Hacker News: wmwragg

New comment by wmwragg in "No more icons in every menu by default"

wmwragg — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 09:25:52 +0000

I'd forgotten there used to be a whole discipline called HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) which seems to have largely disappeared now, at least in a commercial context

New comment by wmwragg in "Burning Man death rates – A short lesson in statistics"

wmwragg — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 20:03:16 +0000

Yeah that would be a really interesting read, either as an article or full length book

New comment by wmwragg in "Fine, I'll build my own text editor"

wmwragg — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 13:37:41 +0000

For the very basic of basic browser based text editors just use this as the URL:

  data:text/html,

New comment by wmwragg in "AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost"

wmwragg — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 09:37:00 +0000

This and the fact that you often read a sentence, paragraph or the whole article, and think this said absolutely nothing in lots of words.

New comment by wmwragg in "Wages in America Are Too Low for the 30% Rule to Work for Renters Anymore"

wmwragg — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 14:22:53 +0000

I think there is another element, private equity (PE) has got involved in the housing market, and like anything that PE gets involved with it burns it to the ground and then exits with it's profit leaving behind a wasteland. PE equity will do anything to get their profit no matter who it hurts

New comment by wmwragg in "The Pentagon is running an AI propaganda mill targeting Latin America"

wmwragg — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 06:27:40 +0000

There is a significant difference between socialism and communism, Americans seem to purposely conflate the two, they are not the same.

New comment by wmwragg in "wolfSSL releases a new product; wolfCOSE a zero alloc C embbedded COSE stack"

wmwragg — Sat, 30 May 2026 23:34:34 +0000

My understanding of zero alloc is that there are no heap allocations i.e. use of a form of malloc. At least that has always been my experience, use of the stack is perfectly fine

New comment by wmwragg in "The economics of software teams: Why most engineering orgs are flying blind"

wmwragg — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 19:43:23 +0000

Yep, I think people who repeat this aphorism essentially equate programming with typing, or as you say just connecting existing bits together. Programming is the working out how to get a computer to perform some task, not just the typing, it's the algorithms, the performance balancing, the structuring, the integration etc.

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.