Hacker News: sgarland

New comment by sgarland in "Release of Polars 2.0"

sgarland — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 13:04:00 +0000

TIL that Polars supports SQL. Amazing.

New comment by sgarland in "Opus 5.5 agents discover two room-temperature magnetic semiconductor candidates"

sgarland — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 23:01:04 +0000

I am deeply upset every time the HomePod in another room decides to attempt to answer my query instead of the phone that’s in my hands, which then has to ask who is speaking, and has a 50:50 chance of ultimately failing to do the task.

With how magical handoff / continuity / whatever it’s called is, it is baffling to me why Apple allows the HomePod to so aggressively take over requests when it sucks so, so much at it.

New comment by sgarland in "Meta Uses A.I. Data Centers to Avoid Billions in Federal Taxes"

sgarland — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 14:11:31 +0000

> One of the biggest expenses of any A.I. data center was computer chips, which are made by companies like Nvidia and cost thousands of dollars each.

“Thousands.” Yes, in the same way that the earth is thousands of years old. 4.5 million thousands, but still, thousands.

New comment by sgarland in "56k.rip – the 1996 dial-up internet experience"

sgarland — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 13:26:16 +0000

This is great! I especially enjoyed the live chat feature, that was surprising. Should definitely allow HN to go through on the browser, though, that would be awesome. It would only take... ~90 seconds to load. Damn, it's heavier than I thought.

New comment by sgarland in "Ask HN: Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it?"

sgarland — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 01:33:44 +0000

Or McLaren needing to use an ancient, very specific Compaq laptop to service the F1.

https://www.extremetech.com/cars/227828-the-mclaren-f1-super...

New comment by sgarland in "Ask HN: Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it?"

sgarland — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 01:21:39 +0000

Because what they have works well enough to be NRC-certified, and they have enough spare parts to comfortably outlast the rated lifetime of the reactor.

Relevant: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

New comment by sgarland in "Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update bricks Samsung smart fridges"

sgarland — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 13:39:58 +0000

Sorry, I was unclear / misunderstood your statement. I haven’t tested this with Spotify, but disabling the thermostat’s mic (Settings / Device Microphone) disables Alexa and Siri implicitly, and also seems to remove it as an AirPlay target, which is primarily how we stream music to Sonos.

New comment by sgarland in "Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update bricks Samsung smart fridges"

sgarland — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 03:17:40 +0000

I also experienced this, albeit deliberately. I saw that it was possible, and out of morbid curiosity, enqueued a song to play through it. I immediately questioned why anyone would want it, stopped play, and disabled it. There are settings on the thermostat you can change such that it isn't used for playback or recording.

New comment by sgarland in "Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update bricks Samsung smart fridges"

sgarland — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 03:08:41 +0000

The Bosch 800 series dishwashers are god-tier, or at least they were as of 5 years ago, when I last bought one. I've had one in the last 3 houses, and went so far recently as to swap my new house's dishwasher (I think a Whirlpool something-or-other) with my old house's Bosch 800, because it was a cross-town move, and I could.

New comment by sgarland in "Vibecoding isn't a crime How Distribute Your App on Linux after Flathub refusal"

sgarland — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 01:11:30 +0000

Have you read maintainer guidelines for a major distro, like Debian's [0]? I would wager there is between 0 - 1% chance that a vibecoder would be willing or able to meet these.

0: https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/deve...

New comment by sgarland in "SAML: A fractal of bad design"

sgarland — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 00:11:48 +0000

If a company said "you must support DES," I would expect that their cybersecurity insurance provider would start asking them some questions, and if they became indignant that no one would do so, I would expect them to be publicly mocked.

There is one valid excuse for why you must have support for an outdated protocol: embedded / air-gapped systems. For anything else, just admit that you don't want to make the change. That's a business decision, nothing else.

New comment by sgarland in "AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up"

sgarland — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 12:01:16 +0000

Agreed. It was the first time I installed a new iOS version I can remember in a long time where it felt faster. My only complaint is that it also seems to have changed WebKit rendering somehow such that the HomeAssistant companion app is incredibly slow, but that also seems to at least partially my fault due to dashboard design. Still tinkering with that.

New comment by sgarland in "AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up"

sgarland — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 11:48:08 +0000

Percona Monitoring and Management [0].

...or not. Probably not.

0: https://github.com/percona/pmm

New comment by sgarland in "Vibecoding isn't a crime How Distribute Your App on Linux after Flathub refusal"

sgarland — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:11:22 +0000

So download the release from the tool’s Git{Hub,Lab} page.

New comment by sgarland in "Vibecoding isn't a crime How Distribute Your App on Linux after Flathub refusal"

sgarland — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:10:15 +0000

> One shared that they were flagged for using Claude Code to submit the pull request, not to write the app.

Who is opening up an LLM to run git push?!

New comment by sgarland in "Heretic removes restrictions from language models"

sgarland — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 12:30:21 +0000

They did, via uv. uv run heretic, and it will handle the rest.

New comment by sgarland in "What Zig felt like, coming from Rust"

sgarland — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 20:42:22 +0000

This is in fact more readable, thank you.

I still don’t know that I find it more intuitive or readable than the simple loop, but it’s much less awful than before.

New comment by sgarland in "What Zig felt like, coming from Rust"

sgarland — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 20:30:14 +0000

THANK YOU. I feel exactly the same way.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49769812

New comment by sgarland in "What Zig felt like, coming from Rust"

sgarland — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 20:22:11 +0000

From TFA, on combinators vs. loops:

    items.iter().enumerate().filter(|(_, i)| cond(i)).map(|(idx, i)| Pointer::idx(i, path, idx)).collect()

    while (i < cursors.len) {
        if (actual_index < arr.items.len) { cursors[i] = .{...}; i += 1; }
        else iteration.remove(i);
    }

I’ve been slowly learning Rust, and this style is my main gripe against it, because I feel like I’m being gaslit. Its proponents praise its readability and ease of use, and just… no. It looks deranged. A simple loop is immediately obvious to anyone who’s programmed in any language. Even Python’s list comprehensions are loop-ish.

New comment by sgarland in "Tin: full-text search for Postgres"

sgarland — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 20:11:31 +0000

On-prem.