Hacker News Reader

emmanueloga_on Show HN: Opening lines of famous literary works

Would it be hard to translate to Spanish? I'd love to share with some friends that love books but don't speak English!

emmanueloga_on Separate the Cord from the Device

Right! [0] Apparently there are not many standard connectors like these, but I found at least one [1] ...

0: https://www.zojirushi.com/blog/design-explained-our-easy-rel...

1: https://www.mcmaster.com/products/breakaway-magnetic-connect...

emmanueloga_on Show HN: Axe – A 12MB binary that replaces your AI framework

The excessive size of Go binaries is a common complain. I last recall seeing a related discussion on Lobsters [1]. Who knows, maybe the binary could be shrunk a bit? IMHO 12mb binary size is not that big of a deal.

1: https://lobste.rs/s/tzyslr/reducing_size_go_binaries_by_up_7...

emmanueloga_on F# 10

good point, could be some 10 years ago now, I think...

emmanueloga_on F# 10

I got into OCaml for a while, which naturally led me to try F#. What pushed me away back then was that the tooling lagged behind C#, especially in VS Code, and the C#/F# interop wasn’t as ergonomic as I expected. I liked the idea of using F# for the core and C# around the edges, but it didn’t feel smooth in practice. This was years ago, so maybe the tooling has improved since.

I’ve always wondered whether tighter integration with C# would have led to broader adoption, though that might have changed the character of the language.

emmanueloga_on Everyone’s building “async agents,” but almost no one can define them

How about framing this in terms of two orthogonal axes the article doesn’t name: concurrency (actors) and continuity (durable execution).

* Durable execution: long‑running, resumable workflows with persistence, replay, and timeouts.

* Actors: isolated entities that own their state and logic, process one message at a time, and get concurrency by existing in large numbers (regardless of whether the runtime uses threads, async/await, or processes under the hood).

Combine the two and you get a "Durable actor", which seems close to what the article calls an “async agent”: a component that can receive messages, maintain state, pause/resume, survive restarts, and call out to an LLM or any other API.

And since spawning is already a primitive in the actor model, the article’s "subagent" fits naturally here too: it’s just another actor the first one creates.

emmanueloga_on Message Queues: A Simple Guide with Analogies (2024)

I’ve been thinking that defaulting to durable execution over lower‑level primitives like queues makes sense a lot of the time, what do you think?

A lot of the "simple queue" use cases end up needing extra machinery like a transactional‑outbox pattern just to be reliable. Durable‑execution frameworks (DBOS/Temporal/etc.) give you retries, state, and consistency out of the box. Patterns like Sagas also tend to get stitched together on top of queues, but a DE workflow gives you the same guarantees with far less complexity.

The main tradeoff I can think of is latency: DE engines add overhead, so for very high throughput, huge fan‑out, or ultra‑low‑latency pipelines, a bare‑bones queue + custom consumers might still be better.

Curious where others draw the line between the two.

emmanueloga_on Show HN: Browser-based interactive 3D Three-Body problem simulator

Tried writing an electrostatic particle simulator in Turbo Pascal 7 with BGI as a teen, a handful of particles before it crawled. Then saw a galaxy collision sim on a CD-ROM magazine disc handling thousands of bodies smoothly. Thought it was assembly tricks.. now I'm sure it's algorithmic (avoiding N**2 runtime) but never dug into the specifics. Are charges vs gravity sims essentially the same n-body problem?

emmanueloga_on Bundler Belongs to the Ruby Community

I haven't used ruby in more than a decade, but I remember there was always some controversy around the corner. Up next: Zed Shaw comes out from his cave, joins forces with the mummy of _why to combat DHH's anti-woke agenda.

emmanueloga_on Page Object (2013)

Page Object Models trade off clarity for encapsulation. Concrete example [1]. They can make tests look "cleaner" but often obscure what's actually happening. For example:

    await page.getStarted(); // what does this actually do?

    await page.locator('a', { hasText: 'Get started' }).first().click();
    await expect(page.locator('h1', { hasText: 'Installation' })).toBeVisible();

The second version is explicit and self-documenting. Tests don't always benefit from aggressive DRY, but I've seen teams adopt POMs to coordinate between SDETs and SWEs.

1: https://playwright.dev/docs/pom

emmanueloga_on Ripple – A TypeScript UI framework that takes the best of React, Solid, Svelte

How about... inlining children:

    const age = 40;
    const children = [<div ~ "Moe" />, <div ~ "Larry"/>, <div ~ "Curly" />];
    return <div age ~ children />;

Rationale: single child elements are ubiquitous in web dev, but most JSX formatters will require 3 lines of code even if there's a single child.

emmanueloga_on Malicious versions of Nx and some supporting plugins were published

I just found that someone posted a showHN for an utility to solve this issue [1].

I think this reinforces the idea that is something that could be built into verdaccio.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44891786

emmanueloga_on Malicious versions of Nx and some supporting plugins were published

I wonder if anyone use https://verdaccio.org/ to vendor packages?

In theory for each package one could:

* npm install pkg

* npm pack pkg

* npm publish --registry=https://verdaccio.company.com

* set .npmrc to "registry=https://verdaccio.company.com/ when working with the actual app.

...this way, one could vet packages one by one. The main caveat I see is that it’s very inconvenient to have to vet and publish each package manually.

It would be great if Verdaccio had a UI to make this easier, for example, showing packages that were attempted to install but not yet vetted, and then allowing approval with a single click.

emmanueloga_on Perfect Freehand – Draw perfect pressure-sensitive freehand lines

Explanation of what this does:

https://github.com/steveruizok/perfect-freehand/tree/main?ta...

emmanueloga_on Airbrush art of the 80s (2015)

TIL about the Scanimate [1] [2].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVNO#Music_video

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1aT_CqhyQs

emmanueloga_on Vanilla JavaScript support for Tailwind Plus

In real projects I typically group the classes in a way that makes it easier to read, something like this:

    <div class={tw(
      "block",
      "transform transition-all",
      "bg-white ring-1 ring-black/5 rounded-xl shadow-2xl",

      "max-w-3xl mx-auto overflow-hidden",

      "group-data-closed/dialog:opacity-0",
      "group-data-closed/dialog:scale-95",

      "group-data-enter/dialog:duration-300",
      "group-data-enter/dialog:ease-out",

      "group-data-leave/dialog:duration-200",
      "group-data-leave/dialog:ease-in"
    )}>
        ...
    </div>

I currently do this manually but it would be nice to have some tooling to automate that kind of format.

emmanueloga_on Writing is thinking

There's been a lot of work in this area but no definitive answer, and few constructed languages speakers [1]. I imagine the wins may be marginal, similar to the wins in dvorak vs qwerty typing.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity#Artifici...

emmanueloga_on TrendWeight v2 Has Launched

I'm a fan of the app, one of those rare web apps that have been reliably there for more than 10 years and "just works". Today I found out it has been refreshed and its source released [1].

Congrats Erv Walter for the launch of v2 and thank you for making the app and source available!

For those who haven't seen this before, this is a free web app that makes it easy to chart a moving average of the weight measured with smart scales (Withings/Fitbit), following the ideas on John Walker's "The hacker diet" [2].

1: https://github.com/ervwalter/trendweight

2: https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/

emmanueloga_on Don't animate height

Not just height, anything that causes continuous repaints can become expensive. Search for "jank free" to find more resources on the subject, or check this oldish website [1].

1: http://jankfree.org/

emmanueloga_on NativeJIT: A C++ expression –> x64 JIT (2018)

Looks similar to https://github.com/kobalicek/mathpresso

emmanueloga_on Coding agents have crossed a chasm

Took me a while to find this [1]: "We’re building the next-gen operating system for AI agents."

1: https://sdsa.ai/

emmanueloga_on Show HN: hcker.news – an ergonomic, timeline-based Hacker News front page

I like it! Suggestions:

* Clarify relationship with https://hckrnews.com/

* Don't put the settings in localStorage, use URL params. That has a lot of usability improvements including being able to share the state, bookmark it, and heads up the current state. Use Rison [1] for the URL params to make it nice to read.

* The settings overview is too terse. What does something like "Timeline, Top 20, Day, Comments"? Maybe you could turn that into a concise natural language sentence.

1: https://github.com/kou64yama/rison2?tab=readme-ov-file

emmanueloga_on Material 3 Expressive

"I understood that the poet's work wasn't in the poetry; it was in inventing reasons for the poetry to be admirable. Naturally, that ulterior work altered the piece for him—but not for anyone else."

  - J. L. Borges, El Aleph [1]

1: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8699659-comprend-que-el-tra...

emmanueloga_on Ask HN: What are good high-information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)?

Chrome debugger tools? htop? visidata [1]? Clicker games are interesting in that they start bare and end up filling the screen with controls. Rerun visualizations come to mind too [2].

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1CBDTgGtOU

2: https://rerun.io/viewer

emmanueloga_on Nnd – a TUI debugger alternative to GDB, LLDB

Cool! I did not know about that book. Added to [1]. :-)

1: https://github.com/munificent/craftinginterpreters/issues/92...

emmanueloga_on Is outbound going to die?

Looks great, is it comparable to Monica [1] or is it more business oriented?

1: https://github.com/monicahq/monica