Hacker News: vsl

New comment by vsl in "Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others"

vsl — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 16:35:07 +0000

Dropped Backblaze over this when I learned about it in December (https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/12/19/backblaze-no-longer-backs...) and went to Arq. Not as polished, especially on Windows, but works and is actually cheaper.

New comment by vsl in "Samsung Magician disk utility takes 18 steps and two reboots to uninstall"

vsl — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 05:37:39 +0000

The author is an unreliable narrator. The very first thing, the location of the script, can’t possibly be true (the app itself won’t be in per-user support data directory). They conflate things, they definitely don’t know enough about macOS to know to use sudo. I mean, they even rant about bog standard localization files…

New comment by vsl in "How I write software with LLMs"

vsl — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 11:02:36 +0000

You improve this skill by not using LLMs more and getting more experienced as a programmer yourself. Spotting problems during review comes from experience, from having learned the lessons, knowing the codebase and libraries used etc.

New comment by vsl in "No right to relicense this project"

vsl — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 06:37:49 +0000

The LLM would, under that argument, be a transformative derivative work, which has important fair use implications (that don’t exist in the chardet case)…

New comment by vsl in "MessageFormat: Unicode standard for localizable message strings"

vsl — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 15:56:55 +0000

> IMHO pluralization is a prime example, with an API that only cleanly handles the English case

That’s not true at all? Gettext is functionally limited to source code being English (or alike). It handles all translation languages just fine, and competently so.

What is doesn’t have is MessageFormat’s gender selectors (useful) or formatting (arguably not really, strays from translations to locales and is better solvable with placeholders and locale-aware formatting code).

> fully in the translator's hands.

That is a problem that gettext doesn’t suffer from. You can’t reasonably expect translators to write correct DSL expressions.

New comment by vsl in "Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions"

vsl — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 21:36:52 +0000

Because GHA was stagnant and expensive and multiple services like https://www.warpbuild.com/ popped up, with better performance and much lower price. Looks like they ate enough of GH’s lunch…

New comment by vsl in "I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me"

vsl — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 13:01:12 +0000

Yeah, the joys of mass ignorance.

- Barely literate native English speakers not comprehending even minimally sophisticated grammatical constructs.

- Windows-centric people not understanding that you can trivially type em-dash (well, en-dash, but people don’t understand the difference either) on Mac by typing - twice.

New comment by vsl in "Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025 post mortem"

vsl — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 10:25:03 +0000

> Why did they think this was a cyberattack and only after two hours realize it was the config file?

They explain that at some length in TFA.

New comment by vsl in "Tesla is at risk of losing subsidies in Korea over widespread battery failures"

vsl — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 16:18:19 +0000

The opposite actually: the market is growing, only Tesla sales are shrinking:

https://electrek.co/2025/09/25/tesla-tsla-down-22-europe-whi...

New comment by vsl in "The Mac app flea market"

vsl — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 06:16:31 +0000

> Apple tells you why they rejected the app, and you correct the problem and resubmit.

Such as, elsewhere in this thread, app for viewing HealthKit data “unnecessarily using HealthKit”?

App Store rejections are arbitrary bullshit most of the time. We stopped shipping through MAS because of that and went direct-only, the 30% wasn’t even part of the decision; the bullshit and broken sandbox were.

New comment by vsl in "Show HN: Base, an SQLite database editor for macOS"

vsl — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 15:12:53 +0000

Polish and decent UI...

New comment by vsl in "Apple's Liquid Glass: When Aesthetics Beat Function"

vsl — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 13:18:16 +0000

Beta 3 walked it back and added frosting.

Beta 4 went back again.

As for being "sure" Apple will find the right balance, they never fixed usability regressions in macOS introduced in the last redesign. And they have ~10 weeks to fix all this.

New comment by vsl in "Show HN: Most users won't report bugs unless you make it stupidly easy"

vsl — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 06:17:53 +0000

That’s security though, not mere bugs.

New comment by vsl in "Link Time Optimizations: New Way to Do Compiler Optimizations"

vsl — Wed, 21 May 2025 16:41:37 +0000

...or in 2020 (the year of the article).

New comment by vsl in "Ground control to Major Trial"

vsl — Sat, 17 May 2025 06:53:29 +0000

Give DeepL Writer a try.

New comment by vsl in "Ground control to Major Trial"

vsl — Sat, 17 May 2025 05:49:58 +0000

Same. Large companies keep freeloading and ask for support. They buy a single personal license and share it among employees. And it’s not some small shops from poor countries, where you can understand it, it’s (often German) enterprises…

New comment by vsl in "Wise refuses to let us access our $60k AUD"

vsl — Wed, 14 May 2025 07:56:06 +0000

...and Wise support became utterly terrible a few years back. I mean "failing basic reading comprehension" terrible, the level of incompetence shown in this article is par for the course.

New comment by vsl in "Wise refuses to let us access our $60k AUD"

vsl — Wed, 14 May 2025 07:44:05 +0000

> Might be an EU thing, though.

So is Wise:

> All investment services are provided by Wise Assets Europe AS, incorporated in Estonia under registration number 16267372. Wise Assets Europe AS is authorised and regulated as an investment firm by the Estonian Financial Supervision and Resolution Authority under licence number 4.1-1/174. The registered address is Veerenni 24, 10135 Tallinn, Estonia.

New comment by vsl in "Why Even Try If You Have A.I.?"

vsl — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 08:01:35 +0000

But people treat them as if they could. You can already see them using LLM output as "proof" in discussions...

New comment by vsl in "Use Long Options in Scripts"

vsl — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 05:05:52 +0000

Major ones are enough. Linux and Darwin (that is, macOS and GNU userspace, really) differ sufficiently that you need to pay attention or limit yourself to POSIX. E.g. sed and wc burned me a few times with scripts that need to run on both.