Hacker News: smrq

New comment by smrq in "Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking"

smrq — Tue, 26 May 2026 18:47:15 +0000

Everyone loves to say this... because it's everyone's experience. I stopped using SO as a resource years ago (well before the advent of LLMs) because it got to the point where almost invariably, when I found a post that managed to perfectly articulate my question, it was closed as a duplicate of some other, distinctly unhelpful question. But it wasn't always that way. There's a fine line between strict moderation and draconian moderation, and at some point they crossed from the former to the latter.

New comment by smrq in "Squares in Squares"

smrq — Tue, 26 May 2026 07:43:13 +0000

The 4 packing takes up 100% of its square; it's trivially optimal. The 6 packing only takes up 2/3 of it, so it's not necessarily obvious that you can't do better.

New comment by smrq in "Don't Roll Your Own"

smrq — Mon, 25 May 2026 15:50:01 +0000

"Just"

Spoken like someone who's never had to work on a date picker.

New comment by smrq in "Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans"

smrq — Thu, 21 May 2026 21:20:53 +0000

This may come as a shock to capitalists, but some artists don't want to charge their fans more. Fugazi famously capped their ticket prices at $5 because they wanted their shows to be affordable.

New comment by smrq in "Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career"

smrq — Mon, 11 May 2026 17:43:47 +0000

People didn't leap from jQuery to React. It's a lot easier to imagine an AI looking at jQuery and [insert any server side MVC framework] and inventing Backbone.

New comment by smrq in "Show HN: AI CAD Harness"

smrq — Fri, 01 May 2026 19:20:43 +0000

Posing OpenSCAD as an alternative to the likes of Fusion is like posing MS Paint as an alternative to Photoshop. It's not even the same class of tool.

New comment by smrq in "HashiCorp co-founder says GitHub 'no longer a place for serious work'"

smrq — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 14:40:52 +0000

"We made merging to main silently drop some commits from main" was another good one recently. If GH had only one job, not doing that would be it.

New comment by smrq in "Stephen's Sausage Roll remains one of the most influential puzzle games"

smrq — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 02:29:10 +0000

This is more or less my take, but at least for me it's not about the level of difficulty exactly. It just feels very transparently like exploring a state space, where the "a-ha" moments just boil down to breaking into a different neighborhood of that space. To be clear, the puzzles are very well designed, and also very hard; but I don't find solving them satisfying at ALL. Compare with Baba Is You, where the "a-ha"s feel to me more like having a grand insight than finding the right very specific sequence of moves.

Put another way, it's been years since I played Baba and I can still remember the key insights to some of the sneakier puzzles. I couldn't even begin to do that for SSR.

New comment by smrq in "Show HN: Pardonned.com – A searchable database of US Pardons"

smrq — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 16:16:29 +0000

Swipe through the "Major Events Timeline". It would be funny if it wasn't so sad how petty it is.

New comment by smrq in "1D Chess"

smrq — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:45:52 +0000

I believe the intended turn order is:

1: P1 selects 2: P2 selects 3: P1 reveals 4: P1 selects 5: P2 reveals 6: GOTO 2

I.e. each player always selects immediately before their opponent reveals.

New comment by smrq in "The truth that haunts the Ramones: 'They sold more T-shirts than records'"

smrq — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 16:49:52 +0000

I doubt he would have much to say on the subject these days.

New comment by smrq in "Why I love NixOS"

smrq — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 04:30:50 +0000

The most NixOS comment I've seen yet was when I was trying to find out about `mkOutOfStoreSymlink`, which lead me to this thread:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/how-to-manage-dotfiles-with-ho...

> Hi, I just wanted to know, where can I find the documentation to know more about this contrib.lib.file.mkOutOfStoreSymlink option ?

> Well, since is a very simple function, no documentation is really needed.

I've been gradually transitioning everything to NixOS, starting with my homelab mini PC, then my Framework laptop, and now my daily driver desktop. It's hard to imagine going back because the pros are so strong compared to the cons, but the docs situation is truly dire.

New comment by smrq in "An interactive map of Flock Cams"

smrq — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 21:56:10 +0000

You might wish to do some cursory research before arguing further. For example, as a starting point, the Wikipedia page on civil disobedience has an entire section labeled "Action" listing counterexamples.

New comment by smrq in "Don't create .gitkeep files, use .gitignore instead (2023)"

smrq — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 04:18:17 +0000

Why is this approach better than the author's?

New comment by smrq in "JavaScript-heavy approaches are not compatible with long-term performance goals"

smrq — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 15:01:06 +0000

Alright, I'll bite. What about imperative programming fixes the scaling issues you're describing?

Typically programming scale is regarded as a benefit of FP over imperative programming, as the lack of mutable state results in less moving parts to reason about.

New comment by smrq in "Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month"

smrq — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 14:55:48 +0000

How often do you suppose they will be re-checking your ID? Once every... never?

New comment by smrq in "Vibe coding kills open source"

smrq — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 14:48:38 +0000

"My Toyota Corolla struggles to drive up icy hills." "It doesn't struggle, you struggle." ???

It's fine to critique your own tools and their strengths and weaknesses. Claiming that any and all failures of AI are an operator skill issue is counterproductive.

New comment by smrq in "The Overcomplexity of the Shadcn Radio Button"

smrq — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 04:51:49 +0000

Vue and Svelte both introduce too much mystery-symbol syntax for my taste, and two way data binding has felt bad since Angular 1.

New comment by smrq in "CSS Web Components for marketing sites (2024)"

smrq — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 18:59:29 +0000

"Clean" is the biggest lie in software development. It's an aesthetic opinion dressed up as objective fact. You think components are clean, someone else thinks classes are clean, and neither of you are wrong, except for believing that "clean" is a property of the code and not something entirely in your own mind.

New comment by smrq in "The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe"

smrq — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 23:25:01 +0000

Give your user NOPASSWD if it's really that bothersome. You can also potentially set it up to use a fingerprint reader if you have that hardware.