Adobe Fireworks - easiest vector / photo editor crossover app there ever was.
Readit Newsdpcan commented on Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why? · Posted by u/ofalkaed
dpcan commented on Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why? · Posted by u/ofalkaed
Macromedia Flash. Its scope and security profile was too big. It gave way to HTML’s canvas. But man, the tooling is still no where near as good. Movieclips, my beloved. I loved it all.
Adobe Animate is still just Flash from a tool-standoint.
Are you referring to the SWF file format?
dpcan commented on What if I don't want videos of my hobby time available to the world? neilzone.co.uk/2025/09/wh... · Posted by u/speckx
I feel like I can't really have fun and be myself when I see people shooting video all around me.
I like to be silly with my kids and close friends, I like to act out around the people who find me fun or funny. But the rest of the world would ridicule me, or make fun of me, or make me a meme possibly.
This makes me sad because as a young man I could just be out there and fun, and at the end of the day, I held a place in the memories of my closest friends, maybe a handful of bystanders. But today, I could be gif'd and immortalized for my silly actions without my permission.
I disagree with the sentiment, you're in public, it's fair game. That just means I have to bend to your world-view, and you don't have to be considerate of mine.
dpcan commented on Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me blog.miguelgrinberg.com/p... · Posted by u/nomdep
What do you even mean with a 10x increase in efficiency? Does that means you commit 10x more code every day? Or that "you" essentially "type" code 10x faster? In the later case all the other tasks surrounding code would still take around the same netting you much less than 10x increase in overall productivity, probably less than 2x?
My favorite example, and the ones I show my team and my employer, is that I can have AI look at a string of fields for my database table and generate all the views for the display, add, and edit forms for those fields in exactly the way I instruct, and that saves me as much as 30 minutes every time I do it. If I do this 8 times in a day, that would save me about 4 hours. Especially when those forms require things like lookups and extra JavaScript functionality.
Another great example, is the power of tabbing with Cursor. If I want to change the parameters of a function in my React app, I can be at one of the functions anywhere in my screen, add a variable that relates to what is being rendered, and I can now quickly tab through to find all the spots that also are affected in that screen, and then it usually helps apply the changes to the function. It's like smart search and replace where I can see every change that needs made but it knows how to make it more intelligently than just replacing a line of code - and I didn't have to write the regex to find it, AND it usually helps get the work done in the function as well to reflect the change. That could save me 3-5 minutes, and I could do that 5 times a day maybe, and another almost half-hour is saved.
The point is, these small things add up SO fast. Now I'm incredibly efficient because the tedious part of programming has been sped up so much.
dpcan commented on Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me blog.miguelgrinberg.com/p... · Posted by u/nomdep
Out of curiosity how much are you spending on AI?
How much do you believe a programmer needs to layout to “get good”?
I have a $20/month GPT subscription, and the $20/month cursor plan. I've yet to come close to going over my limits with either service. I use the unlimited Tab completions in cursor which are what end up saving me an enormous amount of time. I probably use 5 to maybe 10 chats a day in cursor, but I jump over to GPT if I think I'm going to require a few extra chats to get to the bottom of something.
I think that getting "good" at using AI means that you figure out exactly how to formulate your prompts so that the results are what you are looking for given your code base. It also means knowing when to start new chats, and when to have it focus on very specific pieces of code, and finally, knowing what it's really bad at doing.
For example, if I need to have it take a list of 20 fields and create the HTML view for the form, it can do it in a few seconds, and I know to tell it, for example, to use Bootstrap, Bootstrap icons, Bootstrap modals, responsive rows and columns, and I may want certain fields aligned certain ways, buttons in certain places for later, etc, and then I have a form - and just saved myself probably 30 minutes of typing it out and testing the alignment etc. If I do things like this 8 times a day, that's 4 hours of saved time, which is game changing for me.
dpcan commented on Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me blog.miguelgrinberg.com/p... · Posted by u/nomdep
This article is just simply not true for most people who have figured out how to use AI properly when coding. Since switching to Cursor, my coding speed and efficiency has probably increased 10x conservatively. When I'm using it to code in languages I've used for 25+ years, it's a breeze to look over the function it just saved me time by pre-thinking and typing it out for me. Could I have done it myself, yeah, but it would have taken longer if I even had to go lookup one tiny thing in the documentation, like order of parameters for a function, or that little syntax thing I never use...
Also, the auto-complete with tools like Cursor are mind blowing. When I can press tab to have it finish the next 4 lines of a prepared statement, or it just knows the next 5 variables I need to define because I just set up a function that will use them.... that's a huge time saver when you add it all up.
My policy is simple, don't put anything AI creates into production if you don't understand what it's doing. Essentially, I use it for speed and efficiency, not to fill in where I don't know at all what I'm doing.
dpcan commented on Show HN: Astra – a new js2exe compiler github.com/astracompiler/... · Posted by u/qwertycodepl
This is really interesting, got it up and running very quickly.
I'm not sure what the use case is and it doesn't auto-load chromium with its own web server from what I can tell. Is it just for creating javascript CLI utilities?
Wild West Domains is a subsidiary of GoDaddy. They are basically he same company, and the Whois doesn't usually show the owner of the domain anymore, it shows the company that's keeping the owner's information private. WWD and GoDaddy both offer this service. Lookup other domains, you'll see the same thing all over the place. The whois on just about all of my domains say Wild West Domains, the others are GoDaddy or Namecheap, my personal information never comes up anymore because I opt for the privacy options.
dpcan commented on Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it? · Posted by u/zackoverflow
I’ve been doing this a looooooong time. And that’s really about it.
Every time a popup or tooltip covers code around my cursor I groan in agony.
I’d probably use it if the tool tips just updated in the bottom right of my screen while I typed or something.
If it’s fun and you used AI, that’s fine with me. The game served its purpose.
The line for me is copyright on images. If you use ai to generate images to copy a popular game art style, I think that’s over the line. Create your own art or pay the artist.
Code however, I see it as a tool. You wouldn’t scold me for hiring a cheap programmer to get the work done. So to me, AI for coding isn’t any different than hiring a programmer to do the work for you. No problem there.
That being said, I do game dev, and using AI to help figure out an algorithm or do the work of creating my inputs code, etc is a big time saver. However, at the moment, it really struggles with anything else because it has no vision and explaining to it how to put code together for a weird game mechanic or level generation reminds me of that game where you explain how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the 3rd grade, and you tell your teacher to put the peanut butter on the bread and she scoops it out with her hand…