HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

phenylene

4,953 karma · joined August 14, 2007

Founder of Route 42 North Software. http://route42north.com

I write macOS/iOS/win32 apps focusing on networking, monitoring, data analysis, and remote control.

submissionscomments
phenylene··on The HTTP crash course nobody asked for
Playlist link:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLai5B987bZ9CoVR-QEIN9foz4...

phenylene··on Why modern software is slow
As you say, Casey is experienced and his code is valuable. MS should pay him if they want to look at his code! He said as much in his tweets… I mean, why should he be doing charity for MS by fixing their products for them?
phenylene··on Ask HN: What game do you wish existed?
A slower paced, less micro-managy StarCraft and WarCraft 3 for iPad.
phenylene··on Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways
Nice work! Dark mode?
phenylene··on 94% of the universe’s galaxies are permanently beyond our reach
No one needs more than 640k galaxies.
phenylene··on Sir Clive Sinclair has died
I learned to program in 1982 when my mom bought me a Timex Sinclair 1000 (2K RAM!) and had to type in all the games from source listings in books and magazines. At some point later, I bought a 16K memory expansion pack which was awesome until you jiggled the computer a little bit and it would reset all memory.

The very first bug I had to figure out was when I was typing in an expression like "A <> B", and not realizing that "<>" was a single character on the keyboard, and not "<" followed by ">".

phenylene··on Is that ship still stuck?
My non-techie wife just said to me, "We need to NFT this situation somehow."

She's been down that rabbit hole ever since reading about the Beeple piece.

phenylene··on Apple showing signs it may soon launch a search engine
Maybe Apple could use it to search for wherever their developer documentation went.
phenylene··on Apple in Advanced Talks to Buy Intel’s Smartphone-Modem Chip Business
Can someone explain why Intel was having such a hard time competing with Qualcomm? What are the challenges in developing modems?
phenylene··on An Intro to Compilers
Crafting Interpreters is a great read:

http://www.craftinginterpreters.com/contents.html

phenylene··on Citi's Chief Economist Recommends a Universal Basic Income
And likely most skilled labor as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU (Humans Need Not Apply)
phenylene··on Ask HN: What newsletters do you read every day or week?
For iOS developers:

This Week In Swift: https://swiftnews.curated.co

iOS Dev Weekly: https://iosdevweekly.com

In depth Mac and iOS articles: http://www.objc.io

Not strictly a newsletter, but a great weekly podcast for Mac and iOS developers is Core Intuition: http://www.coreint.org

phenylene··on An Unreal Decision
> Anyway, I hope Unity will be competitive again regarding pricing with the imminent announcement of their 5.0 release.

The last couple of paragraphs from this Unity blog post from today seem to indicate that they are happy with the current pricing:

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/08/14/building-and-maintaining...

phenylene··on Apple Design Awards 2014
It's excellent! The background sound is great too (from the musician that did some of Osmos's music).
phenylene··on Flappy Bird Creator Dong Nguyen Speaks Out
Ads.
phenylene··on Introducing Outlook.com - Modern Email for the Next Billion Mailboxes
Here's how I do it using Google Chrome:

1. Sign in to personal Gmail by going to gmail.google.com 2. Sign in to work Gmail by going to mail.google.com/a/foo.com (obviously, replace foo.com with your work domain)

phenylene··on Code Rush - Netscape Mozilla Documentary 1998 - 2000
If you liked that documentary, here's more: http://www.clickmovement.org/coderush

Comes with lots of extra footage: http://clickmovement.org/code_rush_footage_nods

phenylene··on Dungeons & Dragons ruled a threat to prison security
Relevant: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/1/27/
phenylene··on Remote Conductor: Turn iPad Into a Mac Input Device
There is a way to keep it in switcher mode: just tap the little lock icon in the bottom left corner. When the icon is locked, tapping on a window will keep switcher mode active (tapping on the background will bring you back to track mode).
phenylene··on Remote Conductor: Turn iPad Into a Mac Input Device
I'm one of the Remote Conductor devs, and this is the first product from our bootstrapped two person startup, m3me. If you have any questions, let me know!
phenylene··on OpenSSL is written by monkeys
I'm using MatrixSSL (http://www.matrixssl.org) in my product. It's cross platform, small footprint, has dual commercial / GPL license options and a sane API.
phenylene··on SQLite As The MP3 Of Data
What version of Chrome are you running?
phenylene··on Why Google Employees Quit
"... most people are going to have to slog away somewhat tedious things like making context ads match their page content 0.1% better."

I'm not sure why you think that the 0.1% improvments are assumed to be a tedious slog. They may have required some seriously interesting new ML techniques just to get that extra boost. Recall the Netflix recommendation algorithm improvement contest that had teams working very hard to get those last fractions of a percent.

Small adjustments to a huge system can have huge impact: http://norvig.com/speech.html

phenylene··on Google Launches Virtual World (Rooms) Called "Lively"
Citation required.
phenylene··on Joel explains how a new monopoly will emerge around AJAX
I hear you.

I haven't written any Java code, but I recognize that my opinion was not formed by modern experiences: I was woefully unimpressed with the insanely slow craplets of the late '90s (and Paul Graham's mentions of Java in his essays didn't help improve my opinion of it either ;).

Still, I'd be willing to believe that there are far more skilled Java programmers than there are skilled Javascripters, and something like GWT could only help the move to the web for many applications, especially if it truly helps to bypass the browser compatibility issues, not to mention far simpler testing and debugging.

phenylene··on Joel explains how a new monopoly will emerge around AJAX
Or how about http://code.google.com/webtoolkit