HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

hamaluik

1,400 karma · joined August 16, 2018

Software developer in Canada. MSc in Biomechanical Engineering, but now following a lifelong passion for programming. Contact and blog at https://hamaluik.ca
submissionscomments
hamaluik··on How to build a printer
I bought an x4 a month or so ago, zero regrets. It sounds hyperbolic but it’s finally been the thing to actually decouple me from my phone. Whenever I’m out and about, bored, I just slide it out and pick up where I left off reading last. It’s a nicer reading experience on my kobo but the portability and.. frankly charm just can’t be beat.
hamaluik··on Remote workers report the highest well-being in study of 7,700 employees
Since full remote I can spend 8 hours a day on work instead of 10 (an hour commute each way). Putting aside other benefits like easy and cheap lunches, way better desk ergonomics and equipment, and all the sundry other benefits, working remote allows me to have a life that I never could when I worked in an office because of those 2 hours a day.

It's nice to be face-to-face with people, but I don't need that every day (and frankly don't want it neither), but all the benefits in quality of life overwhelming favor remote work for me to the point I will put up with way more shenanigans just to keep this benefit.

hamaluik··on Agent-Manager: A Tmux TUI for Running Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode
There seem to be a lot of these sorts of tools popping up but it’s not clear to me the added value they bring in over using plain tmux (or any other “normal” session multiplexer).

Can someone who uses one of these agent-specific multiplexers share their experience and reasoning for reaching for / building these? What makes this better than a normal multiplexer? I am asking in earnest; I just don’t understand but I want to.

hamaluik··on The Core of Rust
This feels like a fairly uncharitable take. The author conveniently left out all of the things needed to understand that JavaScript version, including async/await, promises, modules, string interpolation, lambda syntax, not to mention the runtime that is running this, etc.

You also don’t have to start with a program that invokes 20 concepts at once, every one of those rust concepts can have its own hello world, introducing one concept at a time. Frankly several of them are just fundamental CS concepts.

hamaluik··on Mathpad: A mathematical keypad for students and professionals
You should try building one for yourself, I did [1] and it’s easier than you’d think. I made mine just a basic numpad but I really like the idea of turning it into a tool to enter math symbols.. guess I know what my next project is, thanks for the inspiration!

1: https://blog.hamaluik.ca/posts/custom-numpad/

hamaluik··on Dart added support for cross-compilation
I released two apps built in dart on flutter. I loved it at the time, but I ran into this issue headlong with both of them. Release v1.0, move on to other things, come back in a year with a new computer to fix a minor bug and I can’t even compile the original release anymore, and had to spend forever rejiggering everything to get it back to the state it was when I left it. I really loved dart, and even flutter, building in it was a breeze. But the churn made the js ecosystem look slow.
hamaluik··on So Much Blood
Plasma can be used outside of prophylactics as well, I don't think this is accounted for in the article (human plasma is used in cosmetics for example).

A lot of plasma is also separated out of whole-blood donations and manufactured into all sorts of things. I don't know all of the end-user financial ramifications of this, but hospitals absolutely do pay (sometimes quite a pretty penny depending on rarity of antigens and antibodies) for RBCs and platelets (and plasma) from suppliers like the American Red Cross.

Purely anecdotally, I have heard stories of some donors being compensated extremely handsomely for their regular donations because of the rarity of their blood attributes - even being flown across the country and wined and dined to obtain their blood on top of thousands of dollars per donation.

hamaluik··on We're back: How tuberculosis is set to surge globally once again
The book includes privates charities and governments, but looks at TB through many more lenses than just those. There is a reason it’s a whole book and not just a comment on an Internet forum. I just finished the book and highly recommend the read, if only to learn about something that I suspect most of us (myself at least, certainly), is known only as _history_, not the raging health crisis that is continues to be.
hamaluik··on We're back: How tuberculosis is set to surge globally once again
Everything is Tuberculosis [1] answers just that. Essentially it boils down to staggering wealth inequality and the aftershocks of colonialism . The west “cured” TB 70 years ago then stopped caring about it. There isn’t a enough profit in preventing a million deaths a year in the rest of the world, so we just.. don’t.

[1]: https://everythingistb.com/

hamaluik··on Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar
Yup! https://www.sheepit-renderfarm.com/home Is a great community example of this.
hamaluik··on The number's up for 999. And 911. And 000. And 111
This was my wifi password for a few weeks, but the wife-acceptance factor just wasn’t there :(
hamaluik··on Color for the color-challenged
Holy crap. Thank you!
hamaluik··on Are cooking videos making us better cooks?
Have you checked out Adam Ragusea on YouTube? https://youtube.com/@aragusea

He continues on in a similar, if more modern, tradition as Alton Brown, I enjoy his videos and I have learned a lot from his videos.

hamaluik··on JetBrains Mono Typeface
It took me a bit to warm up to them, but now I find myself relying on them to more quickly spot errors, so yes it ends up faster. Somewhat counterintuitively, I find the ligature characters easier to process at a glance and see if there's a problem or not (I suspect its something along the lines of my brain looks at "<=" as two separate characters, one after the other, and has to process each in serial then combine them into the concept of "less than or equal to", whereas the ≤ is a single character that goes straight to the "less than or equal to" concept in the same way its easier to remember the number "six hundred ninety-three" than "six, nine, three". I also find it way easier to spot the "≡" vs the "===" in JS land, which surprised me but here I am.

I wouldn't say its harder to go back, but it does make me do a double take. Overall I would say the effect is quite minor and I'm just fine without the ligatures, but given the option I would enable / prefer them.

hamaluik··on Quest for my perfect watch
I don’t get wrist pain, but that’s probably because I find it so uncomfortable I always take my watch off whenever my hands approach a keyboard. I haven’t really experienced carpal tunnel myself yet, but literally every single person I’m physically related to gets it by their 40s so maybe it’s related to that somehow?
hamaluik··on How to use your DSLR from 2008 as a webcam in 2022 (NixOS)
If you have {Windows, Mac Linux} and {Android, iOS}, you can use Iriun: https://iriun.com
hamaluik··on Apple overtakes Android to pass 50% share of smartphones used in US
I fall exactly here.. I used Android for a long time, until I got tired of my phone becoming non-functional after just a year or two. Switched to iPhones, and now they’re lasting 4+ years. I miss the flexibility of Android and iOS is full of bugs and design-based papercuts, yet it still manages to beat Android in just about all the areas that truly matter to me.
hamaluik··on Covid “Fudge Factor” – A map of Covid data corruption and approach that worked
I can get onboard with most of this.. until the end. COVID deaths don’t just mean everyone losing 15 days of life. To me it meant multiple family members dying. It means my respiratory system has been absolutely wrecked, hopefully not forever but for at least several months now. It means my infant son is gasping for breath on my lap as I write this and there’s nothing we can do for him. Statistics in white towers are so decoupled from humanity they are worse than useless; these selfish attitudes cause real harm.
hamaluik··on Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit
I did the same thing a couple years ago [0]. It's not the most elegant and my blog is miniscule, but it was a fun project and also born out of frustration with the existing site generators. I structured it as the source sitting next to the site contents, so from a fresh computer (with Rust installed), it's as straightforward as `cargo build`.

I think the best thing about this approach (writing your own generator) is that it really lets you build your site / content exactly the way you want to. Don't need categories and tags? Don't add them to begin with. Want to add an RSS feed? No problem, just add it. Want to do some fancy image compression and processing in the pipeline? No problem; you're the boss. It sounds simple but it really frees you up to write / generate your site however you want.

0: https://github.com/hamaluik/blog.hamaluik.ca

hamaluik··on Show HN: I built an app for when I talk too much in online meetings
I think it could be, but without trying it I'd hesitate to say spend a bunch of time and energy implementing it. I also can't really help you as I don't have a mac to run it on.
hamaluik··on Show HN: I built an app for when I talk too much in online meetings
Unfortunately I think I have the exact opposite problem (don't talk enough) but awesome work! And thank you for making and clarifying that it is private and 100% on device. More tools need to be like this!
hamaluik··on ProtonMail Is Down
Still down for me :(
hamaluik··on [dead]
The "Foegen effect", written by Fögen, and:

Author contributions

Conceptualization: Zacharias Fögen.

Data curation: Zacharias Fögen.

Formal analysis: Zacharias Fögen.

Funding acquisition: Zacharias Fögen.

Investigation: Zacharias Fögen.

Methodology: Zacharias Fögen.

Project administration: Zacharias Fögen.

Resources: Zacharias Fögen.

Software: Zacharias Fögen.

Supervision: Zacharias Fögen.

Validation: Zacharias Fögen.

Visualization: Zacharias Fögen.

Writing – original draft: Zacharias Fögen.

Writing – review & editing: Zacharias Fögen.

Does not inspire confidence in the quality of this research.

hamaluik··on Ask HN: Is Apple down?
Maps and iMessage are working for me in Canada, but not music.
hamaluik··on Bypass Paywalls: a browser extension to help bypass paywalls for selected sites
Is there a service in the same vein as music streaming, but for news outlets? I'd be happy to pay for a subscription somewhere at a reasonable price, but not happy to pay for and manage 150+ individual subscriptions (like what this tool provides). Granted I wouldn't ever actually sign up for most of them, but managing even more than a couple would be rather undesirable. Perhaps something with pay-per-view built in, given how infrequently I come across articles from certain publishers?
hamaluik··on How I See Numbers
I don't see things the exact same way as the author, though similar (simplest way I could describe it is things like addition are filling up tanks of liquid of [usually] 10^n size, though a little more amorphous and yet "jelly" than what you would normally think of as liquid? I'm finding it hard to describe).

Exponentials get represented as a third dimension; where basic arthimetic is 1 or 2d depending on the context, exponentials go into a third dimension if that makes sense.

Modulo is the leftovers / splash-out when I pour one number into several smaller containers.

Fractions are simply fractional amounts of a tank of liquid (i.e. 2/3 is simply a measuring cup filled to the 2/3 line type of thing), but I can't ever picture them very accurately for weird fractions. "Improper" fractions are basically the same as modulo.. almost as if they're unstable in my head and automatically "pour" themselves into more tanks that fill as needed until some remainder is left.

I don't have a visualization for roots, which is probably why I'm generally so bad at them.

The representations helped in engineering school for getting a "feeling" about a formula; it was often very easy to notice if an equation I was massaging had gone off the rails. For a pure proof however (not that I did much of that), it was useless.

hamaluik··on Namecheap: Russia Service Termination
Your blatant whataboutism aside, I do agree that the world would likely be a much better place if companies applied morals like this across the board.
hamaluik··on Namecheap: Russia Service Termination
Doesn’t it though? It is in effect part of a larger parcel of sanctions the west is applying to Russia for their actions, and in that light is only one tiny lever; but if enough levers can be applied then I firmly believe there is hope for change for Russia.
hamaluik··on Namecheap: Russia Service Termination
I am frankly shocked and dismayed at the number of people deriding this decision. In a grey world this seems like such a black and white thing. Sure it may inconvenience a few, but on the other hand innocents are being slaughtered. All the weight of these complaints don't even begin to touch the scale when compared to literal children being murdered.

Besides all that, Namecheap is a private company and can do business with whomever they wish.

hamaluik··on Flutter is the most popular cross-platform mobile SDK
I unfortunately didn't keep great records at the time (probably because I was so pissed off), but my app [1] has gone through some dependency hell on more than one occasion. I've more or less stepped back from the project but the thing that sticks out to me the most is when I left the project for several months, then tried to re-clone and re-build the app to fix a bug. I ended up having to change at least a few depenencies and even send in an upstream PR to get things working (thankfully accepted quickly) before I could compile because something had somehow changed in those few months. Fixing it took a couple days of effort, which for a toy side-project almost killed it on the spot.

In my experience, Flutter is the worst cross-platform mobile development tool; except for all the others.

[1] Time Cop: https://github.com/hamaluik/timecop

Page 1 of 6Next →