HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

paularmstrong

140 karma · joined April 7, 2011

submissionscomments
paularmstrong··on I Don't Want to Interact with Stochastic Parrots
If only it were so simple to block all of my coworkers.
paularmstrong··on “It works better in the app”
The article you linked is about social media as the proxy for information discovery as opposed to search.

> …clear that mobile is the future…

And also, "mobile" is tangential to "app" vs "website".

paularmstrong··on Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub
I've used git-bug[1] for issues and it works pretty well. The web-ui is lagging behind and PR support would be everything you'd need to ditch a central-hosted web instance.

[1] https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug

paularmstrong··on Bike Bureau: Report Bike Lane Obstructions
I really wish this weren't the case, but I'm afraid that we're heading to a place where if we flood reports to officials, they'll just jump on calling bike lanes "DEI" and take them out.
paularmstrong··on GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability
Four of them were regarding AI/Copilot. So that's really just one long running incident and will probably continue to be 50/50 chance of being down.
paularmstrong··on Designing emoji for the way we communicate today
I also like that the article uses whatever system emoji you have, so everything is just showing apple emoji in text for me. All I see are a few 3D video renders of theirs.
paularmstrong··on Decoy Font
Can someone explain the actual use-case here? I'm struggling with this because it also hides the message from myself, making it incredibly hard to type because I have no confirmation that I hit the right keys on the keyboard.
paularmstrong··on Show HN: One More Letter
Also some instructions. I had no idea what I was supposed to do at first.
paularmstrong··on The git history command
`git history split` is really going to help me help juniors break up their large PRs into smaller more concise changes. If only it had the option to split an entire branch in two easily.
paularmstrong··on Odyssey Linux
I closed the page and gave up figuring out what this was about because of the poor contrast ratio and tiny font.

[edit] apparently the contrast ratio is technically okay. But this is one of those cases where raw contrast ratio isn't actually a good measure of accessibility. Just because some text has 5.92:1 contrast ratio, doesn't mean that at 11px font-size it's legible.

paularmstrong··on What's the best way to do authentication in modern applications
localStorage is not sent to the server when you request a document. So now you threw out the ability to do server-side rendering. This is only fine if you've got a application that always requires authentication, otherwise you risk server vs client mismatch, needless roundtrips, and DOM rewrites.
paularmstrong··on PostHog FOSS
It's all the AI bloat for me. It keeps getting shoved in my face and they _really_ want me to use it. But I neither want nor need it. The product itself was so good that it doesn't need this whole guessing-machine-layer on top of it.

I also agree that the nav, structure, and defaults changing keep being un-intuitive and are making it harder to find the things that I use and that matter to me and my orgs.

paularmstrong··on PostHog FOSS
They've been using AI to shove a lot of AI into their product and trying to force everyone to use AI. I really don't understand the why of any of it. The product was working great for what it needs to do. I don't need AI to make guesses about data for me and I especially do not want _yet another product_ trying to write features in my codebase (which is their latest push).
paularmstrong··on What any website can see about you
Wait till they find out what information native/installed apps can find out about you.
paularmstrong··on macOS needs its grid back
Zen has been working as a full replacement for Arc for me since the Atlassian acquisition. There are only minor things that I miss from Arc ("development mode").
paularmstrong··on [dead]
/me click "Jobs"

> Internal Server Error

I should have assumed this would happen based on how "vibey" the main page looked.

paularmstrong··on Incident with Actions and Pages
What's wrong with codeberg for private repos?
paularmstrong··on Don't Roll Your Own
I agree with a caveat: Default date pickers on mobile devices are very good. But on desktop browsers they are terrible. They break design continuity in a very ugly way and have quirks between browsers and systems. And personally, the popup calendar they provide just too small. If the system took over the date picker on desktop like it does on mobile devices instead of forcing the browser to handle it, I feel like we could get somewhere better.
paularmstrong··on I'm a Normie. Can Normies Vibe Code?
> Having needled her repeatedly over the past couple years about AI’s environmental, political, and economic implications, I brushed all that aside on a recent Sunday and drove to her house. After a little tibia talk, I opened her computer and began emitting vibes.

So the author had a moral, environmental, political and economic stance and then just threw them all in the bin.

This is sad to me because I have all of these stances and more. I just cannot bring myself to give in and use a technology wrought with so many systemic problems. And I cannot understand how anyone could feel so strongly about anything to the point of preaching it to others, only to just sort of … ignore them(?).

paularmstrong··on Out with the JavaScript, in with the HTML
The images will always need a network request, but the non-JS version requires another request for the new HTML source.

And with the previous implementation, all users would get the progressive enhancement, not just non-Firefox users.

paularmstrong··on Out with the JavaScript, in with the HTML
This is a weirdly unpopular opinion here when it comes to HTML & JS, but there's a time and place for everything. This is a neat small example, but hardly worth the effort of changing something that was already working fine.

With the change, I now need another roundtrip network request to get new sizes of the same content on the current page that would have been able to be done in just a couple hundred bytes of JavaScript.

Edit: also there is still no view-transition support on Firefox.

paularmstrong··on Breaking up with WordPress after two decades
Seems like they went through a bunch of vibe coding only to come up with a half-baked copy of Astro. And why not just use Astro? It's got the exact features that they've built, many more, and a large and bustling community.
paularmstrong··on ZomboCom stolen by a hacker, sold, now replaced with AI-generated makeover
html5 zombocom still exists, for your viewing pleasure. you can do anything at zombocom. anything at all. the only limit is yourself.

[1]: https://html5zombo.com/

paularmstrong··on Updates to GitHub Copilot interaction data usage policy
I'm in the US and it's off for me. I believe I've previously opted out of everything copilot related in the past if there was anything.
paularmstrong··on Mouser: An open source alternative to Logi-Plus mouse software
Thanks for pointing this out. I had no idea it existed. The other options in the comments just didn't quite work the way I would like.

- The main topic requires me to pull python dependencies, build, run manually on Mac - All others can't reassign the button below the scroll wheel on the MX Master 3/4

paularmstrong··on Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass
I got this, but then refreshing that page made it work for me
paularmstrong··on Downtown Denver's office vacancy rate grows to 38.2%
I assume it's because they would need to re-wire electrical and retrofit plumbing on a massive scale to accommodate kitchens and bathrooms for separate units. They end up needing to gut the entire building and cut through floors and ceilings without damaging any structural and load-bearing parts. It doesn't sound easy nor cheap.
paularmstrong··on JPEG XL Test Page
Same for me, Zen 1.17.15b on Mac
paularmstrong··on There is no comfortable reading position
Ah yes, I too have $2,000 to spend on a chair for reading in. /s
paularmstrong··on Lotusbail npm package found to be harvesting WhatsApp messages and contacts
This has nothing to do with NodeJS or NPM. The code is freely distributed, just like any open source repo or package manager may provide. The onus is on those who use it to audit what it actually does.
Page 1 of 3Next →