Hacker News: superdisk

New comment by superdisk in "A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw"

superdisk — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 16:28:21 +0000

It's just very poser behavior.

New comment by superdisk in "Ask HN: What weird or scrappy things did you do to get your first users?"

superdisk — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 02:40:57 +0000

I worked on a language learning site and in order to try to onboard tutors, I wrote a script that scraped the Preply tutor list, which gave first names, pictures, and a YouTube account link.

From there I made a spreadsheet and spent hours googling names and trying to match up pictures to faces, sending messages asking if they'd like to be a part of a pilot program on my platform.

Got quite a few people willing to try it out :) but sadly the startup didn't succeed. Fun times though.

New comment by superdisk in "Ask HN: DDD was a great debugger – what would a modern equivalent look like?"

superdisk — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 07:46:35 +0000

This is a legitimate question but this was clearly generated using an LLM.

To add something constructive, this demo represents an amazing ideal of what debugging could be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72y2EC5fkcE

New comment by superdisk in "30 Years of ReactOS"

superdisk — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 13:12:35 +0000

I sometimes daydream about becoming a billionaire and bankrolling this project to completion. Would do the world so much good.

New comment by superdisk in "Claude's new constitution"

superdisk — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 09:08:56 +0000

America wrote the Japanese constitution.

New comment by superdisk in "Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?"

superdisk — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 06:57:40 +0000

This is true. There are a few stock topics that will consistently get the fanboys out (Postgres, Ruby, Rust, SQLite) which is, IMO, usually just uninteresting fodder. And then interesting stuff which requires some intellectual engagement very often rots.

HN does have a much higher ratio of gems to dirt than any other place though, so I'm still here for the forseeable future :)

New comment by superdisk in "Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop"

superdisk — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 19:13:10 +0000

If he made this I would buy it in a second. Right now my non-work daily driver is a Thinkpad X1 Carbon because I fell for the Thinkpad meme, but it's honestly pretty terrible all things considered. Battery life sucks, touchpad sucks, the shell is plasticky and weird. Mac-tier hardware that runs Linux would be extremely welcome.

New comment by superdisk in "Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop"

superdisk — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 19:09:13 +0000

I'll actually answer your question, it's horrible. I have a X1 Carbon and get maybe 3-4 hours on Linux.

New comment by superdisk in "Cloudflare was down"

superdisk — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 09:21:36 +0000

Lol. The fact that the 4x one actually works and is correctly reporting that the 3x one is down actually makes this a lot funnier to me.

New comment by superdisk in "Racket v9.0"

superdisk — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 15:51:55 +0000

It was actually ported to a Common Lisp based implementation a while back.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41683969

New comment by superdisk in "Learn Prolog Now (2006)"

superdisk — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 11:03:47 +0000

Contrary to what everyone else is saying, I think you're completely correct. Using it for AI or "reasoning" is a hopeless dead end, even if people wish otherwise. However I've found that Prolog is an excellent language for expressing certain types of problems in a very concise way, like parsers, compilers, and assemblers (and many more). The whole concept of using a predicate in different modes is actually very useful in a pragmatic way for a lot of problems.

When you add in the constraint solving extensions (CLP(Z) and CLP(B) and so on) it becomes even more powerful, since you can essentially mix vanilla Prolog code with solver tools.

New comment by superdisk in "About KeePassXC's Code Quality Control"

superdisk — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 15:41:09 +0000

> There's no way to determine whether a contributor used LLMs in part or full, not without them being honest about it.

Oh, you can tell.

New comment by superdisk in "You already have a Git server"

superdisk — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 23:27:11 +0000

For what it's worth they do call it out in the manual as a common thing to do: https://git-scm.com/book/ms/v2/Git-on-the-Server-The-Protoco...

Granted I've never tried it so take it with a grain of salt.

New comment by superdisk in "You already have a Git server"

superdisk — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 13:29:04 +0000

If you do it over NFS or whatever then you can collaborate as well.

New comment by superdisk in "Key IOCs for Pegasus and Predator Spyware Removed with iOS 26 Update"

superdisk — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 10:13:25 +0000

I use Swift at my job, and all I can say is anecdotally we've had a ton of problems with memory safety.

- Swift has a feature where you can unwrap a nullable which is basically just unusable, as it completely crashes the entire program if it fails, with no way for you to gracefully handle it or present a message to the user. And it's a massive footgun, since it has such convenient syntax that makes it seem like it should be used. But no, you have to avoid to like the plague.

- There are some Apple APIs where they just disregard their own types, and pass nil to your callback where the type says it's non nullable. This means if you access the var at all, crash.

- Concurrent access of dictionary, crash. And very hard to track down why as well since it can be very intermittent; in our case we were using an asynchronous dispatch queue instead of a sync one, so a single keyword. Oops!

- Stack overflow, crash.

- This isn't really Swift's fault, but in general every single macOS API is riddled with bugs and undocumented behavior. As a matter of fact, I would venture to say that almost every macOS API is virtually undocumented, either since there is literally no documentation or the existing documentation is just names of functions and occasionally an extremely out of date sample app.

So IMO it's about as memory safe as C. We're floating around the idea of just porting everything to Rust and moving on, haven't researched or committed to it yet though.

New comment by superdisk in "Key IOCs for Pegasus and Predator Spyware Removed with iOS 26 Update"

superdisk — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 01:54:02 +0000

Swift is a ridiculously far cry from a memory safe language.

The War Against Indiscipline

superdisk — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 14:45:31 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Against_Indiscipline

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45568874

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by superdisk in "Hundreds lose water source in Colorado's poorest county with no notice"

superdisk — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 16:05:49 +0000

This was the standard of South Africa as well not too long ago. I was just musing that it's funny how quick you get acclimated to complete dysfunction.

New comment by superdisk in "Hundreds lose water source in Colorado's poorest county with no notice"

superdisk — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 16:03:20 +0000

Kind of funny that this warrants a news article. I've been living in South Africa for the last couple years and this is basically just normal. The municipality just doesn't pay the water bill, so we don't have water half the time. What everyone does is install a giant tank and pump at their house so they can shower when the water is out. How quickly you get used to it...

New comment by superdisk in "I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform"

superdisk — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 19:03:14 +0000

You can tell it's fake by the LinkedIn-y prose, which is always short sentences followed by a "mic drop moment."