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unchar1

359 karma · joined November 3, 2018

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unchar1··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2026)
At this point these jobs posts just feel like ways for them to farm PII
unchar1··on What even is an OS now?
Absolutely agree. At the start of the year when Opus 4.6 came out, I remember my co-worker showing me a bunch of apps he made for himself to make himself more productive.

Fast forward a few months, and most of those apps are abandonware. Not that he's not as productive, he just skipped the middlemen (the apps), and started directly asking the agent to do those things.

unchar1··on Stop Making TUIs
From the article

> CLIs have purposes for which they’re irreplaceable. Building a CLI is almost always a good idea. Building a TUI almost never is.

You're also arguing for CLIs which are absolutely great. But TUIs provide none of the composability of CLIs nor the malleability of GUIs

unchar1··on Why eval startups fail (2025)
It's not just figuring out if a model is good at things, but is it good at the things I care about.

Using a targeted eval suite (like a test suite) tells us that.

unchar1··on The Website Specification
Opening the site on my macbook shot the CPU usage to >50%.

Seems a bit ironic considering that it's supposed to be a specification on how a website should be.

unchar1··on VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage
What was the reasoning for this change?
unchar1··on Claude Code runs Git reset –hard origin/main against project repo every 10 mins
Claude tends to disregard "NEVER do X" quite often, but funnily enough, if you tell it "Always ask me to confirm before going X", it never fails to ask you. And you can deny it every time
unchar1··on This time is different
The good thing is that local models are catching up very fast.
unchar1··on This time is different
Calculators are a particularly bad example for your case. There was absolutely hyperbole against calculators when they were introduced. [1]

With similar sentiment as well "They make us dumb" "Machines doing the thinking for us"

Cars were definitely seen as a fad. More accurately a worse version of a horse [2]

If you looked through your other examples, you'd see the same for those as well.

Some things start as fads, but only time will tell if they gain a place in society. Truthfully it's too early to tell for AI, but the arguments you're making, calling it a fad already don't stand up to reason

[1]: https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-item/160697182/ [2]: https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/01/get-horse-americ...

unchar1··on Show HN: I got tired of managing dev environments, so I built ServBay
This looks interesting.

One small feedback: It took me a while to figure out what it actually does. The homepage makes it look more like coolify or dokku.

unchar1··on It's time for modern CSS to kill the SPA
We did an A/B test of an old SPA app, and a modern re-write using SSR and server-rendered pages.

By every performance metric, the new app was faster.

But we kept getting user feedback that the new site was "clunky" and "slow", even though we saw that the p90 was much lower on the new site. Most of our users asked us to enable a toggle to let them go back to the old "fast" site.

I'm not sure if this is a universal experience, but I think a lot of other sites that tried the CSR -> SSR move had similar experiences. It's just harder to talk about, since it goes against the usual narrative.

unchar1··on H1-B visas hurt one type of worker and exploit another
Would it make sense to have a per-country H1B cap?
unchar1··on Show HN: A DOS-like hobby OS written in Rust and x86 assembly
You can write memory safe code in any language, but having a machine i.e. the Rust compiler check it for you is less error-prone than if a human does it.

Also if you look at the repo, only 3% of the codebase is in Assembly. IMO if >95% project is in Rust, you can definitely claim it's a Rust project.

unchar1··on Vibe Coding Is Overrated
Parts of it could probably already exists in the LLM's corpus, but being able to join them together to build new things is what makes "vibe coding" so useful.

Even though, from personal experience, at scale it still falls apart

unchar1··on Deno's Decline
Library and ecosystem support is a big thing. Rust being ML-ish, and having a large ecosystem is probably it's greatest strength
unchar1··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2025)
I see an option on the application form "I'm not UE citizen". Should that have read "EU Citizen" instead?

Also it's a little strange to ask for a passport photo, first time I've seen that.

unchar1··on Why Fennel?
The first thing that comes to mind is macros.
unchar1··on Show HN: Nue – Apps lighter than a React button
> Your Node.js server then interprets that JavaScript and executes C++.

Umm...no? V8 specifically compiles it into machine code directly.

There used to be a pseudo-translation layer in the CrankShaftScript days, but that hasn't been true in almost a decade.

> I can decompile the binary and still see the type information.

Also no. The de-compiler can _infer_ the types, much like how V8 tries to infer the type. But the actual type information is gone.

Even in languages like Java where most of the type information is preserved, some things are still lost (e.g. generic methods with dynamicinvoke)

unchar1··on Show HN: Nue – Apps lighter than a React button
> To be clear, they are not "using" TypeScript, it's more accurate to say they are providing TypeScript bindings.

Interesting that you say it's more about providing "bindings", and not really "using". Much of the types in the svelte codebase are never exported outside of svelte, and they are only consumed internally.

The problem they were having was with transpilation, since the browser doesn't run JS.

From Rich Harris (months after svelte switched to JSDoc) [1]:

> removing types from your own code is clownish, epically misguided behaviour, but whatever — to each their own

I would suggest going through the issues and PRs in the codebase to see how invested the Svelte team is in typescript.

> TypeScript is not "real" static typing in the same sense as Go, Rust, C#.

That is true for Go, Rust, C#. But the same thing is also true for languages like C, and Generics in Java. I'm sure both of those languages have weak type systems, but are definitely statically typed.

I think the fact that type information is lost after being compiled isn't really a classifier for typed/non-typed. Ultimately it all comes down to machine code, and that certainly isn't typed either.

[1]: https://x.com/Rich_Harris/status/1699490194565578882

unchar1··on Show HN: Nue – Apps lighter than a React button
Nue seems to be in an odd space. It's an untyped framework, built on top of "web standards".

But if you wanted web standards + web component, Lit already fills that space. If you want untyped JS or little/no JS at all, there's HTMX. Or if you're just tired of React, and want something faster + simpler, there's Svelte/Solid.

I'm not sure what problem Nue is uniquely solving.

unchar1··on Show HN: Nue – Apps lighter than a React button
From the link [3] you posted,

> If you're rabidly anti-TypeScript and think that us doing this vindicates your position, I'm about to disappoint you.

Rich and the rest of the Svelte team are still using typscript, just through JSDoc + type definition files.

In contrast the Nue team seems to want to keep the view layer untyped.

From the parent comment

> real static typing (like Rust or Go) shines in business logic where it counts

it seems they don't consider typescript to be "real" static typing.

unchar1··on Zoom bias: The social costs of having a 'tinny' sound during video conferences
USB microphones usually have audio converters built into them. So if you're going for a cheap wired headphones, it's usually better to go with one with a 3.5mm jack.
unchar1··on How to add a directory to your PATH
> fish instructions:

> set PATH $PATH ~/.npm-global/bin

Fish has some nice utilities for these type of set calls

set --append PATH ~/.npm-global/bin

unchar1··on Show HN: Yaak – An open source, Git-friendly desktop API client
> Yaak is still open source under the MIT license. You can view, modify, and run the source code for both personal and commercial use. Licensing applies only to the prebuilt binaries.

That's a pretty interesting pricing strategy. I think REHL is the only other project I saw with this type of pricing.

unchar1··on Hacker News for Gamedev
Cool site!

Is there any way to see the top posts? It's really helpful when I'm trying to catch up on things. I know HN doesn't, but I can usually use hn.algolia.com to find the top posts.

unchar1··on SST: Container Support
According to their docs, SST uses Pulumi under the hood [1]

It's supposed to be a bit easier for developers to pick up, but you should be able to achieve the same thing with Pulumi AFAIU

[1]: https://sst.dev/docs/#faq

unchar1··on Proposal: JavaScript Structs
I agree. But it's one reason why someone who is concerned about performance, may prefer classes by default.
unchar1··on Proposal: JavaScript Structs
I'm not sure if "C++ class" is the right term, but it will certainly compile into a class behind the scenes [1]

You can use d8 to check what the class structure ends up looking like [2]

---

[1]: https://v8.dev/docs/hidden-classes

[2]: https://v8.dev/docs/d8

unchar1··on Proposal: JavaScript Structs
Classes generally point you towards writing more performant code. Factory functions allow you to achieve the same performance, you just have to be a bit more careful not to cause a depot :)

For example,

1. field declarations [1] make sure that the fields are always initialized in the same order. That way most of your functions end up monomorphic, instead of being polymorphic [2]

2. Method declarations are also (almost) free, since you only pay for them once, during class initialization.

You also get a few other niceties such as private properties. You can emulate private properties with closures in factory functions but V8 has a hard time optimizing, unfortunately.

---

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

[2]: https://www.builder.io/blog/monomorphic-javascript

unchar1··on Why I still blog after 15 years
I also feel this with X/Twitter, where everything feels like a promotion for a course or a book or a new product. Posting things because they are fun to write is a lost art.
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