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dematz

Re:Gleam doesn't compile to Erlang source anymore on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @09:19AM (#49978026)
gleam is very much a language of "no" which if you like that, cool, if not, also cool :)
Re:Gleam doesn't compile to Erlang source anymore on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @09:11AM (#49977927)
not from a presentation but he made this nice little syntax postcard https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:vzaxc2i...
Is there any classless CSS that you do like, that looks good on mobile etc?
Re:Refurbishing a Tektronix TDS7104 Oscilloscope on Tuesday September 01, 2026 @06:30PM (#49529133)
A bit ago a semi-retired guy came back to help with some stuff including debugging serial ports. It was very cool to see him fiddle with the knobs and be like "oh those squiggles look good" "no that doesn't look right" etc. https://i.imgur.com/R5aEXbq.jpeg

Meanwhile total mystery to everyone else how to operate/interpret the machine but a lot of fun

Re:HTML Can Do That on Thursday August 20, 2026 @11:28AM (#49376026)
This comment by yurishimo should not be [dead], imo

>Just a heads up but datalist is not really a great solution if you need a strong contract. The user can still type whatever they want into the field and there is no fuzzy filtering or typo mitigation. Once you add those requirements, a library that gives you a more fully featured combobox is likely going to make a lot of sense in your project.

It is true! HTML can do a lot of cool stuff, it might get you 100% of the way depending on what you're doing. But if you have a lot of forms where users pick from a value set, and want to enforce no other strings and get a good search experience, datalist does not get you there.

Re:Malicious Rust crate Arrayref runs a build-time payload on Thursday August 20, 2026 @11:03AM (#49375665)
Jumping off the title and ignoring contents of post, as is customary: look at this graph and guess which languages use each number of dependencies for their website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E82ly38YEEQ&t=325s

I won't spoil the claim in the video about what the dependency number is correlated with, and I'm not even sure how true it is in general, but it's very interesting.

Re:Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026) on Monday July 13, 2026 @09:08AM (#48892114)
gleam fhir types and client https://fhir.hexdocs.pm/

it is relatively new and untested irl, but interesting as gleam is very nice for fhir in some ways:

-fhir choice types imo were originally designed for some kind of object oriented polymorphism, but are nicer as sum types

-cardinality works nicely with Option for 0..1 and List for 0..*, the only ugly part is if you need primitive extensions and suddenly there are a ton of Option fields

-works with whatever http client you need for erlang or js target, meaning can use on server or in browser

hl7v2 is much uglier than fhir but commonly used eg by state immunization registries, so I am considering gleam types that have message/segment structure, but leave each field as String (as opposed to gleam fhir which uses Bool or whatever for primitive types)

after that not sure some kind of gpl toy emr probably a stripped down version of openemr that uses gleam/lustre and a fhir server instead of php, but this is definitely the mysterious step 3 ??? as there are a lot of features and integrations that take a lot of work or use different formats (hl7v2, ccda...)

Admin inefficiencies between orgs definitely exist and maybe better interoperability and standards is the solution, but wouldn't there also be less of a problem in the first place if there were fewer different orgs all complicating workflows?

Also not saying you're wrong about many healthcare services being unnecessary or even harmful, and someone has to be the one to say no to patients asking for low value care which is definitely a real hard position to be in and a real problem. At the same time insurance companies aren't making a great case for themselves as the solution imo bring on the government death panels.

For what it's worth I know you've worked on FHIR and probably know a lot of details I don't. Actually I'd be interested in talking to you about FHIR.

That said!

1) In the big picture isn't the US clearly paying more than other countries? I'm sure some of this is eg a janitor in the US costs more than a janitor elsewhere, but still...

2) Isn't the cap for the margin that insurance companies can take 20%? That is, they have to pay out 80% as claims take 20% for overhead

3) Doesn't insurance also induce more work done by everyone else who has to deal with them? So the margin the insurance company itself takes is not the only cost they add. Maybe they make providers do more paperwork, or let patients order tests etc that they would not if they were not spending other people's money, or some other reason. Say insurance pays out 80%, but 30% of documentation or actual work is not done by insurance but only exists because of them, now we're down to 56%.

I say this because literally yesterday, my wife, a pediatrician, after she spent the day seeing patients and got home to go through notes, had to leave a message with an insurance company: she saw they faxed her clinic on Saturday, when the clinic was closed, to cancel care for a patient with an ongoing chronic condition with no changes unless the insurance company got a reply in 48 hours (again, while the clinic was closed!). Now she has to schedule some kind of I don't even know what with them, to confirm the condition is the exact same, except she sees patients all day so it's a pain to schedule...

idk the fact that BCBS is a non profit and has no margin in some technical sense does not seem like a big consolation, something is rotten no?

(edit - the insurance company in the anecdote is not BCBS)

Re:Software Is Made Between Commits on Thursday June 11, 2026 @01:29PM (#48493452)
there is a fork of zed against ai: https://gram-editor.com/

I am happy about even though I've never tried gram, because if zed goes to shit there will be an alternative, which hopefully pressures zed to stay sane

Re:Elixir v1.20 released: now a gradually typed language on Wednesday June 03, 2026 @06:03PM (#48390746)
I agree with you but an alternative view, "Why are gradual static types so great?" https://www.benkuhn.net/gradual/
Re:Elixir v1.20 released: now a gradually typed language on Wednesday June 03, 2026 @04:50PM (#48389851)
If you don't want to then fair enough :) that said if your problem is just installation, some of the gleam people realized it can be tricky and made a nice guide for various operating systems and package managers: https://gleam.run/install/

Note this includes installing erlang as well

While it is multiple steps, the frustration is a much more one time thing compared to the problems and frustrations you'd have using a language or its ecosystem for a long time or big project

Re:Elixir v1.20 released: now a gradually typed language on Wednesday June 03, 2026 @04:11PM (#48389318)
Is your issue something with the runtime itself, or just the difficulty of installing it?
Re:It is time to build a new internet on Thursday May 21, 2026 @11:21PM (#48231590)
Eh, idk if a totally new internet is either feasible or needed.

I also feel like if you're going to invent a new internet from first principles, how are you going to not end up with the current one? (or a shitty version of it)

The answer might be an invite tree as the article suggests. They might be hoping for too much user quality from the invite tree, or at least hoping for a level of user quality that would only work at a small scale. Rather than "zany founders, reclusive poets, eccentric engineers of all kinds, high school teachers, homegrown philosophers, garage tinkerers, and beloved drug-addled futurist artists", imo to include a lot of people a simple invite tree would get you "not a literal bot". Trying to actually evaluate user quality gets you into moderation, federation, it is not easy. You could keep it small, but that's not an Internet replacement, that's a private forum, which as the author says they already have.

Imo a good start would be the much narrow problem of identifying your device as not a bot when browsing. Something like google fraud defense https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48039362 except instead of a google owning your identity, some sort of user tree where you can vouch anonymously for people you know, and ban users and users who added them for scraping.

Re:Don't Answer the First Question on Monday May 18, 2026 @10:53AM (#48180749)
Probably a lot of comments will bounce off the title to discuss the XY problem in general, and especially stackoverflow. The article does claim to go further than XY though!

"Diagnosing the ask" and "When they’re missing the philosophy" seem to me like traditional XY problem answers - the user doesn't know what the right question is, we need to step back to guide them.

"When the product needs to change" on the other hand is about figuring out what users want in order to add it to the product. Which takes a lot of figuring out, because it adds debt and you can add things the wrong way. This feels much less condescending to me than traditional XY where it's just tech support for a dumb user. Instead now figuring out questions from enough users helps direct new features.

"When the right path is hidden" I think the text for this one could do more to discuss helping direct the product as well, specifically in terms of documentation, if https://perfetto.dev/docs/getting-started/periodic-trace-sna... exists why is it hidden instead of where people find it when wanting to visualize a long trace.

If you read the title and just want to talk about XY eh fine, but the article's last sentence is the difference, "Both sides almost always walk away with more than they came in with."

Re:I keep tripping over "true, false, true" on Monday May 11, 2026 @10:01AM (#48095149)
First, sentences like "Not because it’s complicated. Just because I have no idea what I’m looking at." and "Tiny interruption. Still annoying every time." fatigue me, it's like you have an editor who, no matter what the content is, tries to spice up your writing with lots of little punchy exclamations, not everything needs such emphasis

Second, this may differ a bit from language to language, but maybe those booleans should not be a boolean: https://gleam.run/documentation/conventions-patterns-and-ant... for example isAdmin boolean could instead be a UserRole custom type, with variants Normal and Admin, which is easier to understand in the function call, and extendable with another Moderator (or whatever) variant

duffpkg's comment 2 years ago does not inspire great confidence in OpenEMR: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40763424

>I was the main contributor and maintainer to OpenEMR about ~20 years ago and then decided it was irredeemable and started over with ClearHealth/HealthCloud. Shockingly some of my code code lives on (from PHP 3). I am reluctant to say don't use it but if you do please don't expose it to anything public, which sadly happens most of the time. There are some real problems that exist in that code base from a security and HIPAA perspective.

Finding SQL injections etc is definitely valuable, but at the same time they did not hack Epic; the "100000 medical providers" number links to https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/open-emr-sector-aler... which links open-emr.org/blog/openemr-is-proud-to-announce-seamless-support-for-telehealth/ which...404s. Per archive.org the source is something the CEO of now defunct lifemesh.ai said.

"medical record software" makes it sound super serious, but again OpenEMR should not be taken as seriously as for instance Epic.

For sure, I'm doing something very similar, asking an AI to make a boring but working web app using an API I'm working on. The API is the interesting part and the web app is basically just to test it.

I do think though if I were to delegate the API itself to AI and say something like the code doesn't matter, the high level thinking would suffer from lack of pain working through implementation details.

You're absolutely right (as they say) - https://www.folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html

I don't think it's just the base rate of rounded corners though, these posts feel like the AI tends to spit out a bullet point list of features, like you'd see on an AI readme where each feature has a tangential emoji, then for a website puts them in a grid of rounded rects

>if AI saves you time, why wouldn't you use it

AI might (might not, but often does!) also save you from doing original thinking in the domain, which in a show my side project is what people are interested in

Nice list of design patterns, but imo a big unmentioned one is a grid of rounded rects https://correctarity.com/roundedrects

(maybe what this post calls "Icon-topped feature card grid." ...that might be the official design pattern term)

Re:Show HN: Made a little Artemis II tracker on Friday April 03, 2026 @08:40AM (#47626007)
one big AI tell is grid of rounded rects - https://correctarity.com/roundedrects
Re:I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era on Monday March 30, 2026 @01:25PM (#47577167)
When a drunk chef dumps way too much salt into my ramen, the fact that good ramen also contains (more tastefully applied) salt redeems nothing!
Re:Swift 6.3 Released on Thursday March 26, 2026 @09:15AM (#47530066)
Ah makes sense, personally I wouldn't consider reserved but unused words as keywords in the sense that you don't need to know them to read the language (even though they're keywords in some other technical sense). I was curious because I just tried counting number of keywords by language and it seemed surprisingly ambiguous/subjective/up to the language to say what's a "keyword" vs some type of core module. So my attempt (https://correctarity.com/keywords) probably has mistakes...
Re:Swift 6.3 Released on Thursday March 26, 2026 @08:00AM (#47529400)
are there actually 217 keywords? Just wondering what the difference between that file and https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-pr... (a mere 102 keywords)
Idk, while system architecture diagrams look cool and feel informative, I generally don't feel like they actually help you get started working somewhere on a project. Mistake #3 in this article, putting too much in, is part of this.

So https://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2025/on_layers_and_boxes_and_l... is an interesting take: put links in your diagram, so it functions as a table of contents. This seems most useful for someone who needs to start working on a project.

Similarly https://haskellforall.com/2026/02/browse-code-by-meaning asks how to show what's in a repo, but maybe file tree is not best and a diagram with links as table of contents is the answer.

That said practically speaking, I'm not sure what tooling easily creates working links in a diagram that looks good in any context, for instance mermaid might render on github but not a text editor.

Of course for other purposes maybe just go crazy with the diagram. I once had a coworker draw this super detailed master diagram, maybe 50-100 things on it, which I was told impressed senior government officials (after my manager recolored all the red to avoid connoting errors). But for the purpose of orienting developers a table of contents with links sounds better.

these things seem like too much fun, someone made a gleam printer library (https://hexdocs.pm/escpos/) and suddenly everyone on the discord is buying a printer...
1st comment: 2 day old account, "is the real story here", summary -> comment -> question, general punchiness of style without saying that much. These llms feel like someone said "be an informal hacker news commenter" so they often end with "Curious how" instead of "I'm curious how" or "Worth building" instead of "It's worth building". Not that humans don't do any of this but all of it together in their comment history, you just get a general vibe.

author reply: not as obvious, but for one thing yes literally em dash, their post has 10 em dashes in 748 words, this comment has 2 em dashes in 115 words. Not that em dash = ai, but in the context of a post about AI it seems more likely. And finally, https://github.com/mksglu/claude-context-mode/blob/main/cont... the file the author linked in their own repo does not exist!

(https://github.com/mksglu/claude-context-mode/blob/main/src/... exists but they messed up the link?)

It's annoying because it is a super common widget and it is interesting work, the first draft or literally even prompt they gave the AI probably would've been a great post, all they had to do was not ensloppify it...

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