Hacker News Reader

k3vinwon GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

Jump navigation is a nice way to solve this. Something like FlashJump for Mac. Tab navigation too for close proximity jumping.

k3vinwon Happy 45th Birthday to the IBM PC and Model F/XT

https://sharktastica.co.uk/image?id=yysMQjg1

Admiring the keyboard layout they went with. I love that Ctrl is placed in my preferred location. That’s prime real estate that modern keyboards waste on Capslock. Unfortunately, Capslock still exists awkwardly adjacent to the space bar.

k3vinwon Buz – A fork of Bun using modern Zig, with sub-1s incremental builds

Should have called it Bunz!

k3vinwon The primary purpose of code review is to find code that will be hard to maintain

I appreciate the perspective, but code reviews are subjective. The tooling and the language can be so good that it shifts to this kind of utopian state, where all bugs are caught and eliminated by guarantees in the language and tooling. Or they could be dismal to the point a human needs to check for mundane issues like bugs in the code.

k3vinwon Bashblog – a single bash script to create blogs

> Nice idea but I don't understand why people write bash scripts more than a few lines long.

From a pragmatic perspective I agree. But I think you’re missing the point here. A lot of the most entertaining, and dare I say inspiring content, found on Hacker News is about exactly things like this. Things that seem silly, but are also very intentionally pushing the boundaries to the extreme/absurd.

k3vinwon Bashblog – a single bash script to create blogs

Awesome! I’m the author and I created that project as a way to teach myself Bash at the time. I called it NanoBlogger because it was inspired by MicroBlogger, yet another Bash blog.

I still have fond memories of the open source community’s warm welcome and amazing contributions to the project.

k3vinwon - -dangerously-skip-reading-code

like declarative vs imperative?

k3vinwon --dangerously-skip-reading-code

> We can stop reading LLM-generated code just like we don’t read assembly, or bytecode, or transpiled JavaScript; our high-level language source would now be another form of machine code

This is too weird for me. At least with programming languages I can consult the documentation and if the programming language isn’t behaving as documented, it’s obviously a defect and if you’re savvy enough you often have open channels that accept contributions. Can we say the same for Claude or other AI solutions?

k3vinwon Building my own Vi text editor in BASIC

Never occurred to me how much ms dos batch syntax must have been inspired by basic when I saw the comments (aka remarks) start with “rem”

k3vinwon Uncle Bob: It's Over

Fair point. I’m still learning how best to take advantage of Ai. And to be honest, a statically typed language would have caught the issue with the wrong return type before the AI tool.

k3vinwon Uncle Bob: It's Over

I’m not so sure. I had a recent experience where Kiro was convinced there was a defect in the testing library when I asked it to refactor some existing project code.

However this conclusion made no sense as we had similar scenarios across our project that worked flawlessly. After intervening I determined the root cause was a combination of an async issue with the production code and some incorrect mocking that was covering up the async issue.

It never occurred to the AI agent to do some simple cross examination before essentially throwing in the towel?

k3vinwon Uncle Bob: It's Over

Gives me a whole new perspective to the phrase clean code.

k3vinwon Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

Interesting. I replaced most of my gripes with power toys and WSL. That and a ridiculous amount of hardware. YMMV.

k3vinwon Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

I’m most excited for the scheduler and memory footprint improvements. As bad as I hear Windows 11 is, I’ve rarely had issues with it. For the most part it just works and stays out of my way. My only gripes are the occasional forced updates and a rare hard crash that happened once in a span of a year of using it as my daily driver.

Well that and I have to be mindful of running too many resource starving processes at the same time including WSL. Otherwise performance will quickly degrade. But that’s not much different than my 2015 ASUS zenbook running Linux off of 8gb of ram. In comparison my work laptop runs on 32gb of ram with much more powerful cpu cores.

WSL is my favorite and most used feature of Windows 11. So I’ll be happy as long as they don’t screw that up.

k3vinwon EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security

If you think that's wild just wait until you find out what programming language their AI tool was written in.

k3vinwon EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security

Thanks for sharing this on GitHub. Nice to see how others are using AI in their projects.

k3vinwon Show HN: Pano, a bookmarking tool built around shareable shelves

At first I thought it was interactive. It would have been much cooler if it was ;)

k3vinwon The United States and Israel have launched a major attack on Iran

agreed. Although "starts another war" dismisses 50 years of history. Iran never stopped being at war with US and Israel and they clearly were never going to agree to a deal that left them without the nuclear capability to wipe both US and Israel off the map.

k3vinwon The United States and Israel have launched a major attack on Iran

That's funny, I can't shake the thought that China's AI tech could be helping the ayatollahs' conduct their retaliation strikes.

k3vinwon What does " 2>&1 " mean?

Perhaps it’s the odd placement of the ampersand. Something like >2&1 would make more sense to me.

On the other hand, pipe “|” is brilliant!

k3vinwon US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere

False equivalency. As a green card holder he does not share the same freedom of speech rights as that of a US citizen.

k3vinwon US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere

Good. I’m bypassing the UK altogether since they can throw you in jail for thought crimes.

https://www.newsweek.com/policing-thought-crime-should-have-...

k3vinwon US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere

So not books banned from the general public? Got it!

k3vinwon Terminals should generate the 256-color palette

It’s a messy situation for sure and what lead me to discover tinted theming: https://github.com/tinted-theming/base24/

It’s been a fairly decent stop gap measure. I use tinted shell to switch between color schemes.

k3vinwon Vim 9.2

That’s an interesting thought. I don’t believe that Vim’s modal system will be to their taste, but makes me curious if anyone has put together a collection of useful text editing macros for Vim similar to what Notepad++ offers.

Typically, I just pipe the output of my buffer to external commands to apply similar transformations that Notepad++ offers out of the box, but I would think the same would be challenging to do on Windows without Cygwin to close the gap. So a Vim macro collection similar to Notepad++ implemented in Vim script or Lua would be pretty cool.

k3vinwon Vim 9.2

> The MS-Windows GUI now supports native dark mode for the menu and title bars, along with improved fullscreen support and higher-quality toolbar icons.

Congratulations on the new release! Looking forward to applying these awesome improvements.

k3vinwon Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

That’s a more meaningful prefix than “,” at the expense of a couple more key strokes. I consider that to still be a win in the book of tab completions.

I would replace underscore with “-“ or “.”

k3vinwon Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers (2022)

Not an expert here, so I’m genuinely curious how could a video stream (edit: with muted audio stream) possibly cause another laptop in close proximity to crash?

k3vinwon Show HN: HN Wrapped 2025 - an LLM reviews your year on HN

Haha. You make one positive comment about a language and suddenly you’re a Rust evangelist :) Well that was fun. Thank you for this!

https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/k3vinw

k3vinwon JSDoc is TypeScript

Generally, no. Only in the case you had a requirement to exclusively use JavaScript as the programming language you might be in for an awkward time justifying that you added type checking to the project via the type checker component of TypeScript with JSDoc :)