Hacker News: wmwragg

New comment by wmwragg in "Show HN: Brutalist Concrete Laptop Stand (2024)"

wmwragg — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:00:21 +0000

I believe it's this keyboard[1] from Posturite, but doing a web search for "Left-Side Numpad" of "Left handed keyboard" should show a few options.

[1] https://www.posturite.co.uk/left-handed-mechanical-keyboard

New comment by wmwragg in "The MacBook Neo"

wmwragg — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 21:13:46 +0000

Cheers, opening System Settings and then Option clicking Displays, did the trick and showed the rotation option for the built in display. It's mostly PDFs I'd be reading so might try the PDF reader option, as yeah, navigation using the trackpad after the screen rotates is challenging.

Edit: Just tried rotation in the built in MacOS Preview app, (Command+R or Command+L) and works really well. You do have to set the View to Single Page, and rotate each page separately (it does remember which pages were rotated), but other than that it's great.

New comment by wmwragg in "The MacBook Neo"

wmwragg — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 14:38:50 +0000

I believe that is only applicable for external displays, and I don't see the rotation option on my M1 MacBook Air, even if I Ctrl+Command click

New comment by wmwragg in "The MacBook Neo"

wmwragg — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 10:59:48 +0000

That sounds interesting, I might give it a go, but how do you rotate the screen, I can't see an option for it for the built in MacBook screen?

New comment by wmwragg in "Traffic to top tech publications has plummeted since 2024, new analysis shows"

wmwragg — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 12:31:26 +0000

Yep same. The reason I don't visit most of them anymore has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with ads and quality of content (which I suppose may have to do with AI) i.e. enshitification

New comment by wmwragg in "Six Math Essentials"

wmwragg — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 08:36:11 +0000

The Pelican UK version[1] looks a lot nicer

[1] https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/482167/six-maths-essentials-...

New comment by wmwragg in "Make.ts"

wmwragg — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 13:47:20 +0000

I generally use AWK as my scripting language, or often just write the whole thing directly in AWK. It doesn't change, is always installed on all POSIX platforms, easily interfaces with the command line, and is an easy to learn small language.

New comment by wmwragg in "JPEG XL Test Page"

wmwragg — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 19:26:46 +0000

You probably want the JPEG XL Info[1] site then. A nice site outlining what JPEG XL actually is.

[1] https://jpegxl.info/

How I Work From Anywhere with mosh, tmux, Git, and stow

wmwragg — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 17:53:00 +0000

Article URL: https://bnbalsamo.github.io/2019/06/09/work_from_anywhere.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46682191

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by wmwragg in "Don't fall into the anti-AI hype"

wmwragg — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 15:50:40 +0000

Yep, good point. If they don't make the hardware available for personal use, then we wouldn't be able to buy it even it could be used in a personal system.

New comment by wmwragg in "Don't fall into the anti-AI hype"

wmwragg — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 11:49:53 +0000

There is that, but the way this usually works is that there is always a better closed service you have to pay for, and we see that with LLMs as well. Plus there is the fact that you currently need a very powerful machine to run these models at anywhere near the speed of the PaaS systems, and I'm not convinced we'll be able to do the Moore's law style jumps required to get that level of performance locally, not to mention the massive energy requirements, you can only go so small, and we are getting pretty close to the limit. Perhaps I'm wrong, but we don't see the jumps in processing power we used to see in the 80s and 90s, due to clock speed jumps, the clock speed of most CPUs has stayed pretty much the same for a long time. As LLMs are essentially probabilistic in nature, this does open up options not available to current deterministic CPU designs, so that might be an avenue which gets exploited to bring this to local development.

New comment by wmwragg in "Don't fall into the anti-AI hype"

wmwragg — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 11:19:14 +0000

This is something I think a lot of people don't seem to notice, or worry about, the moving of programming as a local task, to one that is controlled by big corporations, essentially turning programming into a subscription model, just like everything else, if you don't pay the subscription you will no longer be able to code i.e. PaaS (Programming as a Service). Obviously at the moment most programmers can still code without LLMs, but when autocomplete IDEs became main stream, it didn't take long before a large proportion of programmers couldn't program without an autocomplete IDE, I expect most new programmers coming in won't be able to "program" without a remote LLM.

New comment by wmwragg in "Don't fall into the anti-AI hype"

wmwragg — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 11:11:48 +0000

Yep, this is my take as well. It's not that open source is being stolen as such, as if you abide by an open source license you aren't stealing anything, it's that the licenses are being completely ignored for the profit of a few massive corporations.

New comment by wmwragg in "Apple will phase out Rosetta 2 in macOS 28"

wmwragg — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 17:50:10 +0000

Yep, this is another reason I've needed the use of x86-64 images, as although they should be technically the same when rebuilt for ARM, they aren't always, so using the same architecture image which is run in production, will sometimes catch edge case bugs the ARM version doesn't. Admittedly it's not common, but I have had it happen. Obviously there is also the argument that the x86-64 image is being translated, so isn't the same as production anyway, but I've found that to have far less bugs than the different architecture

New comment by wmwragg in "Apple will phase out Rosetta 2 in macOS 28"

wmwragg — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 17:41:55 +0000

I'm aware, I use ARM images all the time, I was trying to indicate that the usual refrain that the developers have had years to migrate their software to apple silicon, doesn't really apply to docker images. It's only the increase in use of ARM elsewhere (possibly driven by the great performance of macs running apple silicon) which has driven any migration of docker images to have ARM versions

New comment by wmwragg in "Apple will phase out Rosetta 2 in macOS 28"

wmwragg — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 17:34:03 +0000

Yes that was my first thought as well, and as the images aren't designed to be run on a mac specifically, like a native app might be, there is no expectation for the developers to create a native apple silicon version. This is going to be a pretty major issue for a lot of developers

New comment by wmwragg in "This World of Ours (2014) [pdf]"

wmwragg — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 12:05:48 +0000

Yeah, Science shouldn't be concerned with usefulness, just like Art. It's the application of those fields which should concern itself with usefulness i.e. applied science, engineering, design etc. I'm not saying that scientific research shouldn't be carried out by companies with specific goals in mind, just that it shouldn't be the expected default.

New comment by wmwragg in "Computers Have Killed Chess"

wmwragg — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 07:21:51 +0000

I created a smaller version of chess called Mischia[1], mainly for casual games, but except for the opening phase it tries to play like normal chess. Games usually last 15 to 20 minutes.

[1] https://www.chessvariants.com/rules/mischia

New comment by wmwragg in "The Great SaaS Gaslight"

wmwragg — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 14:47:42 +0000

My issue isn't specifically the subscription model, though it gets annoying and I prefer a one time fee, or the cost, I'm happy to pay, my issue is the lock-in accompanied with the SaaS subscription model. You stop paying you loose access to your work, esp. as most SaaS models aim for proprietary data formats and no, or deliberately really annoying and cumbersome, export abilities often only allowing exporting in their own proprietary formats "for backup", which are useless once you stop paying

New comment by wmwragg in "Show HN: I built a web framework in C"

wmwragg — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 10:52:33 +0000

The book "Understanding and Using C Pointers: Core Techniques for Memory Management" by Richard M Reese, is a great way to learn pointers