Hacker News Reader

moritzon Apple/macOS silently removed from official Unix registry

I also use colima mostly, it‘s great! (the Apple container thing de facto requires macos 26+)

moritzon Apple/macOS silently removed from official Unix registry

and they have a first-party one now as well

https://github.com/apple/container

moritzon Apple/macOS removed from official Unix registry

https://github.com/apple/container

moritzon Topcoat is pushing the boundary of server applications with Rust

assembler?

moritzon Topcoat is pushing the boundary of server applications with Rust

You‘ll notice a lot of "I found"s and "my hunch"s and similar in the comments.

There aren’t many comparative benchmarks, and obviously the design of such a benchmark is difficult, but, e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09101

In this benchmark, models can correctly solve Rust problems 61% on first pass — A far cry from other languages such as C# (88%) or Elixir (97%, no static typing whatsoever).

moritzon The CSS Zen Garden dream, finally shipped

Is the code open source? It‘s not part of the protocol design system?

moritzon The CSS Zen Garden dream, finally shipped

Do they have the design system open source somewhere?

moritzon Distributed Systems Classics (2017)

Related hot take

Maybe thats why one of the not-so-bad ideas how to go about distributed systems came from a guy who was trained as a physicist and used to complain to his fellow programmers that “a lot of systems actually break the laws of physics”[1]?

> In distributed systems there is no real shared state (imagine one machine in the USA another in Sweden) where is the shared state? In the middle of the Atlantic? - shared state breaks laws of physics. State changes are propagated at the speed of light - we always know how things were at a remote site not how they are now. What we know is what they last told us. If you make a software abstraction that ignores this fact you’ll be in trouble.[2]

[1]: “The Mess We’re In”, 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKXe3HUG2l4 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19708900

moritzon Distributed Systems Classics (2017)

One can skip the Erlang-specific things/the description of the programming language.

Just the first 2 chapters (~30p) + the Conclusion (~10p) contain a lot of useful food for thought.

moritzon It's time to move your docs in the repo

In the Elixir ecosystem (where documentation is considered a "first-class citizen" in the language), you can run code examples as part of your test suite in a similar fashion ("doctest"): https://elixir-recipes.github.io/testing/doctests/

moritzon The dead Internet is not a theory anymore

https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/specification.gmi

[no, not that gemini]

moritzon I don't know Apple's endgame for the Fn/Globe key–or if Apple does

That’s all in the article. The author goes into the confusion that it had the Apple logo on it.

Win was conceived as a modifier reserved for the OS (not to be used by applications), while command never was. Command is for commands. If you come to the Mac from Win or Linux it often helps to think of command as what ctrl does on those systems. Ctrl on the Mac started as Terminal-Emulator specific modifier— Which to this day is great, because your universal copy shortcut (cmd-c) and interrupt (ctrl-c) are different things.

Indeed one would map win to command, but only because you need another key for a modifier that‘s not ctrl or opt/alt, conceptually they are different

moritzon A case for Go as the best language for AI agents

https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09101

In this benchmark, models can correctly solve Rust problems 61% on first pass — A far cry from other languages such as C# (88%) or Elixir (a “buggy dynamic language”) where they perform best (97%).

I wonder why that is, it’s quite surprising. Obviously details of their benchmark design matter, but this study doesn’t support your claims.

moritzon A case for Go as the best language for AI agents

C.f., from 25d ago:

“Why Elixir is the best language for AI” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46900241

- for comparison of the arguments made

- features a bit more actual data than “intuitions” compared to OP

- interesting to think about in an agent context specifically is runtime introspection afforded by the BEAM (which, out of how it developed, has always been very important in that world) - the blog post has a few notes on that as well

moritzon I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

Apple already flipped the switch in December with 18.7.3, if your phone is capable running 26, you will not get offered 18.x updates anymore

moritzon Trillions spent and big software projects are still failing

As the great Joe Armstrong used to say, “a lot of systems actually break the laws of physics”[1] — don’t program against the laws of physics.

[1]: “The Mess We’re In”, 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKXe3HUG2l4

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19708900

moritzon Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

It’s astonishing to me that even so many long-term Apple observers don’t see this, even though they are sorta obvious about it. “Now that the hardware is so close, the systems converge, etc., there is really no reason iPad will not eventually run macOS” – No, macOS will continue to be dumbed and locked down (“security!!11”) until the point where the Macs can be safely switched over from the terribly open legacy OS.

moritzon WebDAV isn't dead yet

dou you happen to have the source code open somewhere? i was just looking into webdav via elixir

moritzon Why I Chose Elixir Phoenix over Rails, Laravel, and Next.js

  mix phx.gen.html Accounts User users name:string email:string

moritzon The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025

And the story of how this came to be is absolutely wild. See

Mirowski, Philip. 2020. “The Neoliberal Ersatz Nobel Prize”. Pp. 219-254 in Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, edited by Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian and Philip Mirowski. Verso. Fulltext: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/215796/1/Full-text-b...

moritzon Aspects of modern HTML/CSS you may not be familiar with

> I always feel like I'm having to decode it. But I can easily and happily work with some programming languages that most devs would cross the street to avoid.

Those languages happen to be "imperative"? – the few backend devs I know who at least sort of vibe with CSS are all used to declarative programming. I think that might be at least one of the reasons?

moritzon Why Elixir? Common misconceptions

Maybe not Erlang the language, but it’s useful to know its "philosophy" and what the BEAM is all about.

moritzon Interview with the Creator of Deluxe Ski Jump

PSA: DSJ2 is available on mobile. Doesn’t beat the mouse experience of the original, but still fun

moritzon File Systems: The Original Hypermedia

> You would create and manage content directly from the file explorer application, in the most natural way possible. This version of the web wouldn’t require users to learn advanced computer skills in order to participate.

My students at university (Gen Z) have no concept of the “file system”.

moritzon Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites

Backlinks are cool

moritzon Show HN: I've built a macOS app for developers to clean their dev machines

And apps that "focus on the niche" such as DevCleaner [1] are free too.

[1]: https://github.com/vashpan/xcode-dev-cleaner

moritzon Show HN: I've built a macOS app for developers to clean their dev machines

To potentially save you the click, the app is a subscription service.

moritzon Visiting the annual Braun collectors fair

Sold to Gilette in 1967, expansion into many different areas after. Then, I guess their story is not really unique, they shared the fate of all European household appliance manufacturers — increasing competition from Asian companies, so by the 1990s, Braun was dead.

After Procter & Gamble bought them in 2005, it now mostly exists as a brand to be licensed (everything other than shaving and electric toothbrushes).

moritzon Google Scholar PDF Reader

Try Skim

moritzon COP28: Countries launch declaration to triple nuclear energy by 2050

Nuclear already is the expensive alternative. Just in the beginning of Nov, NuScale Power terminated its much hyped SMR projects in Utah [1]. Target price for these was $89 per megawatt hour. Wind and solar are what, ~$25/MWh currently?

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/nuscale-power-uamps-...