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tiddleson I made a real-time C/C++/Rust build visualizer

Nice, I’ve been looking for something like this for a while.

I’ve noticed on my huge catkin cmake project that cmake is checking the existence of the same files hundreds of times too. Is there anything that can hook into fork() and provide a cached value after the first invocation?

tiddleson GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

Code is a liability. When I let a LLM take the wheel, I end up with thousands of lines of crappy abstractions and needless comments and strange patterns that take way more brain power to understand than if I did it myself.

My current workflow has reverted to primitive copy paste into web chat (via Kagi Assistant). The friction is enough to make me put a lot of thought into each prompt and how much code context I give it (gathered via files-to-prompt from simonw).

I have little experience with frontend and web apps, so I am trying out a supervised vibe coding flow. I give most of the code base per prompt, ask for a single feature, then read the code output fully and iterate on it a few times to reduce aforementioned bad patterns. Normally I will then type it out myself, or at most copy a few snippets of tens of lines.

What doesn’t work I found is asking for the full file with changes applied already. Not only does it take a long time and waste tokens, it normally breaks/truncates/rewords unrelated code.

So far I’m happy with how this project is going. I am familiar with all the code as I have audited and typed it out nearly entirely myself. I am actually retaining some knowledge and learning new concepts (reactive state with VanJS) and have confidence I can maintain this project even without an LLM in future, which includes handing it over to colleagues :)

tiddleson Show HN: Jaws – a JavaScript to WASM ahead-of-time compiler

Probably 10 at most.

tiddleson Show HN: Jaws – a JavaScript to WASM ahead-of-time compiler

What worked for me in Estonia was to find a C++ job (robotics) then gradually push for Rust as I gained seniority and autonomy. Now maybe 70% of the code I write is Rust, both robot side and backend :)

tiddleson Ask HN: What work/office purchase transformed your life?

I have been trying out a trackball as a mouse replacement only. I will try this setup, nice idea

tiddleson Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better

I’m having this problem now. I want to publish a post about recent months of progress on my project, but while writing it I found the solution isn’t complete and still has some flaws, so I feel I must put some more weeks of work into the code first before I can publish the post…

I’m trying to practice writing “this doesn’t work yet” acknowledging in the post that it isn’t fully done, and publishing the bloody thing. We will see how it works next time I sit down to write!

tiddleson Ask HN: What is your preferred domain registrar?

iwantmyname.com, because I couldn’t find anywhere else that would sell .ms domains for cheap. Never had a problem with them

tiddleson Show HN: OPML list of Hacker News Users Personal Blogs

Me too, added now!

tiddleson Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

https://domwillia.ms I write about Rust and game engine development while slowly working towards a Dwarf Fortress-like game.

tiddleson Ask HN: What projects did you build to get better as a programmer?

I wrote game engine after game engine with various languages and designs. Somehow I’m still motivated today to rewrite navigation in my 15th engine for the 3rd time.

tiddleson Estonia: Become an E-Resident

Yep, moved to Tallinn from England for work 6 months ago. Being a software engineer classes you as a “top specialist” so getting a visa and residence permit was very straightforward.

It really is a beautiful country. And today is the first day of snow :)

tiddleson Fixing an ancient GDB problem

Great suggestion, thanks. I’m sick of the program output constantly screwing up the tui.

tiddleson Ask HN: Have you ever had a changed-your-life moment?

I remember reading your post about this a few years ago, when I was first considering moving abroad!

Glad it’s going well for you. I have recently taken the plunge and moved to Estonia :)

tiddleson The Lazy Monad

It is, after all, just a monoid in the category of endofunctors.

tiddleson Ask HN: How do you keep track of your to-dos? longer-term projects?

For my long term side project I just dump ideas into a barely organised backlog.md [^1]. After finishing a feature or taking a few months away, I normally dive back in by browsing this and choosing the next milestone.

It's worked well for a couple of years, and helps me keep the long term goals in mind.

[^1] https://github.com/DomWilliams0/name-needed/blob/develop/.pl...

tiddleson Ask HN: Share your personal site

https://domwillia.ms

I write about Rust side projects occasionally.

It uses a custom static site generator because I needed to procrastinate somehow before starting the first post... Now it's nicely stable and punishing new posts is quick and easy

tiddleson An update on recent service disruptions

Very interesting, thanks for sharing. I didn't know I wanted to understand how ticker names are implemented until now!

tiddleson Show HN: FUSE Filesystem for Manipulating Minecraft

Author here, this was a fun side project as an excuse to mess around with FUSE, Rust and Kotlin.

I've written a blog post covering the technical details: https://domwillia.ms/minecraft-fs

tiddleson How to speed up the Rust compiler in 2022

These posts are always a pleasure to read. it's great to see continuous work on improving compiler performance, and especially with good results too.

tiddleson Rust 1.59.0 with inline assembly support etc.

Glad to see inline asm is finally stabilised, that's one less reason to use nightly for osdev!

tiddleson Chris Lattner left Swift core team

The recent post[^1] about the roadmap for Async Rust shows promise for the coming years.

[^1]: https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2022/02/03/async-in-2...

tiddleson How to mentor software engineers

Aspell is a good interactive spell checker for just before publishing.

‘aspell -c text.md’

tiddleson How do I transfer files from Linux to iOS and vice versa via local WLAN?

I use a simple python http server that supports uploads. Good for transfers of photos and files both ways.

https://gist.github.com/UniIsland/3346170

tiddleson Why is Excalidraw so good?

You can go into insert mode with i, then keys like question mark will be forwarded to the site.

tiddleson Ask HN: What is your story of immigrating to another country?

Very timely for me too, as I'm planning an unbounded move from the UK to Europe in the next few months.

tiddleson How does Google Authenticator work?

Sounds like they're doing it properly then!

tiddleson Ask HN: How to become a ridiculously good back end staff eng?

My personal experience - after nearly 3 years at my current employer working mostly on features and bug fixes for existing big projects, I've found myself at the centre of several greenfield projects that fit my expertise perfectly. I am now one of "the guys" to go to about these exciting long term projects, which is exactly what I was looking for.

tiddleson Ask HN: Problems in your field that you want, but can't, solve?

Falling asleep on a plane is another option

tiddleson Pokegb: A gameboy emulator that only plays Pokémon Blue, in 68 lines of C++

That’s a great idea, I’m not that familiar with wasm and the best way to learn is of course to implement a VM :)

Cheers for the link to the meeting notes in the other comment chain, sounds like a great rabbit hole

tiddleson Pokegb: A gameboy emulator that only plays Pokémon Blue, in 68 lines of C++

The gigantic spec has so many surprises hidden in it - the use of a bespoke “modified utf8” for native strings was a fun discovery.

Good luck with the mammoth project! I think the fun will really start when it comes to running mini programs to test against a reference implementation and finding out we implemented core parts like method/field/(super)interface resolution totally wrong.

Oh, and optimisation too. It’d be cool to implement a JIT but that’s a long way away