If I’m going to pay for News, I want to never see another advertisement so long as I live.
Readit Newsdfansteel commented on Most Americans don’t pay for news and don’t think they need to niemanlab.org/2026/02/mos... · Posted by u/jaredwiener
dfansteel commented on Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment? · Posted by u/jack_riminton
I once used the Xcode feature to play a sound when a breakpoint was hit. My EM had a conversation with me.
dfansteel commented on Neither Elon Musk nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars defector.com/neither-elon... · Posted by u/quesera
I don’t get it. He uses Everest and the South Pole as proof that Mars can’t support human life.
But there’s a base at the South Pole and people climb Everest
I think these are substantial engineering issues, but I think he must be kidding. They are obviously solvable.
I read, for example, that you can put a nuclear powered electromagnet in one of the Lagrange points that will protect Mars from solar wind.
It’s that there’s no life native to those environments. The authors is making the point that lay people, us, lack a frame of reference for how inhospitable Mars is.
Star Wars: The Customizable Card Game.
Of the 90’s era deck building games it had the most advanced mechanics. The unique, beautiful, brilliance of the game was an element of randomness built into the game be the cards themselves.
Your deck was a stack that you would often draw the top from to determine random elements. Then place the card on the bottom (there’s more to this rule, but good enough for now).
Experienced players could learn to count cards in the end game, creating either fast, dynamic play or hard fought chess battles, jockeying for positions slowly undermining your opponent.
Tournament games had a time limit, but I’ve played regulation decks for 3 hours.
Lucasfilm eventually pulled the license for lesser games, but for a while it was amazing.
dfansteel commented on Ask HN: Is it worth switching from web development to native iOS dev? · Posted by u/supernov_a
Curious how you have handled some of these challenges:
1. What do you do to avoid massive view controllers? I have found that a lot of iOS apps I have worked on end up having the view controller be responsible for doing everything from fetching data from an API to setting the corner radius on some component. This leads to view controllers being really big and not unit tested.
2. Do you do anything to explicitly keep your application state in one place? I find that state in iOS apps ends up being scattered between a data store, singletons and view controllers. This is a lot more cumberesome than something like Redux where state is just in a single store.
3. I am pretty excited about SwiftUI as it addresses a lot of these pain points and brings iOS development into a more modern era similar to React. What is your opinion of SwiftUI? Are you using it on your apps? If so, what have been the challenges of introducing it into existing apps? If not, why not?
1. Don't have massive VCs by not having massive VCs. That sounds unhelpful, but hear me out... You're asking the VC to do too much. Break that sucker down. Have many, many small classes that do small things. Use libraries for stuff. A VC should be a hub to transit data from the user to a model us MVVC, MVP, MVC... I don't care, every architecture has their acolyte.
2. No. Again not helpful. This is a domain specific problem. I will say I'm waging a now multi-decade war against singletons. Dependency injection is the way to go. For Swift checkout Swinject, it really superpowers your testing.
3. Haven't touched it... yet. My primary projects need to ship and my secondary projects haven't hit the point of UI. Won't until later this year. Then I'll deal with SwiftUI. Combine, however, is my new hawtness and I recommend diving into.
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Saving massive amount of money? Judging just from demographic that uses hackernews (mostly tech workers), I think it's actually cheaper to eat out if you measure price of your time by how much money would you earn in that time while working compared to shopping for the ingredients, cooking and doing dishes.
If I go to H-E-B and buy a rib eye steak for $15.99 a pound and cook it. I'm out less than $15.99, because I don't want a pound of steak. If I go to a mid range steak restaurant I'm going to get a rib-eye for $29.99 for 12 oz of steak. And it's going to be of lower grade and less seasoned. Why would I do that?
Also, I'm not working all the time. Cooking is a way of relaxing.
dfansteel commented on Ask HN: Is it worth switching from web development to native iOS dev? · Posted by u/supernov_a
I've been an iOS dev for... 12 years now. And I love it. I'm in a position now where I'm learning Android for the first time. It's Kotlin and I don't hate it. And I'm still trying to learn back end. I can't code my way out of a box using HTML. I guess you'd say I can't code my way out of a <div>
The ecosystem is amazing. I love the tools. Xcode is a joy of an IDE to work with. There's some room to improve, but compared to everything else... it's not even a question. The community is full of people who are full of wonder and excitement.
As a web dev, you probably already know some Ruby and have some familiarity with some build tools that I didn't when I came to iOS dev. That'll help. You won't be exclusive to Apple. You'll be using CocoaPods and Gradle and Bazel and Jenkins and Travis and god only knows what else. On any given day I code in Swift, Objective-C, Ruby, Kotlin, and Groovy.
At the end of the day, remember you'll be doing this 40 to 80 hours a week. Make sure you enjoy it.
What blows my mind is how much I took my ability to cook for granted. So many people my age (millennial) can barely cook anything. I have friends who eat out every single meal of every single day. People give me weird looks when every single workday I have the same answer to “you wanna go out and get some lunch?” “Nope. I have leftovers!”
I cook or eat left overs 6 nights a week at this point. Beyond saving a massive amount of money it's shocking how much better the steak I make myself is than one I can get out. Most cities have kitchen equipment stores (not just Bed Bath) that actually have cooking courses you can take.
Now "home made pasta" starts with flour and eggs.