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mcdow

Re:Sonnet 5.5 on Monday September 28, 2026 @07:50PM (#49886074)
i’d rather “waste” my tokens on opus+ than waste my time with sonnet
can’t speak for Proton, but it’s no wonder Windows doesn’t see Wine as a threat. because Wine sucks to run. any normal person would just run Windows instead of having to fool with Wine. it’s for us hobbyists, because we don’t mind a little pain.
not saying $TECHCO doesn’t know about X project. i’m just saying that if the average person doesn’t know about it, it’s unlikely to get shut down, as it poses no threat.
from the faq: > Is this... legally sketchy? No. Consider projects like ReactOS, a from-scratch effort to create an OS compatible with Microsoft Windows, GNUstep, which provides an open implementation of Cocoa APIs and other things, or Darling, a compatibility layer for running Darwin (macOS) binaries on Linux. ravynOS is similar and stands on the shoulders of many such projects.

as far as i understand it, most companies don’t bother sending cease and desists to projects you’ve never heard of. the fact that the aforementioned projects have avoided the banhammer of Apple should not be an indication that a successful MacOS clone would receive the same treatment.

but on the other hand, maybe that’s a champagne problem. if you can make a macos clone good enough to get the attention of Apple, you’ve already done something incredible.

Re:Sort branches by last commit date on Sunday August 30, 2026 @07:02PM (#49503691)
yep, i have a little helper in my zshrc for this sort of thing:

alias git-hot-refs="git branch --sort=committerdate | tail"

Re:No AI Fridays on Sunday August 30, 2026 @11:45AM (#49499721)
i inadvertently do this at work anyway. i burn through my monthly token budget on boring-but-valuable tasks, and then i spend the rest of the month doing stuff by hand.
that’s the issue with these newer models. they are able to string together a sequence of “not-serious” bugs in a system that ultimately results in some serious vulnerabilities.

it may not be an issue for ffmpeg, but it might be for an application that bundles ffmpeg.

Re:A curmudgeon tries a language server on Wednesday August 26, 2026 @10:35AM (#49449966)
every tool present in an IDE is available elsewhere. it’s not that the IDE-avoidant aren’t using sophisticated tools, they just aren’t using them packaged up in a single application.
Re:RISC-V: They should have known better on Saturday August 15, 2026 @02:13PM (#49312849)
it’s funny because it’s unexpected. one of those members is not like the others. the rest are tech companies.

it does make me wonder what prompted them to join. it would suggest to me there are forward looking people in Brazil’s government. I am impressed.

Re:RISC-V: They should have known better on Saturday August 15, 2026 @12:49PM (#49312125)
lol the government of brazil is in there
Re:Oracle bans AI-generated code from OpenJDK on Friday August 07, 2026 @02:15PM (#49214304)
y’all seem to be missing the fact that Java is a mature product. it has left the “move fast and break things” era of it’s development.

code is a liability, and they likely have more to lose than gain by allowing AI contribution.

Re:My Thoughts on the Bun Rust Rewrite on Thursday July 09, 2026 @03:47PM (#48851454)
“no open source project will succeed with this level of unprofessionalism”

y’all clearly are not acquainted with some of the things Linus has said on the LKML

Haven't done any research into this, but I wonder how tough it would be to build a decent 3D printer. Maybe there are open-source designs out there.
Re:The Deadly Rise of Giant Trucks and S.U.V.s on Tuesday June 23, 2026 @01:43PM (#48648533)
there’s another thing that started to get quite popular in the late 2000s… smartphones
Re:Online age verification is the hill to die on on Wednesday April 29, 2026 @01:04PM (#47951232)
Chrome, Android, and Gmail are optional to use.
Re:Vercel April 2026 security incident on Sunday April 19, 2026 @05:04PM (#47827638)
They might be buying time to sell the relevant stock
Re:Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026) on Monday April 13, 2026 @01:29PM (#47755301)
I’m working on a combination of a semantic embedder and vector database with a focus on Apple devices https://github.com/emmettmcdow/dve

It should be drop in semantic search for any text. No need to worry about what models, what database, how the data is processed, dealing with performance concerns. None of that. Just vector search.

Re:What is RISC-V and why it matters to Canonical on Friday April 10, 2026 @03:48PM (#47722807)
I’m looking forward to using a RISC-V computer in 20 years

Show HN: On-device embedding and vector search for Apple Devices, built in Zig

https://github.com/emmettmcdow/dve

dve handles embedding, vector storage, and search all in one library with a simple interface.This last year I was working on an app for Macs which required doing vector search. The local AI/ML libraries for Apple devices are lacking, which means the only real option is to use an API. I didn’t want to do that, so I started working on my own library. It worked well enough for my uses that I...

( Read More... | no comments | on HN )
Re:Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic? on Thursday January 15, 2026 @04:20PM (#46639497)
It's the phones dude. It's literally just the phones. Get rid of the phones and you fix it.
This is awesome! I’ve been looking for a way to batch export my notes out of Apple notes, will this work for that purpose?

I totally agree with you that most notes apps miss the mark. I’m working on one now which I hope satisfies the same requirements as Apple notes(dead simple, iCloud sync, free) but has some things I want (improved search, first class markdown support).

I’ve been using it as my daily driver for a while, but it’s not quite ready for other users yet. I wrote a bit about it in my year in review[1] under the section “Not Another Notes App!”.

1. https://emmettmcdow.com/posts/2025-in-review

Re:Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2026) on Friday January 02, 2026 @03:36PM (#46469058)
Is any company actually doing this? I haven’t heard of anyone that has this setup. Maybe contract work, but never a full time employee working 4 days.
Re:DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says on Wednesday December 10, 2025 @01:53PM (#46221841)
This is tangential but the whole Tiananmen Square thing is kind of odd. When I visited China many people were more willing to discuss it than I had imagined. Some spoke about it unsolicited. It’s a tourist destination you have to buy tickets for. It’s rather subtle what can and cannot be discussed relating to it. Those I spoke to about it told me that most people have a good understanding of what happened, and many people speak negatively of the CCP. You just can’t do it if you have a major platform (e.g. you’re Jack Ma or you are an LLM).

Not to discount how negative free speech restrictions are, but I’m not so sure how effective that particular propaganda campaign would be.

Re:Anthropic acquires Bun on Tuesday December 02, 2025 @07:05PM (#46128659)
From the comments here it sounds like most people think the amount Anthropic paid for the company was probably not much more than the VC funding which Bun raised.

How would the payout split work? It wouldn’t seem fair to the investors if the founder profited X million while the investors get their original money returned. I understand VC has the expectation that 99 out of 100 of investments will net them no money. But what happens in the cases where money is made, it just isn’t profitable for the VC firm.

What’s to stop everyone from doing this? Besides integrity, why shouldn’t every founder just cash out when the payout is life-changing?

Is there usually some clause in the agreements like “if you do not return X% profit, the founder forfeits his or her equity back to the shareholders”?

Ask HN: Have you ever seen a perfect codebase?

In my experience even the best software projects have a few skeletons in their closet, blemishes on an otherwise well-built project.At the end of the day, we all have to build things that simply work and provide business value. Striving for perfect code is not the goal. But it does make me wonder: does perfect software even exist? If not, what's the gold standard?

( Read More... | 13 comments | 2 points | on HN )
Re:One Handed Keyboard on Saturday November 15, 2025 @09:43AM (#45937771)
Super cool!
Re:Steam Machine on Wednesday November 12, 2025 @02:40PM (#45905226)
Why does Steam/Valve care so much about Linux? I know as devs we all would prefer to use Linux/Unix. But developer experience isn’t a good business justification.

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