Viewing profile — smittywerben

HN always sides with web operators. There's probably a vc joke in there.

> "The higher you go in abstraction, the more it's okay to design an alternative." What choice of paint you throw into the tarpit makes zero difference.

That matches what I've heard, so I think you stated the trope perfectly. Your response is a good point about the actual difficulty. Perhaps I'm confused about what 'rolling your ow…

I don't believe in the "never roll your own encryption" it's literally giving up. Does it make economic sense, or is it just for a hobby? That's more debatable. It's also like a fo…

When this happened to me it was because, I can only guess, it was the Gemini servers were overloaded. Symptoms: Gemini model, Opaque API wrapper error, truncated responses. To be f…

Ah, the ol' Dropbox risk management tactic where they show you a random selection of your photos when you open the page. Or any page on the site. Suggested: "Remembering Summer Vac…

I avoided KDE after first experiencing several bad dates with Gnome. Skipped straight to xfce or a tiling wm. Years later, decided to try KDE again because someone made an arch lin…

There's olympics for persons with disabilities. TikTok is in one of those but with other similarly sized companies. News at 11: 1080p today looks worse than 5 years ago, ending a a…

Google claimed Protobuffers are the solution but Google's planetary engineers clearly have ZERO respect for the mixed-endian remote systems keeping the galactic federation afloat w…

This might sound crazy, but what if we're hitting some sort of hardware limitation, like too many people are sharing a single phone line, and Slashdot is innovative, but is like ne…

Dare me to say costless leaky abstraction. Then I'll point to the thread next door using Chrome profilers to diagnose Chrome internals using Scratch. Then I'll finish saying that a…

NEW QUEST: "These New Gaming Requirements Are Unreal" OBJECTIVE: Any project that demands HDRP and Nanometric Mesh BONUS: Find the happy path

Valve should also delete its chat app. You can send a game if it's that important.

A user's attempt to send a sticker reveals Valve's misguided implementation of the Y combinator, where Steam App and Steam Chat exist only to question each other's purpose. The sol…

For context, Steam has never really supported mobile devices for using the Steam store. It kind of makes sense if you think about it.

I already spent time proofreading it, but I forgot that I couldn't edit it after so much time. Unless the merciful admin lets me roll the 12-sided dice to replace the above cringe …

Sir, your reply is more coherent than mine. I'll give you props for that. Still, I disagree that Kafka is always overkill. When god opened a datagram socket on your computer, you n…

Kafka is a write-ahead log, not a queue per se. It handles transactions to the disk. Not across the network. RabbitMQ is neat out of the box. But I went with ZeroMQ at the time. Ze…

[gong sound] The Master said, “I consider my not being present at the sacrifice, as if I did not sacrifice.” The Analects (Confucius, 551-479 BCE), translated by James Legge (1815-…

Hell even today in 2025 I installed my Wacom tablet drivers (USB drawing tablet) and the installer says "You must restart your system... Note: Shut down is not the same as Restart"…

C# has aged better but I feel like Java 8 approaching ANSI C level solid tools. If only Swing wasn't so ugly. They should poach Raymond Chen to make Java 8 Remastered I like his bl…

I don't understand how everyone hates Kafka I use it as a typed write-ahead JSON log with library support for most languages. Yes the systems I've built with this were overengineer…

Thanks I didn't notice until now. I miskeyed SPARC on my iPhone keyboard.