Hacker News: dajt

New comment by dajt in "Python Polars Cheatsheet (based on our O'Reilly book)"

dajt — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 04:10:05 +0000

I use rpy2 for that. The scientists wrote the calc engine in R (via my Python transscription of the Excel original :) and I wrote the dashboard and data pipeline in Python. The data pipeline batch process embeds the R interpreter to avoid spawning processes all the time.

New comment by dajt in "Man and the Computer by John G. Kemeny (1972 book by the co-creator of BASIC)"

dajt — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 01:09:58 +0000

Everyone in Silly Valley needs to read chapter 5 ASAP.

New comment by dajt in "Show HN: I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s"

dajt — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 23:40:20 +0000

We had a guy give a talk at our local nerd meet-up about doing this to an old landrover with the hopes of commercialising it. Did a good job, but it was only for someone with money to burn.

Looks like he did commercialise it: https://www.jauntmotors.com/series

I recognise some of the photos from back then.

New comment by dajt in "GenCAD"

dajt — Mon, 18 May 2026 08:25:45 +0000

I'm stumped by things like this. The drawing & modelling are not the difficult bit - the CAM programming is.

That seems difficult enough that I have not found an open source program to load a 3D model and allow me to set the toolpaths in a UI, never mind have an LLM generate them from the model.

New comment by dajt in "Halt and Catch Fire"

dajt — Sun, 17 May 2026 00:08:18 +0000

I'm from back then, love programming, and I can't type. Just can't be bothered learning how; it's not the bottleneck.

New comment by dajt in "Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce"

dajt — Fri, 08 May 2026 09:58:45 +0000

I have AuDHD - there is no way I'm running my own company. I'm a good developer but I need someone else to have the idea and run the business and I can lead a small team to bring it about.

Given I'm now in my mid-50s, things are looking grim. And I'm not getting paid SV silly money. I'm not even getting paid US dollers.

New comment by dajt in "Mine, an IDE for Coalton and Common Lisp"

dajt — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 09:54:27 +0000

I think the number of non-programmers who think 'I want to learn to program; I'll start with common lisp but emacs is too difficult!' is so small it is not a group worth considering. It's probably MIT & Stanford undergrads?

It's their IDE and they can design it how they want, but that's a weird goal for a CL IDE.

New comment by dajt in "Mine, an IDE for Coalton and Common Lisp"

dajt — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 02:41:06 +0000

Why would a non-programmer want to download, install and run a CL IDE?

New comment by dajt in "Oracle slashes 30k jobs"

dajt — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 01:13:42 +0000

We would not be sad if they were lawyers. But I'm sure they were not lawyers. Lawyers are how Oracle generates revenue.

Developers & QA are cost centres and liabilties.

New comment by dajt in "Astral to Join OpenAI"

dajt — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:02:25 +0000

I've been using DBeaver CE since I lost my DataGrip license.

New comment by dajt in "“Microslop” filtered in the official Microsoft Copilot Discord server"

dajt — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 07:51:40 +0000

This is still happening. The org I work at was all-in on Google stuff, then just before I joined 5 years ago, some senior exec joined. Must have been in tight with Microsoft because suddenly the org was all in on Microsoft. The exec left, job well done, and the org suffered for years during the changeover; we still suffer because all the Microsoft stuff is total garbage these days.

I yearn for the Microsoft software of the 90s and 00s, pre-cloud, pre-webslop, pre-AI.

New comment by dajt in "Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion"

dajt — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 02:49:21 +0000

I know how you feel. I'm 54 and resisted this stuff until about a month ago when I decided if I want any hope of staying employed as a coder I'll need to get on board.

Using codex has allowed me to add bring up my current project so much more quickly, and I'm enjoying saying what I want, asking for suggestions on how things could be improved, and having what is essentially a junior dev who knows way more about web tech than I ever want to, to put it all together. Every few days I go through the codebase and templates to look for redundancies, opportities for cleanup, check on db queries, etc.

Early days for me but it seems like a great way to build a system.

Of course the problem is you need to be a senior dev to keep things in check and know what you want and mostly how you want it done, and look for problems.

I've written enough code over the last 40 years that I don't feel the need to type every character.

New comment by dajt in "MacBook Neo"

dajt — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 08:27:13 +0000

I'm (unfortunately) running Tahoe on my M1 macbook pro and don't notice it to be slower than Sequoia. Where is your slowdown?

I'm dislike Tahoe as much as anyone else but performance isn't the problem for me.

New comment by dajt in "MacBook Neo"

dajt — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 08:24:46 +0000

I use UTM, it's simple and seems light. I can share my source directory with the VM so I can edit using macos pycharm, and test the containers in the VM.

What really caught me out was I downloaded an x64 image once (there was no arm64 image) and it somehow just ran anyway in the arm64 VM. That may have been some qemu magic?

I love the macos/virtualised linux dev workflow, but is isn't better than plain linux. I'm just still not convinced GUI stuff works on linux as well as it does on macos and macbook hardware is so nice (if you're not paying for it).

New comment by dajt in "“Microslop” filtered in the official Microsoft Copilot Discord server"

dajt — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 21:42:31 +0000

That's been obvious for years. It feels like they're extracting whatever remaining money they can get from the home PC market while it lasts but won't much miss it when it's gone.

I'm surprised they haven't given up on xbox and games but perhaps there's enough money there to keep it going.

New comment by dajt in "“Microslop” filtered in the official Microsoft Copilot Discord server"

dajt — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 21:35:02 +0000

I've been a full time developer since 1988, using linux since 1996, and kubuntu is the only linux distro I'd use ATM for a desktop.

There's paper cuts but it feels about right.

I tried kionite but there was too much friction.

New comment by dajt in "Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown"

dajt — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 02:14:54 +0000

"A new welcome experience" for a text editor? What have we become?

New comment by dajt in "Jimi Hendrix was a systems engineer"

dajt — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 21:11:35 +0000

We should not call ourselves engineers - it's a massive insult to actual professional engineers.

New comment by dajt in "Paged Out Issue #8 [pdf]"

dajt — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:26:58 +0000

The vibe is flawless.

New comment by dajt in "Let's compile Quake like it's 1997"

dajt — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 07:13:20 +0000

I never used the Turbo stuff, but I know they were very good for the time by reading about people using them in Dr. Dobbs.

I started with C on the Amiga and then went to UNIX and only later starting doing Windows coding on Windows 3.1.