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hwc

240 karma · joined June 7, 2013

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hwc··on Ask HN: What are you reading?
For me, I took a copy of it with me on a solo backpacking trip. It was the only entertainment I had for a week.
hwc··on Show HN: Gdocs-me-up: a high-fidelity Google Docs exporter
Behdad, why isn't this just part of Google Docs?
hwc··on Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils
I had no idea they were doing this; good for them!

1. What fraction of the core OS can be switched over? Can they oxidize systemd?

2. Are other distros going to switch over (e.g. Debian, which I think of as the ur-distro)?

hwc··on Golang proposal: container/: generic collection types
> Developers can't pick it up in a week...

I don't think any of the new additions to the library have seriously made the learning curve more difficult. I suspect that most projects don't use templates at all.

There have always been parts of the standard library I'm not familiar with. when I read code that uses it, I just go read the documentation. Now the standard library is just larger.

hwc··on Golang proposal: container/: generic collection types
On the other hand, I've found that for every real-world application I've written in Go, I have not found myself missing any of the containers C++ has had since 2003. I didn't really ever need generics either. I only use them to make it to make it clear which functions don't rely on specific properties of the type they operate on.

Yes, there are occasionally really good reasons to use an ordered map or a priority queue, but I haven't needed either in years.

hwc··on 98.css
Those fonts make me very sad.
hwc··on Show HN: Clawk – Give coding agents a disposable Linux VM, not your laptop
If there is any attack surface within a properly-configured container, that's a kernel bug, right?
hwc··on No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026
just move the prime meridian. the one we use for timekeeping doesn't have to aligh with longitude forever.
hwc··on Half-Life 2 in a Browser
A few years ago, before I bought a Nintendo for my kid, he was playing Minecraft on an iPad. I tried to pair a Bluetooth controller, and had no luck. I think the OS was too locked down. At the same time, I could connect a Bluetooth controller to my Android phone and play Minecraft with no problem.

In fact, I've said for a long time that I wish I had a nice Android tablet with a Tegra chip that I could both use as regular tablet and as a game system.

hwc··on Half-Life 2 in a Browser
With WASM and WebGL being mature technologies, I'm not sure why there aren't more video games published this way. For really big games with lots of assets, having those assets in local storage makes sense. But I wouldn't mind if a game "installer" is just your browser asking "This game wants to use up to 20 GB of local disc space. Is that okay?"
hwc··on Tesla Solar Roof is on life support as it pivot to panels
Aren't you supposed to find the solutions BEFORE you announce the product?
hwc··on OpenAI agrees with Dept. of War to deploy models in their classified network
Please note that the US Congress has not approved the existence of a "Department of War" this century. Calling it the Department of Defense is the only legally correct way to refer to it.
hwc··on A visualization of the RGB space covered by named colors
Now make it do a perceptually uniform color space.
hwc··on Solar energy is now the cheapest source of power, study
Yep, I can't quite get as much power out of the panels on my roof as I use on average, but that's okay because I am reducing the cost of transmission by a significant amount.
hwc··on Solar energy is now the cheapest source of power, study
Probably not orders of magnitude cheaper than today. But energy prices will become very stable.
hwc··on Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image
How did they make any money at all without ads?
hwc··on Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?
Yeah, if you can't send robots to the surface to mine necessary minerals, don't bother building floating cities.
hwc··on Is a movie prop the ultimate laptop bag?
> and padded

I prefer to use a laptop sleeve, and then it doesn't matter if it is padded or not.

hwc··on Should we drain the Everglades?
Also, you need a place to build the dike. Look at a map of Miami, for example, and tell me where you want to build a dike. In front of Miami Beach? And how far does it go? All the way up the coast? There's 120 miles of continuous city on the Atlantic Coast. Also, the land is all very porous sand on top of porous coral. Even if you build a dike out of clay and concrete, water will still seep in from below. This is already happening at high tide.
hwc··on Should we drain the Everglades?
My parents bought a house 11 feet above sea level. The right combination of high tides and storm surge could easily flood that any time. It hasn't happened yet, but the sea level could rise a foot or so in the next generation, making flooding more likely every year.
hwc··on Should we drain the Everglades?
I used to live in this part of the country. There's an insane amount of disregard for the environment and climate. Yes, new buildings have to be reinforced against hurricanes. But they are still building new houses only a few meters above sea level, as if sea level rise wasn't already unavoidable.

And on the largest scale, there is a limit to the amount of fresh groundwater that wells along the South Florida coast can get. Once they exceed that amount, they'll be pumping brackish water seeping in from the ocean. Then they have to desalinate the brackish water.

But the last time I was there, they were still building new houses.

hwc··on Nintendo locked down the Switch 2's USB-C port and broke third-party docking
the new dock is huge and has a fan. We won't be able to find a more compact alternative.
hwc··on Android 16 is here
I already can run vim on my phone. That's enough for me.
hwc··on Android 16 is here
It almost works. But the monitor just mirrors the phone, including its weird aspect ratio and font size.

It's almost usable for playing movies on a TV, but that's about it.

hwc··on Android 16 is here
If Android is getting desktop windowing, how long until I can just plug my phone into a monitor and keyboard and have a usable computer?
hwc··on MacBook Air M4
I care more about total mass than thinness. But those things tend to be correlated.
hwc··on MacBook Air M4
Is the Pro fan cooled? I have never heard a fan on my M2 Pro.
hwc··on MacBook Air M4
I still love my M2 MacBook. I can't see any reason at all to upgrade.

But I am glad that they continue to refine the technology.

hwc··on MacBook Air M4
Other than battery mass and screen size, is there a significant difference between the new Macbook Air and the low-end Macbook Pro?
hwc··on Making memcpy(NULL, NULL, 0) well-defined
> internal function

every time you introduce something nonstandard, you add one little hardship to anyone trying to read or modify your code.

if a programmer is familiar with the language, it's standard library, and the normal idioms, then they should be able to just jump in.

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