Hacker News: urxvtcd

New comment by urxvtcd in "Monad Tutorials Timeline"

urxvtcd — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 09:57:49 +0000

Yeah, would like to know as well. I think the applicative functor was originally call "Idiom", another weird name.

New comment by urxvtcd in "Coffee with a splash of physics: how to make the most out of your brew"

urxvtcd — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:19:16 +0000

For an entire book about the topic, see "The physics of filter coffee" by Jonathan Gagné.

Also

> This can be achieved using an espresso machine (figure 1), or with smaller contraptions at much lower pressures such as a moka pot or AeroPress.

Please, just stop. They're not even remotely close.

New comment by urxvtcd in "Drunk post: Things I've learned as a senior engineer (2021)"

urxvtcd — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 07:38:13 +0000

Retirement accounts are a thing in Europe though. In Poland for example there's IKE and IKZE. IKE is a bit simpler of the two. If you hold your money on IKE until you're 60 you're not paying taxes on that. Can invest in stocks or bonds.

New comment by urxvtcd in "Laws of Software Engineering"

urxvtcd — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 14:06:07 +0000

Well, ackchyually, you can not pick P, it's just not cheap. You could imagine a network behaving like a motherboard really.

New comment by urxvtcd in "10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips"

urxvtcd — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 15:42:04 +0000

There's a Polish electronics forum that's infamous because it's kind of actively hostile to them noobs. "Blacklisted power supply, closing thread." is a micro meme at this point.

New comment by urxvtcd in "MacBook Neo"

urxvtcd — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 13:31:22 +0000

But is the system choking? Or, are you certain it would choke with half the RAM you have? It's a well know thing that OS will book majority of the RAM you have and that's actually not a problem at all.

New comment by urxvtcd in "A beginner's guide to split keyboards"

urxvtcd — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 10:08:34 +0000

What gets me the most is that all the "correct typing posture" images seem to indicate that it's best to keep the keyboard low, close to you, elbows bent around 90 degrees. In this position the palms are naturally positioned so thumbs are pointing up, and you need to force the palms to be level with the keyboard (that's pronation/supination if I recall correctly). That's just madness to me, I can't last more than few minutes in that position.

New comment by urxvtcd in "Sumerian Star Map Recorded the Impact of an Asteroid (2024)"

urxvtcd — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 10:43:38 +0000

Eh, so too good to be true.

New comment by urxvtcd in "Sumerian Star Map Recorded the Impact of an Asteroid (2024)"

urxvtcd — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 09:12:29 +0000

We found an ancient tablet, dated it, reconstruded a long-dead language well enough to read it, reconstructed the night sky on that day, five and a half thousand years ago, found the orbit of this thing, and connected it to a geological formation thousands of kilometers away. Humans can do some amazing stuff.

New comment by urxvtcd in "In a genre where spoilers are devastating, how do we talk about puzzle games?"

urxvtcd — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 08:22:49 +0000

Baba is You is literally a sokoban for software engineers, highly recommended. It's quite difficult though.

New comment by urxvtcd in "A prediction market user made $436k betting on Maduro's downfall"

urxvtcd — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 22:13:57 +0000

Yeah, sorry for not being clear enough. I just struggle how a good faith market can even exist. I immediately start thinking how participants would be incentivized to cheat by neglecting or even introducing vulnerabilities to win. Maybe I’m just a bit too cynical and/or should do more reading on the topic.

New comment by urxvtcd in "A prediction market user made $436k betting on Maduro's downfall"

urxvtcd — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 08:06:30 +0000

How isn’t a knowledgeable person incentivized to find vulnerabilities but not disclose them?

New comment by urxvtcd in "Is it a bubble?"

urxvtcd — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 11:09:23 +0000

I wasn't around back then, but it must've been at least a bit crazy, considering Atwood threw an exception (heh) high enough to write a blog entry about it. What I think has happened is that with functional programming concepts sort of permeating mainstream, and with the advent of languages like Go and Rust (which I wouldn't exactly call low-level, for different reasons), treating errors as values is nothing unorthodox in principle. I'm not sure how real or prevalent this is really, just a guess.

I'm not trying to advocate going against the stream and not using exceptions in languages based around them, but I can see it being pulled off by a competent team, which I'm certain Joel could put together.

New comment by urxvtcd in "The highest quality codebase"

urxvtcd — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 10:37:39 +0000

Few weeks ago I'd disagree with you, but recently I've been struggling with concentration and motivation and now I kind of try to embrace coding with AI. I guide it pretty strictly, try to stick with pure functions, and always read the output thoroughly. In a couple of places requiring some carefulness I coded them in executable pseudocode (Python) and made AI translate it to the more boilerplate-y target language.

I don't know if I'm any faster than I would be if I was motivated, but I'm A LOT more productive in my current state. I still hope for the next AI winter though.

New comment by urxvtcd in "Is it a bubble?"

urxvtcd — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 08:43:42 +0000

First time reading this. It's actually funny how disliking exceptions seemed crazy then but it's pretty normal now. And writing a new programming language for a certain product, well, it could turn out to be pretty cool, right? It's how we get all those Elms and so on.

New comment by urxvtcd in "Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?"

urxvtcd — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 15:18:02 +0000

If AI is such a competitive advantage, why are AI companies even trying to sell it? Wouldn't it bring more money to use a bleeding edge internal model and just vibe a couple of facebooks at the fraction of the cost and profit like crazy?

New comment by urxvtcd in "Simplify your code: Functional core, imperative shell"

urxvtcd — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 16:01:42 +0000

May I ask you how you model your functional code in Python, in absence of Haskell's algebraic data types?

New comment by urxvtcd in "Simplify your code: Functional core, imperative shell"

urxvtcd — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 07:19:48 +0000

I have written a small system in Elixir adhering to FCIS. Not used to the approach, I was pretty slow and sometimes it felt like jumping through hoops set by myself, lol, but I loved it, the code was very clean, testable, and refactorable. Highly recommend it as an exercise, it was surprising just how much state and IO can be pushed out.

New comment by urxvtcd in "The elegance of movement in Silksong"

urxvtcd — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 10:16:47 +0000

Yeah, N++ is super floaty, there's A LOT of inertia. It might feel off at the beginning, but when you get the hang of it, it's just beautiful. It's the opposite of twitchy. You work to preserve the momentum through jumps and corners and evasion maneuvers, it's got that sleek race-y feel. I get it, it's not for everyone, but for me it's bonkers good.

New comment by urxvtcd in "Stop writing CLI validation. Parse it right the first time"

urxvtcd — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 22:30:56 +0000

I’ll go one step further: what makes you think it’s an average auto-translate job? I didn’t notice anything weird, felt like your average, slightly ranty HN post. I’m not a native speaker though.