HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

Tinos

72 karma · joined February 15, 2025

submissionscomments
Tinos··on What if your AI could buy you a car?
I just bought my first car and man I wish this was an option instead of just copy pasting hundreds of links to my notes app
Tinos··on OpenCS2 – 5k hours recording of Counter Strike for world model training
Would love to see the applications of this in anti-cheat
Tinos··on Neubrutalism: A Guide to the Design Movement
Built with vanilla HTML, CSS & JS. No frameworks

That's something I haven't seen in a while!

Tinos··on Show HN: CryptoFlora – Visualize SHA256 to a flower using Rose curves
Neat! Do you have a simple TLDR for how it was done? I'm assuming HTML canvas but would be curious to hear the mathematics behind it
Tinos··on Ask HN: How to convert viral Reddit posts into Website traffic?
At my old company we did some guerilla marketing on Reddit and got a post go mega viral (front page for 3 days) 15k+ upvotes.

For us it was a bit different because we were doing robotic F&B so people could come to our restaurant to see the place from Reddit IRL.

I would target memes in niche dev communities if you want direct outreach. Like if you're looking for people to test your product you'd have more luck on a 100 upvote post in some obscure deeptech subreddit then you would if your post got 10k upvotes on r/funny.

Sorry for any grammar mistakes - writing this on the rush hour train :)

Tinos··on Googler... ex-Googler
"I really was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp"

Yup. Must have been a horrific wake up call :(

Tinos··on The best programmers I know
Fantastic post - you've made me feel a lot better about admitting that I didn't know something during my interview yesterday!

Really well written and insightful.

Tinos··on Show HN: Electro – A hyper-fast Windows image viewer with a built-in terminal
I believe most of the popular image viewers you'll see discussed in this thread will be using very low-level renderers.

I'm in discussions with friends of Electro on what approach would be best to take. I go into more detail on this announcement made on the discussions board: https://github.com/pTinosq/Electro/discussions/17

Tinos··on Show HN: Electro – A hyper-fast Windows image viewer with a built-in terminal
Just a reminder that this is *free* open source software. I understand your concerns, and I agree with some of them. This is my first proper open source project so there are bound to be some issues ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I will take your advice into account for future updates. Thank you

Tinos··on Show HN: Electro – A hyper-fast Windows image viewer with a built-in terminal
So this is a hotly debated subject and I 100% understand why and even agree with many people on this. I do firmly believe that Electro is indeed "hyperfast" even with WebView2 and that's down to the fact that there is absolutely zero bloat shipped with the tool & every addition is carefully considered for its potential performance impact before it's added.

I had a meeting today with 6 other software engineers who are interested in the project & have experience in computer graphics (a topic I will admit is not my strongest) and we all unanimously agreed to gradually shift Electro away from WebView2 and towards a custom-built 2D renderer for truly native "hyperfast" performance :)

As mentioned in another reply on this thread, I'm not here to fool anyone - this is version ~4.0 of Electro and the first version I feel is feature rich enough to ship publicly. The other 3 versions of experimentation (over the last year and a half) included Rust, C++ & OpenGL, Electron, and Tauri all of which had significant pitfalls.

The final decision was to "just ship it" and see how the community reacts. I've seen (as I anticipated) a huge number of people suggesting we move away from Tauri and that's exactly what we will do.

Open sourcing this project was keeping me up at night because deep inside I knew that it would need another version. That being said, I'm so glad I did it or else there would not be any pressure to actually do it and it probably would have ended up just like all my other dozens of projects that are just sat in private repos collecting dust. At least now with this version people can A) Enjoy using a new tool w/ unique features (built-in terminal, performance focus) and B) Even contribute if they feel like doing so.

I'm very excited to see where this goes but the compass is very clearly pointing towards ultra low-level rendering techniques and I honestly can't wait to set sail!!

Tinos··on Show HN: Electro – A hyper-fast Windows image viewer with a built-in terminal
So I spoke to one of the contributors of Tauri who got back to me with the following response: " It's not a thing tauri controls and the telemetry settings are an operating system setting since you are running windows this kind of telemetry is not completely avoidable."

He also kindly pointed to this GH Issue which discusses your privacy concern: https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/WebView2Feedback/issues/105...

This quote from the issue stood out in particular: " WebView2 is considered a Windows component, and the data collection consent is governed by Windows Diagnostic setting on Windows 10 as a centralized switch.

End users are empowered to control the data collection of WebView2 and can do so via toggling the Windows Diagnostic setting on Windows 10. This is also what the Edge browser does. On Windows 7/8.1, because there is no Windows Diagnostic setting, we treat this as no consent for optional data. There is very limited required data that the OS always collects, unless you're on some specific SKUs. Developers are definitely welcomed to convey that to their end users and ask them to use the OS toggle. "

I've been meaning to move away from Tauri + WebView2, this might be the best call to make (not only for this reason of course)

Tinos··on Show HN: Electro – A hyper-fast Windows image viewer with a built-in terminal
I haven't been able to do direct comparisons but they most likely have very similar performance. The major bottleneck with Electro at the moment (which will certainly be addressed on Electro (internal) v5.0 aka Electro Next) is the reliance on Tauri & WebView2.

As soon as I can port over core functionality to a custom desktop renderer things will go from being 10x faster (currently) to 1000x faster (the end goal).

I'm currently trying to balance Electro with: university final year, job applications, 2 other OSS projects I contribute to, and a friends' business website so these features will most likely take many months to get through. I'm hoping the eyes Electro has gained from this announcement will bring in some talent who know more about lower level image viewer functionality than I do so that they can help guide the project towards the ultimate performance-first tech stack!

Tinos··on Show HN: Electro – A hyper-fast Windows image viewer with a built-in terminal
Naturally images of this magnitude will take slightly longer to load on any hardware & image viewer. It's not instant but it's also significantly faster than the other image viewers I have tried on my system.

I downloaded NASA's photos of the moon and tested those with wonderful results. I was actually using these enormous 16k+ images during my testing specifically because they are the ultimate benchmark for image viewer performance!

Tinos··on Show HN: Electro – A hyper-fast Windows image viewer with a built-in terminal
Not yet but 100% a feature we can get shipped (seems to be pretty high demand)
Tinos··on Show HN: Electro – A hyper-fast Windows image viewer with a built-in terminal
Oh bloody hell of course Microsoft is pulling off stunts like this. Thanks for raising this, I'll have a look at what my options are to turn this off.

Tauri 2.0 was initially chosen because it would let me get an MVP out quickly to start getting user feedback (like your own). My end goal is to move to a custom renderer so I'm not relying on Chromium / WebView2. This will take many months of work I suspect (balancing with my FYP @ university & other projects).

Tinos··on Show HN: Electro – A hyper-fast Windows image viewer with a built-in terminal
Would absolutely love to get linux & macOS included. I don't own a mac so naturally that will need to be community contributed / wait until I cough up the money. Linux is 100% on the agenda.

Thanks for bringing Oculante to my attention - it looks awesome! That level of functionality is what I'm striving for (w/o as much UI clutter though).

I feel the TS & CSS pain. Electro v1.0 was C# WPF and very very very fast but the UI was just rubbish and I knew C# WPF would hold me back in the future. Electro v2.0 was then written in C++ but I didn't get far with it because I REALLY didn't like writing C++. Electro v3.0 was then written with Electron + TS + CSS but electron is shit. Finally, I landed where we are today - it struck the perfect balance of performant, modern language, fun to write, allowing for rapid iteration.

Will Electro stay with the TS+CSS+Tauri stack forever? Probably not! As the community grows I hope bring in contributors who are more well versed in the world of low-level image viewers to help guide Electro to be EVEN FASTER & closer to the system level (Like Electro v2.0 aimed to be w/ c++).

For the time being I've decided to just ship with what I have and iterations will come later. I do dream of the day we go frameworkless (to an extent ofc) and render everything from the GPU at nanosecond speeds while also maintaining the sleek feeling Electro currently has!

Tinos··on Show HN: Electro – A hyper-fast Windows image viewer with a built-in terminal
Loved Irfanview, switched to ImageGlass for aesthetics (hated the performance), switched back to Irfanview, hated how ancient it felt.

Electro aims to do what an image viewer should do best - show images. There aren't any UI elements when an image is first loaded - hence the hidden terminal (pack a lot of functionality without worrying about visual clutter).

I have been carefully thinking about the direction I want to take with UI elements. The goal was to build the fastest & most efficient image viewer. Will I achieve this through clickable UI elements? Through keybinds only? Through terminal? Only time and testing will tell.

The project is fresh out of the oven and ready to be moulded into whatever the community wants it to be. The two mantras Electro will always stand by are Performance & Efficiency.

Thanks for the thread - loved reading everyone's thoughts.

P.S JPEGView was by far my favourite but again, too ancient. I want something truly fresh and that was the goal of this project

Tinos··on Show HN: Electro – A hyper-fast Windows image viewer with a built-in terminal
Being able to launch Electro via CLI would be awesome! Never really done something like that - might have a look at implementing it (unless you want to contribute :^)

The project is in its infancy at the moment. Features like keyboard controls to zoom etc. are all on the table - I love when users give me all these ideas for where to take the project

Tinos··on Show HN: Electro – A hyper-fast Windows image viewer with a built-in terminal
Hey! Appreciate the concern w/ web requests. If you look closely at the URL you'll notice that all the requests are to *.localhost addresses. This is just how Tauri's asset handling & IPC systems work - nothing to worry about :)

I've gone ahead and create a GitHub Issue about setting up a checkbox with the installer such that it doesn't force Electro as the default app. It's something I wanted to add pre-announcement but figured it wouldn't be as much of a requested feature as it clearly is, my bad.

Thanks for the feedback!

Tinos··on Show HN: Electro – A hyper-fast Windows image viewer with a built-in terminal
Thanks for the constructive feedback - the folder feature is 100% coming soon, it was one of my favourite features from other viewers as well.

I'll create an issue for the resizing, good spot!

Feedback is always greatly appreciated :))

Tinos··on Open sourcing my project feels terrifying. Is this anxiety normal?
The project was originally built just for personal use as I was just so frustrated by how boring Windows image viewers are.

I think part of my anxiety comes from the fact that I’m also working on shaping my online presence to improve employability and my GitHub profile is something employers often look at.

I wish this was just about sharing what I love, but it has also become a strategic move which makes a positive launch feel more high-stakes than it probably should.

Tinos··on Biases in Apple's Image Playground
I wonder if adding a simple "Describe yourself" feature along with the image to help guide the model would fix this?

Like if the model was told he is a white male + given the image

Tinos··on Whisky War [Canada / Denmark Border]
The timeline is such a great laugh!
Tinos··on Show HN: I made a desk toy for people in long-distance relationships
So neat! Thanks for sharing
Tinos··on Ask HN: The Worst Engineer I Know Is Demanding We Start Using Celery (Python)
Oh boy this sounds like quite the situation. You obviously understand the internal affairs far greater than I, but you did say "I am the person who has to put him in his place". Not saying this is the solution but if you're the person who put him in, you're probably the best person to kick him out?

Again, I don't want to meddle with decisions involving total stangers' careers but philosophy that the CEO at my old company had (which was a startup optimising for 100x efficiency) was "hire fast; fire fast" and his startup is doing pretty well under that mantra!

Tinos··on Ask HN: What commit message conventions do you follow?
Yes you are right, well said! I suppose it's key to look at your project from a birds' eye view and try and estimate how large scale you expect it to be.

If you're building the next open source self-hosted facebook, yeah I think a convention is necessary. However, if you're building "my calculator app in Rust" then you're probably okay just doing commits "abcd123" just so that you can have remote code storage :^)

Tinos··on 50 Years of Travel Tips
Great read but I must say I completely disagree with:

"the best way to avoid [[getting cheated/swindled]] is to give strangers your trust and treat them well. Being good to them brings out their good. If you are on your best behavior, they will be on their best behavior."

As someone who's lived in London for 20 years, if you trust and treat everyone well you will lose all of your money, your watch, and phone. Unfortunately, those looking to cheat you out of something have become extremely common and totally remorseless!

I get that the author is probably referring to locals but these days it's impossible to tell who's a local trying to be kind and who's trying to distract you to reach into your bag.

Maybe I'm being unnecessarily pessimistic about strangers but i guess that's what London does to you haha

Tinos··on Show HN: I made a desk toy for people in long-distance relationships
Pretty cute. How'd you get them to pair overseas?
Tinos··on Ask HN: The Worst Engineer I Know Is Demanding We Start Using Celery (Python)
Sounds like your company/team have some serious communication issues. These things do happen in all companies regardless of size - but from what I understand, this is a repeat event.

Mentioning these sorts of concerns with other people in the company (especially higher-ups) is crucial. They can offer you the guidance on how to handle the situation far more effectively than some strangers on a forum.

I have had many instances of these sort of situations. Half the time you just suck it up and do it (if the person is more senior or it's a topic you're not so confident about) and the other half you can usually find some other strategy like meeting in the middle.

Maybe Celery is the best option? Have a team-wide meeting to discuss his side of the story. Sure, he might be one to just advocate constantly, but give him his pedestal to speak. If his arguments are shaky, he will step down from the pedestal on his own when he realises that this decision is inefficient and unnecessary. If he's not the founder/CEO then talk to the founder/CEO or anyone above this guy so that they can help you put him in his place.

Sorry I couldn't be of technical help but I hope this feedback will help tackle your team's root problem - communication.

Tinos··on Ask HN: What commit message conventions do you follow?
My advice is never use conventions for personal/solo projects - they do not matter.

When it comes to working in teams I actually do recommend them because during a code review you can - at a glance - read what each commit has done so you can familiarise yourself with the steps the developer took to reach the state in the PR.

For small teams I'm a big proponent of slimmed down version of Conventional Commits' standard. At our startup we would only really use these types: fix/feat/chore/docs/refactor/revert/ci/test.

Something simple like:

fix(ControlPanel): popover animation no longer causes layout shifts

is perfect