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microflash

4,283 karma · joined December 10, 2021

A software engineer, avid reader and fellow web wanderer
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microflash··on Apple's new 'Switch to Safari' campaign details why you should ditch Chrome
Talk to me when I can set custom search engines, when developer tools become sane enough and when ‘localhost’ starts resolving.
microflash··on Apple's new 'Switch to Safari' campaign details why you should ditch Chrome
Siri
microflash··on Apple HomeView
Thank you for pointing that out. We’ll bump the domed version by $100 to fix this mistake. /s
microflash··on Karpathy on Learning
I’ve found that increasing the number of screens is not helpful at all for learning.

What worked for me was building a system that lets me think consistently everyday. And by system, I mean sitting in a library with paper books and if really necessary, with my existing laptop.

microflash··on Ask HN: What's your favorite children's books?
I’d add Ranger’s Apprentice by John Flanagan in others’ recommendations.
microflash··on Is AI Killing the Value of Human Writing?
> Text is no longer rare and precious like in ancient times.

Text was never rare. What made it special was the people, their experiences, imperfections and the ways they expressed them. It may be corny to say but words do have power - to light up your imagination, let you visit worlds through the eye of the narrator, and spark that tiny flame which could lead to great discoveries.

AI-generated text has none of that effect on me. My brain just shuts down as soon as it detects it. My eyes glaze over and my fickle attention flickers away.

So, if anything, AI is making some human writing way more precious than before.

microflash··on Apple may have an iPhone 18 Pro demand problem
Yes, weight and size have been a major detracting factor for me as well. I’d also like some innovation on the basics: improving the keyboard which has been really bad since forever, enabling people to use any search engine in Safari, larger battery, interoperable USB-C connection without requiring specialized software, support for high-res audio codecs, in-place translation (like Firefox or mastodon client Phanpy). Give me a reason to upgrade. With past few generations and current one, there’s been none.
microflash··on Bitwarden Dual License Model
This post is what triggered me to cancel my subscription and migrate away from Bitwarden in July. I’ve seen too many repeats of this show. This has completely soured me from cloud-backed critical software. Slowly moving toward offline alternatives wherever possible and self-hosting when it isn’t.
microflash··on Firefox version 157 is round (and how to make it less round)
I was also fine with FF 156 version of Nova where compact mode was really compact with vertical tabs and rounding was restrained enough. With FF 157 they have added more padding to vertical tabs to compensate for close tab icon on rounded favicons, menu borders are so rounded they clip menu items, PIP min size lock has been removed so you can minimize it to a popsicle, and so on. It seems like they skipped a lot of QA.
microflash··on Someone has decompiled the Adobe suite, rebuilt in Rust and released it as OSS
In a similar vein, https://redlamp.app
microflash··on Ask HN: How to deal with AI "true believer" leadership at work
I’m not necessarily confrontational about AI adoption. I’m more interested in situations where leadership basically sets you to fail: unrealistic velocity expectation, too much context switching, code sprawl, PR floods, and so on.
microflash··on JetBrains reports revenue growth, net financial loss for 2025
As a very heavy user of IDEA, DataGrip and PyCharm, I still appreciate the level of power and flexibility JetBrains offer but continue to be dismayed by the absolutely massive binaries of their IDEs and really bad performance, especially their file watching capabilities which take ages to sync the changes done by external tools into the IDE.

Say what you may, VSCode feels lightweight in comparison despite a lot of plugins (I’m not a VSCode user but I do endure it at work).

Shedding IDE size, decoupling bundled plugins from shipped binaries, and improving file system sync would be great improvements they could do, besides pursuing AI and whatnot.

microflash··on There are only 5,000 elite software engineers in the world (2025)
I’ve found that most companies don’t want an elite engineer. They want “best for the bucks” engineers who’re often mediocre.

If by accident, they do end up with an elite engineer, the company most likely doesn’t know what to do with them. Everyone gets beaten down to the same level of mediocrity, suffering the indifference of managers who don’t even know they’ve got an elite engineer. And, oftentimes, the incentives are aligned in the opposite direction.

microflash··on Show HN: Rhun, an open-source code editor written in assembly
The source code also has all the hallmarks of slop.
microflash··on PipePipe: NewPipe hard fork implementing SponsorBlock
Although not a direct equivalent, but check out Unwatched [1].

[1]: https://github.com/fer0n/Unwatched

microflash··on Floci: Locally emulating any cloud service
Been using it for a while to run integration tests with Testcontainers [1]. It's very good and much more lightweight than Localstack.

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

microflash··on Sublime Text Build 4213
Unfortunately, still not much progress on improving the ergonomics of the sidebar. You still can’t do drag and drop, cut and paste etc.

Otherwise, really excellent editor. I use their Git client [1] daily and there’s nothing like it.

[1]: https://www.sublimemerge.com

microflash··on macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review
> Repeat for each app in the list, there should be at least 70 of them.

Just do it 70 times, no sweat.

microflash··on iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27
My biggest complaint is the regressions on font size both on macOS and iOS. Some of the copy which was of comfortably readable size is now microscopic (for example, the organization and job title on a contact card in the Contacts app). Similarly, on macOS, when the sidebar icons are set to small, the labels also become terribly tiny.
microflash··on iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27
Yeah, I did the same but found the experience worse. Currently I've set it at 75% where it is tolerable.
microflash··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
My grandfather and uncles have left me a vast pile of Urdu magazines and books, many of which are withering away due to old age. I’m working on digitizing them so I can enjoy them on modern devices. Very much in initial stages.

https://nashist.naiyerasif.com

microflash··on Rune is now open source
Do I have to use Rune Network? Can it can run offline?
microflash··on Finder is so frustrating and has been since day one
At this point, I've come to live with it. I do use Supercharge[1] to fix some of the warts.

[1]: https://sindresorhus.com/supercharge

microflash··on Ambient CSS v3 – Blender meets CSS
Yup.
microflash··on Ambient CSS v3 – Blender meets CSS
> A user you’ve blocked has previously contributed to this repository.

Sigh.

microflash··on Firefox 155.0
> Firefox now limits CSS to 75 levels of nested blocks and functions, preventing crashes that extremely deep nesting can cause under some circumstances. More deeply nested rules and values no longer parse.

Very interesting change. I’ve yet to see CSS more than 20 levels deep. Good to put a stop to such insanity.

microflash··on Death to px, long live ch
Not necessarily. See https://screenspan.net/fallback
microflash··on Death to px, long live ch
I’ve found that ch and ex units are heavily influenced by latin characters. They just give weird results with non-latin characters leading to magic numbers. But the concept is really solid: use them if you want the spacing relative to text.
microflash··on Ameliorate
Very nice. I think this can be a good visual way to run LEAN activities like 5 Why and A3 Problem Solving.
microflash··on Tangled: The next-generation social coding platform
How do I sign up with my own domain name without Bluesky account?
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