Hacker News: tnelsond4

New comment by tnelsond4 in "Show HN: I built 184 free browser tools – PDF, image, dev, AI tasks, no upload"

tnelsond4 — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 14:57:53 +0000

Probably. But at least it's useful and runs locally. Better than all the predatory apps that you have to download 100mbs to do something this website can do instantly without downloading anything or sending anything to a server.

New comment by tnelsond4 in "Python dev saved from disaster by intuition...and AI"

tnelsond4 — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 22:31:58 +0000

Yeah, now anyone can write really long impressive code with a sophisticated backdoor by using AI.

Can't trust anything anymore. (Not that I ever did trust npm)

New comment by tnelsond4 in "I'm 15. I spent the last three years building a programming language"

tnelsond4 — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 13:28:00 +0000

I'm amazed by how in-depth the documentation is. Usually projects struggle to get decent docs. (Unless the docs are LLM generated). I'm not sure what's better, the design or the docs.

Like you said in your backstory, it's an awful shame to work so hard on something and have it get absolutely no attention.

I haven't tried out any of the code yet, but I'm curious enough to maybe try it sometime, especially since it has a robust FFI already. I had just uninstalled rust because I'm more of an old school C guy and don't like writing "safe" code.

New comment by tnelsond4 in "I'm 15. I spent the last three years building a programming language"

tnelsond4 — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 13:13:38 +0000

So you used rust to write a better rust? I'm just kidding. Looks like a real interesting language with some good features without being verbose or ugly.

The backstory is interesting, though I wish it covered more the rationale behind the language and the thought-process that went into its design.

I especially like that track covers everything from switch statements to if-else statements in a nice concise way.

Curious if the 1 based arrays get confusing in @low mode.

As far as the benchmarks go, I didn't see, was there any other languages compared?

New comment by tnelsond4 in "Show HN: Pilang – A scripting language and VM written in C"

tnelsond4 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 13:49:17 +0000

Very interesting and polished. I see that it's got a regex engine written in Pilang as well. I'm curious if there's any benchmarks or comparisons. I'd like to see how big the runtime is, etc.

New comment by tnelsond4 in "The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML (2021)"

tnelsond4 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 15:56:12 +0000

With a 17kb jbig2 decoder all you need is a few one-bit images (a page of a book scan) for it to save bandwidth.

With a 60kb codec2 decoder you need about 2 minutes of audio to start saving.

But the target is dictionary apps with thousands of seconds of audio and thousands of images.

New comment by tnelsond4 in "Emacs appearances in pop culture"

tnelsond4 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:35:19 +0000

I think you mean Ed, the standard editor.

New comment by tnelsond4 in "The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML (2021)"

tnelsond4 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:28:44 +0000

http://Bellard.org is peak web design. Change my mind.

New comment by tnelsond4 in "The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML (2021)"

tnelsond4 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:19:23 +0000

You can also get really small file sizes by ignoring frameworks and porting unsupported codecs to wasm.

I ported jbig2 (17kb uncompressed) and codec2 (60kb uncompressed) to wasm which enables me to use really small image and audio files in my web app. I also made a custom read only database and search engine with built-in zstd decompressor (39kb uncompressed). It probably wouldn't run on a psp though.

I like optimizing and making things small. I want to use neural audio codecs for even better compression but the model sizes and compute complexity are major hurdles and muddy the vision.

New comment by tnelsond4 in "Life is too short for a slow terminal"

tnelsond4 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:18:00 +0000

I was so disappointed that Ghostty doesn't properly render Khmer text. Abugidas are important and you have to be able to render the symbols non-linearly. Cosmic term is the only terminal I've seen that actually works. But it's a bit slow on my 14 year old laptop.

Kitty doesn't work, alacrity doesn't work, foot doesn't work, gnome terminal doesn't work, xfce terminal doesn't work, urxvt doesn't work, xterm doesn't work, the list goes on.

New comment by tnelsond4 in "OOP Principles That Will Take You Far"

tnelsond4 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 14:52:37 +0000

Oop is just Unix philosophy misapplied. Unix philosophy is that each program does one thing and you chain them together. In OOP you have each class do one thing, but at that scale it can become very messy.

New comment by tnelsond4 in "For the Nation's Birthday, Making It Harder to Become an American"

tnelsond4 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 14:48:50 +0000

The whole period of Obama's presidency was also skipped.

The largest Muslim country in the world is Indonesia, it's quite odd that it wasn't included in Trump's Muslim ban. Obama's administration was the one that made the list of the seven countries that were banned before Trump even became president.

New comment by tnelsond4 in "Announcing Zstandard in Rust"

tnelsond4 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 07:32:15 +0000

39kb includes the zstd decoder which is statically compiled into it. I'm not targeting microcontrollers, but I am targeting smartphones in areas with bad internet connections, so every kilobyte saved is nice. I also just like to optimize things and make them minimal while still being powerful. I don't handle tls, GitHub pages handles all that, I'm just using it to host a static pwa.

New comment by tnelsond4 in "How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown"

tnelsond4 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:12:05 +0000

If it uses indexedb under the hood, indexedb is ridiculously slow on first write but subsequent loads are very fast, if you're loading data you would have to load it via some other method first before putting it in indexedb, in order to make it fast.

Linear is 21mb of minified JavaScript which is an awful lot. I made a dictionary progressive web app recently that just needed read only databases, so I rolled my own simple system complete with zstd compression all in a 38kb wasm module.

New comment by tnelsond4 in "Announcing Zstandard in Rust"

tnelsond4 — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 12:32:57 +0000

I was using the original zstd rust crate for my web app, but I couldn't get my module any smaller than 150kb, but when I switched to C for web app I was able to do a whole lot of optimizing and culling until I got it down to 39kb.

I wanted to like Rust, but I was using unsafe code for performance and such anyway that it made more sense to switch to C.

New comment by tnelsond4 in "I Love Meta Platforms"

tnelsond4 — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 05:28:00 +0000

I too love meta. My feed is only my friends and people I follow. It's definitely not 90% sponsored posts.

New comment by tnelsond4 in "Keep AI Weird"

tnelsond4 — Sun, 31 May 2026 07:21:06 +0000

With the sans serif font I assumed it was someone complaining that Weird Al Yankovic was normal now or changing his name.

New comment by tnelsond4 in "Dusklight – GC Twilight Princess Decompiled"

tnelsond4 — Sat, 30 May 2026 21:52:18 +0000

This isn't just a decompilation, this is a full port. Even supports Android.

New comment by tnelsond4 in "I love my Bluetooth keyboard"

tnelsond4 — Mon, 25 May 2026 23:21:56 +0000

iOS doesn't allow for native code execution (or JIT compilers) in apps like Android does (they don't like anything that could be used for sideloading) so the termux equivalents are ridiculously slow. I tried using ffmpeg on someone's ipad one time and it went so slow (about 100 times slower) that I ended up launching a web server, downloading the file to my phone and running ffmpeg there and then transferring it back.

New comment by tnelsond4 in "I love my Bluetooth keyboard"

tnelsond4 — Mon, 25 May 2026 07:00:23 +0000

If you get an Android you can use termux and do literally anything. I like to write websites, write newsletters in vim and run a jekyll instance, transcode video with ffmpeg, etc.