Hacker News: submain

New comment by submain in "Sky – an Elm-inspired language that compiles to Go"

submain — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 19:30:03 +0000

Great work :). Go doesn't have TCO. That means functional languages (no for loops) could blow up the stack. How did you solve that?

New comment by submain in "Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use"

submain — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 17:21:15 +0000

> And don't even let me get started on how bad Claude client has become

The latest versions of claude code have been freezing and then crashing while waiting on long running commands. It's pretty frustrating.

New comment by submain in "[dead]"

submain — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:15:27 +0000

bots perhaps? Anyways, mods should remove this post.

New comment by submain in "I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great"

submain — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 04:36:13 +0000

> If you search for problems on linux, you will get much higher quality answers.

Not only that, but in the past I've cooked hacky bash scripts to work around issues while waiting for upstream fixes. I'd imagine that'd be harder with other OSs.

New comment by submain in "Functional programming and reliability: ADTs, safety, critical infrastructure"

submain — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 16:35:53 +0000

I usually define functional programming as "how far away a language is from untyped lambda calculus". By that definition, different languages would fall in different parts of that spectrum.

New comment by submain in "Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?"

submain — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 22:31:49 +0000

> The real secret to agent productivity is letting go of your understanding of the code and trusting the AI to generate the proper thing

The few times I've done that, the agent eventually faced a problem/bug it couldn't solve and I had to go and read the entire codebase myself.

Then, found several subtle bugs (like writing private keys to disk even when that was an explicit instruction not to). Eventually ended up refactoring most of it.

It does have value on coming up with boilerplate code that I then tweak.

New comment by submain in "Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now"

submain — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 18:42:05 +0000

"Magic Leap raises $827M in Series C". Aged like wine.

New comment by submain in "Show HN: Lockenv – Simple encrypted secrets storage for Git"

submain — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 11:25:21 +0000

This is great! Coincidentally, I just started replacing my collection of bespoke security bash scripts with an app like yours. WIP here: https://github.com/leolimasa/age-vault

We all keep reinventing the same thing :)

New comment by submain in "Poll HN: What operating system do you primarily develop on?"

submain — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 18:23:09 +0000

Yeah, I run macos for the same reason.

However, I went back to linux on my personal laptop (nixos on my case) and I am pleasantly surprised how many things now just work.

The only thing that still annoys me is the laptop not sleeping properly and therefore using too much battery power when idle.

It has made great strides on the last two or so years.

New comment by submain in "The hidden cost of AI coding"

submain — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 12:44:13 +0000

This echoes my sentiment that LLMs are higher level programming languages. And, as every layer of abstraction, they add assumptions that may or may not fit the use case. The same way we optimize SQL queries by knowing how the database makes a query plan, we need to optimize LLM outputs, specially when the assumptions given are not ideal.

New comment by submain in "Show HN: Cot: a Rust web framework for lazy developers"

submain — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 22:43:24 +0000

Type checking is indeed an advantage of ORMs. You pay for it with object relational impedance mismatch. That impedance grows as your schema grows.

In my experience, the way to get the best of both worlds is to use a query builder as opposed to a full ORM.

New comment by submain in "Show HN: Cot: a Rust web framework for lazy developers"

submain — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 14:46:24 +0000

ORMs are one of those things that make sense for really tiny projects but fail to scale once complexity settles in.

New comment by submain in "Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees"

submain — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 21:00:14 +0000

I love doing research. I published a minor unimportant paper in undergrad and had a blast doing it.

Then at graduation I was offered a well paid job in the industry. Decided to pursue it as opposed to spending 5-6 more years in academia looking for grants.

Would love to go back and get a PhD, but the economics just don't make sense for me. For now, it's a retirement plan.

New comment by submain in "Over engineered cars are pushing technicians away"

submain — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 22:01:53 +0000

>What does windows 7 do that windows 10 doesn't? Why does the same web page need 60MBs to load when it only need 1-3MB 10 years ago.

Ads. And tracking code to serve you ads. And AI - that collects your prompts to serve you more ads.

New comment by submain in "Show HN: Unforget, the note-taking app I always wanted: offline first, encrypted"

submain — Wed, 12 Jun 2024 02:20:00 +0000

This is great! How does it compare to silverbullet (https://silverbullet.md/)?

New comment by submain in "Mental health in software engineering"

submain — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 12:51:45 +0000

As a manager, if upstream changes priorities on me but what we’re working on is almost done, I just go ahead and finish it anyways.

When they eventually switch back to the original thing they are always surprised to know it’s been completed.

New comment by submain in "LiveView Is Best with Svelte"

submain — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 14:27:39 +0000

I am not familiar with LiveView, so I'm curious. Looks like it processes UI actions server side.

So, are all client interactions sent through the websocket? I remember years/decades ago we used to do that with ASP.NET, where every single component interaction was handled by the server. How is this different / better?

New comment by submain in "Ask HN: Did you encounter any leap year bugs today?"

submain — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 00:14:03 +0000

just like you don't roll your own crypto, you don't roll your own date libraries.

New comment by submain in "Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]"

submain — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 17:25:37 +0000

His book "A new kind of science" is quite fascinating and has some interesting ideas about cellular automata. But I couldn't finish it because of how every few pages there is something about how great the author/his ideas are.

New comment by submain in "I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)"

submain — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 02:11:17 +0000

Quite the opposite actually. My developers barely touch their tickets. Most of the updates are done rather informally. They mostly interact with git and I make sure things are tracked.

You’ve used quite strong words there.