Hacker News: tkcranny

New comment by tkcranny in "I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack"

tkcranny — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 08:02:30 +0000

There’s a lot to be said about his approach with go for simplicity. Python needs virtual environments, package managers, dependencies on disk, a wsgi/asgi server to run forked copies of the server, and all of that uses 4x-20x the ram usage of go. Docker usually gets involved around here and before you know it you’re neck deep in helm charts and cursing CNI configs in an EKS cluster.

The go equivalent of just coping one file across to a server a restarting its process has a lot of appeal and clearly works well for him.

New comment by tkcranny in "Apple Exclaves and the Secure Design of the Neo's On-Screen Camera Indicator"

tkcranny — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 21:12:23 +0000

> It runs in a privileged environment separate from the kernel and blits the light directly onto the screen hardware.

That explains how it can still be safe from even kernel-level exploits. Neat approach, and it works for the microphone light too.

New comment by tkcranny in "Too much color: how many decimal places do you need?"

tkcranny — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 23:13:34 +0000

Their working is exceptionally thorough, all the concerns about additional maths and transformations is well considered. I really have to wonder if introducing any semantic-changing transformations for what I’m guessing are minuscule savings of bytes is worth it though. Safe things like stripping white space and shortening identifiers would be the major contributors to minification surely. How many CSS colours need to be defined for oklab rounding to even affect how many tcp packets are sent for instance?

New comment by tkcranny in "What does " 2>&1 " mean?"

tkcranny — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 22:57:58 +0000

Python too under the hood, a lot of its core is still from how it started as a quick way to do unixy/C things.

New comment by tkcranny in "Apple introduces new AirTag with longer range and improved findability"

tkcranny — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 05:17:39 +0000

I don’t lose bags either, but airlines do. The AirTag let me tell United which building in Houston in ended up in (after getting lost at SFO), and refute their gaslighting multiple times that it was heading my way. Worth its weight in gold, literally.

New comment by tkcranny in "The Quiet Power of SQL"

tkcranny — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 03:24:28 +0000

While it’s hardly insightful that SQL is useful, I would have liked to read more about what the actual workload involving duckdb on a local machine looked like. I’m fully on board that local or single vm workloads can do an awful lot, but I’ve never been particularly satisfied with the pipelines I’ve seen (including my own). Usually they’re piles of scripts and intermediate data files sitting around and are hard to make idempotent and understand if you aren’t the author.

Also fwiw there’s no such thing as an M4 Ultra chip. That detail was either a mistake or hallucinated.

New comment by tkcranny in "Enjoy CarPlay While You Still Can"

tkcranny — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 21:57:05 +0000

I’ve spent a lot of time with both, and hands down the wired one is far more flakey. Granted I think that’s more a Mazda software issue, but a solid 10% of the time I get “CarPlay failed” and the only way to fix it is to turn the car on and off. Never once had an issue with wireless in a Hyundai.

New comment by tkcranny in "Django 6.0 beta 1 released"

tkcranny — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 20:23:12 +0000

Looks like Django 6 is getting an offical task system.

There’s no real world brokers or workers supported (at least built in), but still centralising around a standard interface might make things nicer than the celery tentacle monsters Django apps eventually tend to mutate into.

New comment by tkcranny in "Python 3.14.0 is now available"

tkcranny — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 00:43:25 +0000

Introducing JIT features has a lot of opportunities beyond numerical numpy/numba vectorisation. There’s endless amounts of hot loops, data shuffling, garbage collection, and monomorphisation that could be done in real world python that would benefit a lot, much like V8 has done for JS.

New comment by tkcranny in "Python 3.14.0 is now available"

tkcranny — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 00:37:41 +0000

The release has a pretty cute logo of the snakes eating a pie: https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3140/

New comment by tkcranny in "How does lossless compression in Fuji RAF files work? (2020)"

tkcranny — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 20:10:05 +0000

It’s true that phones cameras are miracles of technology, especially considering their size. But I take a modern Fuji traveling because the modern phone camera look is so over-processed and distinct. There’s no faking the real optics a large aperture and sensor gives, the portrait mode on phones is still a poor imitation of the real thing.

Fuji then has the whole film simulation system with all their colour science from the last century. It’s a ton of fun, and the jpgs it produces are distinct and beautiful, and I believe better than 99% of people could achieve from post processing the raws, myself included.

The middle-age guy part is accurate though, I got it as a thirtieth present.

New comment by tkcranny in "How Container Filesystem Works: Building a Docker-Like Container from Scratch"

tkcranny — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 21:31:19 +0000

Yeah it really was a social phenomena. Ten years ago conferences were swarmed with docker employees, swag, plenty of talks and excitement.

The effort to introduce the concepts to the mainstream can’t be understated. It seems mundane now but it took a lot of grassroots effort and marketing to hit that critical mass.

New comment by tkcranny in "Fast Type-Aware Linting in Oxlint"

tkcranny — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 00:56:21 +0000

Oxc js a rust toolkit made by Void0, the mob that makes vite and vitest. These are highly regarded and performant additions to the Js/Ts ecosystem.

Oxlint is a alternative to eslint built on Oxc. It has suffered from not supporting the additional level of type-based linting that typescript-eslint can provide. They’ve now addressed that by patching and wrapping Microsoft’s new go-based typescript compiler.

Hopefully they are up to the task of continually keeping up to date with the go compiler’s internals, and/or Microsoft exposes a programmatic interface for the new compiler’s parser and type-checking.

I also wonder if or how plugins will be possible for this go+rust combination linter – they’re a pretty important part of the eslint ecosystem they’re trying to upend.

New comment by tkcranny in "The Photographic Periodic Table of the Elements (2017)"

tkcranny — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 22:41:41 +0000

That site is misleading. Even putting aside regulations for many of the elements, everything after plutonium does not occur in nature and is made synthetically in individual atomic amounts that usually decay in hours to milliseconds. There is no way to see them, let alone sell them as a commercial product.

New comment by tkcranny in "Eliminating JavaScript cold starts on AWS Lambda"

tkcranny — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 10:53:25 +0000

It’s a TS/JS to wasm to C tool chain, that runs the same JS a dozen times faster than on node. Very cool approach, and lambda cold starts are definitely where it ought to shine.

That said I wonder if it could ever go mainstream – JS is not a trivial language anymore. Matching all of its quirks to the point of being stable seems like a monstrous task. And then Node and all of its APIs are the gorilla in the room too. Even Deno had to acquiesce and replicate those with bugs and all, and it’s just based on V8 too.

New comment by tkcranny in "Modern Node.js Patterns"

tkcranny — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 22:32:40 +0000

It has native TS and JSX support, excellent spy, module, and DOM mocking, benchmarking, works with vite configs, and parallelises tests to be really fast.

New comment by tkcranny in "Big Data was used to see if TCM was scientific (2023)"

tkcranny — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 22:25:41 +0000

You know what they call alternative medicine that's been proved to work? - Medicine.

—Tim Minchin

New comment by tkcranny in "Dict Unpacking in Python"

tkcranny — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 04:35:07 +0000

I don’t mind the distinction of it as a map container keeping dot properties/methods separate from the keyed values. But yeah the endless string quoting is painful coming back from JS, bare key literals in constructors like JS would be a welcome addition for sure, as would named key unpacking like this whole post is about.

New comment by tkcranny in "Dict Unpacking in Python"

tkcranny — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 04:31:23 +0000

Yeah I had totally forgotten about this. I remember seeing it around a bit in the python 2 days when UTF-8 wasn’t always assumed. The fact a ~macro system can be bolted on using this is impressive, hilarious, and shockingly terrible.

New comment by tkcranny in "A 37-year-old wanting to learn computer science"

tkcranny — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 05:08:01 +0000

Respectfully I disagree. I believe what Dijkstra is getting at is that the specifics of modern computers aren’t “relevant” at all. Ultimately it’s the science of information and whats computable. Be that a modern day silicon processor at X gigahertz, a pen and paper, or a universe sized computer, that’s irrelevant for the science itself.