Hacker News: Zanfa

New comment by Zanfa in "Switching to electric stoves can dramatically cut indoor air pollution (2025)"

Zanfa — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 15:51:30 +0000

To be fair, induction doesn’t heat the sides of the pan at all. So carbon steel pans are more annoying to use and keep uniformly seasoned. Woks don’t really work by default either. It’s also more susceptible to slightly warped pans exacerbating uneven heating.

New comment by Zanfa in "Switching to electric stoves can dramatically cut indoor air pollution (2025)"

Zanfa — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 15:38:30 +0000

I’m skeptical about the reasoning being regulations. There are still a few Italian manufacturers who have a combined oven & stovetop models (“range” in US terms) including induction, but they’re really expensive and with questionable reliability / warranty support. I think all manufacturers just care about cutting costs and putting out a “sleak” design.

I can’t wait for knobs to make a comeback.

New comment by Zanfa in "Switching to electric stoves can dramatically cut indoor air pollution (2025)"

Zanfa — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 15:03:00 +0000

This! The only electric (induction or otherwise) stovetops are either bottom of the barrel portable or top of the line commercial models. Everything in between is capacitive touch garbage.

New comment by Zanfa in "SAP stops most travel and hiring because of AI's soaring cost"

Zanfa — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 14:55:42 +0000

And can’t forget Metaverse and the $70B Meta sunk into it either.

New comment by Zanfa in "AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job"

Zanfa — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 11:23:11 +0000

I have a similar one. Is Claude Code (web and/or VS Code) still a buggy mess? Pretty much every single agent loop bugs out and requires a hard refresh, which sometimes still doesn’t help. And they have an effectively infinite LLM budget and unreleased models to fix the issues.

New comment by Zanfa in "Baseload Is a Myth (2024)"

Zanfa — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 02:27:30 +0000

The problem is still long periods (up to weeks) of single-digit percentage of nominal capacity of power generation from wind farms. Overbuilding doesn’t help much, so a non-renewable option still needs to be available.

New comment by Zanfa in "Removing React.js from the codebase and adapting Htmx for UI interactivity (2023)"

Zanfa — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 14:18:10 +0000

> In fact, the complexity of Chat Messages and Notifications synchronisation is one of the prime reasons why React exists.

Which makes it even more ironic that in the 10 years since React was announced in 2013 and when I quit Facebook, they never managed to fix the original state synchronization bug that they demonstrated in the original React announcement for more than a few months at a time at best.

I'm sure technically it wasn't a singular bug over the years and the causes were complex, but React did fuck all in relation to the unread message counter being correct.

New comment by Zanfa in "If you want to create a button from scratch, you must first create the universe"

Zanfa — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 07:15:03 +0000

It hasn't even been a few weeks since I had AI use a button + onClick handler for navigation instead of a simple anchor tag...

New comment by Zanfa in "The Coming Loop"

Zanfa — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 09:15:38 +0000

Not to mention that effectively reviewing code is a much more difficult skill than writing it. Without a good mental map of how it affects other parts of the system, it’s basically a rubber stamping ceremony.

Github’s poor PR UI doesn’t help either, there’s limited tooling to navigate around the codebase not directly changed (but affected) to identify and highlight problems.

New comment by Zanfa in "There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing"

Zanfa — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 06:51:02 +0000

> Over time the gems will rise to the top

I’m not sure this can be assumed. Discovery was already one of the biggest hurdles when releases were bottlenecked by human output. Increasing output 10x is only going to make it worse.

Same as with Google, where they’ve lost the SEO war against AI spammers and valuable content has become close to impossible to find.

New comment by Zanfa in "Software is made between commits"

Zanfa — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 07:59:39 +0000

This seems exactly backwards. Most commits should not exist, because the majority of people can't already help themselves from committing "wip" "fix lint", let alone anything more granular.

New comment by Zanfa in "Upcoming breaking changes for npm v12"

Zanfa — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 09:53:02 +0000

I don't know what NPM is doing, but yarn installs deps much faster than NPM

New comment by Zanfa in "Orchestrating AI code review at scale"

Zanfa — Fri, 29 May 2026 11:48:26 +0000

Can you elaborate about the practical value of having the history of back and forth, in a PR or even in the commit log? In my 20ish years of experience, I can’t recall a single instance where I’ve solved something thanks to having this work-in-progress state persisted in the repo history.

It’s exclusively been the other way around where having a smaller number of larger squished commits (post merge) that’s made the project be more maintainable.

New comment by Zanfa in "Does anybody like React?"

Zanfa — Tue, 26 May 2026 03:36:43 +0000

It’s not that. The sort of issues all of the above have caused are fundamental, eg not using anchor tags for navigation. It’s not in any way easier to use a button or div with an onclick handler. It’s also not easier to serve megabytes of JS to render 5kb of comments.

New comment by Zanfa in "Does anybody like React?"

Zanfa — Tue, 26 May 2026 03:06:40 +0000

> You hate BAD react SPAs that break the fundamentals of how the web works.

But that’s all of them? If Github, Reddit, LinkedIn and Facebook and others are unable to build SPAs that don’t constantly break the fundamentals while also choking the browser, maybe it is a tech problem.

New comment by Zanfa in "Google I/O"

Zanfa — Tue, 19 May 2026 18:00:06 +0000

Not surprising. It’s placed exactly where the regular search results used to be (when navigating away from image results) and muscle memory is strong. Haven’t clicked it intentionally once though.

New comment by Zanfa in "Gyroflow: Video stabilization using gyroscope data"

Zanfa — Fri, 15 May 2026 05:26:58 +0000

There are external devices that can be attached to the camera to record gyro data, e.g https://docs.gyroflow.xyz/app/advanced-usage/using-external-... I just ordered one a few weeks ago and haven't received it yet, so can't talk about personal experience, but there's no technical reason it couldn't work well.

New comment by Zanfa in "I hate soldering"

Zanfa — Wed, 13 May 2026 05:38:37 +0000

It's been awhile, but the best experience I've had desoldering ICs with many pins was with JBCs hot air extractors. They're little metal funnels you put around the component you want to desolder to contain hot air, with a tiny suction cup to lift the part once solder starts to melt.

JBCs stations are expensive though, but you should be able to use just the heat deflectors and a pair of tweezers, rather than a vacuum pump as long as you already have a hot air station.

New comment by Zanfa in "Poland is now among the 20 largest economies"

Zanfa — Fri, 08 May 2026 16:32:17 +0000

> Outright lie about the problem and the scope of it.

One of my favorites was “EU is banning juice”, when the definition of juice was being standardized and local producers of fruit-flavored sugar water couldn’t keep selling their beverages as “juice” anymore.

New comment by Zanfa in "GitHub unwanted UX change: issue links now open in a popup"

Zanfa — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 16:16:16 +0000

> It’s always been interesting to me that multi-million and even billion dollar tech companies don’t have perfect websites in terms of UX.

This, but for online shops, especially clothing. Horrendously buggy, laggy, with broken navigation (especially when navigating back), filters that don't work on > 95% of online stores. Why they wouldn't fix their primary (or at the very least highest margin) income stream is beyond me, but I've had to abandon so many shopping carts just because the checkout flow is literally broken.