Hacker News: deweywsu

New comment by deweywsu in "The quiet resurgence of RF engineering"

deweywsu — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 05:17:17 +0000

Thank you for the recommendation!

New comment by deweywsu in "The quiet resurgence of RF engineering"

deweywsu — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 19:33:50 +0000

I always wanted to get into RF design, but couldn't find it within the mega company I work for (we integrate more than we design at the component level). RF design has always been a bit of black magic, even as an EE. Other than some really great books from ARRL in the amateur radio arena, I haven't found too many good "as it really works in the working world" references. Can anyone point at any good books and/or sites that go into detail about this fascinating field?

New comment by deweywsu in "Running a Minecraft Server and more on a 1960s UNIVAC Computer"

deweywsu — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 18:52:30 +0000

WOW! I started off thinking "this could be a boring meandering through registers and op codes" but by the time I got half way through your write-up, I was bouncing off the walls excited. Thanks for sharing your awesome write-up and glad you had such a cool project!

New comment by deweywsu in "I wanted to build vertical SaaS for pest control, so I took a technician job"

deweywsu — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 01:27:46 +0000

How did you get such a good sense for business alongside implementing solutions with programming? Did you have experience doing this before?

New comment by deweywsu in "I wanted to build vertical SaaS for pest control, so I took a technician job"

deweywsu — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 23:46:14 +0000

Would you recommend buying a business over starting one from scratch when possible?

New comment by deweywsu in "I wanted to build vertical SaaS for pest control, so I took a technician job"

deweywsu — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 23:43:47 +0000

That said, this guy is a superstar. This kind of application of skill to a totally different business paradigm to improve it is what I'd love to spend my time doing. Knowing my personality, once I improved the business, I'd get bored running it and move on to finding something else to improve.

New comment by deweywsu in "I wanted to build vertical SaaS for pest control, so I took a technician job"

deweywsu — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 23:30:04 +0000

This might be a bit of a gold rush of sorts at first, in that the first people to transition from tech to running a small business, whether tech-enabled or not, will find a bigger piece of the pie waiting for their taking. But as the stream of many others increases over the years, the pie's slices will get smaller as competition for the same market segments increases. Not trying to paint doom and gloom, just that I'd imagine, as the author says, this kind of white to blue collar shift will accelerate, and as it does, competition will rise, lowering the chance for overall profits.

New comment by deweywsu in "WeatherStar 4000+: Weather Channel Simulator"

deweywsu — Fri, 30 May 2025 00:11:40 +0000

I got curious as to what ever happened to Jeanetta Jones. Found this (tear):

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/231278045/jeanetta-danie...

New comment by deweywsu in "The earliest versions of the first C compiler known to exist"

deweywsu — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 16:07:52 +0000

Am I interpreting this repo correctly? The first C compiler was written in...C?

New comment by deweywsu in "It is as if you were on your phone"

deweywsu — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 20:04:48 +0000

I think it's sad that we've created a society that feels social pressure to stare at a screen when they find themselves somewhere without something to say to someone else. This explains why social skills are on the decline.

New comment by deweywsu in "Bill prohibiting police from lying to children passes Virginia Senate"

deweywsu — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 18:47:44 +0000

How about expanding the law such that the police can't lie to ANYONE?

New comment by deweywsu in "I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps"

deweywsu — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 17:54:13 +0000

I second this. I'm guessing you're limiting access at a lower price point because you're worried too many business customers will opt for the lower cost plan when they should be on the higher priced one? I would pay somewhere in the neighborhood of $10/mo or so for a personal plan that had more than your free tier and less than the business one.

New comment by deweywsu in "I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps"

deweywsu — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 02:17:24 +0000

Glide appears pretty cool, except that the next level up plan over the free one is $69 per month, more than a little steep for most personal users. I myself am wondering if there are any good projects out there that do similar things but that use either local databases or even browser storage?

New comment by deweywsu in "Panic at the Job Market"

deweywsu — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 17:06:32 +0000

What a brilliant breakdown of so many concepts. Great read! The author has distilled a lot of experience into an insightful article with years of "read between the lines" wisdom gained.

New comment by deweywsu in "Don't use 7-segment displays (2011) [pdf]"

deweywsu — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 19:34:11 +0000

Is this a hit piece by a high-definition display manufacturer? It seems like an unnecessary litany of detractors against one technology without a lot of alternative solutions or trade-offs with others. At the end, there are only 3 sentences that could be called alternatives with the heading "use high resolution displays". Making a "helpful" paper that only lists problems without comparisons or solutions misses all the reasons one would use a 7-segment display (mentioned in the comments here so I won't repeat). There's nothing wrong with this technology. The title "don't use" is too inclusive and is not supported by the paper. I think "Consider not using in certain applications" would have been more appropriate based on the paper's body.

New comment by deweywsu in "Show HN: I created an After Effects alternative"

deweywsu — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 17:33:28 +0000

Wonderful. You just "created" this?! This seems like it took many years and lots of hours. Great work!

New comment by deweywsu in "Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger"

deweywsu — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 17:19:12 +0000

I think this is at the core of the rot of American society. The thinking that a CEO "owes" the marketing of their company so as to cash it in or even turn profits is, in my opinion, is a mark of the biggest moral ineptitude of the western world's thinking. Yes, I realize this is the 'norm', but it clashes with deep values of the people who aren't shareholders, but are no doubt vested in the product the company produces, mainly the customers. It ignores their needs completely because they don't own stock. "We sold the company, and the new owners bastardized it by slapping their logo on it by eliminating the free tier" is almost commonplace now in business dogma, and yes, most people think it is the kind of strategy 'owed' to shareholders, but this one-sided thinking ignores the better interest of users who the company has built their business on the backs of, and who will now be bait-and-switched into a subscription model, never mind the needs that drove them to the product in the first place. Yes, this is how capitalism works. What I'm saying is that capitalism, as a model, is flawed from a moralistically balanced point of view. It's a never-ending race to the bottom by optimizing for greed until every drop of monetization is squeezed out and every person is left without. Should the owner's employees make money, I mean after all they do the work? Yes, but who takes into account the inestimable value added by the initial users who's interaction with the product shaped it into what it is today?

New comment by deweywsu in "The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy"

deweywsu — Fri, 27 Oct 2023 17:01:37 +0000

This article shoots itself in the foot right at the start. It reveals that the author is in fact just as wrapped up in Twitter as those he critiques. It shows a graph with a person on the left who has "nothing to say" being a mongrel, as if it's bad not to want to insert or even have a personal opinion about everything. There is completely nothing wrong with not getting wrapped up in the BS that is modern western society at large. In fact, it's quite healthy NOT to have an opinion about any of it because you're off doing much better, much healthier things.

New comment by deweywsu in "The Cloud Computer"

deweywsu — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 14:12:06 +0000

For someone who's not familiar with what you get from AWS, this appears to be similar, on the surface anyway. Can someone explain how it's different?

New comment by deweywsu in "Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?"

deweywsu — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 07:13:03 +0000

Nothing compared then or since to VB 6's ease of layout and GUI-centered approach. It was a language that was easy to use and WAY less complicated than C#. To me, complicated is a huge drawback. Give me just enough tools to make something that works. VB6 was absolutely fantastic for prototyping. I have absolutely no need for 200 methods for every expression that I have to go lookup every time (this is why IntelliSense even exists), having to think about bullshit like "syntactic sugar", aka "the only way to do something because it's otherwise too hard to remember", which to be fair started with javascript frameworks, but applies equally well to .NET.

The whole dot paradigm took a group of people who were very comfortable with a language and tried to turn their brains inside out. Ex: x.ToString doesn't have the same intuitive recognition as Str(x), nor can Str(x) be as easily muddled together with 3 other methods. Call it simple and meaningless, but .NET is profuse with these turnarounds, and they required people to re-learn everything, even the simple stuff. .NET adds layers of complexity by enabling super-spiffy compact writing of multiple operations with complex operators all on the same line that is far too easy to get lost in and that frankly, is unnecessary. I'm talking about things like delegates, lambda expressions, extension methods, and async/await. These are cute if you're super nerdy, but for most of the rest of the world they take something that was easy to use and contort it into an unrecognizable mess.

VB6 was just complex enough and graphics-centered and they moved it to a hugely overly complex and language-centered model. It made no sense to me. Of course, everyone who thought "real" programming should be harder embraced C# like it was manna from God, and this by and large is the thinking that killed VB6. It was a complete paradigm shift in the wrong direction for visual thinkers.