Hacker News Reader

yAakon You can't trust macOS Privacy and Security settings

The gotcha is “I gave it permission, then revoked permission in the UI, but it still has permission.”

yAakon Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

That's not what arghandugh was saying at all. But I'm guessing you know that.

yAakon Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?

Dyslexia isn’t curable. It doesn’t magically go away with help, techniques, or accommodations —- it just becomes more manageable.

He/she probably wouldn’t have gotten into an elite university without that help through childhood.

yAakon Steam Machine

https://www.lunarg.com/lunarg-at-xdc-2025-kosmickrisp-overvi...

yAakon Swift on FreeBSD Preview

From what I've read, SwiftUI is using parts of UIKit under the hood, so it also doesn't seem too likely.

yAakon SQLiteData: A fast, lightweight replacement for SwiftData using SQL and CloudKit

GRDB is an invaluable tool to me and, IMO, to the Swift community — thank you for open-sourcing your countless hours of work and expertise!!

yAakon Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes

Box cake mix almost never tastes better than scratch.

Next you’ll tell me store-bought frosting tastes better?

yAakon I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform

> Because they finally understood who was actually using our product.

Yes!!!

> The biggest problem with most engineers is actually over-engineering.

Err, wait, go back to step 1. Over-engineering is sometimes a byproduct of not understanding the customer use cases. That lack of understanding is the biggest problem.

So, I’m an “engineer” —- my most common frustration with other engineers is their lack of interest in understanding of the actual product being sold. In my experience, sometimes the reason is job-fit issues, sometimes it’s ego, but usually it’s a combination of culture and incentive.

yAakon A Vision for WebAssembly Support in Swift

I agree with you, but sounds like a rough problem:

https://danielchasehooper.com/posts/why-swift-is-slow/

yAakon I won't connect my dishwasher to your cloud

There’s plenty of Bosch models that don’t have this “feature” — he just bought the crappy one

yAakon Amazon workers to strike at multiple US warehouses during busy holiday season

Cancelling and replacing credit cards is a massive pain and waste of time.

yAakon Building Lego Machines to Destroy Tall Lego Towers

I share an outrage for mass production of plastic, but not at all for Lego.

Lego is a fantastic use of plastic, IMO. Durable, reusable, broad appeal, and designed to be kept, not churned out into the landfill or ocean.

yAakon Sqlite-vec: Work-in-progress vector search SQLite extension that runs anywhere

Thank you! This was an extremely helpful explanation to me, as someone not familiar on the topic. =)

yAakon Using Goatse to Stop App Theft

Could this be solved by just adding some TOS to his site?

yAakon Strong static typing, a hill I'm willing to die on

I’m half convinced it’s a difference in how people’s brains work. Dynamic typing adds just so much cognitive overhead for me.

Well, that and PTSD from digging through so many horrors created with Python and JavaScript.

yAakon Unity has seemingly silently removed its GitHub repo that tracks ToS changes

Thankfully Godot is safe from acquisition: https://godotengine.org/governance/

(Or, at least they say they are.)

yAakon Unity cancels town hall over reported death threats

Maybe just cancelled due to the short-notice.

But, I also wouldn't be surprised if leadership doesn't have great answers to the questions their employees would have asked if the meeting had happened.

yAakon So You've Decided to Move from Unity to Unreal Engine

Sounds very similar to the problems of using XIBs/Storyboards in iOS dev. (aside from the perf. cost you mention)

yAakon Spring 6.1 now compatible with virtual threads and JDK 21

Sorta random, but I really appreciate this kind of post on HN. People have tons of domain expertise and hard-earned lessons that get shared like this, and it broadens my awareness without requiring any time investment on my part.

Thank you, thank you (and others like you) for taking the time to type this up!

yAakon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (August 2023)

   Location:  Boise, ID USA 
   Remote:  Yes 
   Willing to relocate:  No 
   Role:  Senior iOS/mobile Dev

   Technologies:
   - iOS / Swift / Obj-C focus  
   - Android / Java capable 
   - Flutter / Dart capable 
   - .NET / Unity3D / C# capable 

   Résumé/CV: On Request
   - Senior Dev with wide range of experience working with small teams on consumer-facing apps.  
   - UI / UX expertise & actual passion. =) 
   - Great at preventing & fixing concurrency/async bugs. 
   - Prefer role that collaborates closely with Product, Design and customers. 

   Email: virtual-rose.0n@icloud.com

yAakon Why use OpenID Connect instead of plain OAuth2?

Yeah, I'm finding that I also need to understand authentication well enough that I COULD implement it, just to safely and correctly use someone else's implementation.

yAakon Show HN: I've built a C# IDE, Runtime, and AppStore inside Excel

Yeah, I thought you crafted some Excel monstrosity based on the title. Maybe a mod can change the title for you to say "for Excel."

Also, I would be super proud if I'd created this. Excellent work!!!

yAakon Apple announces full Swift rewrite of the Foundation framework (2022)

I would love it.

Swift is fantastic, and by far my favorite language to write client code in. (Compared to Rust, TypeScript/JS, ObjC, C++, C#, & Java.)

yAakon Dwarf Fortress has sold half a million copies

yAakon Human gene linked to bigger brains was born from seemingly useless DNA

I feel like me keeping copies of all the code I've ever written is a awkwardly good analogy here.

yAakon Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information

Yeah, I guess this comes down to how your brain works best, because it's the complete opposite for me -- just listening would result in almost no understanding or retention.

But, if I just took even crappy notes, I would remember and understand MUCH better. I rarely looked at the notes afterwards, just the act of writing it down was critical for me.

----

Edit: sometimes, the topic wasn't a great fit for notes, so I would doodle instead. Same benefits. The brain is weird.

yAakon How Precision Time Protocol is being deployed at Meta

The way I read it: a larger "Window Of Uncertainty" impacts performance. Having a smaller WOU by using PTP gave them a 100x perf increase in their experiments with the commit-wait solution for "ensuring consistency guarantee."

I'm completely ignorant on the topic in general though... so I'm probably missing something. =)

yAakon Wikipedians are rebelling against “unethical” Wikipedia fundraising banners

"Bad" and "nefarious" things... that's some pretty heavy assumptions and value judgement.

The lack of honesty and transparency is definitely cause for concern, and makes me hesitate to donate, but it feels like you have your own dishonest agenda.

yAakon Gamedevs not baking in monetization are “fucking idiots”, says Unity CEO

The Big Lebowski comes to mind: "You're not wrong, Walter. You're just an asshole."

yAakon I fucking hate Jira

Yeah, I've yet to use something that doesn't make me sad and aggravated at the same time.

On my "hate" list: Jira, Asana, Zenhub &/or Github Issues, Trello.