Hacker News: yalue

New comment by yalue in "Dostoyevsky isn't difficult"

yalue — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 02:31:45 +0000

I had the same experience, lol. I started with Crime and Punishment expecting thinly veiled philosophy where each character is a mouthpiece for one of the author's thought processes. Granted there's some of that, but I wasn't expecting such an exciting murder drama. Went into Karamazov expecting an exciting murder drama, and got the type of Russian literature I initially expected Crime and Punishment to be! Really it's a question of expectations.

New comment by yalue in "Klondike Solitaire game for curses in 5k of C"

yalue — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 13:29:24 +0000

Truly the biggest prize of the IOCCC is getting your name listed next to geniuses like the author of nanochess.

New comment by yalue in "The newest Instagram “exploit” is the goofiest I've seen"

yalue — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 21:37:20 +0000

So every time my ISP changes my IP, facebook pitches a fit, makes me solve a dozen captchas and authenticate on an existing login session, but in the meantime Meta' sother website doesn't even require using the registration email for a password reset?

New comment by yalue in "I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed"

yalue — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 01:19:23 +0000

Pathetically hypocritical to use AI to write this blog post when generic copy editors have been hit way harder by AI than programmers.

New comment by yalue in "The Overcomplexity of the Shadcn Radio Button"

yalue — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 12:48:39 +0000

15 years ago, Enterprise FizzBuzz [1] was supposed to be satire. These days, it's not quite complex enough to capture "modern" web dev.

[1] https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...

New comment by yalue in "Update and shut down no longer restarts PC, 25H2 patch addresses decades-old bug"

yalue — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 15:04:16 +0000

For a long time, windows had two options:

1. Update and restart and prompt for bitlocker password and update and restart and prompt for bitlocker password and restart

2. Update and restart and prompt for bitlocker password and update and restart and prompt for bitlocker password and shut down (and restart)

Finally, they fixed the last bit of option 2

New comment by yalue in "Microsoft Go 1.24 FIPS changes"

yalue — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 19:47:15 +0000

Microsoft Go? I've used Go on windows for years now and this is the first I've heard of this fork. So it only exists because microsoft wants to have a crypto package that complies with an arbitrary regulation? Is there a reason that a better package requires a fork of the entire runtime rather than just, say, a normal Go package? It sounds like it requires cgo to call into third-party libraries, but that's already a common practice in "normal" Go libraries.

One thing I do appreciate is how the relevant issue in the upstream Go repo says: "A number of companies must comply with them, for example as part of a broader FedRAMP compliance posture. (If that's not you, you can ignore this. Run!)" [1]

Apparently I'm just not the target audience. Sounds like I'm correct in assuming it's security theater at best, and an avenue for new backdoors at worst.

[1] https://github.com/golang/go/issues/69536

New comment by yalue in "Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico"

yalue — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 15:23:36 +0000

The velocity of a spacecraft in low earth orbit is over 15,000 miles per hour. Smashing into the atmosphere is perhaps the most fuel- and cost-efficient way to slow down to a speed at which landing is possible.

New comment by yalue in "The roller ship was not an effective way to cross the high seas"

yalue — Sun, 31 Mar 2024 23:48:13 +0000

Heh, so it's an 1897 version of what this guy on youtube attempted with a monster truck with mild success: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohxGA7fpfu0 (warning: extremely redneck)

New comment by yalue in "Experiments on a $50 DIY air purifier you can make in 30s"

yalue — Mon, 29 Jan 2024 18:46:14 +0000

One thing the article doesn't seem to mention is noise. I've found that the "actual" air purifiers seem to be much quieter than box fans. Perhaps if you had greater control over the box fan's speed you could get the noise down to a comparable level, but I doubt the cheap type of fan used in the article is capable of such a thing.

New comment by yalue in "One in five young Americans thinks the Holocaust is a myth"

yalue — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 14:46:28 +0000

The issue is that the "young" demographic mentioned in the article is ages 18-29, and high school must have changed quite a bit in recent years if students have not actually heard about the holocaust or WWII.

New comment by yalue in "Show HN: Error return traces for Go, inspired by Zig"

yalue — Wed, 29 Nov 2023 17:32:37 +0000

Judging by the project, it's implemented by instrumenting the source code; either manually modifying error returns with a wrapper function, or by running source files through an automated tool that will find and modify the return statements for you.

New comment by yalue in "New emojis in 2023-2024"

yalue — Sat, 15 Jul 2023 11:44:25 +0000

Even though I hate emojis in general, it still drives me nuts that there's a swan emoji but not a goose emoji

New comment by yalue in "Ask HN: Is it just me or GPT-4's quality has significantly deteriorated lately?"

yalue — Wed, 31 May 2023 14:07:03 +0000

I'm not anyone involved in this thread (so far), but I've written a minimal PDF parser in the past using something between 1500-2000 lines of Go. (Sadly, it was for work so I can't go back and check.) Granted, this was only for the bare-bones parsing of the top-level structures, and notably did not handle postscript, so it wouldn't be nearly enough to render graphics. Despite this, it was tricky because it turns out that "following the spec" is not always clear when it comes to PDFs.

For example, I recall the spec being unclear as to whether a newline character was required after a certain element (though I don't remember which element). I processed a corpus containing thousands of PDFs to try to determine what was done in practice, and I found that about half of them included the newline and half did not---an emblematic issue where an unclear official "spec" meant falling back to the de facto specification: flexbility.

It's honestly a great example of something a GPT-like system could probably handle. Doable in a single source file if necessary, fewer than 5k lines, and can be broken into subtasks if need be.

New comment by yalue in "Brain images just got 64 million times sharper"

yalue — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 16:51:56 +0000

Having to hold perfectly still (possibly in an uncomfortable pose) in a giant machine that's making loud, uncanny noises for 20+ minutes is indeed a very bizarre, meditative experience. It is interesting, but, in my opinion, you're probably going to be happier not having the health concerns that lead to getting an MRI in the first place!

New comment by yalue in "ESA – Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer: Live Launch"

yalue — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 15:21:21 +0000

Jon Bois is a genius, and this is the main example I return to when tempted to think that hypermedia is just a gimmick. It takes a special type of creativity to not just make it feel "tacked on." Perhaps the light jazz and dated look of the google maps visuals just meld well with the nostalgia evoked by the content of the story. The text alone would probably work as a good scifi short, but the additional material makes it so much more dramatic.

New comment by yalue in "Making Go telemetry opt-in is a mistake"

yalue — Sun, 26 Feb 2023 13:50:27 +0000

Here's an idea for how to maintain Go moving forward: keep making the damn tool however you want. The thing never would have existed in the first place if they had started with an industry survey. It was created to address a perceived need, by the people with the need, for themselves. This model is perfectly fine moving forward. Some industrial user wants a new Go feature or bugfix? Great. If it's enough of a problem, they can fix it and upstream a patch. That's how open source software is always supposed to work. Telemetry does nothing to improve this situation. If the Go team at google no longer has any ideas for what to work on (as must be the case if they're wasting their time on dumb crap like forced google spyware in a compiler) then they should just stop. Maybe focus on accepting PRs from people with ideas and strong enough motivation to work on them. I mean, there are 5000+ issues and 330 open PRs on the go github right now, so that should be plenty to keep them occupied. On top of that, how can literal thousands of issues not be a strong enough source of actionable usage information that they saw fit to try to get more? Do they plan on wrapping up all the open issues before looking at telemetry?

New comment by yalue in "Godot 4 Release Candidate 1"

yalue — Wed, 08 Feb 2023 17:31:27 +0000

Yes, I was in the first category of people, where I am using GDNative to ultimately call a single function written in Go, not due to speed, but simply in order to leverage a huge amount of code I had already written in that language. Judging by the GDExtension headers, I can probably pull off something similar if I forgo all of the C++ bindings that I don't need. However, I am hesitant to dedicate any time to doing so at the moment.

Don't get me wrong, GDExtension seems awesome, but it's also true that it doesn't seem geared towards the case that I was using GDNative for.

New comment by yalue in "Godot 4 Release Candidate 1"

yalue — Wed, 08 Feb 2023 16:40:51 +0000

As much as I'm looking forward to 4, has GDExtension been stabilized / documented yet? I know there's the existing C++ example [1], but I really, really don't want to jump through a scons & C++ project simply to call a single native function in a DLL. You can do such a thing with GDNative, and I presume that it is possible in GDExtension as well, though it isn't obvious how to do so. This strikes me as a huge barrier to adoption, since GDNative is one of the big things that will be incompatible with 4.

[1] In the godot-cpp library: https://github.com/godotengine/godot-cpp

New comment by yalue in "Marp: Markdown Presentation Ecosystem"

yalue — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 17:27:49 +0000

Boy, if only you saw how popular Beamer (a LaTeX presentation framework) was in certain academic circles. Spoiler: it leads to exactly the problem you describe, in addition to using some default styling that manages to be both hideous and crushingly bland at the same time. At least, based on the screenshots, this proposed framework doesn't have the second problem.

I guess, the way I view this is as a "better beamer" (which isn't saying much IMO) rather than a better powerpoint. Basically, it's a way for people who were going to make a text-heavy presentation anyway to produce something that looks OK, and to avoid using a heavyweight tool like LaTeX.