Hacker News: pharaohgeek

New comment by pharaohgeek in "New pancreatic cancer drug might open the door to much longer survival times"

pharaohgeek — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 20:54:35 +0000

There was a KRAS conference a couple of weeks ago, and as I understand it that's exactly what happened. It is such a game changer that they could not contain their excitement. For all the ridiculous talk of "they're being paid by 'Big Pharma' to prolong treatment to make them money", I assure you that oncologists DEEPLY want to become "obsolete". They want a cure. They want patients to live. Drugs like this and many others on the horizon are another step in that process.

New comment by pharaohgeek in "New pancreatic cancer drug might open the door to much longer survival times"

pharaohgeek — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 20:52:39 +0000

I was fortunate to participate in the trial for this drug for over a year. It is nothing short of a miracle drug (although there is still more that can be done). I was forced to withdraw after the drug lost its effectiveness and my disease progressed. That said, though, for over a year all of my tumors either disappeared, shrank, or remained stable. For a disease that was largely considered a near-immediate death sentence, this drug is an absolute game change. I am eternally grateful for the scientists and researchers at RevMed.

New comment by pharaohgeek in "New pancreatic cancer drug might open the door to much longer survival times"

pharaohgeek — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 20:50:53 +0000

The Johns Hopkins Children's' Center is looking at trialing it for rhabdomyosarcoma, a particularly deadly form of cancer that primary targets children. If successful, this would represent a HUGE leap forward in its treatment.

New comment by pharaohgeek in "Expanding Swift's IDE Support"

pharaohgeek — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 13:03:23 +0000

As I understand it, though, it's really not well suited to server-side Swift development. Doesn't leverage SPM, requires Xcode, etc. I'd LOVE a revival of AppCode (or Swift support in CLion) that would facilitate server-side Swift development.

New comment by pharaohgeek in "More Americans Are Breaking into the Upper Middle Class"

pharaohgeek — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 13:28:19 +0000

It doesn't feel like it if you're living in MOST places. I bought my first house 6 months after graduating from college (2000). It cost me roughly 3x my salary at the time. I know what I pay new grads right now, and it's way more than I made back then. There's no way they can afford a house like that at 3x their salary. It's closer to 4-5x, and we are nowhere near as expensive in this area as NYC, SF, DC, etc.

New comment by pharaohgeek in "A new Oracle Solaris Common Build Environment (CBE) release"

pharaohgeek — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 13:37:41 +0000

Started using Solaris 7 in college when Sun made it available for free. All you had to do was fill out a web form! I absolutely loved it. To this day it remains my favorite OS to use. I love macOS and its ease of use (plus its Unix-ish support) but there's something about Solaris that always made me feel like I was doing "real" work.

New comment by pharaohgeek in "Stop Using Face ID"

pharaohgeek — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 23:26:39 +0000

Thankfully, you can disable that feature

New comment by pharaohgeek in "Improving the usability of C libraries in Swift"

pharaohgeek — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 14:21:02 +0000

I do miss JetBrains' AppCode and their support for Swift in CLion. I wish they would open-source those plugins so that they can continue to be used in modern versions of CLion.

New comment by pharaohgeek in "Improving the usability of C libraries in Swift"

pharaohgeek — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 14:20:05 +0000

I absolutely love Swift. I find it to be such an elegant language. I've done a few macOS/iOS apps with it over the years, but have really come to love it on the server. There are a couple of areas I feel could use some improvement with respect to cross-platform support, but overall the use of frameworks like Vapor have been a breeze to work with.

More support for language interoperability like this will just enhance the cross-platform experience. The Java ecosystem is what makes it so attractive to enterprises. Swift being able to easily take advantage of open-source C/C++ libraries will help with the migration.

New comment by pharaohgeek in "illumos"

pharaohgeek — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 14:13:52 +0000

I began using Solaris in college when Sun made Solaris 7 free for anyone who wanted it. I still remember getting the huge package of CDs in the mail and installing them on my Pentium II desktop at home. It quickly became my favorite OS. When I used it, I felt like I was doing "real" work. I can't explain it. It wasn't a consumer OS like Windows, and it was more stable and polished than Linux was at the time. I miss those days.

New comment by pharaohgeek in "The Anatomy of a macOS App"

pharaohgeek — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 17:33:17 +0000

I love macOS, but definitely do miss the days of a more utilitarian look. The old Unix GUIs like CDE hold a special place in my heart.

New comment by pharaohgeek in "Cancer is surging, bringing a debate about whether to look for it"

pharaohgeek — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 17:31:28 +0000

As part of my post-cancer screening, I have received a full-body MRI every year since 2017. In 2024, it discovered pancreatic cancer. Grateful for those years where it found nothing, but even MORE grateful when it did catch something!

New comment by pharaohgeek in "The x86 Interrupt List, aka “Ralf Brown's Interrupt List” (2018)"

pharaohgeek — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 13:56:58 +0000

I remember the first time I found this list and playing around with it using Microsoft QuickBASIC. I couldn't believe how much more functionality it opened up to me. Mouse support. Graphics support. Fun memories!

New comment by pharaohgeek in "Xcode Is the Worst Piece of Professional Software I Have Ever Used"

pharaohgeek — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 14:04:13 +0000

App code was a really great IDE, Especially if you were developing server-side Swift. I wish JetBrains would've open sourced the plugins so it could carry on

New comment by pharaohgeek in "Most RESTful APIs aren't really RESTful"

pharaohgeek — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 12:40:57 +0000

ElasticSearch and OpenSearch are certainly egregiously guilty of this. Their API is an absolute nightmare to work with if you don't have a supported native client. Why such a popular project doesn't have an easy-to-use OpenAPI spec document in this day and age is beyond me.

New comment by pharaohgeek in "Redesigned Swift.org is now live"

pharaohgeek — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 13:04:43 +0000

I'm using it on my most recent projects and have had a great experience. It doesn't have the ecosystem of a language like Java, which can be frustrating, but it certainly handles 90% of my needs out of the box. I've never had a performance issue with Vapor. Compile times can be a bit slow if you have a lot of dependencies, but runtime performance has been great.

New comment by pharaohgeek in "Swift at Apple: Migrating the Password Monitoring Service from Java"

pharaohgeek — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 20:17:55 +0000

Sadly, Jetbrains no longer sells AppCode or supports their Swift plugins for CLion. I WISH they would open source the plugins, as CLion is far superior to Xcode. For now, though, we're really stuck with either Xcode (Mac) or VSCode (wherever). That said, I am really starting to love server-side Swift using Vapor. Swift, as a language, is great to develop in.

New comment by pharaohgeek in "XTool – Cross-platform Xcode replacement"

pharaohgeek — Mon, 19 May 2025 12:20:01 +0000

Unfortunately, even that isn't supported any longer. I do a lot of server-side Swift development and would LOVE to be able to ditch Xcode for CLion and the Swift plugin.

New comment by pharaohgeek in "Cheap blood test detects pancreatic cancer before it spreads"

pharaohgeek — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 16:42:33 +0000

Aspiring pancreatic cancer survivor here. This is excellent news. Part of the reason this is such a deadly form of cancer is that there are often no symptoms until it's far too late. I know that there is a blood marker - CA19 - can indicate issues with the pancreas. I don't know if this blood test is related to that or anything, but any advancements on this disease are great and sorely needed.

New comment by pharaohgeek in "MaXX Interactive Desktop -- the little brother of the great SGI Desktop on IRIX"

pharaohgeek — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 13:38:32 +0000

I've often said I would LOVE a modernized version of CDE. Smooth out some of the edges, GREATLY improve the font rendering, etc. but keep the feel that this is a system designed for work. I love the polish of macOS, but there's something about the feel of old-school Solaris 8 that I really miss. It felt like it wasn't a toy. It was meant for something more important than that.