HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

shadytrees

1,305 karma · joined August 20, 2008

submissionscomments
shadytrees··on Turning a dumb AC unit smart (without losing my security deposit)
PTACs suck. Well-maintained, newer models suck less, but they still suck. Unless well-insulated, the sleeves leak air (and humidity). And there's a duopoly between Ice Air and Islandaire, so they get to charge more for maintenance. They benefit from the trend of maintenance for older models being a yearly chore also.

From what I understand, PTACs started as a convenient way to retrofit apartments with air conditioning. You don't need ductwork, which I believe is more expensive in the concrete buildings around here. Also, I think you need protected refrigerant sleeves to meet code here, but only if the sleeves go from one floor to another (someone just told me this fact today, and i haven't verified this).

BTW that PTAC's thermostat dial in the link doesn't have numbers around the dial, which I think is honest. No A/C unit I've ever owned has managed to have a thermostat that read the temperature I was feeling consistently. It makes me think the apartment was built before the late 2010s though -- still feels new but a generation ago in HVAC terms. Mini-splits seem to have arrived, even for <1M condos. Talking to the mini-split contractors I had over recently for a squeaky noise, I got the feeling that business was booming. They had every day in the summer booked months in advance.

shadytrees··on What it feels like to work with Mythos
The Balatro game that Fable spit out (Flipside) https://play-flipside.netlify.app/ is buggy but fun. Fable also fixed one of my personal pet peeves. Unlike Balatro, it comes with a calculator to preview the score!
shadytrees··on Helium Browser
Scroll through his X account -- Charlie Kirk and DHH content are some recent entries. He is one of those people who thinks tech should be apolitical without really interrogating what apolitical means or how it affects people who have been marginalized by politics
shadytrees··on Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy
Kling's politics aside, he's also had a history of abandoning projects after hyping them up on social media and attracting contributors. Here is what happened to SerenityOS and jakt, for example:

https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/graphs/commit-activit... https://github.com/SerenityOS/jakt/graphs/commit-activity

If Cloudflare wants to defend the future of the web, maybe they could also throw a few dollars towards projects with better governance and aren't helmed by a BFDL with a spotty record and are written in a more future-proof language than C++ [0]. (For example, Servo.)

[0]: In Kling's own words! https://web.archive.org/web/20250819053816/https://awesomekl...

shadytrees··on Pipelining might be my favorite programming language feature
Maybe not common, but there’s Control.Arrow.(>>>)
shadytrees··on Why is it so hard to buy things that work well? (2022)
try this alt stylesheet https://ddanluu.com/nothing-works
shadytrees··on What's New in F# 9
Rider's recent free non-commercial license makes F# a much more attractive option for macOS, I think
shadytrees··on The Tragedy of Google Books (2017)
James Somers writes beautifully; https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/james-somers has some of his other writing
shadytrees··on Greenwich: an experiment in collaborative links
reminds me of why the lucky stiff's hoodwink.d project, in a good way
shadytrees··on Making your own hot sauce
> I made fermented hot sauce once, and i don't think it was sufficiently different to other kinds to be worth doing again. But then, i have only done it once!

+1. I spent hours lovingly sanitizing and prepping and waiting for habaneros to ferment; in the end, they added a bit of funky tang, but I didn't feel like it was worth the time. I realized that vinegar-based hot sauce recipes are quicker to iterate on and perfect and taste closer to what I prefer.

However, it's all subjective! Watching something ferment in a container is inherently fun, in the way a terrarium with a small creature in it can be. YMMV.

shadytrees··on Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
Formatted with minimal CSS: https://ddanluu.com/seo-spam
shadytrees··on The curious case of the abominable shower
Yes, this article is borrowing liberally from Passage of Power (2012), the fourth book:

> Lucy’s father was not as pleased with his new quarters. Two days after the Johnsons moved in, he told West, “Mr. West, if you can’t get that shower of mine fixed, I’m going to have to move back to The Elms.”

> “He didn’t sound as if he were joking,” West was to say. And after the President explained that the water pressure was inadequate, and that he wanted the same elaborate, multi-nozzle arrangement that he had had at his former home, he repeated his threat to move out. Then, “without a smile, he turned on his heel and walked away.”

> A few minutes later, Mrs. Johnson asked West to come by the room she had chosen for her once, a small sitting room with one door. “I guess you’ve been told about the shower,” she said, with a smile, and repeated to West what she said to all Johnson employees. “Anything that ... needs to be done, remember this: my husband comes first, the girls second, and I will be satisfied with what’s left.”

> As he became acquainted with the Johnsons, West was to write, “I soon could see that had been her life’s pattern.” Nothing, he came to see, could “faze her.”

shadytrees··on Firefox address bar
Apropos of nothing, except that it shows off that Firefox implements the OpenSearch spec correctly, here's a Wordle clone my friend Nolen built in Firefox's address bar:

https://eieio.games/nonsense/implementing-wordle-in-the-fire...

I hope it brings you the five minutes of delight that it brought me

shadytrees··on Janet for Mortals
I think you're using concurrency in a non-traditional sense https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1050222/what-is-the-diff... and I also think you're being a little bit uncharitable
shadytrees··on Normalization of Deviance (2015)
formatted for wide monitors https://ddanluu.com/wat
shadytrees··on There’s no planet B
Related: https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_mars.htm
shadytrees··on Barnes and Noble's surprising turnaround
The person who founded Elliott Management (Paul Eliott Singer) is far from a saint, but he has been astonishingly accurate during his career. According to Wikipedia (I did a big deep dive into this hedge fund and person after reading the submitted article), he warned about CDOs in 2006. The hedge fund also exited its holdings in Twitter in June 2022, right before the Musk-pocalypse.

I'm kind of astounded the article didn't talk about Paul Singer at all. It seems like a massive oversight to not dig into the money behind Barnes and Noble.

shadytrees··on Avoid exception throwing in performance-sensitive code
Yes, raising an exn in OCaml is close to jumping to an address stored in a register. https://stackoverflow.com/a/8567429

As a result, raising and catching exns in OCaml is cheap. List.fold_until in Base, for example, is implemented with exceptions: https://github.com/janestreet/base/blob/ae169dc8097b3da8e99d... (With_return is internally implemented by raising an exception in a try-with.)

Implementations of functional programming languages often have powerful, yet fast!, non-local control-flow primitives. GHC recently sprouted delimited continuations (https://ghc.gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/doc/users_guide/9.6.1-not...), for example, and Lisps have had that for much longer. It's easy to program in an imperative language for a long time and think that straight-line control flow is the end-all, be-all for performance—but it doesn't have to be the case.

shadytrees··on Signed distance functions in 46 lines of Python
Check out https://bauble.studio too
shadytrees··on Wendy Carlos: The brilliant but lonely life of an electronic music pioneer
+1 Sisters with Transistors. I watched this in the dark at the Metrograph, a theater in the outskirts of Manhattan, with maybe six other people, and the experience was transcendental.
shadytrees··on Keyboard shortcuts for GNU Readline
Fun fact: GNU Readline and Bash are maintained by a single person. https://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/readline/rltop.html#Maintai...

In case you were looking for more examples of "open source being held together by one tireless person somewhere" (obligatory xkcd comic link omitted).

shadytrees··on Extremely Linear Git History
There's a memorable Stripe CTF from 2014 that had something similar (Gitcoins). This brought back fond memories of that.
shadytrees··on APL deserves its renaissance too (2018)
I agree!! I think having APL be a embedded domain-specific language is the perfect fit. I don't want to give up record and union types when I'm programming something large; but some piece of the app I'm writing will want to perform vector math or compute order statistics, and for that there's nothing better than APL. Note that Python and numpy is shockingly close to this state of the world already: Python's the general language, and numpy is the beautiful vector escape hatch. If only Python and numpy were statically typed.
shadytrees··on APL deserves its renaissance too (2018)
This is what got me and my friend into APL-likes. My friend even made an APL-like towards the end. I assert that APL is one of the main, definitional pillars of programming languages, the way Lisp and C and Prolog are. It is extraordinarily easy to build an APL with scalar and vector support -- once you start thinking about higher-dimensional data structures, though, it is the ergonomics and the design that become subtle and tricky. (Ivy, in particular, does some questionable things at with multi-dimensional matrices.) Also, if you think of APL operators as verbs, perhaps there should be adverbs that lift the verbs up into higher dimensions...
shadytrees··on The most extensive Apple (pommes) database
stark apple subtweeting vibes in this post
shadytrees··on U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
Agreed. This seems like a newspaper trying to squeeze an article out of a weak signal.
shadytrees··on My Favourite Computer, an Old Mac
I hope the author has found their way to joshua stein's blog: https://jcs.org/
shadytrees··on Bash 5.2
I found them: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/bash.git/log/

Cool comment

shadytrees··on Get in zoomer, we're saving React
Yes, there's the NSEvent ecosystem.

Cocoa also lets you two-way bind a state object with the view as long as the state object (whether it's a controller or a model or a view model) implements key-value coding; notably, the blessed data framework (Core Data) is KVC-compliant, so apps that use Core Data sort of get all this for free. Core Data also has fairly good support for undo/redo. That being said, Core Data is a fairly idiosyncratic relational data layer. It's sort of a double-edged sword: it's easy to do 90% of what you want, and the last 10% will involve some deep dives into Apple's documentation. But it's been a long time since I've written an app on OS X -- someone will have to correct my errors.

I've long thought that the inverse of what the OP suggests, bringing reactive UI programming techniques to Cocoa, would be much more interesting. Making native apps just as easy and as fun to build as web apps would be great! ReactiveCocoa/ReactiveSwift are promising, but the underlying, mutation-heavy Apple APIs still peek through. SwiftUI also seems promising, but still relatively immature to the, gosh, decades-old OS X platform.

shadytrees··on As unrest grows, Iran restricts access to Instagram, WhatsApp
In case you, like me, needed more context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Mahsa_Amini
Page 1 of 8Next →