Hacker News: wwalexander

New comment by wwalexander in "Show HN: HackerNows – Native iOS HN Client"

wwalexander — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 12:46:41 +0000

Not really fixable, unfortunately. The API requires an network call for each comment:

> The v0 API is essentially a dump of our in-memory data structures. We know, what works great locally in memory isn't so hot over the network.

When I played around with making a client, I found the best approach was to only load the first level of comments, and asynchronously fetch children inside DisclosureGroups on appear.

Then I realized the only reason I was making an HN app was so it didn’t blind me at night, and then I realized Lobsters has all the same stories as this place but lets me filter out vibe coding articles, and I just gave up.

New comment by wwalexander in "Parse, Don't Validate – In a Language That Doesn't Want You To"

wwalexander — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 14:27:13 +0000

> It's the same thing. In the latter case, something has validated that your NonEmpty has a first and a last element.

No, it has parsed it into a structure that structurally has at least one element, not just the promise that there ought to be one. From the original “Parse, don’t validate” article:

    data NonEmpty a = a :| [a]

> your type still permits {name: "\0\0\0\0\0\0", host: "!"}

I actually originally wrote it with an array of EmailNameCharacters, etc but didn’t want to overcomplicate the example.

New comment by wwalexander in "Parse, Don't Validate – In a Language That Doesn't Want You To"

wwalexander — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 13:14:59 +0000

This is just validation that is using the type system to indicate the validation has already occurred. I think the real point of “parse, don’t validate” is to make the type system give you structural guarantees that couldn’t exist otherwise (e.g. always having a first/last element in the NonEmpty example from the original article). If you’re just branding the types as “parsed” (in reality, simply validated) you still have to know that the invariants you care about hold when using the “parsed” type (e.g. splitting the email type using “@“ will always yield 2 elements), instead of the structure of the type holding that info inherently (e.g. struct Email { name: String, host: String }).

New comment by wwalexander in "U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6"

wwalexander — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 20:51:56 +0000

> Japanese electronic tariffs in the 80s

Also motorcycles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_motorcycle_tariff

New comment by wwalexander in ""Fix" MacBook Neo Cursor Lag: Record 1 Pixel of the Screen Every 10 Seconds"

wwalexander — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 07:05:16 +0000

guard has two advantages: the compiler ensures that you exit the current scope if the condition does not hold (via return, break, continue, etc), and bindings established in the guard clause (e.g. let foo = optionalBar) remaining in scope after the guard block, rather than inside it like an if block.

New comment by wwalexander in "Made a free macOS menu bar app that fixes typing in the wrong keyboard layout"

wwalexander — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 13:15:05 +0000

You can configure macOS to switch between languages by pressing the globe key, but it’s a far cry from letting you type in any of your languages without it autocorrecting/red-underlining.

New comment by wwalexander in "Made a free macOS menu bar app that fixes typing in the wrong keyboard layout"

wwalexander — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 14:59:37 +0000

iOS supports using one keyboard for two languages (for me, a USA keyboard with English and Italian). Unfortunately this doesn't exist on macOS yet.

New comment by wwalexander in "Ubiquiti: Enterprise NAS, Built on ZFS"

wwalexander — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 09:24:15 +0000

Will this support expansion in the case of all bays being filled?

EDIT: Nevermind, the product page has an option to add up to 32 additional drives via expansion units. Nice!

New comment by wwalexander in "Sweet Jeebus, macOS 27 Golden Gate Removes the Dumb Icons from Menu Items"

wwalexander — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 15:28:06 +0000

> In addition, every software company seems to go their own way and have their own “style”

Hence Apple using the same set of SF Symbols across all their platforms. And I don't think icons are intended to be used to initially identify the purpose of a button, but instead to provide a quick visual anchor once you are already familiar. Sure, there are some buttons that everyone will use more (like Save or Open), but I don't think there's anything wrong with allowing every button to have this sort of quick visual lookup. Predicting user behavior is hard.

New comment by wwalexander in "Sweet Jeebus, macOS 27 Golden Gate Removes the Dumb Icons from Menu Items"

wwalexander — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 15:26:01 +0000

What about toolbars? Those almost universally have both text and icons for each item. Why should menus be any different?

New comment by wwalexander in "Sweet Jeebus, macOS 27 Golden Gate Removes the Dumb Icons from Menu Items"

wwalexander — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 15:23:46 +0000

I strongly dislike Ive's influence overall, but skeuomorphism made it incredibly difficult and cost-prohibitive for a single indie developer to make an app that felt like a polished first-party experience for iOS. I'm glad it's gone. You're still welcome to do it if you want and you have the whimsy and artistic talent (or design team) for it.

New comment by wwalexander in "Sweet Jeebus, macOS 27 Golden Gate Removes the Dumb Icons from Menu Items"

wwalexander — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 15:11:14 +0000

Yes, I have been listening to Gruber complain about them for a year now. His critique is that "Apple's HIG used to say not to," not anything about what actually makes them bad.

Curiously, I haven't heard him talk about Apple Intelligence in Shortcuts, or any of the cool new features in Tahoe. Design is how it looks, I guess.

New comment by wwalexander in "Sweet Jeebus, macOS 27 Golden Gate Removes the Dumb Icons from Menu Items"

wwalexander — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 15:07:36 +0000

Icons in menu bars serve the same purpose as icons elsewhere: quickly identifying buttons. I don't know why this is such a big deal.

New comment by wwalexander in "Siri AI"

wwalexander — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 07:33:21 +0000

Poste Italiane is not.

New comment by wwalexander in "It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12"

wwalexander — Sat, 30 May 2026 07:50:44 +0000

> This is about setting keyboard shortcuts for custom actions for applications, not window traversal on the desktop.

The "All Applications" section lets you define global shortcuts. As long as there is a menu bar item for it (in this case, one from the Window menu) you can define a shortcut for it.

New comment by wwalexander in "It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12"

wwalexander — Sat, 30 May 2026 06:53:32 +0000

> cannot be traversed with keyboard shortcuts

Yes, it can: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/mac-window-tiling-i...

You can define additional shortcuts in Keyboard settings: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/create-keyboard-sho...

New comment by wwalexander in "Where does next-token prediction leave us?"

wwalexander — Wed, 27 May 2026 10:33:47 +0000

Who do you think is going to throw food at you?

New comment by wwalexander in "Jira Is Turing-Complete"

wwalexander — Mon, 25 May 2026 08:33:42 +0000

AIs can barely handle PKCE OAuth flow. It’s not very hard to confuse them.

New comment by wwalexander in "BBEdit 16"

wwalexander — Fri, 22 May 2026 14:30:00 +0000

Thank you very much for this recommendation! Most of my work is in Xcode, and in an ideal world Xcode would just support third-party syntax highlighting (or LSP), and I've been looking for a Mac-assed simple editor for those scenarios where I just want basic syntax support for a random text file. CotEditor is perfect!

New comment by wwalexander in "No way to parse integers in C (2022)"

wwalexander — Wed, 20 May 2026 17:17:32 +0000

Arbitrary precision arithmetic (GMP, BigInteger, etc). Numbers can take arbitrary amounts of memory, instead of just a single machine word.