Hacker News: KenSF

New comment by KenSF in "BBEdit 16"

KenSF — Thu, 21 May 2026 19:45:21 +0000

It still doesn't suck.

New comment by KenSF in "Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver"

KenSF — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 18:12:10 +0000

The EV1 predated the Roadster by a decade. Had GM been improving the EV1 for those 10 years, including Lithium Ion batteries, GM would have been far ahead of everyone . . . had they just kept going with a technology that was inevitable. Where would Cruse be today had they continued with this new technology that is inevitable?

New comment by KenSF in "Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver"

KenSF — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 22:48:27 +0000

We should not forget this is the same company that had an amazing lead on everyone in the electric car market 3 decades ago with the EV1. See "Who Killed the Electric Car [0]

[0] https://www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com/

New comment by KenSF in "Show HN: Rails UI"

KenSF — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 22:25:54 +0000

Please check out my response to another comment on this thread as so much has changed especially recently. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46712477

New comment by KenSF in "Show HN: Rails UI"

KenSF — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 22:22:58 +0000

You’re overlooking Hotwire, PWA as a first-class concept, and Hotwire Native — the easiest way to take a functioning web app and migrate it to native mobile apps on both iOS and Android. I’d encourage you to take a fresh look at the new Rails technologies introduced in Rails 7 and Rails 8. You may find that the current Rails stack is the best fit for most, though not all, cloud applications that need a web client along with iOS and Android clients.

New comment by KenSF in "Matz 2/2: The trajectory of Ruby's growth, Open-Source Software today etc."

KenSF — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 01:12:14 +0000

To start, you build a standard Rails web app, enabling you to interact with your customers. When you want to build that iOS and Android app, Hotwire Native makes it easy to create an app store app for each. From there, you can add native features as you need, as fast or ask slow as you like.

New comment by KenSF in "Show HN: HCB Mobile – financial app built by 17 y/o, processing $6M/month"

KenSF — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 23:18:40 +0000

HCB is an amazing Rails 8 app. It is the Rails app that is processing $6M/month.

https://github.com/hackclub/hcb

Excellent work on the mobile app though I would wonder, since HCB runs on Hotwire, why it was not written as a Hotwire Native app which would leverage the existing Rails Hotwire app and not require a complete rewrite?

New comment by KenSF in "Is Ruby (and Rails) Back?"

KenSF — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 21:04:32 +0000

Yes, absolutely we are noticing.

As I commented in similar question, check out any one of Irina Nazarova's talks about the startups that are starting with Rails. There are a growing number of them. Rails is having a resurgence. I believe it is because Rails is dedicated to the one person dev team, perfect for startups, as well as the Rails 7 shift away from the need for React, the Rails 8 shift towards full support for PWAs, and the Hotwire Native extension which makes transitioning from PWAs to native mobile apps easy.

Another observation, Chime is just one of the Rails companies which went public recently. Figma is a Ruby company that has done the same.

New comment by KenSF in "Ruby on Rails in 2025?"

KenSF — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 20:53:55 +0000

SF Ruby held one of our meetings at Y Combinator because they are big fans of Ruby on Rails. Check out any one of Irina Nazarova's talks about the startups that are starting with Rails. Rails is having a resurgence. I believe it is because Rails is dedicated to the one person dev team, perfect for startups, as well as the Rails 7 shift away from the need for React, the Rails 8 shift towards full support for PWAs, and the Hotwire Native extension which makes transitioning from PWAs to native mobile apps easy.

Also, remember, Chime is just one of the Rails companies which went public recently.

New comment by KenSF in "The internet wants to check your ID"

KenSF — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 17:18:36 +0000

In the real world, we have many businesses which will look at ones gov't issued ID, most bars for instance. We have other businesses which will record the information off ones ID, most dispensaries for instance. I will go into the first. I will not go into the second. Verifying my eligibility is one thing. Recording my data for later use is a very different thing. I can tell the difference in the real world because I can see the process. Online, it is impossible to tell. Providers can build a reputation for privacy, think Proton.

You say we are looking for solutions. There are better solutions, including privacy preserving solutions, which can work. We just don’t have any of those yet.

New comment by KenSF in "Why MIT switched from Scheme to Python (2009)"

KenSF — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 17:51:46 +0000

The move away from Scheme has always saddened me. The first thing we learned in 6.001 was abstraction and invariance. These are still the core of writing good software. I still use these principles every day. There is a purity to Scheme. It is a beautiful light-weight language anyone can learn over a weekend. It does nothing magical for you which means you get to / have to build everything you want and you must understand how it fits together.

New comment by KenSF in "Dual-Link QR Code Generator"

KenSF — Sat, 25 Jan 2025 22:42:27 +0000

as asked repeatedly and never answered on reddit, what is the use case for this?

New comment by KenSF in "My vote on voting systems"

KenSF — Sun, 22 Dec 2024 00:11:51 +0000

My vote is 'any 1 election runoff system'[score, star, approval, ranked choice, ...]. Every 1ER is better than first past the post. It would be nice if vote nerds would shut the frak up about this one is better than that on. Open primaries; top 4 or 5 go through to the general; general uses any 1ER. Were I writing a law to put this in place, I would say we should revisit which 1ER after X number of years or Y voting cycles.

New comment by KenSF in "Self-Driving Cars will Destroy Cities (and what to do about it) [video]"

KenSF — Sun, 10 Nov 2024 23:56:10 +0000

According to the DMV of CA in 2023 there were 453,180 including motorcycles and trailers. Most vehicles are used very little or not at all where as autonomous vehicles are used most of the time. Also, the NHTSA numbers are for all AVs everywhere in the US so your astonishingly numbers precise are way off.

Still, as a pedestrian, I am pretty happy the AVs are not parking in the crosswalks all the time.

New comment by KenSF in "Self-Driving Cars will Destroy Cities (and what to do about it) [video]"

KenSF — Sun, 10 Nov 2024 23:07:11 +0000

My neighborhood is shown in this video multiple times. Number of times I have seen an AV act dangerously? Zero. Number of times an SUV has hit me while I was legally in a crosswalk lifting me off my feet and throwing me through the air? more than zero. Number of times I have seen an AV parked in the box on a red light? Zero. Number of times I have seen a human parked in the box on a red light? All the time, every frackin day.

Are AVs perfect? Nope but they might already be safer drivers than the median driver in SF. There have been 310 pedestrian deaths in SF over the past 10 years. Number of deaths the NHTSA has attributed to full self driving vehicles? Zero.

New comment by KenSF in "California's gas prices to increase 65 cents per gallon with new fuel standards"

KenSF — Sun, 10 Nov 2024 22:29:28 +0000

What amazes me is that none of the stories I have read address the decrease in health costs these changes will bring. “An EPA analysis showed that the Clean Air Act’s benefits outweigh its costs by a factor of 30.” [0] Nor has any one talked about how this will drive adoptions of other transportation methods including public transportation. If we fully baked in the actual costs, health and environmental, I suspect gasoline would cost much, much more.

[0] https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/clean-air-act-50-year...