Hacker News: robertlagrant

New comment by robertlagrant in "France Launches Government Linux Desktop Plan as Windows Exit Begins"

robertlagrant — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 12:33:27 +0000

I imagine the biggest thing they need to open up is Outlook.

New comment by robertlagrant in "France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech"

robertlagrant — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 12:20:49 +0000

I tried LibreOffice (Impress) for something simple and it was not good - in fact it would just freeze. Although it did have a feature on MacOS that PowerPoint for Mac didn't, so I ended up using Impress for the first little bit and then PowerPoint for the rest.

New comment by robertlagrant in "We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git"

robertlagrant — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 12:17:47 +0000

> For $17M, one could probably build a vacuum robot prototype that’ll also clean up all of the kids toys and sort LEGO bricks by colour and size. Parents worldwide would love it.

Just write down how you'll spend the money to make that, what it'll eventually cost to produce, what the market size will be, and what the price will be, and if it's enough return you can easily convince someone to give you $17m to do it all.

New comment by robertlagrant in "Show HN: Gemini can now natively embed video, so I built sub-second video search"

robertlagrant — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 13:33:56 +0000

I live in Oxford, UK and walked past a police van that said "automatic facial recognition in use". Not exactly a good sign without any caveats. I imagine they recorded me staring at their van.

New comment by robertlagrant in "Migrating to the EU"

robertlagrant — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 11:43:14 +0000

I had no idea how cheap this was. Thanks.

New comment by robertlagrant in "Migrating to the EU"

robertlagrant — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 11:41:47 +0000

Also docs collaboration, and now video calling as well. And they've just bought Standard Notes, so that'll be next. It's definitely chugging along fast.

New comment by robertlagrant in "Tech hobbyist makes shoulder-mounted guided missile prototype with $96 in parts"

robertlagrant — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 14:30:59 +0000

I suppose I'd say: well, no, a gun's ammunition does something significant, but also even if that disambiguation were necessary in a particular circumstance, this article is not that.

New comment by robertlagrant in "$96 3D-printed rocket that recalculates its mid-air trajectory using a $5 sensor"

robertlagrant — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 14:18:11 +0000

> Despite the tech-cool factor of the project, Tom's Hardware does not condone making your own weapons system at home.

Not that this matters for the topic, but I don't see why people have started saying "weapons system" instead of "weapon".

New comment by robertlagrant in "Meta’s renewed commitment to jemalloc"

robertlagrant — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 09:24:18 +0000

> With the leverage jemalloc provides however, it can be tempting to realize some short-term benefit. It requires strong self-discipline as an organization to resist that temptation and adhere to the core engineering principles.

This doesn't quite read properly to me. What does it actually mean, does anyone know?

New comment by robertlagrant in "The "are you sure?" Problem: Why AI keeps changing its mind"

robertlagrant — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 13:05:09 +0000

Exactly. It's not just nauseating—it's sickening.

New comment by robertlagrant in "Nobody gets promoted for simplicity"

robertlagrant — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 12:24:15 +0000

Thank you, although I regret the "bizarrely".

New comment by robertlagrant in "Vite 8.0 Is Out"

robertlagrant — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 10:36:05 +0000

I'm trying to build a nextjs app and it's quite painful. It seems to be more and more focused on SSR, which I don't care about (looking for a static app that calls separate API endpoints). That would have been fine in the NextJS I remember from a few years ago, where static and SSR seemed equally viable, but I can't be bothered now. I'm going to try Tanstack Start.

New comment by robertlagrant in "Source code of Swedish e-government services has been leaked"

robertlagrant — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 10:32:52 +0000

The source code is the least of it! From the article:

> citizen PII databases and electronic signing documents were also collected but are being sold separately

New comment by robertlagrant in "Returning to Rails in 2026"

robertlagrant — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 09:25:13 +0000

> I think microservices emerged for a different reason: to make more efficient use of hardware at scale.

Scaling different areas of an application is one thing. Being able to use different technology choices for different areas is another, even at low scale. And being able to have teams own individual areas of an application via a reasonably hard boundary is a third.

New comment by robertlagrant in "Nobody gets promoted for simplicity"

robertlagrant — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 14:26:26 +0000

I had a similar idea once when answering a Stack Overflow question[0].

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/a/1831841/61938

New comment by robertlagrant in "DoNotNotify is now Open Source"

robertlagrant — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 12:47:03 +0000

This is what drove me to uninstall Facebook, twitter, etc. I use their websites if I occasionally want to visit. I don't want notifications hooking me into my phone.

New comment by robertlagrant in "Coding assistants are solving the wrong problem"

robertlagrant — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 11:18:00 +0000

> There’s a name for misalignment between business intent and codebase implementation: technical debt.

I wish we'd stop redefining this term. Technical debt is a shortcut agreed upon with the business to get something out now and fix later, and the fix will cost more than the original. It is entirely in line with business intent.

New comment by robertlagrant in "Todd C. Miller – Sudo maintainer for over 30 years"

robertlagrant — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 20:17:08 +0000

I would love it if something like Github would accept donations from a repo and parcel it out to the repo's dependencies somehow. It would sadly make Github even stickier, but it would be a great feature.

New comment by robertlagrant in "Adventure Game Studio: OSS software for creating adventure games"

robertlagrant — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 17:32:26 +0000

I remember making a very simple adventure game from scratch in BBC Basic in the mid 90s. Good times. Code immediately lost on reboot.

New comment by robertlagrant in "I’m leaving Redis for SolidQueue"

robertlagrant — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 13:56:11 +0000

> their policy is not to accept RDMS engine specific queries

Why? Is it so they can switch in future?