Hacker News: tiddles

New comment by tiddles in "I made a real-time C/C++/Rust build visualizer"

tiddles — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 18:54:55 +0000

Nice, I’ve been looking for something like this for a while.

I’ve noticed on my huge catkin cmake project that cmake is checking the existence of the same files hundreds of times too. Is there anything that can hook into fork() and provide a cached value after the first invocation?

New comment by tiddles in "GPTs and Feeling Left Behind"

tiddles — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 07:38:10 +0000

Code is a liability. When I let a LLM take the wheel, I end up with thousands of lines of crappy abstractions and needless comments and strange patterns that take way more brain power to understand than if I did it myself.

My current workflow has reverted to primitive copy paste into web chat (via Kagi Assistant). The friction is enough to make me put a lot of thought into each prompt and how much code context I give it (gathered via files-to-prompt from simonw).

I have little experience with frontend and web apps, so I am trying out a supervised vibe coding flow. I give most of the code base per prompt, ask for a single feature, then read the code output fully and iterate on it a few times to reduce aforementioned bad patterns. Normally I will then type it out myself, or at most copy a few snippets of tens of lines.

What doesn’t work I found is asking for the full file with changes applied already. Not only does it take a long time and waste tokens, it normally breaks/truncates/rewords unrelated code.

So far I’m happy with how this project is going. I am familiar with all the code as I have audited and typed it out nearly entirely myself. I am actually retaining some knowledge and learning new concepts (reactive state with VanJS) and have confidence I can maintain this project even without an LLM in future, which includes handing it over to colleagues :)

New comment by tiddles in "Show HN: Jaws – a JavaScript to WASM ahead-of-time compiler"

tiddles — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 06:21:36 +0000

Probably 10 at most.

New comment by tiddles in "Show HN: Jaws – a JavaScript to WASM ahead-of-time compiler"

tiddles — Sun, 10 Nov 2024 09:40:02 +0000

What worked for me in Estonia was to find a C++ job (robotics) then gradually push for Rust as I gained seniority and autonomy. Now maybe 70% of the code I write is Rust, both robot side and backend :)

New comment by tiddles in "Ask HN: What work/office purchase transformed your life?"

tiddles — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 15:36:54 +0000

I have been trying out a trackball as a mouse replacement only. I will try this setup, nice idea

New comment by tiddles in "Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better"

tiddles — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 11:12:51 +0000

I’m having this problem now. I want to publish a post about recent months of progress on my project, but while writing it I found the solution isn’t complete and still has some flaws, so I feel I must put some more weeks of work into the code first before I can publish the post…

I’m trying to practice writing “this doesn’t work yet” acknowledging in the post that it isn’t fully done, and publishing the bloody thing. We will see how it works next time I sit down to write!

New comment by tiddles in "Ask HN: What is your preferred domain registrar?"

tiddles — Sun, 13 Aug 2023 06:38:08 +0000

iwantmyname.com, because I couldn’t find anywhere else that would sell .ms domains for cheap. Never had a problem with them

New comment by tiddles in "Show HN: OPML list of Hacker News Users Personal Blogs"

tiddles — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 16:56:50 +0000

Me too, added now!

New comment by tiddles in "Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?"

tiddles — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 05:05:51 +0000

https://domwillia.ms I write about Rust and game engine development while slowly working towards a Dwarf Fortress-like game.

New comment by tiddles in "Ask HN: What projects did you build to get better as a programmer?"

tiddles — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 05:42:42 +0000

I wrote game engine after game engine with various languages and designs. Somehow I’m still motivated today to rewrite navigation in my 15th engine for the 3rd time.

New comment by tiddles in "Estonia: Become an E-Resident"

tiddles — Thu, 17 Nov 2022 11:58:11 +0000

Yep, moved to Tallinn from England for work 6 months ago. Being a software engineer classes you as a “top specialist” so getting a visa and residence permit was very straightforward.

It really is a beautiful country. And today is the first day of snow :)

New comment by tiddles in "Fixing an ancient GDB problem"

tiddles — Fri, 30 Sep 2022 10:46:06 +0000

Great suggestion, thanks. I’m sick of the program output constantly screwing up the tui.

New comment by tiddles in "Ask HN: Have you ever had a changed-your-life moment?"

tiddles — Wed, 27 Jul 2022 13:13:57 +0000

I remember reading your post about this a few years ago, when I was first considering moving abroad!

Glad it’s going well for you. I have recently taken the plunge and moved to Estonia :)

New comment by tiddles in "The Lazy Monad"

tiddles — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 09:19:25 +0000

It is, after all, just a monoid in the category of endofunctors.

New comment by tiddles in "Ask HN: How do you keep track of your to-dos? longer-term projects?"

tiddles — Sun, 24 Apr 2022 20:56:37 +0000

For my long term side project I just dump ideas into a barely organised backlog.md [^1]. After finishing a feature or taking a few months away, I normally dive back in by browsing this and choosing the next milestone.

It's worked well for a couple of years, and helps me keep the long term goals in mind.

[^1] https://github.com/DomWilliams0/name-needed/blob/develop/.pl...

New comment by tiddles in "Ask HN: Share your personal site"

tiddles — Thu, 07 Apr 2022 08:47:03 +0000

https://domwillia.ms

I write about Rust side projects occasionally.

It uses a custom static site generator because I needed to procrastinate somehow before starting the first post... Now it's nicely stable and punishing new posts is quick and easy

New comment by tiddles in "An update on recent service disruptions"

tiddles — Thu, 24 Mar 2022 07:05:48 +0000

Very interesting, thanks for sharing. I didn't know I wanted to understand how ticker names are implemented until now!

New comment by tiddles in "Show HN: FUSE Filesystem for Manipulating Minecraft"

tiddles — Sat, 05 Mar 2022 19:14:12 +0000

Author here, this was a fun side project as an excuse to mess around with FUSE, Rust and Kotlin.

I've written a blog post covering the technical details: https://domwillia.ms/minecraft-fs

Show HN: FUSE Filesystem for Manipulating Minecraft

tiddles — Sat, 05 Mar 2022 19:11:03 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/DomWilliams0/minecraft-fs

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30570814

Points: 14

# Comments: 3

New comment by tiddles in "How to speed up the Rust compiler in 2022"

tiddles — Fri, 25 Feb 2022 08:10:37 +0000

These posts are always a pleasure to read. it's great to see continuous work on improving compiler performance, and especially with good results too.