Hacker News: Shalomboy

New comment by Shalomboy in "Union types in C# 15"

Shalomboy — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 20:47:39 +0000

Not OP but I would love to check that out

New comment by Shalomboy in "Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?"

Shalomboy — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 20:30:56 +0000

You should try getting _extremely_ good at Trading Card Games. Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Magic The Gathering all have extremely active current player bases and loads of places to play across the Americas, Europe, and (mostly east) Asia. Getting deep into card advantage, deck construction, and hypergeometric theory has been an absolute blast. Plus, the online simulators are free for Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon are free and pretty current with the paper game. Making new friendships with people not in my usual circles has been so rewarding, I can't recommend it enough. Not to mention the most meaningful contribution of all - winning events moves the needle on the way the rest of the playerbase plays the game. I could go on and on about this.

New comment by Shalomboy in "Every GPU That Mattered"

Shalomboy — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 13:25:51 +0000

This is a wonderful-looking infographic, but I truly don't think there are 49 GPUs that mattered in the PC gaming hardware space - let alone all of computer graphics. Call it recency bias, but after the Pascal cards it feels like maybe one or two more entrants actually mattered?

New comment by Shalomboy in "FCC has banned the import of all new foreign-made routers here's what you can do"

Shalomboy — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 18:19:06 +0000

are there though?

New comment by Shalomboy in "“This is not the computer for you”"

Shalomboy — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 18:02:25 +0000

Outstanding article; I'm glad you put these thoughts into words and published them because I've felt similarly this week since I've had time and reason to reminisce on my 2010 MacBook. I had AutoCAD on that poor little computer, working at the pace it could handle.

New comment by Shalomboy in "MacBook Neo"

Shalomboy — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 19:19:55 +0000

This is such a better deal than I had growing up, Apple has to be taking a bath on these.

My high school required students to bring their own laptops to school when I started in 2010. Their shopping list suggested a MacBook Pro 13" with a case - I looked up "MacBook Pro price" for the first time in my life and just about walked into traffic. I didn't have a laptop to bring, I didn't want to bring the wrong kind of laptop and get double-screwed, so I bit the bullet and brought my car savings to the Apple store at the mall. A tremendously thoughtful sales rep told me "that's crazy, what school requires a MacBook Pro for 9th graders?", led me to the white unibody MacBooks on the side, and showed me that if I was buying it for school, I would get a discount on the laptop, a free inkjet printer (with ink!), and a free iPod Touch. This blew my mind. I thought it was a scam.

If I recall, that model of MacBook compared admirably against the same year's base model MacBook Pro 13 on a stat sheet but felt worse in hand. The MacBook Neo might actually bring up the rear on fit and finish at the expense of I/O and like, the questionable idea of running an A-series chip in a laptop running Tahoe and Chrome. I'm thrilled with this release.

New comment by Shalomboy in "MacBook Neo"

Shalomboy — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 18:35:28 +0000

I could use a laugh today, do you have a link to the leica comment? It wasn't that one review of the Fuji X Half, was it?

New comment by Shalomboy in "MacBook Neo"

Shalomboy — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 18:10:47 +0000

> K-to-12 edu customers don’t care for that and just want a keyboard with a screen with dead-simple admin options.

Which is why I highly doubt this is a play for the K-12 education space. Lots of school-owned chromebook repairs get done at the district level before making their way to the OEM for RMA/replacement. There's no way Apple is supporting that system, they'll want all repairs done under their roof. Not to mention MacOS adminware options lag behind what's built-into ChromeOS. Are you really gonna tell your severely-underpaid sysadmin to put 10,000 devices on Kandji? They'll walk into traffic before you finish speaking.

New comment by Shalomboy in "Why software stocks are getting pummelled"

Shalomboy — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 21:00:19 +0000

Agreed. The SWEs already receive a steady supply of conflicting demands from every possible business unit; the value add for these teams is a working PMO to prioritize the requests coming in.

New comment by Shalomboy in "iPhone 16 Best-Selling Smartphone in 2025; Apple Takes 7 Spots in Top Models"

Shalomboy — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 21:48:16 +0000

Google bought out HTC 8 years ago to the day, and if I recall correctly that exacerbated a lot of the tension in the Android OEM space that the original Google Pixel rollout caused in the first place.

New comment by Shalomboy in "iPhone 16 Best-Selling Smartphone in 2025; Apple Takes 7 Spots in Top Models"

Shalomboy — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 21:40:29 +0000

I've been a pixel guy since HTC was making them for google, and honestly jumping from the 6 to the 9 has made me think that pastures are greener someplace else.

New comment by Shalomboy in "The Hallucination Defense"

Shalomboy — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 21:18:46 +0000

This is true for bricks, but it is not true if your dog starts up your car and hits a pedestrian. Collisions caused by non-human drivers are a fascinating edge case for the times we're in.

New comment by Shalomboy in "Things I've learned in my 10 years as an engineering manager"

Shalomboy — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 21:08:11 +0000

My favorite manager told me a similar analogy before I left, but with a caveat; a good manager has to provide cover for the team, but it's up to the team to hold the manager up - just like an umbrella.

New comment by Shalomboy in "‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid"

Shalomboy — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 20:20:23 +0000

Well that's clearly an example of putting the cart before the horse. You should be able to sleep at night so long as you remember that Git isn't what enables Palantir to power an army of federalized brownshirts; it's the people making the tools explicitly for an army of federalized brownshirts with Git that are morally culpable.

New comment by Shalomboy in "What happened to WebAssembly"

Shalomboy — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 17:09:33 +0000

I found Blazor WASM to be extremely helpful if you have to start from the opposite side of the spectrum. I was working in a self-proclaimed gov agency "Microsoft Shop" whose head of development was adamantly opposed to any sort of JS-driven web app development, but kept accepting requesting apps that fit perfectly into the SPA model. .NET 6 released a few months after I started and with it came a huge amount of progress with Blazor WASM. I had plenty of experience with Vue and Typescript, so Blazor WASM and C# mapped really easily to my existing model of how to build. That similarity also made it easy to onboard new grads who had experience in web dev but weren't familiar with C#. After enough evangelizing, we built a critical mass of projects leveraging Blazor WASM to convince leadership to reconsider his position on Typescript. I can't say enough nice things about the work Steve Sanderson has done to bring Blazor to the public.

New comment by Shalomboy in "ICE's Tool to Monitor Phones in Neighborhoods"

Shalomboy — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 18:40:23 +0000

Well first off, it is very expensive. Vendors that supply to DHS and DOD have to be selective about who they sell their services to as well. Citizen-developed services to track ICE are routinely shut down by Apple and Google.

New comment by Shalomboy in "Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team"

Shalomboy — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 15:55:19 +0000

> Another thing to consider, it seems JS devs use more AI for work than .NET devs for example, which might be in more old-school companies and industries.

Speaking from years of .NET work in state and federal government, the sort of dev groups that lean on Telerik or DevExpress have less leverage to build new things for themselves than you would expect, so the use of AI inside of them is predominantly for maintaining existing software. Decisions on how things get built at most public agencies still revolve around MS Access and WebForms due to a whole bunch of BS ordinances that legislators put in place; for those sorts of places a reliable vendor can absorb the blame if concerns surrounding accessibility, compliance, or security of your ancient web services crop up, while Claude and Codex put the liability back on your org.

New comment by Shalomboy in "Try to take my position: The best promotion advice I ever got"

Shalomboy — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 14:31:12 +0000

Not to diminish your skepticism, but your reply comes off jaded in a way that might be hurting you. The author's suggestion for employees seeking promotion is to operate on a higher level than they're asked to and keep operating in that fashion for a sustained window of time. Show growth, in other words.

New comment by Shalomboy in "The Curious Case of the Shallow Session SPAs"

Shalomboy — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 23:42:56 +0000

Russell paints a convincing picture of cargo cult programming with this article, but it all seems to hinge on the supposition that the datasets are compiling complete logs of what web developers are doing with all their SPA-driven DOM manipulation capabilities. I'm happy to be proven wrong, but the idea that developers are just recreating MPAs with React sounds silly.

New comment by Shalomboy in "Prepare for That Stupid World"

Shalomboy — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 19:36:54 +0000

There will still be new engineers, scientists, and doctors by then. But aptitude won't be a factor in who matriculates into those fields anymore. That's the worrying part.