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mahoro

119 karma · joined July 28, 2011

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mahoro··on Show HN: macOS menu bar gauges for your Claude Code quota
Unexpected: reading the code was entertaining (no sarcasm): pixel fonts, png encoder.
mahoro··on My Grandma Was a Fed – Lessons from Digitizing Hours of Childhood
Oh, that's unexpected idea. I hope I'll try it one day, thank you.

I use FireWire as well. Spent a month connecting it, that was a devastating part. It turned out, only IEE1394 cards with TI chips works with Sony cameras. And only some cables. But to me, result is worth it.

mahoro··on My Grandma Was a Fed – Lessons from Digitizing Hours of Childhood
I film my kids with the same camera in 2026. I don't know how to explain it, but it feels completely different. When I film something on a phone I feel awkward but with this camera I could film everyone and it's much more comfortable to all (including adults I mean)
mahoro··on EmuDevz: A game about developing emulators
I love it
mahoro··on Hardening Firefox – a checklist for improved browser privacy
Neat article.

I would add `layout.css.font-visibility=1` to hide all non-default fonts (makes a canvas font rendering test less useful).

mahoro··on Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser
Thanks, eager to try :)
mahoro··on Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser
This is great, I'd like to test! Is there any recommendations on which ollama models works best with this kind of tasks?
mahoro··on AI Is Making Developers Dumb
I feel your pain. I have my own struggles with switching tasks and what helps to some degree is understanding that that kind of switching and adapting is a skill which could be trained by doing exactly this. At least I feel less like a victim and more like a person who improves himself :)

But it appears I'm in a better position because I don't have to work with clearly stupid GUIs and have no strong emotions to them.

mahoro··on AI Is Making Developers Dumb
> There is a concept called “Copilot Lag”. It refers to a state where after each action, an engineer pauses, waiting for something to prompt them what to do next.

I've been experiencing this for 10-15 years. I type something and then wait for IDE to complete function names, class methods etc. From this perspective, LLM won't hurt too much because I'm already dumb enough.

mahoro··on TypeScript types can run DOOM [video]
Normally you would write a program that is a game of Doom when you run it (you create a program, then compile it and run). Dmitri created a program that does nothing and he don't even run it. But while it's compiling, it does a lot of tricky things to make typescript compiler to run Doom as a side effect.

It's extremely hacky because Typescript is not even a runtime, it's not meant to run any code at all. Typescript is a thing that takes .ts file and produces .js file (which you then run using different program - a javascript runtime).

mahoro··on SQLook – A free online SQLite database manager with a Windows 2000 interface
I enabled "Offline mode", and it worked. But yes.
mahoro··on Show HN: Interactive systemd – a better way to work with systemd units
So cool that with uv it becomes so easy to install such tools.

What's missing in the install routine is uv installing this tool ignoring the Python dependency. My box has 3.10 and isd won't work with it. Fixed with `-p 3.13` option. May be worth mention in the docs.

mahoro··on Russia is being set aflame by arson attacks
Phone scams are the problem in Russia: https://meduza.io/en/feature/2025/01/10/they-terrorized-him

(TL;DR: student commits suicide because of such scams).

mahoro··on Imhex: A hex editor for reverse engineers
This is an absolutely great project. I had a lot of fun tinkering with the ROM of my Philips smart clock.

It has a built-in DSL that looks like Rust (without memory management, though – so it's very lightweight), and with that, it's possible to visualize and extract structural data from binary streams. That's really fun and cool.

It also has a visual editor to make simple calculations with no code. It didn't feel polished at the time I tried it. Strangely, writing code in DSL was more intuitive and easier for me.

mahoro··on Advanced Shell Scripting Techniques: Automating Complex Tasks with Bash
The very first "technique" is odd and based on a false assumption. Bash doesn't call /bin/[ binary when evaluating expressions. It uses its own builtin implementation instead.
mahoro··on Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?
As a teenager, I discovered disassemblers/debuggers and became very enthusiastic about hacking and patching things. I reset the trial period counter on a few shareware apps, and the next "victim" that caught my eyes was encrypted RAR SFX archive. I thought it would be the perfect target.

I spent ~20 hours trying to find a routine that compares the entered password with the correct one. That humbling moment I realised there was no such routine, and moreover, most of disassembled code is just garbage.

[*] this is an encrypted archive combined with extractor in one .exe file.

mahoro··on PySheets – Spreadsheet UI for Python
This is awesome, and client-side Python is magic :-)
mahoro··on Yandex open sourced it's BI tool DataLens
ClickHouse is a separate company registered in US and some part of it is owned by US-based venture funds.
mahoro··on Show HN: Paisa – Open-Source Personal Finance Manager
This is awesome! I like how it's built and I looks like it's open for integrations of any kind.

I'm also too impatient to manually enter all transactions but import from PDF statement form a bank looks like a doable task. The only transactions that would be required to enter manually is cash/crypto/etc but for them there are no other choice.

Contrats with the the release Anantha and I hope your project will gain attention it deserves!

mahoro··on Warteschlangensimulator – queueing systems simulator (free and open source)
I found it extremely useful when I need to estimate throughput of some system. Especially it has some elements non-linear or non-continuous characteristics like rate limits etc.
mahoro··on Queueing Theory: An introduction for software development
I would recommend Warteschlangensimulator to simulate processes involving queues. It's often faster to simulate things than to build mathematical models.

https://a-herzog.github.io/Warteschlangensimulator/

mahoro··on Mini – The Minimal Language
I'm excited about the language but it's impossible to google anything about it :(
mahoro··on Russia is persecuting dissenters by taking away their children
They took my daughter to the orphanage luckily for two days because of this reason (I'm a single parent).
mahoro··on Visual design rules you can safely follow
As a software engineer who occasionally creates interfaces, I appreciate these kinds of rules a lot.

The most valuable thing is that it gives me the instruments to think and reason about my designs.

Many thanks to the author!

mahoro··on Tell HN: Whole Yandex Git repository leaked
When you're judging them, think about the space of possibilities as well. Is any example of a Russian business of such volume not tied to the government?
mahoro··on Why I'm still using Python
Wow. Why did you say 'still'? I use python a more than decade, with other languages as well (go, typescript). And I even don't think to abandon it. I do so many things with it, that it would be nonsense.

Yes, the drawbacks are here (async is not as good as in Go, typing I would say is rigid, packaging is not perfect at all). But I have a lot of projects where it just doesn't matter.

mahoro··on A Linux Evening
One more thing that happened with Linux in last 20 years is complexity raised in orders of magnitude.

I remember Linux 2.x times and I had similar problems with hardware but a lot of them I fixed by following a limited set of tricks/patterns. Sometime I read a source code of some drivers or maybe applied some patches but not so often.

But at that time I felt confidence that most problems I could fix. Now I don’t (and actually switched to Mac 5 years ago)

mahoro··on Laika, the space dog, and her one-way trip into orbit (2018)
Not completely related, but here a mockumentary movie about Russians visiting Moon in ~1910-1920s (I guess)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljKPnQNp_kA

It is beautiful even if you choose any random moment in the middle.

mahoro··on Ask HN: Advice that changed your life?
100 situps is a lot for a beginner. Actually, after 3 years in gym I did ~80 in 4 sets. Not because I can't do more but 1) it is a high stress for a spine and 2) there are other exercises to do.
mahoro··on A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page
BTW you can also open multiple connections and fetch 14kb from each of them quickly
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