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duckfruit

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Software engineer at a boring Silicon Valley bigtech co.

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Yeah, wading through an endless stream of AI slop articles posted here (and elsewhere like on reddit) is exhausting. I suspect I won't be coming here as often anymore, which is a shame, because I used to find this site very informative and engaging.

Though we've always had our fair share of marketing and growth hack posts this turn with AI is just a different level of frustrating. The dead internet theory is unfortunately very real.

Poison Fountain 6 months ago

I mean, good on them but its like fighting a wildfire with a thimbleful of water.

Feel like the model trainers would be able to easily work around this.

OLED, Not for Me 6 months ago

+1.

While the author's complaint is perfectly valid, in practice the advantages of even current OLEDs - for me - far outweigh any disadvantages due to subpixel layout fringing and everything else. Even for programming, the lack of backlight and resulting infinite contrast makes such a huge difference in my day to day life that I refuse to use a non-OLED monitor anymore for any purpose whatsoever. Heck it could be half the DPI and I'd still go for OLED anytime.

The only reason LCDs still exist is price, nothing else.

But if all you want to do is render HTML then why use <canvas>?

I'm only speculating, but it doesn't seem surprising that regular DOM rendering logic - which has to handle approximately a bazillion different rules and special cases - is slower than a custom renderer written for a specific subset of HTML.

It’s a patently obvious money grab or scam or PR attempt because there’s no way in hell Wordpress will be around in 30 years let alone a hundred.

But that got me thinking. Will the web itself be around a century from now? ICANN? HTML? HTTP? A hundred years ago there were no transatlantic flights. The television hadn’t been invented yet. What will the next hundred years bring? Kind of thought provoking really. Good weekend musings.

This makes me indescribably sad.

Apart from mourning the loss of a fantastic app by an awesome developer, to me it signals the end of a golden era of small indie client only apps. Since the APIs for the likes of reddit, twitter (RIP tweetbot) and others were available for free or a reasonable fee it spawned a whole cottage industry of developers who made a living selling alternate front ends for these services. These apps invented many of the conventions and designs that eventually percolated to the official clients. Sometimes these innovations even became platform wide conventions (pull to refresh anyone?). The writing was on the wall for a while, but now the door is firmly closed on that era - and we will all be poorer for it.

Is there something remotely similar for the US market? I would love a small, cheap electric city car and it doesn't have to be solar or anything - though that would be a plus! It would be perfect for my Silicon Valley commute (<10 miles on urban streets) although I appreciate that it probably won't be quite as useful for the vast majority of my countrymen.

I have considered a used electric smart fortwo and a fiat 500e, but the combination of upfront cost and upkeep expenses owing to the need to register it as a car dulls their value proposition as a secondary commuter vehicle. I have looked into an Electrameccanica Solo, but as far as I can tell that company has folded after a series of recalls.

On that vein, I recently joined home-barista, an old school web forum for coffee geeks.

That site is seemingly frozen in time from the early 2000s. There are no trackers - there's no need, since it is already filled with a self selected group. The ads are just simple banners. And best of all it filled with a group of passionate, kind and helpful folks. A simpler site from a simpler time. One of my favorite haunts on the web.

Social media promotes a vicious callout culture where everything you say in the past is permanently used against you in the court of public opinion whenever you change your mind. While I did not share PG's opinion at the time I also don't think it was completely unreasonable to think that someone like Musk would be capable of running Twitter judiciously after the acquisition. I appreciate that instead of digging in his heels PG seems to have evolved his judgement after recent developments.

Starlink for RVs 4 years ago

I'm willing to bet on it! I live in the center of Silicon Valley and it would take me a 30 minute drive to the south or the east before I lose cell phone access.

I agree. We live in a golden age of gaming. Steam and all the game stores have a practically unlimited catalog (granted there's a lot of shovelware, but still plenty to chew on). Triple A games with budgets that rival and even exceed tentpole Hollywood franchises. New art forms constantly furthering the boundaries of narrative driven entertainment. Hyper realistic graphics pushing the frontiers of CG and even AI research with DLSS and the like. Gaming can be entertainment, a social activity, a creative tool (There's Minecraft of course, but also check out some of the incredible stuff made in Dreams on the Playstation https://youtu.be/AXtNlgjPb80?t=288).

And on top of all that, there's also innovation in the underlying business models. F2P games that are morally dubious and depend on hapless whales that get addicted to your product and subsidize it for the rest of the playerbase? Sure! Single $60 or $70 purchase without DLCs? Contrary to the author's insinuation, there are plenty of games that still follow that model. Expansion packs! Monthly subscriptions! There's just no other kind of media that even comes close -- where else can you spend $50 and potentially get hundreds or even thousands of hours of entertainment?

I would be surprised if it starts to show wear within the next 10 years.

I've been using mine daily for around 10 years, and yes, you are entirely correct. If I could somehow clean all the coffee stains and grime it has accumulated it could probably pass off as new! And while I personally love the feel of topre keys, I can see why people might not like them - to each his own.

I just wish the new wireless HHKBs weren't so dang ugly!

I've been on HN long enough to realize that the majority of comments here are going to inevitably devolve into a discussion of the sheer complexity and breadth of tooling listed here.

However, bear in mind that the site is built by a popular JS influencer whose day job is popularizing frameworks and increasing demand for services of the sort he offers.

This certainly happens quite often. However, speaking purely anecdotally just to add a data point - in my current team at a big tech firm, none of my teammates have left because of compensation. We've had quite a bit of turnover over the years and the vast majority left due to a myriad of other reasons, many even having taken pay cuts in the process.

This is a very good point that I feel gets overlooked way too often. When people talk about the UI feeling sluggish most of the time they are talking about responsiveness.

Like, who cares if your app is rendering at 120 fps if it takes me 3 seconds to focus on a text field? I feel like that’s where most cross platform tooling has their work cut out.

Absolutely! The top hits are often SEO’d to death and so devoid of quality I often find myself appending “Reddit” to a lot search queries just to get any sort of relevant results.

“best espresso grinders reddit” -> good, relatively unbrigaded discussions of pros and cons from r/coffee

“Best espresso grinder” -> plenty of “best of 2021” type articles that are patently paid for and gamed, often by publications that have nothing to do with coffee or by some kind of purpose built “www.bestcoffeegrinder2021.com” sites that don’t exactly engender trust. Most of these are so obviously written by low quality contractors or bots that it’s somewhat worrisome that they cant be filtered out by google.

Fuck You Sunday 6 years ago

Not everything has to have a purpose. If you're looking for solutions or life hacks, there are millions of SEO-d to death pages and self proclaimed gurus out there that peddle such things.

Personally I utterly relate to what the author is trying to express - so I heave a wry chuckle and after a momentary rush of kinship with the author sitting at his keyboard thousands of miles away, I move on. And what is HN if not a community of individuals sharing a connection.

Always love hearing from Boom. By far the most impressive YC startup I know of. In a sea of interchangeable SaaS and mobile app ventures, they are out there doing hard things and actually trying to make a reality the kind of future we all dream about. Inspirational. They certainly have some daunting challenges to overcome but hope they pull through. I'm rooting for them.