Hacker News: chickenWing

New comment by chickenWing in "Ingesting PDFs and why Gemini 2.0 changes everything"

chickenWing — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 20:16:21 +0000

It is cheaper now, but I wonder if it will continue to be cheaper when companies like Google and OpenAI decide they want to make a profit off of AI, instead of pouring billions of dollars of investment funds into it. By the time that happens, many of the specialized service providers will be out of business and Google will be free to jack up the price.

New comment by chickenWing in "My Struggle with Doom Scrolling"

chickenWing — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 18:35:12 +0000

Having some music on helps me with this too.

New comment by chickenWing in "Introducing Copilot+ PCs"

chickenWing — Mon, 20 May 2024 18:51:14 +0000

The real danger of AI is it will annoy us all to death as companies keep jamming it into everything.

New comment by chickenWing in "Thirteen Ways of Looking at Art"

chickenWing — Wed, 07 Feb 2024 21:28:29 +0000

We should resist the temptation to create "evolutionary just-so stories" to explain human behaviors.

New comment by chickenWing in "Airlines will make $118B in extra fees"

chickenWing — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 20:41:13 +0000

If you actually read the article you'd know that unbundling is not not what it's about. It's about the dark patterns that trick or coerce people into purchasing "extras" that they don't want, or didn't know they had to pay extra for.

New comment by chickenWing in "Organic Maps"

chickenWing — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 13:30:38 +0000

Seeing all the praise in this thread, I downloaded the app, and I must admit I'm disappointed and confused at the effusion, but maybe I'm doing something wrong.

I tried a very basic task of getting driving directions to a specific address and that doesn't seem to be supported. For some streets, it will give me directions to the street as a whole, but that's not useful for long streets. Other streets don't seem to exist in the map.

Then I typed in a simple query: "ice cream", and the closest result listed was 4 miles away, but there are several ice cream shops within less than a mile. Other business listings are out of date or inaccurate.

New comment by chickenWing in "Why even let users set their own passwords?"

chickenWing — Sun, 23 Jul 2023 13:24:37 +0000

Sadly you still have many sites that have stupid password rules like requiring numbers and "special characters" -- but no spaces, and no, periods don't count as special characters, and blah blah blah. Point being, the ideal of a simple phrase that's easy to remember gets thrown out the window when you have to deal with all the different rules.

New comment by chickenWing in "Map Data: False Assumptions"

chickenWing — Tue, 21 Jun 2022 12:54:44 +0000

Not only that, but don't rely on third-party services to do your validation for you, and yes, that includes the US Post Office, if you're looking for a physical address. There are many physical addresses in the United States that the Post Office doesn't deliver mail to, and yet people live there. I know because I live in one of those places. UPS and Fed-Ex have no problem finding the address, but for regular mail I have to use a PO Box. It is frustrating when I don't know which method an online store will use. It is also frustrating when a site repeatedly tells me my address doesn't exist.

New comment by chickenWing in "Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?"

chickenWing — Thu, 12 May 2022 13:44:19 +0000

Don't build software for salons; start your own salon that uses software you create, and make that your competitive advantage. Don't know how to cut hair? Then you probably don't know what software would help in that business anyway. Find a business you can do yourself, and help yourself using your technical skills.

This is also why this (very good) advice is not so easy to follow in real life. You need multiple skillsets.

New comment by chickenWing in "Dennis Ritchie Home Page (2006)"

chickenWing — Sun, 30 Jan 2022 12:49:12 +0000

The art of marble or bronze sculpting is still around, although much rarer than it used to be. It's a trade like any other, requiring years of study to achieve a high level of competence (notwithstanding the trend of throwing a bunch of random metal pieces together and calling it art - true art requires creativity and skill; one or the other does not suffice).

Many university art programs have a sculpture department. Student and faculty artists will make works on commission, although it's hard to find good figurative art among the sea of abstract political B.S. If you're really serious, Italy is the place for the best artisans, as it has been since the Renaissance[1].

There are still some old-school sculptors around [2] in America who take the craft seriously.

[1] http://www.spartacopalla-scultore.it/english.html [2] https://corneliussullivan.com/

New comment by chickenWing in "Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?"

chickenWing — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 16:41:06 +0000

> Was OP perhaps looking for languages that feel more "fresh" and are more hyped, while still having vibrant communities around them?

For me, it's more about the day-to-day experience, hence the reference to React Native. I'm dismayed by its popularity, because it feels like such a step backwards - the ugly language (Typescript is slightly better than JS but still not great), the massive amounts of external dependencies required for even simple projects, the bugs, the lack of a decent debugger, and so on. All those things take away from the day-to-day enjoyment of programming.

New comment by chickenWing in "Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?"

chickenWing — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 14:43:48 +0000

Thanks. My first few jobs out of college were programming in pure C, doing embedded software. I do have good memories of that time, although I'm not sure I would have the patience for ten-minute compile times these days. (Obviously not all C projects have that, but the ones I worked on did.)

New comment by chickenWing in "Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?"

chickenWing — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 14:42:35 +0000

Yes indeed. To clarify, what I'm looking for is people's subjective opinions, and if possible, some reasoning behind them. I can see this being helpful to many people, especially if we know what you're priorities are and whether they overlap with our own. Thanks for your answer.

Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?

chickenWing — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 14:17:41 +0000

After unintentionally ending up on several React Native projects, I hunger for the days when I used to enjoy coding. The developer experience of React Native is tedious, frustrating, and unrewarding. But as I ponder a job change, I wonder: What is better in this day and age?

I remember when Ruby on Rails hit it big, one of its mantras was that it made coding fun. As Rails has waned in popularity, has any other tech stack taken that crown?

What do you all think?

EDIT: Obviously this is highly subjective so if you can provide your motivations for why you feel how you do, that would help us all. Thanks!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29625165

Points: 100

# Comments: 181

New comment by chickenWing in "The battle of the computing clouds is intensifying"

chickenWing — Tue, 14 Dec 2021 15:23:11 +0000

Get a job for Cisco or Juniper. You'll be moving and wiring up a lot of physical routers.

Dependency Mixins in Swift Using Protocol-Oriented-Programming

chickenWing — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 11:24:00 +0000

Article URL: https://chickenwing.software/scratches/programming/swift-programming/swift-dependency-mixin

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16706098

Points: 1

# Comments: 0