Hacker News: skgough

New comment by skgough in "BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time"

skgough — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 23:28:16 +0000

Hexagon is very prominent in precision manufacturing through their dimensional measurement robots (CMM Coordinate Measurement Machine) and other metrology software/hardware. This is most likely why they were chosen by BMW, as I imagine they already have a working relationship together, although the EU aspect could have contributed as well.

I wonder if this is a newly acquired subsidiary producing these robots (they've been doing a lot of acquisitions recently), or if these have been in development in-house for a while.

New comment by skgough in "Plumbing vs. Internet, Revisited"

skgough — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 00:27:28 +0000

One counterpoint I can think of: most forms of electronic payment require the Internet now. Credit card transactions, Venmo et al. You could transition back to cash but there would be enormous switching costs and short-term chaos, and I could imagine paper-based transactions are also way less efficient in terms of transaction fees and literal loss of the cash.

New comment by skgough in "Fluid Glass"

skgough — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 23:45:33 +0000

it's interesting that the drops tend to collect in straight lines. I wonder what's happening in the sim code to keep them from collecting into round droplets?

New comment by skgough in "Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy"

skgough — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 23:15:03 +0000

It is strange to me that omarchy took off and not Regolith Desktop [1], which is a very similar project, and has been around a lot longer. I suppose the DHH effect is real. There is definitely a critical mass accumulating around the hyprland ecosystem. They seem to be forming their own culture separate from the wider FOSS community that I find concerning.

[1] https://regolith-desktop.com/

New comment by skgough in "AWS European Sovereign Cloud to be operated by EU citizens"

skgough — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 22:51:32 +0000

It sounds like a natural expansion of AWS GovCloud offerings to me. Servicing the US government and it's contractors has been very lucrative for AWS. Taking that successful model into new markets makes sense.

New comment by skgough in "Show HN: Windows 7 GUI for the web"

skgough — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 18:58:25 +0000

I don't think you could 100% nail the Win7 glass or Win11 mica material without having transparency effects that have access to the compositor pipeline. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to get close enough!

New comment by skgough in "My Lights Run on Bash"

skgough — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 21:32:36 +0000

HomeAssistant's dependency requirements are so complex as to make a deployment of it essentially read-only. Trying to mod it with HACS is so hard that I gave up even though I write python for a living. I can't recommend it to anyone that doesn't know how to use linux at an expert level. This detracts from it's mission IMO; I would like to tell my family to use it instead of Google Home or Amazon whatever but it is so fragile that I can't do that in good conscience.

New comment by skgough in "Selfish reasons for building accessible UIs"

skgough — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 05:26:48 +0000

Another selfish reason: web pages just work a lot better when you use the actual HTML elements, especially when you compose them together. React projects often mix several component libraries together to make a comprehensive UI. All of these libraries behave differently in subtle ways. When you compose them together, the differences compound: focus is not restored to the button that opened a dialog when it is dismissed, there are 4 different blues used on the page, the date input doesn't use your country's date format.

When you use HTML primitives like inputs with associated labels, the new popover API, dialogs, details + summary elements, their behaviors are all made by the browser vendor and are designed to compose with each other. It really is a difference of night and day, and for free. We don't take advantage of the amazingly powerful tools we have been given.

New comment by skgough in "Show HN: Most users won't report bugs unless you make it stupidly easy"

skgough — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 00:02:26 +0000

factorio needs to be studied in general for the quality of the software, it's performance, and the UI.

The UI has the best productivity-focused design I've ever seen in any GUI application. And its a game. Absolutely incredible.

New comment by skgough in "Show HN: Windows 98 themed website in 1 HTML file for my post punk band"

skgough — Mon, 19 May 2025 20:58:25 +0000

loving the decapitation queue in the console

New comment by skgough in "The Subjective Charms of Objective-C"

skgough — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 15:09:46 +0000

Very cool that you can use the XCode interface builder to build the UI.

I wonder why this type of style hasn't caught on with React and friends? It would be really nice to be able to have an AppKit-quality UI programmable in React or Svelte.

I know I know mobile blah blah. But lots of web apps are complicated enough to only be useful on a large screen, like Figma.

New comment by skgough in "The Frontend Treadmill"

skgough — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 03:25:29 +0000

HTML: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn_web_developme...

CSS: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn_web_developme...

JS: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn_web_developme...

They even have courses for frameworks.

React: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn_web_developme...

Svelte: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn_web_developme...

Vue: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn_web_developme...

New comment by skgough in "AI cracks superbug problem in two days that took scientists years"

skgough — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 18:10:42 +0000

I'm getting the impression that this worked becaused the LLM had hoovered up all the previous research on this topic and found a reasonable string of words that could be a hypothesis based on what it found?

I think we are starting to get to the root of the utility of LLMs as a technology. They are the next generation of search engines.

But it makes me wonder, if we had thrown more resources towards using "traditional" search techniques on scientific papers, if we could have gotten here without gigawatts of GPU work spent on it, and a few years earlier?

New comment by skgough in "Undergraduate shows that searches within hash tables can be much faster"

skgough — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 01:14:42 +0000

Maybe the best way to have the best of both worlds is to ensure well-established areas of research are open to “outsider art” submissions on the topic?

New comment by skgough in "Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video]"

skgough — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 01:18:28 +0000

this plane doesn't look like it was made to produce a low boom. It has a very distinct von Karman ogive [1] fuselage and typical delta wings. I would guess that it's shape is primarily optimized for fuel efficiency at 1.5 mach or above.

If you take a look at NASA's low boom demonstrator [2], you can see that it's much skinnier and the nose is crazy elongated. This is intended to break up the bow shock into multiple parts, thereby decreasing the amount of energy each one has.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nose_cone_design#Von_K%C3%A1rm... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_X-59_Quesst

New comment by skgough in "Blue Origin New Glenn Mission NG-1 (video)"

skgough — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 08:12:05 +0000

Could you elaborate on that? Why would the exhaust reflecting off the shock wave cause damage to the nozzle?

New comment by skgough in "A couple CSS tricks for HTML Dialog elements"

skgough — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 18:25:51 +0000

this is most likely due to the absolute positioning. position: absolute will use the top-left corner of the closest ancestor that is "positioned" as the origin for it's layout [1]. If you want that origin to be the top-left corner of the viewport, use position: fixed.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Containing_...

New comment by skgough in "Show HN: Mizu.js – Lightweight HTML templating library for any-side rendering"

skgough — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 20:43:19 +0000

Can you talk about why separation of concerns is useful? I like it too, but I have a hard time trying to articulate why I prefer it over keeping everything in the same file. I've started working in a project that uses react and tailwind, and I've gotten pretty comfortable, but (ideological purity aside) it just isn't very enjoyable to use.

New comment by skgough in "Android XR"

skgough — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 18:52:16 +0000

It would super cool if they eventually make this a part of the phone OS and all you would need to do is buy a headset and plug it in over USB-C. Same idea as Dex, different display form factor, but same computer.

Then with Android Auto, Dex, and XR, you would just need a single computer you can carry with you.

Seems like the end state for personal computing. Instead of buying separate computers, you buy human interface devices and plug them in over USB-C.

New comment by skgough in "Linux: We need tiling desktop environments"

skgough — Mon, 26 Aug 2024 16:14:21 +0000

One feature of i3 and friends that I really relied on when I was using a laptop as my main computer was the tab mode. Being able to tab between windows on half of your screen while keeping your browser open in the other half was extremely useful.

I know BeOS had tabbed windows in the 90s in a floating window manager; it makes me wonder why this idea didn't catch on in the early 2000s.

Windows has started to add tabs to individual programs incrementally as part of their rewrites of core applications in the new GUI frameworks. Notepad got tabs and so did Explorer. So they see the utility.

Why hasn't tabbing been included as a core feature of the window manager outside of these niche tiling window managers for Linux?