Hacker News: pngwen

New comment by pngwen in "Your phone is about to stop being yours"

pngwen — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 04:05:38 +0000

Actually I have been tinkering with PWA as a way to remake some of my toy apps. Though a lot of the automations I made for Android can be replicated through Apple’s Shortcuts app.

The biggest loss for me was Termux. I had lots of scripts and such that I ran, plus just having a Linux environment in my pocket was nice. Luckily I found ish which gives me alpine Linux on top of a virtual x86 machine as provided by a JITC layer. I can host PWA apps out of that environment for local use. Of course I can also ssh to my unix like machines from there too.

I am starting to tinker with swift a bit more too. As with google, I could buy a dev key to deploy my own apps only this way I have all the window dressing and end to end encryption on cloud storage.

New comment by pngwen in "Your phone is about to stop being yours"

pngwen — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 16:40:35 +0000

This change has served me well! I have been a Mac OS X users for years who used an android phone. As soon as google announced their impending walled garden status, I went out and bought into the ios eco system. I have really been enjoying my iphone, ipad, and apple watch.

You see, the only value that Android really offered me was the ability to run my own code on my own device. Since they are taking that away that just makes it a crappier shadow of the vastly superior apple experience. And, as it turns out, ios is less restrictive than it was 18 years ago when I left them for Android!

New comment by pngwen in "Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price"

pngwen — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 12:16:53 +0000

Wouldn’t a “no-tech tractor “ be a mule? They are selling tractors based on internal combustion technology.

New comment by pngwen in "Changes to GitHub Copilot individual plans"

pngwen — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 12:06:28 +0000

I wonder what this will mean for all of my students. I have been weaving copilot into my software engineering and code centric courses, but that depends on copilot pro as provided by the GitHub education package. If those signups are paused too, that means I can’t bring in any new ones, at least not to this stack. For me, I’ll probably have to send them to Claude code where they will have to pay for access. (Though it is a better product IMHO.)

This points toward a deeper issue though. We’ll probably see more individual offerings dry up over time. That means you’ll have individuals stuck with hand coding while the hyper productive AI assisted coders will all be at large organizations. If that happens, we’ll enter a phase where computing will once more be available exclusively to the elite few.

New comment by pngwen in "Ask HN: Is using AI tooling for a PhD literature review dishonest?"

pngwen — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 01:44:10 +0000

I'm a professor of computer science, and I use AI to conduct literature reviews all the time. It's actually one of the handful of things that AI really excels at. So really, I think I would be more inclined to teach students how to do use AI effectively rather than discourage it. I know I would have loved to have it when I was working on my PhD, and I haven't authored a paper in the past 2 years that did not include help from LLMs.

I tend to use Notebook LM to gather and analyze papers, then I synthesize some notes, outline the ideas and prompt it to give citations to the outline. Then I take that and write my literature review narrative, which I then hand over to claud for proofreading.

End to end, the process is much faster than back when I did it manually. Just like typesetting a paper in latex is faster than the hot metal process of 50 years ago. The bottom line for me is this: You should always use every tool at your disposal when doing real work, and research is real work.