Hacker News Reader

duckfruiton I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

The AI writing thats ubiquitous these days - on my company email and slack, on random quotations in the newspaper, blogspam, even narrated by youtubers on camera (!) - is exactly like the Pluribus hive mind. Everywhere on the internet you encounter the same entity.

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:ig5qohlny4csxs2lu3dyvhp5/po...

duckfruiton Nearly half of LG smart TV apps contain residential proxy SDKs

Exactly. This is like that Sci fi show where the whole world is taken over by an alien organism and everyone you meet is basically the same one person. The AI is also off-puttingly nice, just like the alien.

duckfruiton Nearly half of LG smart TV apps contain residential proxy SDKs

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.

duckfruiton Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?

This makes me indescribably sad. Dr. Rauschmayer's books and articles helped me tremendously early in my career. I owe him a debt of gratitude.

duckfruiton Poison Fountain

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.

duckfruiton OLED, Not for Me

+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.

duckfruiton Show HN: Dropflow, a CSS layout engine for node or <canvas>

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.

duckfruiton Japan's Space One rocket explodes seconds after liftoff

Essentially a

  throw new RuntimeException(e)

for rockets?

As a fellow engineer, I sympathize.

duckfruiton It takes 12 people to use the 18k Sphere camera

Great article. The Sphere is such a ridiculous, hilarious and fantastic project. We should be build one in every city.

duckfruiton WordPress introduces 100 year domain registrations

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.

duckfruiton Learn how to design systems at scale and prepare for system design interviews

Certainly not at the FAANG I work at. We hire specialized engineers to work on device drivers and OS kernels and absolutely do not ask them questions on how to design distributed web services.

I encourage you to apply: https://www.apple.com/careers/us/

duckfruiton Apollo will close down on June 30th

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.

duckfruiton Squad Solar City Car

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.

duckfruiton A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most

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.

duckfruiton Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

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.

duckfruiton Starlink for RVs

I am agreeing with you, but I can see how my comment is unclear.

duckfruiton Starlink for RVs

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.

duckfruiton Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

A rate hike that that was widely telegraphed and has been anticipated for years, to boot!

duckfruiton I hate what video games have become

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?

duckfruiton I’m not convinced by the new lab leak debunking

Worth bearing in mind that the author has himself admitted to and apologized for factual errors in his article that could change some of his conclusions.

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1499465032547061767?...

duckfruiton Vijayanagara – The Last Emperors of South India [audio]

Happy to see the Fall of Civs podcast on HN. An amazingly well produced, thought provoking podcast - highly recommended by this Internet Stranger!

duckfruiton Why Are Topre Keyboards So Expensive?

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!

duckfruiton How I built a modern website in 2021

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.

duckfruiton Crews are abandoned on ships in record numbers without pay, food or a way home

This sounds fascinating. I'm interested to learn more. How does one go about paying for passage on a cargo ship?

duckfruiton In software, when an engineer exits the team

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.

duckfruiton The Persistent Gravity of Cross Platform

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.

duckfruiton It appears that Reddit is forcing me to use their app to see deep linked content

Even worse, when I clicked on "Continue in App" it didn't actually open the relevant page in the app, instead taking me to the product page for Reddit on the iOS app store.

I already have the app installed.

Native apps and URLs are like peanut butter and mayonnaise, they just don't go well together.

duckfruiton Ask HN: Has Google search been worse at finding information lately?

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.

duckfruiton I followed my dreams to get demoted to software developer

I don't know if I'd call it clickbait. Whimsically worded, sure, but the author did literally go from being a Director of design to an associate software developer so it doesn't seem inaccurate to call it a demotion.

duckfruiton Fuck You Sunday

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.