Hacker News: alternatex

New comment by alternatex in "Flutter 3.47"

alternatex — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 12:44:06 +0000

As someone coming from MacroFactor, estimating macros on food is the hardest part of dieting. So your app is great but it tackles the part of dieting that people aren't stuggling with and doesn't address the part that they do struggle with.

Most dieting apps are pushing for the AI photo and barcode scanning to make estimating easier and though far from perfect, it makes the whole experience at least somewhat doable.

New comment by alternatex in "Pixel Watch 5"

alternatex — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 06:54:56 +0000

Chest straps work with ECG, so they're hard to beat for heart rate tracking. That said, Apple watches are some of the best wrist wearables for heart rate tracking. Most other brands aren't as accurate and many don't come even close.

Check out the Quantified Scientist on YouTube, he does some interesting testing on health devices.

New comment by alternatex in "A physicist rigged his pet hamster’s wheel to upload to Strava"

alternatex — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 12:14:28 +0000

It's 10km, which is a lot more than 10k steps.

New comment by alternatex in "That time when I failed the Microsoft interview"

alternatex — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 09:33:42 +0000

Speaking as someone who worked offshore for most of their career and is now a full time employee at MS.

Vendors are treated as vendors usually are. They are given the work that nobody wants (work that provides no career growth and usually is uninteresting), they get the least amount of attention and mentoring, they are expected onboard quickly with little help from the team, etc.

I have noticed that I'm more empathetic to vendors than people who have never been the offshore/contractor person.

New comment by alternatex in "OnePlus halts operations in USA and Europe"

alternatex — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 16:44:02 +0000

Pixel phones have always been behind in hardware power. They're not performing at budget level, but compared to most OnePlus devices they are way behind in performance. In the Android world performance means longevity. Any Pixel tensor chip or non-high-end Snapdragon or MediaTek chip has a "smoothness" lifespan of 2-3 years.

New comment by alternatex in "What will be left for us to work on?"

alternatex — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 07:18:12 +0000

Nothing effective about self-diagnosis. Quick and easy yes, but not effective. Most things that are worth diagnosing require a visit to a clinic. No doctor is going to lose a job because people are self-diagnosing using the internet.

New comment by alternatex in "98% isn't much"

alternatex — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 15:23:03 +0000

I've a Xiaomi Mi 6 phone (2017 model) that I still use as a fridge-mounted shopping list and it's using the latest version of Chrome. I think it would be quite the stretch to find a user using a 10 year old browser.

New comment by alternatex in "Oura says it gets government demands for user data"

alternatex — Sat, 23 May 2026 17:28:00 +0000

I think it's also meant to protect from potential mistakes in handling of hard disk decommissioning which presumably is a common thing with data centers.

New comment by alternatex in "Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses"

alternatex — Sat, 23 May 2026 12:23:30 +0000

Copilot cannot be behind any models because it's a harness, not a model. You can use any of the popular models through it, including Claude models. Though people have been saying that Claude CLI is a better experience.

New comment by alternatex in "Vivaldi 8.0"

alternatex — Thu, 21 May 2026 15:48:11 +0000

Same experience with UI performance, especially on Linux (Fedora). I went back to Zen Browser because of this, but frankly most browsers are performing worse for me on Linux than on Windows.

New comment by alternatex in "GitHub is investigating unauthorized access to their internal repositories"

alternatex — Wed, 20 May 2026 16:30:18 +0000

According to the email I initially received for this alert, zed.exe was attempting to access its own folder within the AppData directory. Nothing more normal than that, no?

No idea how that related to what I was told by the sec people shortly afterwards.

New comment by alternatex in "GitHub is investigating unauthorized access to their internal repositories"

alternatex — Wed, 20 May 2026 07:11:35 +0000

I installed Zed on a work machine at a well-known software company and a week later they forced me to reimage my machine because they got some alert that the app was attempting to access browser credentials :(

No shade on Zed, sometimes in-house security tools just don't like new software.

New comment by alternatex in "I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis"

alternatex — Sat, 16 May 2026 23:55:16 +0000

As with regex, querying is about not getting what you don't want as much as it is about getting what you want. And the former of the two is much more difficult to verify.

New comment by alternatex in "I let AI build a tool to help me figure out what was waking me up at night"

alternatex — Tue, 12 May 2026 14:38:58 +0000

I don't want to paint your comment as pro-AI brigading, but in the solution to any problem, considering the collaterals is a pillar principle of engineering. You don't get praise for solving a bug infestation problem by nuking the city.

I feel some of the recent HackerNews stories start leaning a bit too much toward using AI regardless of whether it makes sense. A solution to any problem, however interesting or clever should be critiqued holistically, alternatives included.

New comment by alternatex in "Learning Software Architecture"

alternatex — Tue, 12 May 2026 14:30:47 +0000

I don't think performance advice should be part of a general architectural principles list, so I don't think that's what they meant. Otherwise might as well add "avoid nested loops", etc, and then it devolves into a general programming advice list.

Performance is and always was something dependent on the domain rules. You don't start architecting for performance before understanding requirements so why make it a pillar of all architecture.

New comment by alternatex in "Google says criminal hackers used AI to find a major software flaw"

alternatex — Tue, 12 May 2026 13:38:15 +0000

Not sure if it's a joke, but twins don't have the same biometrics

New comment by alternatex in "The bottleneck was never the code"

alternatex — Sat, 09 May 2026 14:30:55 +0000

Adaptability is a virtue, flip flopping is being disingenuous.

New comment by alternatex in "The bottleneck was never the code"

alternatex — Wed, 06 May 2026 16:05:37 +0000

Bottom line is the people described as hypocritical in the comment have no principles, but rather feign passion in anything they think other people consider valuable. When devs thought coding skill was valuable, that's what they claimed to be passionate about, when the game changed and communication became key, they suddenly changed their passion. Either the timing is a coincidence, or they are hypocrites.

I don't think switching one's passion on a dime is a valid escape hatch from hypocrisy.

New comment by alternatex in "Removable batteries in smartphones will be mandatory in the EU starting in 2027"

alternatex — Tue, 05 May 2026 13:10:58 +0000

They said 2 years after purchase. So that's where the debate is. How long should we hold manufacturers accountable for in regards to waterproofing? 1 year, 2 years, forever?

New comment by alternatex in "Can I disable all data collection from my vehicle?"

alternatex — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 21:42:02 +0000

Legal wiggle room in case the sleepy eyes cam catches some action? Disclaimer: no idea how the tired driver sensors work.