Hacker News: wffurr

New comment by wffurr in "Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)"

wffurr — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 20:12:00 +0000

I have a lot of gripes with Apple's various design decisions over the years, but they're at least consistent across their apps, which is the point of TFA.

Mystery gesture navigation is also now on by default and terrible on Android, too. It's awful with children or older folks (or even me!) who trigger it by accident all the time. Some of it I was able to disable on my children's iPads. It's still frustrating that easy to accidentally trigger but impossible to discover gestures are the default and also frustrating that we have the very last iPad generation with a button.

New comment by wffurr in "Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)"

wffurr — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 20:07:12 +0000

The number of JavaScript dropdown replacements that don't work correctly with the keyboard is stunning. It always amazes me how many forms fail at this basic usability aspect. The browser has homogeneous form controls built in, just use them!

New comment by wffurr in "One item purchased, Ten emails"

wffurr — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 18:45:35 +0000

I've internalized the delete shortcut in gmail and configured one of the swipe directions in the app to be delete. For a long time, I archived every email, but there's so much crap like this now to wade through.

I also discovered that a busy local mailing list was sending images as attachments that counted against my quota, so even more incentive to delete instead of archive.

New comment by wffurr in "Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones"

wffurr — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 14:13:44 +0000

>> Like imagine if you were at the grocery store, blocking the isle and someone lightly chimed a bell at you

That sounds delightful. We should have more bells lightly chimed around us.

New comment by wffurr in "How to turn anything into a router"

wffurr — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 14:37:02 +0000

The idle power usage on those is atrocious compared to say an Intel N100 or an Arm system.

New comment by wffurr in "LG's new 1Hz display is the secret behind a new laptop's battery life"

wffurr — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 23:03:29 +0000

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/lg-display-starts-ma... is a better article but LG is light on details of their new proprietary display tech.

New comment by wffurr in "Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case"

wffurr — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 13:19:49 +0000

As a parent, the only solution is sticking to ad-free subscription services. PBS is a godsend here, but there's other good options out there too. Tragic that the public broadcasting funding was cut when there's clear harms in the free* commercial options.

*Except for your time and mental health of course

New comment by wffurr in "Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids"

wffurr — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 14:40:05 +0000

I was going to say Nomorobo fixes this, but it's not supported on most landlines anymore.

New comment by wffurr in "Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids"

wffurr — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 14:26:58 +0000

I'm missing the benefit to this over just adding on phone service to my cable internet bill.

New comment by wffurr in "Waymo Safety Impact"

wffurr — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 21:17:10 +0000

Presumably that was the submitter's choice.

New comment by wffurr in "Waymo Safety Impact"

wffurr — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 21:16:01 +0000

If you ride conservatively (use lights at night, use good judgement at intersections) and stay away from buses and trucks, the exercise vastly outweighs any risk.

New comment by wffurr in "Afroman found not liable in defamation case"

wffurr — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 17:24:09 +0000

I don't think you understand what "de-escalation" is. It's not ignoring antisocial behavior or failing to confront people.

New comment by wffurr in "Get Shit Done: A meta-prompting, context engineering and spec-driven dev system"

wffurr — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 15:47:06 +0000

There was a post from Apenwarr[1] recently that gave it a name: "the AI Developer’s Descent Into Madness", ending with "I need an agent framework. I can have my agent write an agent framework!"

[1]: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20260316

New comment by wffurr in "Making WebAssembly a first-class language on the Web"

wffurr — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 13:32:54 +0000

JVM bytecode didn't have support for C and required GC. Even in the early days it was a lot heavier than Wasm.

New comment by wffurr in "Making WebAssembly a first-class language on the Web"

wffurr — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 13:31:22 +0000

Can you use WTF-16 for strings in your language?

New comment by wffurr in "Lego's 0.002mm specification and its implications for manufacturing (2025)"

wffurr — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 18:05:22 +0000

When I was a kid and I got a new set, I would build it according to the instructions, play with it, and then disassemble it and sort it into my brick collection. Occasionally I would get the instructions back out and re-build it, and other times I would kitbash and make random cool stuff.

My parents still have all my Legos from the 90s, including the instructions, and I've been able to rebuild a bunch of the space ships with translucent neon accents. It's pretty sweet and my kids love it.

New comment by wffurr in "EVi, a Hard-Fork of Vim"

wffurr — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 12:37:54 +0000

A cursory search didn't turn anything up in the vim repo or elsewhere. I can see why the authors of the fork wouldn't want to stir up drama, but I am really curious too.

New comment by wffurr in "EVi, a Hard-Fork of Vim"

wffurr — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 12:34:41 +0000

I would guess it means they accepted AI generated submissions into the vim codebase.

There's a discussion in the EVi repo about needing to find people who know vimscript. Funny enough, I am planning to use contributing some vimscript to an extension as my first AI coding agent project partly because I don't know vimscript well. Although that does mean it'll be hard to critically evaluate the output. I can compare it to the rest of the code in the extension at least to make sure it fits the style.

New comment by wffurr in "The hidden compile-time cost of C++26 reflection"

wffurr — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 12:23:28 +0000

There are no zero cost abstractions: https://youtu.be/rHIkrotSwcc?si=oSBlKG9M_Ey8sVIU

New comment by wffurr in "The window chrome of our discontent"

wffurr — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 20:53:53 +0000

>> For the past decade, UX designers have fetishized flat, monochrome, low-contrast designs with zero visual cues or opportunities for feature discovery

Yeah but why? Is it just a design trend? Is it just fashion? Or is there some underlying reason why it went this way?