Hacker News: creichenbach

New comment by creichenbach in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

creichenbach — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 20:35:12 +0000

https://billhillapps.com/ Mostly from the time I was actively building and maintaining mobile apps. It's slightly outdated, but I'm still proud of the metro-style design.

New comment by creichenbach in "Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn"

creichenbach — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 13:50:14 +0000

> it added additional delays to the entire system

Yes, obviously. And that hurts statistics. That's like killing sick cattle to be able to say that 100% of yours are healthy.

New comment by creichenbach in "Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn"

creichenbach — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 13:28:35 +0000

As per my other comment, Swiss trains (especially SBB) are not as pleasant as they get credit for. I get a lot that "you know, in other countries it's much worse", and it reminds me of software hosting, where it was normal in the past to be offline occasionally. Then Google et al. came and showed that much more reliability is possible with good engineering. I think there would be a lot of room for improvement.

New comment by creichenbach in "Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn"

creichenbach — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 13:19:57 +0000

I'm a heavy public transport user in Switzerland, and even though it's almost a meme how reliable the trains are, reality is different. Yes, they operate in a way that make the stats look good (x% on time), but they take tradeoff to get there. E.g. they won't await connections if another train is a few minutes late. So you might have to wait for 30 minutes for the next one, or even longer if you're unlucky. And there's the occasional big incident, where you get stuck for several hours. I missed flights that way, even though planning in 3 hours of buffer. There is zero compensation in such cases as long as they bring you to your destination on the same day. Plus, several trains are regularly way too crowded.

New comment by creichenbach in "Android developer verification: Early access starts"

creichenbach — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 06:59:01 +0000

Banks have stupid rules probably made by people who don't understand the matter. A relative recently got victim to phishing and gave away some of his banking details (fake e-banking login screen on a website). After locking the account, the bank said it would only unlock it after the phone got wiped, which obviously doesn't add anything in this situation.

Another pet peeve is that they prevent screenshots simply because they can, and it feels safer. I know, 3rd-party apps which can do screenshots etc., but this is fighting the threat the wrong way. And yes, it's partially the fault of the platform, which could just allow user-initiated screenshots. Or at least make it configurable.

New comment by creichenbach in "Valdi – A cross-platform UI framework that delivers native performance"

creichenbach — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 08:44:07 +0000

I've done it before on a personal project and I was pretty obsessed with user experience. For example, I changed the way buttons work (because they were natively links with Cordova, which trigger upon tap, not "finger lift", like native buttons). Also, implemented some gestures to e.g. switch between pages (tab-style navigation). While not really in line with system UI (wasn't my goal), I think usability is quite decent.

In case you're interested, the app is named "QuickÖV" - not relevant to anyone outside Switzerland, but just for trying it out: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.billhillap...

New comment by creichenbach in "Avoid 2:00 and 3:00 am cron jobs (2013)"

creichenbach — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 20:02:37 +0000

That's still a bit risky as Arizona might just change its time zone definition on a whim. I'm an engineer on one of the big calendaring applications, and it's mind-boggling how often stuff like this happens world-wide, sometimes short-notice (a few weeks in advance). It regularly gives us headaches.

New comment by creichenbach in "Show HN: Wat – Deep inspection of Python objects"

creichenbach — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 23:42:46 +0000

Neat. I built something similar but web-based for Java years ago: https://scg.unibe.ch/wiki/projects/DoodleDebug

New comment by creichenbach in "Flutter Web: A Fractal of Bad Design (2020)"

creichenbach — Tue, 09 May 2023 18:11:16 +0000

Well, among other things. Native APIs are another thing that comes to mind, but those can be bridged more easily I suppose.

New comment by creichenbach in "Flutter Web: A Fractal of Bad Design (2020)"

creichenbach — Fri, 05 May 2023 20:10:32 +0000

Well, to have a perfect-ish solution, you'd have to build a framework with UI elements that map to native elements on each platform. Behavior and styling (e.g. positioning of elements) would need to be consistent, so you'd probably have to reduce functionality to the least common denominator for each possible dimension, or take the burden of implementing compatibility for A on platforms B and C. Web has a legacy of document-based components, while mobile is generally more interactive. There are overlaps nowadays, but staying within those boundaries would be a serious restriction.

On top of all that, you'd need a runtime that works on all platforms and is able to interact with native controls. I think React Native does something like that, but back then when I checked they did not have official web platform support (which is somewhat ironic, but I suspect technical difficulties too).

New comment by creichenbach in "Flutter Web: A Fractal of Bad Design (2020)"

creichenbach — Fri, 05 May 2023 14:45:47 +0000

A few years back I looked around what options exist for building a cross-plattform app. It should support mobile platforms (at least Android and iOS) as well as the web, properly.

The problem with cross-platform frameworks is that they either focus on a good mobile experience, and web becomes an afterthought, or vice versa, meaning mobile basically embeds a browser. Flutter is one of former; back then the web variant was in alpha and basically just a canvas that couldn't even adjust aspect ratio. Since web had priority for our project (accessability, reactive scaling, etc.), this was a no-go.

We ended up going with Ionic (which is basically Cordova with some components on top). The web experience is tweakable to a low level, and the mobile experience is acceptably good, even if not perfect. And we get to cover 3 platforms with the effort of building for ~1.2 apps (there is some platform-specific work involved still).

I'm not even sure if cross-platform is at all solvable in a perfect way, since the UI patterns between mobile and web are just too different.

Google Workspace adds client-side encryption to Gmail and Calendar

creichenbach — Wed, 01 Mar 2023 08:43:10 +0000

Article URL: https://workspace.google.com/blog/product-announcements/gmail-and-calendar-client-side-encryption

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34980128

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Show HN: Visualization of Catmull-ROM Spline Generation

creichenbach — Sun, 26 Feb 2023 21:26:29 +0000

Article URL: https://billhillapps.com/billhill/catmull-rom.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34949643

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

Client-side encryption for Google Calendar

creichenbach — Wed, 15 Feb 2023 08:40:52 +0000

Article URL: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2023/02/client-side-encryption-google-calendar.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34801452

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Asteroid captured on doorbell camera [video]

creichenbach — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 10:11:57 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tam9YKDAddY

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34322674

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by creichenbach in "Bra size calculator"

creichenbach — Wed, 28 Dec 2022 20:45:40 +0000

Years ago I built the same kind of app for Windows Phone 8. I can't find any reference online anymore, though I still have the git repo.

It was motivated by my girlfriend stating that it's hard to understand one's size in the various systems that are in parallel use, at least in parts of Europe. Worst part is that some systems have weird overlaps where not only they use the same "alphabet", but also the homonymous sizes partially cover the same range, but don't match exactly. Therefore it's impossible to exactly convert between sizes, and they should be derived from raw measurements.

New comment by creichenbach in "Widespread exploitation of critical remote code execution in Apache Log4j"

creichenbach — Sat, 11 Dec 2021 16:44:26 +0000

Meta: This website has one of the worst and most ridiculous cookie opt-out mechanisms. You are expected to read through a wall of text and follow complex instructions to manually opt-out of each vendor.

New comment by creichenbach in "Ask HN: What is your blog and why should I read it?"

creichenbach — Tue, 07 Apr 2020 10:13:54 +0000

Sometimes I have a song stuck in my head when I wake up in the morning, so I started tracking it. There's no text, just a music video occasionally. Not sure if it's interesting to anyone else though. https://morningtunes.music.blog/

Show HN: Sortable table with Covid-19 spread statistics

creichenbach — Thu, 19 Mar 2020 21:08:19 +0000

Article URL: https://cedricreichenbach.github.io/covid-19-stats/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22631759

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by creichenbach in "Civic honesty around the globe"

creichenbach — Fri, 21 Jun 2019 10:05:42 +0000

I think the numbers in reality are a bit worse. I recently lost my wallet, noticed about a minute later and went back - it was already gone. Later someone found it in a trash can, emptied of all money. This happened in Switzerland, which is at the top of this list, and I've heard similar stories before.