Hacker News: shminge

New comment by shminge in "High-Level Rust: Getting 80% of the Benefits with 20% of the Pain"

shminge — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 04:17:15 +0000

I'm surprised no one in the comments is mentioning Kotlin. Out of all the languages I've worked with it has been the most enjoyable by far. I agree with the article that there isn't much community but I feel like that's arguably the least important category there. You should definitely give it a shot if you've never tried it before.

New comment by shminge in "Infinite Midwit"

shminge — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 21:28:44 +0000

I think this sums up my thoughts on the LLM writing "style" pretty well:

> If a student submitted a piece of writing to me that sounded like this—and I was sure they wrote it themselves—I wouldn’t know where to start. I guess I would tell them to stop writing for a while and go read some old novels, or work a crummy job, or backpack around the other side of the world. But that would be bad advice, because I know people who have done all of those things in the hopes of becoming a more interesting person, and it hasn’t worked. So I might ask them instead: “Have you ever considered a career in consulting?”

Code doesn't need subjective intelligence. I think LLMs, as much as I dislike offloading thinking to them, are likely to become a large part of software engineering. I'm hoping that it'll never nail the subjective experience - I read to explore others thoughts, however ungrammatical, broken, or convoluted their prose is. Give me that over a bowl of bland and tasteless slop any day

The End

shminge — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 20:57:38 +0000

Article URL: https://www.focalcurve.com/journal/the-end/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47535621

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by shminge in "Show HN: Red Grid Link – peer-to-peer team tracking over Bluetooth, no servers"

shminge — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 23:38:09 +0000

Very cool idea. What's the range of BLE connectivity? I can't imagine it gets far

New comment by shminge in "Building a new Flash"

shminge — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 03:17:04 +0000

I've tried Love2D and enjoyed it but just found the lack of support for Lua was tough - how do you handle debugging and things?

New comment by shminge in "Obsidian Sync now has a headless client"

shminge — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 03:45:28 +0000

I have sync to support the amazing devs, and for convenience, and an automatic git-based backup that runs in the background. It's good to double dip sometimes

The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral (2015)

shminge — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 06:37:16 +0000

Article URL: https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47118854

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by shminge in "What's the best way to learn a new language?"

shminge — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 11:18:10 +0000

I thought this was about programming languages before I saw it was from BBC, making me ask - what is the best way to learn a new programming language?

I'm guessing the answer is making small things, but what exactly? I've made so many to do list apps I don't know what to do with them

New comment by shminge in "How I use Obsidian (2023)"

shminge — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 03:34:00 +0000

offline first, so much faster, no terrible pricing model. Hugely better in my opinion

New comment by shminge in "I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed"

shminge — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 02:24:05 +0000

fwiw, it's 'foolproof' not 'full-proof'

New comment by shminge in "Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?"

shminge — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 13:05:39 +0000

I'm sick of using React for personal projects so I've been building a lightweight, functional, and minimalistic reactive web framework. Turns out there are a lot of decisions that go into something like this, it truly is an iceberg of complexity. It creates plenty of enjoyable problems to think about though

New comment by shminge in "Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled"

shminge — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 02:36:08 +0000

If you're on Android, YouTube Revanced does this (+many other premium features)

How to Start a Startup (2005)

shminge — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 21:58:14 +0000

Article URL: https://paulgraham.com/start.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45958831

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by shminge in "Notion 3.0"

shminge — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 08:07:07 +0000

What does it give you that Obsidian can't?

Visualizing Algorithms (2014)

shminge — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 23:59:51 +0000

Article URL: https://bost.ocks.org/mike/algorithms/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45256418

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Ask HN: What do you do when you want to make something but aren't sure what?

shminge — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 09:57:08 +0000

Maybe I have too much free time, but lately I've been left wanting to make something, anything, but not coming up with any ideas strong enough to motivate me to push through the initial programming before it becomes fun. How do you get your ideas for fun side-projects? What do you do when inspiration won't strike?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45147969

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

WeakC4, or Distilling an Emergent Object

shminge — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 00:24:33 +0000

Article URL: https://2swap.github.io/WeakC4/explanation/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44991673

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by shminge in "Obsidian Bases"

shminge — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 22:31:54 +0000

That seems such a minor gain to me. Are you not concerned about notion a) being online only and b) not letting you be in control of your data?

I'm a strong proponent of File over App: who knows how long Obsidian or notion will exist - at least I know I can work with my Obsidian notes as long as text editors exist

New comment by shminge in "The Joy of Mixing Custom Elements, Web Components, and Markdown"

shminge — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 23:41:34 +0000

I've recently hit a very similar problem. There's various problems with the web components (like he mentions) and I wanted a better way to write plain html with components. I ended up making a tiny python build script to process fake html components into proper HTML: https://github.com/shminge/builder

I've designed it for myself, deliberately to work around the flaws with web components mentioned. It hugely speeds up my process of writing pages for my blog (after trying everything, I've ended up just writing plain html) because I can define a component that holds all the boilerplate of the page (header, css, etc) and then write my pages as `

body content here

` and have that be expanded into proper valid HTML

New comment by shminge in "An open letter from educators who refuse the call to adopt GenAI in education"

shminge — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 01:50:08 +0000

One of my favourite quotes on this topic:

> Using ChatGPT to write an essay is a bit like using a forklift to lift weights. The forklift might do a perfectly good job of moving around some heavy iron plates, but you’d be wasting your time.

The point of writing essays (or doing any other school assessment) is not the completed product, it's the work (and hopefully learning) that went into it.

You can definitely use AI responsibly, but many students will not and do not.