Hacker News: w4rh4wk5

New comment by w4rh4wk5 in "My favorite keyboards"

w4rh4wk5 — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 09:47:03 +0000

For anyone interested in a single-body, low-profile mechanical keyboard with a split layout, checkout PERIBOARD-335. Highly recommend it.

New comment by w4rh4wk5 in "Photo GIMP – A Patch for GIMP 3 for Photoshop Users"

w4rh4wk5 — Tue, 19 May 2026 11:49:02 +0000

I highly doubt that. Photoshop, even for 95% of users, is pretty heavy on non-destructive editing. GIMP did not have that for a very long time and is no where near feature parity today AFAIK.

Don't get me wrong, Photoshop sucks hard, Adobe as a company even more, but on a technical level most Photoshop users cannot transition to GIMP.

Edit: Although, I have to highlight that GIMP has made noticeable progress within the last years. I can now, finally, group two layers together and apply a drop shadow effect to the group, which correctly applies to all layers within the group. It's been quite a while...

New comment by w4rh4wk5 in "Where to buy a non-Apple, non-Google smartphone"

w4rh4wk5 — Sat, 16 May 2026 16:33:07 +0000

At this point, I am thinking about connecting a stock Android phone to a server and access it via scrcpy from my laptop whenever I need to interact with some stupid app bs that could've just been a website.

At least this way I can keep the majority of bloat away from primary communications device.

New comment by w4rh4wk5 in "Cost of enum-to-string: C++26 reflection vs. the old ways"

w4rh4wk5 — Thu, 14 May 2026 14:39:49 +0000

Yeah, in my field this approach is pretty much infeasible.

Typically, I am given an ancient code base that is full of bad decisions, hard to read code and no tests in sight. Sometimes there are assertions, if I am lucky. It's impractical to create a reliably test suite, or rewrite everything from scratch.

Here, I heavily rely on a debugger just to make sense of the code. Sure, I'd wish that all of this code would just be sparkling clean, easy to read, free of UB, etc. But that's not the reality I work in, and good debugger is my number one tool getting the job done.

And don't even get me started on dealing with closed source implementations where all you could read is disassembly.

New comment by w4rh4wk5 in "Cost of enum-to-string: C++26 reflection vs. the old ways"

w4rh4wk5 — Thu, 14 May 2026 08:04:57 +0000

It's not that people are _still_ using debuggers; it's that people have actually discovered debuggers and workflows that are more productive than adding print statements, recompiling, and rerunning the program.

Casey has been talking about this some time ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzD_Ze6zFKA

Also, John Carmack's perspective: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/PRE51epznT8

New comment by w4rh4wk5 in "Cost of enum-to-string: C++26 reflection vs. the old ways"

w4rh4wk5 — Wed, 13 May 2026 13:30:10 +0000

I'd argue reflection is very much a feature for libraries. You wouldn't use it directly, but your JSON / YAML serialize is then built on top of it. So are your bindings for scripting engines like Lua.

New comment by w4rh4wk5 in "Googlebook"

w4rh4wk5 — Wed, 13 May 2026 13:09:37 +0000

IIRC Ubuntu provided this when they introduced Unity -- quite a long time ago. When the window is maximized the menubar was merged into the top panel, but when the window was not maximized it looked like a regular window with tilebar and menubar at the window's top.

Not long ago there was also a KDE extension to replicate this; however, since many GNOME apps moved away from menubars, this approach isn't that helpful anymore.

New comment by w4rh4wk5 in "Cost of enum-to-string: C++26 reflection vs. the old ways"

w4rh4wk5 — Wed, 13 May 2026 12:14:52 +0000

I've been wondering about debug-ability of code using reflection. X-Macros are quite annoying to step through in most debuggers, though possible. While the code in the first example is evaluated fully at compile-time, how would you approach debugging it?

New comment by w4rh4wk5 in "Googlebook"

w4rh4wk5 — Wed, 13 May 2026 11:00:05 +0000

The panel itself is not the problem, it's the lack of integration with windows. In GNOME, when you maximize a window, the title bar stacks underneath the top bar. If that window also happens to have a menubar (e.g. LibreOffice) that gets stack underneath as well.

This is just a lot of wasted space and makes the menubar harder to click, compared to having the menubar at the very top, next to the screen boundary.

New comment by w4rh4wk5 in "Clarification on the Notepad++ Trademark Issue"

w4rh4wk5 — Tue, 05 May 2026 18:48:57 +0000

I commonly hear people saying that, but then other people claiming this isn't true.

Is there a clear source for this mechanism?

New comment by w4rh4wk5 in "Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March"

w4rh4wk5 — Sun, 03 May 2026 13:00:19 +0000

DXVK works great for DirectX 11. However, it's rather annoying to debug through this intermediate layer. I wouldn't recommend this for development.

New comment by w4rh4wk5 in "Monad Tutorials Timeline"

w4rh4wk5 — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 10:55:28 +0000

From my experience having used Haskell (a long time ago), the main benefit of Monads is the `do` and <- syntax. Once you got your thing to satisfy the Monad interface, you unlocked the nice syntax for writing code. That, and compatibility with transformers.

Whether this is the best thing since sliced bread or not, is left as an exercise to the reader.

New comment by w4rh4wk5 in "I won't download your app. The web version is a-ok"

w4rh4wk5 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 15:48:47 +0000

I'd argue it's absolutely ludicrous to give _other people's information_ up to an app (or website). Your contacts contain names, phone numbers, potentially photos and addresses of _other people_.

New comment by w4rh4wk5 in "Neovim 0.12.0"

w4rh4wk5 — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 19:23:46 +0000

Multi cursor support in VSCode replaced 98% of my need for macros. Yes, macros are more powerful, but they are pretty easy to get wrong. With multiple cursors, it's far easier to spot where your inputs don't work out and adjust accordingly.

Multi cursor is the feature that increased my productivity the most across the board.

New comment by w4rh4wk5 in "Ghostling"

w4rh4wk5 — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 07:38:48 +0000

For completeness, there's also the somewhat common way of creating an object file directly from the binary using objcopy. The object file ends up with 3 symbols with names based on the input file. For instance, a binary file level0.map yields: _binary_level0_map_start, _binary_level0_map_end, _binary_level0_map_size.

These can be used in the application through external declarations; and you include the object file in the linking step, like any other object file.

New comment by w4rh4wk5 in "Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?"

w4rh4wk5 — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 21:35:43 +0000

Pretty much: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/file-roller/-/issues/4

New comment by w4rh4wk5 in "Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps"

w4rh4wk5 — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 20:16:05 +0000

I'll repeat my question from a while ago. Is the official Temu app, available on the Play Store, still full of questionable malware / spyware code?

If so, it's clear that none of these changes are actually to protect users.

New comment by w4rh4wk5 in "Why I love FreeBSD"

w4rh4wk5 — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 17:56:33 +0000

For someone who has multiple years of experience using Linux for desktop and servers, what's the best way to get into FreeBSD? Any specific recommendations for desktop, like is Wayland ready on FreeBSD?

New comment by w4rh4wk5 in "Ask HN: How to Learn C++ in 2026?"

w4rh4wk5 — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 06:16:17 +0000

I am part of a game dev focused Discord server where people regularly ask how to get into C++. Because of this (and similar) repeating questions I've put together this repository as a guide. Note that this is full of my personal opinions and experiences; feel free to disagree.

https://github.com/W4RH4WK/cpp-init

New comment by w4rh4wk5 in "Wired headphone sales are exploding"

w4rh4wk5 — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 16:24:19 +0000

Thanks for pointing this one out.

I am hesitant to buy Apple accessories like these as I am having quality concerns. Specifically the macbook chargers I've encountered are far less rigid than Lenovo Thinkpad chargers (at least before they switched to USB-C). I never felt Apple did a particularly good job with cables and connectors when it comes to longevity.