HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

IdiotSavage

241 karma · joined May 1, 2026

submissionscomments
IdiotSavage··on Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage
Certainly the vast majority of water is not absorbed by plants, but evaporates from the ground or drains off without being used. You can't just ignore that.
IdiotSavage··on The new Firefox design is here

  "Pills here!"
    ―Louis
IdiotSavage··on The new Firefox design is here
iOS, macOS, android and GNOME have massively increased corner radiuses over the last couple of years, so it must be good, right?
IdiotSavage··on How to build a printer
You're right. I mis-remembered it.

I see that it applies styles to markdown documents, but keeps all formatting characters visible (e.g. # for titles). I guess I wasn't happy with that and looked for another solution.

IdiotSavage··on How to build a printer
TextEdit.app supports printing, so does Notepad.exe (unless they removed that recently).
IdiotSavage··on How to build a printer
> any program that supports printing

Unfortunately printing support seems to go out of fashion, at least in macOS land.

Lately I needed a quick printout of a markdown document. I could have used TextEdit for the raw text, but I wanted the styling too. Learned that neither VSCode, Xcode nor Obsidian can print. (There is a community plugin for Obsidian.)

IdiotSavage··on GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
> …and that means that users can input and navigate at light speed.

Oh yeah? I remember when they introduced these shitty animations that made everything feel extremely laggy.

From the article linked below:

"Microsoft Excel now animates certain actions as you work. For instance, when you move from one cell to another, it animates the move. When you paste copied information, it animates the paste. Or when you enter a formula, it animates the calculation."

https://www.adventuresincre.com/disable-animations-excel/

IdiotSavage··on Inception-style curved map for turn-by-turn directions
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMjAxMzY3NjcxNF5BMl5B...
IdiotSavage··on Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2
> other than that all I really need is a web browser and Ghostty with good battery life.

Then why bother installing a different OS?

IdiotSavage··on About the security content of macOS Tahoe 26.6
I hate the round corners. It's already too much on 15, but way worse on 26. It looks like "Baby's first OS", designed by Fisher-Price.
IdiotSavage··on A shell colon does nothing. Use it anyway
> Another important feature of a tool like this is the ability to tolerate errors: I can't imagine a Linux today that would be able to even boot if the shell was extra pedantic about errors. A lot of mostly irrelevant things routinely fail on boot and during normal operation. Stamping them all out is an arduous...

You seem to be implying PowerShell aborts on any error. That's not the case:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof...

IdiotSavage··on A shell colon does nothing. Use it anyway
What if there was a less cryptic way to have mandatory arguments, something harder to get wrong, like

  param(
    [parameter(mandatory)] $name
  )

  "Hello, $name!"
And then:

  $ ./script.ps1 Dave
  Hello, Dave!

  $ ./script.ps1 -name Dave
  Hello, Dave!

  $ ./script.ps1
  cmdlet script.ps1 at command pipeline position 1
  Supply values for the following parameters:
  name: <cursor here>
Or non interactively:

  $ pwsh -nonint ./script.ps1
  script.ps1: Cannot process command because of one or more missing mandatory parameters: name.
IdiotSavage··on An old patent inspired the new "Y-zipper", a three-sided fastener
Is any of MIT's stuff "open"?

Clicking around on news.mit.edu I see lots of cool ideas. Articles mention "the software allows users to...", yet I never see a link to actual software.

For example, I expected to be able to try that 3D-zipper generator they show in the video myself.

Edit: found something:

https://github.com/tichaesque/FabObscura

IdiotSavage··on It's getting harder to focus every day
Meanwhile in Japan:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9FsQXYVgUE

IdiotSavage··on I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs
In this thread: bash experts with arcane knowledge, unintentionally demonstrating how awful bash is.

The obvious solution would be to use something more sane, like PowerShell or nushell, but instead old experts will always defend the skills they have honed for years, while criticizing anything that's different.

IdiotSavage··on If you're a button, you have one job
Interestingly the "activate on release" logic was implemented in computer GUIs long before touchscreens were common, used purely by mouse-click (a physical button).
IdiotSavage··on If you're a button, you have one job
My point was about user expectations / users not being aware when the button triggers. Your argument has nothing to do with that.
IdiotSavage··on Vancouver PD website features Quick Escape button that wipes itself from history
Isn't this exactly why browsers implemented "private mode"?

Why don't they inform users about how to properly use private mode, which works with any website, instead of rolling their own solution, which the user has to learn just for that one website?

IdiotSavage··on If you're a button, you have one job
> But a button that works like that in a GUI would feel wrong.

No, it doesn't. It feels way more responsive.

My pet peeve is "stopwatch apps" which trigger on release instead of on press. When timing something where fractions of a second matter, most people won't realize that it triggers on release and tap down when they want to start / stop, adding some arbitrary delay until they actually release the button.

IdiotSavage··on Bashblog – a single bash script to create blogs
You're wrong.

"Users should vote and comment when they run across something they personally find interesting—not for promotion."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#:~:text=Use...

IdiotSavage··on Show HN: Brain Frog – Can you be random enough for 11 lines of JavaScript?
If you want to see what a random distribution looks like:

  jot -r 100 0 1 | rs -t 10
I noticed my "fake randomness" is lacking long sequences of the same key. I feel like I'm "predictable" when I press the same key 5 times in a row, yet that happens a lot in a truly random distribution.
IdiotSavage··on Writing Postcards with a 3D Printer
Only in theory. A 3D printer doesn't need to sustain lateral forces - a router does. It might not be built for this.
IdiotSavage··on Deno Desktop
The docs say that's the default:

https://docs.deno.com/runtime/desktop/backends/#webview-(def...

IdiotSavage··on Sakana Fugu
More fun facts:

Omitting those characters makes it good for generating passwords if they need to be typed in by hand.

Double-clicking a base58 string always selects the whole string and it doesn't wrap accidentally, thanks to missing / and +, so it's also convenient to copy and paste.

IdiotSavage··on GrapheneOS has been ported to Android 17
Or the more recent memory of the F1 ad pushed via the wallet app.
IdiotSavage··on Are insecure code completions in PyCharm a vulnerability?
This is just a continuation of common StackOverflow advice to "make it work", which the LLMs use as "knowledge":

https://stackoverflow.com/a/28002687

https://stackoverflow.com/a/32282390

https://stackoverflow.com/a/18062293

Naive users used to copy paste those things from StackOverflow, now they can use line completion in their editor.

IdiotSavage··on Rust goal: cargo script (like uv does for Python)
Already works with nightly:

https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/cargo/reference/unstable.h...

  #!/usr/bin/env -S cargo +nightly -Zscript
  ---cargo
  [package]
  edition = "2024"

  [profile.dev]
  opt-level = 3
  ---

  fn main() {
      println!("Hey, man!");
  }
IdiotSavage··on A 10 year old Xeon is all you need
I think you've misunderstood the analogy. Just ignore it, analogies mostly break down anyways.

> a model capable of completing the tasks assigned to it

The thing is, the "task assigned to it" is changing with improved capabilities. If everyone around you in 2036 is using general AI to do amazing stuff, you will probably have little interest in vibe coding slop like it's 2026.

IdiotSavage··on A 10 year old Xeon is all you need
I find that hard to believe. The AI companies will want to control what's possible and find new things to do that "need" their services. Otherwise it would be like Intel and Microsoft had decided in the year 2000 that computers are "good enough" now and we would have explored what's possible with that hardware ever since.
IdiotSavage··on Ten Basic Clouds
Definitely.

  x-cache: Error from cloudfront
Page 1 of 3Next →