Hacker News: ximm

New comment by ximm in "Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak"

ximm — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 10:09:35 +0000

I have bad news for you: The flatpak developers plan to stop using bubblewrap. They say it is no longer necessary because most distros now support unprivileged user namespaces. https://youtu.be/NsVhkz2Xl0E?si=-ypxvTlRukCZLql9

New comment by ximm in "Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak"

ximm — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 10:04:34 +0000

Flatpak itself might not survive, but the underlying protocols (portals, security contexts in wayland, pipewire, and d-bus, systemd-appd, …) are relevant for sandboxing on linux as a whole. While I do not personally with every design decision, I still think this is useful and valuable work.

New comment by ximm in "Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak"

ximm — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 09:54:41 +0000

There is also the option of structural funding (Strukturförderung in german) where important organizations receive multi-year contracts instead of short term project funding.

New comment by ximm in "Algorithmic Theming Engines"

ximm — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 04:13:45 +0000

> APCA models how human eyes actually perceive contrast, factoring in font weight, spatial frequency, and ambient light — a genuine improvement over the WCAG 2.x formula. […] The research behind it is peer-reviewed and substantive

That's what the author claims, but I have not seen any evidence that it is actually true. In a ticket where they were asked to provide peer review, they instead linked to a bunch of blog posts that in my opinion do not qualify as peer review: https://github.com/w3c/wcag3/issues/29

Also, it is not as if the WCAG 2 formula would not model how humans actually perceive contrast.

New comment by ximm in "How to convert between wealth and income tax"

ximm — Fri, 22 May 2026 17:59:18 +0000

Corrected version:

A wealth tax of 1% is equivalent to an income tax of 20% on capital gains.

New comment by ximm in "The text mode lie: why modern TUIs are a nightmare for accessibility"

ximm — Mon, 04 May 2026 06:57:48 +0000

Are there any recommendations for testing accessibility for TUI applications? The article mentions speakup, but as far as I understand, you need a hardware synthesizer to use that. Is it also possible to use orca?

New comment by ximm in "The text mode lie: why modern TUIs are a nightmare for accessibility"

ximm — Mon, 04 May 2026 06:28:39 +0000

I am not sure it is helpful to shoehorn terminals into being a second web. The terminal's strength is its simplicity.

For example, I really dislike mouse support in TUIs. 100% of the times I used the mouse on a TUI, I wanted to copy a piece of text. If the TUI hijacks the mouse and does something different with it (e.g. vim switching into visual mode) that is just annoying.

Of course a11y is important. But it barely works on the web and we won't get perfect semantics on the terminal without a lot of work. I say the better option is to strip down the experience to the parts that work well.

New comment by ximm in "The text mode lie: why modern TUIs are a nightmare for accessibility"

ximm — Mon, 04 May 2026 06:13:20 +0000

My experience as a developer (with a preference for simplicity):

- CLI by default

- if I need a GUI, but no access to the local system: web

- if I need a (restricted) GUI with access to the local system: TUI

- else: either start a local web server, or, if nothing else works, go for a GUI toolkit

New comment by ximm in "A desktop made for one"

ximm — Mon, 04 May 2026 05:50:33 +0000

My experience is that often when I think "I wish my email / browser / calendar / … did X" it turns out be a limitation of the underlying protocol. So even if you build all software yourself, you still have to make compromises when you interact with the outside world.

New comment by ximm in "Unsigned sizes: A five year mistake"

ximm — Sat, 02 May 2026 19:19:49 +0000

Is the text on this page really #bbbdc3 on #ffffff? How is anyone supposed to be able to read that?

New comment by ximm in "Do_not_track"

ximm — Sat, 02 May 2026 19:16:56 +0000

Looks like a helpful honeypot! Any tool that will public announce support for this spec is a tool I know to avoid because it collects telemetry without explicit opt-in in the first place.

New comment by ximm in "Show HN: A terminal spreadsheet editor with Vim keybindings"

ximm — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 14:36:11 +0000

I was working on something similar a while back (https://github.com/xi/spreadsheet) but ended up not using it. I just didn't end up being the first tool that came to mind when I was reaching for a spreadsheet. Not sure why.

I will definitely try out your tool and check if it works better to me.

Two random thoughts:

- In excel I often use the dragging feature, i.e. use a formula like $A2 + B$1 and then drag it in both directions. Does your tool have something similar?

- Another nice feature are visualizations. In my tool I added a bar() function that renders a value between 0 and 1 as a bar in the cell. Not sure how flexible that is, but I did have some fun with it.

New comment by ximm in "Firefox Has Integrated Brave's Adblock Engine"

ximm — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 05:56:53 +0000

Firefox supports webRequestBlocking with MV3, so even if they fully remove support for MV2, ad blocking is still available.

New comment by ximm in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)"

ximm — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 06:45:36 +0000

I am working on https://github.com/xi/xiio, a minimal async runtime for python. It is mostly feature complete with a fraction of the code of asyncio or trio. It is great fun to get into low level stuff and hopefully it helps me to better understand the finer details of async programming.

New comment by ximm in "Zero-build privacy policies with Astro"

ximm — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 11:30:32 +0000

I am still confused what exactly this tool is doing. I clicked on "examples" in the hope of finding an example of a generated policy. But it only gives examples of the configuration, not the output.

New comment by ximm in "Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager"

ximm — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 07:08:17 +0000

I don't get the frustration with wayland (the protocol) in the comments. This project shows that having a separate window manager was always possible. First we got wlroots as a library that did most of the heavy lifting, and now we got river as an even higher level abstraction.

Sure I agree that wayland (the project) could have provided these abstractions much earlier. But anyone else could have done it, too. We get all of this for free, so we shouldn't complain if other people don't do the work that we could do just as well.

New comment by ximm in "So you want to write an “app” (2025)"

ximm — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 05:37:56 +0000

I also find building apps for the web is much easier than any of the native frameworks. You can start by writing plain text in a file and then progressively add HTML, CSS, and JS. The app described in the article is trivial to implement in the web.

A lot of that comes down to the huge community and the shear amount of documentation that exists. OTOH, nowadays you will quickly be distracted by frameworks and build systems.

IMHO the biggest hurdle is hosting, but github pages makes even that somewhat easy.

New comment by ximm in "Show HN: What I learned building a local-only password manager (PassForgePro)"

ximm — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 23:14:50 +0000

The README talks a lot about crypto. But the interesting bit is how you can access the passwords. Is there an API? If yes, how does it protect your passwords from malicious software? If not -- are you sure? (Have you checked for example accessibility APIs by the platform?)

New comment by ximm in "CSS sucks because we don't bother learning it (2022)"

ximm — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 16:32:23 +0000

I absolutely hate this argument. Everything in CSS is public (as in: can interface with HTML), not global. Think of writing CSS as designing an API.

New comment by ximm in "39th Chaos Communication Congress Videos"

ximm — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 16:55:16 +0000

It is a Maneki-neko (beckoning cat / Winkekatze). The video team started putting them on podiums so they could see when a stream was frozen. So it became kind of a mascot.