Hacker News: r24y

New comment by r24y in "Incident with Actions – Resolved"

r24y — Tue, 05 May 2026 16:10:27 +0000

My theory is that vibecoded replacements haven't succeeded for the same reason why GitHub's quality has declined: because vibecoding/AI software development isn't as efficient as believed when measuring real-world outcomes.

New comment by r24y in "The 3,000-year-old story hidden in the @ sign"

r24y — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 14:46:26 +0000

Great article. I had long thought that the official name for the symbol was "asperand", but it seems like this is a recent invention!

New comment by r24y in "Search all text in New York City"

r24y — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 13:22:38 +0000

Searching "Fool" gives a lot of OCR errors, some of which are due to occlusions: https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=fool&p=3

"Surgery of the Fool" is my personal favorite.

New comment by r24y in "Ask HN: Options for One-Handed Typing"

r24y — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 09:57:18 +0000

I use a Moonlander keyboard: https://www.zsa.io/moonlander It's very easy to change the layout on these boards since you can do it directly from their website.

One of the left thumb keys "flips" the board so that the left half behaves like the right half. In my experience it's not hard to learn to type like this. Here's my layout: https://configure.zsa.io/moonlander/layouts/oLyWr/latest/0

Bonus of using a Moonlander in this case is that you can unplug the unused right half and put it away if you don't need it.

New comment by r24y in "Ask HN: Code should be stored in a database. Who has tried this?"

r24y — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 09:59:13 +0000

That's basically what an LSP is. It's true that it's built on top of the file system, and most IDE users will navigate using the folder hierarchy, but it still stores information about the name, type, and connectedness of the codebase, and allows querying. Your idea about arbitrary tags (feature, environment) would be useful but does not seem to be supported by the spec [^1] yet.

[^1]: https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/specifi...

New comment by r24y in "Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free"

r24y — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 02:52:56 +0000

> proximity of this federal U.S. District Court to the defendant’s country of citizenship, Australia

This is a little disingenuous, and made me chuckle. It's faster and cheaper to get to Australia from the US mainland than it is from Saipan. Yes, it's physically closer as stated, but does not confer the claimed benefits.

New comment by r24y in "POV-Ray – The Persistence of Vision Raytracer (2021)"

r24y — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 20:05:15 +0000

This is an amazing project and I'm glad it exists. My college capstone project was building a 3d scanner, and we were able to use POV-Ray to create a repeatable test environment for our algorithms. Wish I had an excuse to play around with it nowadays.

New comment by r24y in "Guam: The America that Americans forget"

r24y — Fri, 14 Jul 2023 01:12:39 +0000

For anyone interested: the article mentions “How to Hide an Empire” by Daniel Immerwahr. It's a very well-written and well-researched book -- Immerwahr does a great job creating a narrative from all the historical events in the book. The reason I mention it here is because it goes into detail about Americans' reluctance to grant full citizenship to residents of its overseas territories.

New comment by r24y in "Guam: The America that Americans forget"

r24y — Fri, 14 Jul 2023 01:07:55 +0000

Flight costs are a pain, and the flight durations are nothing to sneeze at either. I live out in Guam (my wife is stationed here with the Navy) and the two most common ways to get back to the mainland are via Tokyo (Narita) and Honolulu.

I would definitely encourage visiting if you have the means! I find there are two types of people here: those who feel limited by the island and its infrastructure (no Target, no Starbucks, etc.) and those who enjoy its incredible outdoor environment. Some of the best snorkeling and scuba diving in the world is right here, and as for hiking: we've been hiking very frequently for the two years since we arrived and haven't gotten bored yet. Depending on where you go on the island, the terrain and plant life looks very different.

New comment by r24y in "Noticing when an app is only hosted in us-east-1"

r24y — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 06:10:05 +0000

This article brought to mind a different but related scenario. I live on an island that was recently affected by a typhoon. Internet speeds are usually pretty good, but in the aftermath of the storm cable internet has been up-and-down depending on the day, and the cell towers are very spotty. I've found that most modern apps depend on a high-speed connection, and give a very poor experience otherwise. Of course this seems obvious in hindsight, but it's a different experience living through it.

New comment by r24y in "Pulsar: A Community Effort to Revive the Atom Text Editor"

r24y — Sat, 10 Dec 2022 07:22:29 +0000

It’s ironic that VS Code has become the premier Electron-based IDE, since Electron (originally called Atom Shell) came from the original Atom project.

I loved using Atom, and I like that there’s a community trying to keep it going. However, I think there’s value in trying to push the platform forward, too; maybe rethinking the extension model to maximize stability/performance would allow Pulsar to start stealing market share back from VS Code.

New comment by r24y in "Ask HN: How many of you prefer to use Ethernet?"

r24y — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 00:32:30 +0000

I work from home, in a home office with no sane way to route an Ethernet cable to, and I've been feeling the crunch during video calls. We have a wifi-enabled baby video monitor in a corner bedroom, and from my experience it's been proving "Rule 10: Your Wi-Fi network is only as fast as its slowest connected device" (see source [1]). My best-practice workflow has been to unplug the camera before an important video call.

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/02/the-ars-technica-sem...

New comment by r24y in "Beaming solar energy from space"

r24y — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 23:59:43 +0000

I remember this fondly from SimCity 2000, where you could build a "microwave power plant" that would collect beamed energy from space-based solar panels. (If I remember correctly, sometimes the beam would get out of alignment and set fire to nearby neighborhoods.)

New comment by r24y in "I’m a productive programmer with a memory of a fruit fly"

r24y — Mon, 19 Sep 2022 20:29:16 +0000

One thing that I believe is under-documented in code is _business decisions_. The team arrives at a decision in a meeting or informal discussion, and it leads to some code that might be tough to understand without context. I'll usually add a comment briefly describing the decision, and initial and date it.

Initially I would just link to a wiki page in a comment, but occasionally these links break, so in my experience it's better to include the notes directly.

New comment by r24y in "Ask HN: Experienced JavaScript programmers, what are your recommendations?"

r24y — Mon, 28 Aug 2017 13:31:37 +0000

I love JavaScript but agree with your point about hype fatigue. At some point, you have to ask yourself if you're using JS to solve your problems anymore, or if you're just allowing yourself to be nerd-sniped by all the trivial choices you can make.

It's like [Obama's suits][1]. JS gives you all these little decisions you _can_ make, which wear you down. As soon as you stop caring and decide to "just pick one", you'll generally be fine.

[1]: https://www.fastcompany.com/3026265/always-wear-the-same-sui...

New comment by r24y in "NASA Releases Latest Software Catalog to Public to Spur Tech Innovation"

r24y — Sat, 04 Mar 2017 18:36:52 +0000

Wonderful; now we can proactively modify Curiosity's code to act as an interplanetary telegraph so Matt Damon doesn't have to do it once he gets stranded there.

New comment by r24y in "GitHub.com font changed"

r24y — Mon, 11 Jul 2016 19:24:43 +0000

Viewing it on OS X, it looks like they're using the San Francisco font. A little jarring if you're used to seeing the old typeface 20+ times/day, but it looks good.

Fortunately, the transition seems to have gone a bit better than Medium's: https://medium.com/design/system-shock-6b1dc6d6596f#.j5z5g5g...

New comment by r24y in "Ask HN: How do you view large JSON files?"

r24y — Mon, 11 Jul 2016 18:49:13 +0000

Generally I'll copy it to the clipboard (usually `pbcopy < file.json`), fire up Chrome, Cmd+Alt+J, then paste into the console. Instant, attractive, collapsible rendering of the content. Usually when I do this I'm interested in performing some sort of transformation on the data, and this way I can prototype it without any further steps.

New comment by r24y in "Organize Your Closet Like a Computer Organizes Memory"

r24y — Fri, 22 Apr 2016 01:16:42 +0000

My personal style is a lot like Haskell: I barely understand it, but give me a few minutes and I'll probably come up with something passable.

New comment by r24y in "Qt Licensing Changes"

r24y — Wed, 13 Jan 2016 14:25:07 +0000

Yeah. The two differences seem to be that end-users are guaranteed to be able to use their own version of Qt (because Qt is LGPL and the user should be able to modify it) and that now there's more protection against patent claims.

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong or missed something.

EDIT: oh, and I forgot the GPLv2 -> v3 bit, but that doesn't affect your use case.