to date with the upstream software that has bug fixes

It is a very rare occurrence that my distro's packages are more than a week out of date from upstream releases

> That's precisely why software authors prefer to release as flatpaks

This implies that "software authors" do "prefer" releasing flatpaks, a plainly false statement for the vast majority of software.

> distros can't provide assurances that software will work

based on interpretation, either plainly false or a misrepresentation. They can't guarantee that software will always work because they operate in the realm of reality, but their raison d'etre is to package software together so they interoperate.

> They can't fix it if it's broken

In fact, distros regularly patch software so they're not broken before (if ever) those patches are merged upstream

> a tiny minority of users

A "tiny minority" of users prefer using their system's package manager? Implying that the vast majority would prefer all their software be packaged and flatpaks and appimages and docker containers? I don't know where you're pulling these numbers from but I bet it smell crazy in there

New comment by qubidt in "Software Mise En Place"

qubidt — Sun, 24 Apr 2022 09:19:48 +0000

Sure, but the ratio is way different. I frequently cook the exact recipe the exact same way as I've done before, but I'd struggle to think of a reason to rewrite the exact same implementation of the same program.

New comment by qubidt in "API-0.core.keybaseapi.com has expired certificate"

qubidt — Sat, 26 Mar 2022 01:20:35 +0000

Not to be overly cynical or patronizing, but everybody should really know better than to trust zoom, or any for-profit company really, on things like this