Hacker News: sheept

New comment by sheept in "A Topological Picture Book, Rendered"

sheept — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 03:07:23 +0000

In addition to making the sidebar dismissable on small screens, it'd be nice to add touch-action: none to the canvas so rotating the object doesn't get interpreted as a scroll on touchscreens.

Right now, at least in Android Chrome, dragging to rotate only works briefly before it's interrupted.

New comment by sheept in "Civic Hygiene – avoid building technologies that could be used by a police state (2013)"

sheept — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 16:39:16 +0000

That wouldn't be open source. OSI includes the clause "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor"[0] for its definition of open source. Famously, the JSON license[1] has a clause "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil," so the Free Software Foundation considers it nonfree.[2]

[0]: https://opensource.org/osd

[1]: https://www.json.org/license.html

[2]: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#JSON

New comment by sheept in "Sun Clock"

sheept — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 18:47:20 +0000

It'd be neat if you could pan a slider through the year to see the sunrise sunset times change

New comment by sheept in "Sun Clock"

sheept — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 18:46:01 +0000

Dragging the globe around isn't working on touch; it feels like it's missing touch-action: none

New comment by sheept in "Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code"

sheept — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 07:16:12 +0000

I use dontAsk mode[0] with read access to the entire file system, write access to files from the working directory[1], some git commands (git commit yes, git push no), and a script wrapping Deno with the same read/write permissions (safer substitute for `python -c`).

These are usually enough for most of my coding tasks. In my experience, Claude has been good enough that it can write code and fix bugs without needing anything else. It's far better than ever needing to approve permission requests.

[0]: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/permission-modes#available-m...

[1]: Note that this includes escaping the directory via symlinks

New comment by sheept in "We finally learned to center a div, then browsers added sidebars"

sheept — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 02:31:34 +0000

There's several web APIs for browser window positioning, like screenX/Y[0] (which is what OP uses), which allows for those classic pop-up based browser games from over a decade ago, like Browser Ball.[1]

[0]: demo: https://mdn.github.io/dom-examples/screenleft-screentop/

[1]: https://romanbaiocco.github.io/browser-ball-reloaded/

New comment by sheept in "Seedance 2.5"

sheept — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 02:02:26 +0000

Video generation models generate videos of a predetermined duration, so if a character finishes a line but there's still seconds remaining, then the model still has to fill it in

New comment by sheept in "Printing floating point numbers in binary"

sheept — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 03:57:19 +0000

In JavaScript, it's

    Math.PI.toString(2)

Who knows how optimized Python or JavaScript's implementations are, but I'd imagine printing the binary representation of floating point numbers is relatively easy to implement manually because you'd just take 1 followed by the bits of the mantissa, then move the decimal point based on the exponent.

New comment by sheept in "Progressive Web Components"

sheept — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 00:04:15 +0000

HTML is case insensitive, so

New comment by sheept in "Show HN: Gander, an Android file viewer that asks for no permissions at all"

sheept — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 07:41:53 +0000

I guess that makes sense. Since most non-privacy-focused Android distributions don't let users turn off the internet permission, keeping the permission secure likely ceased to be a priority.

The full list of bypasses is likely much larger because it doesn't fall in the scope of bug bounties.

New comment by sheept in "JEP 401: Value Objects (Preview) merged to OpenJDK master"

sheept — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 07:21:04 +0000

It's pretty interesting that while both languages still receive new features, Java seems to stay ahead of JavaScript:

- Java has long had a modern replacement for Date, while JavaScript's recently standardized Temporal API still isn't supported in Safari.

- Java has switch expressions, while JavaScript, despite its Scheme influence, does not.

- And now Java is getting value objects, while JavaScript's equivalent tuples & records proposal has been withdrawn.[0]

JavaScript was not developed as a fork of Java, but much of its basic syntax still resembles Java, so I think it's fair to compare them.

[0]: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-record-tuple

New comment by sheept in "Upper stage impacting the moon on 2026 August 5"

sheept — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 15:42:10 +0000

The main drawback with the page's unstyled design is that the page is not mobile friendly.

Publishing web pages by manually editing HTML files is still very common today; any GitHub Pages blog does this.

New comment by sheept in "Scriptc by Vercel: TypeScript-to-Native compiler, no JavaScript engine in binary"

sheept — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 02:50:14 +0000

One of the strengths of TypeScript besides its expressiveness is that it's compatible with the massive npm ecosystem. Most packages only ship untyped JavaScript with type declarations defining the interface,[0] so realistically you'd still need a JavaScript engine if you use any packages.

But if you're starting from scratch and know you won't be using any npm packages, you might as well use AssemblyScript.[2]

[0]: Publishing packages in TypeScript is explicitly discouraged by Node[1]. TypeScript isn't backwards compatible even in minor releases, and its compiler settings aren't portable for packages.

[1]: https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/main/doc/api/typescript....

[2]: https://www.assemblyscript.org/

New comment by sheept in "Show HN: Writemark, a dependency free web component for inline Markdown editing"

sheept — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 00:01:29 +0000

It'd be nice if there was a live demo without needing to clone the repo. Though I suppose I could just try it out with a bookmarklet:

    javascript:import('https://esm.sh/writemark-editor').then(() => document.body.append(document.createElement('writemark-editor')))

New comment by sheept in "Kimi K3 built a Windows XP in browser"

sheept — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 23:58:13 +0000

I'm surprised it doesn't use proper HTML by default. I wasn't able to tab focus on the Administrator button on the login screen, and it turns out it's because the entire UI is div spam.

New comment by sheept in "Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed"

sheept — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 18:40:58 +0000

I personally rely on this behavior of LLMs. For example, for reviewing prose, I might ask the LLM to find five issues. If there are obvious issues I missed, then it'll find them. But if all the issues it lists are minor or hallucinated, then I can have some confidence there weren't any glaring issues.

I do the same for LLM code review comments: some changes are out of scope or could be moved to a separate PR; some edge cases don't happen in practice and should just fail noisily instead of writing more code to maintain. When these are the only issues it's raising, then I know it's done.

New comment by sheept in "Em dashes are amazing"

sheept — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 15:58:32 +0000

> - dash: compounds word-parts (Sarbanes-Oxley)

That's a hyphen, and (to be pedantic) style guides usually do not consider it a dash.

There's also the 2-em dash in some style guides for redacting words, and since care needs to be taken to avoid a line wrap between the em dashes, Unicode has a character for it: ⸺

Finally,

> - em dash: adjoining thought (Hey, so — )

This use is sometimes discouraged by style guides, and in many cases, it can be replaced with a colon, comma, or semicolon.

In general, even before AI, the em dash is often considered overused.[0] My guess is that the em dash is perceived as sounding educated, so novice writers who learn about it end up using it recklessly, and LLMs could've picked up this habit from them.

[0]: https://slate.com/human-interest/2011/05/em-dashes-why-write...

New comment by sheept in "git's –end-of-options Flag"

sheept — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 05:45:19 +0000

It is an en dash, not an em dash, since it's about as wide as an n.

Some software substitutes a double hyphen -- with an en dash rather than em, and use the triple hyphen --- for the em dash. Perhaps Hacker News' title formatter is one of them.

New comment by sheept in "Are AI labs pelicanmaxxing?"

sheept — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 03:23:46 +0000

That's interesting. I think the bikes-facing-left bias probably comes from how humans use bikes: the kickstand is on the left, so people likely hold and approach bikes from its left.

Looking online, the kickstand is apparently on the left to avoid the gears. Based on the other comment about bike photography, it's interesting the same design choice makes humans and cameras/LLMs see bikes from different sides.

New comment by sheept in "Qwen-Image-3.0: Rich Content, Authentic Details, Deep Knowledge"

sheept — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 09:50:56 +0000

I find it mildly interesting how your comment repeats itself but with different phrasing