News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

pharaohgeek

Re:Commodore Callback on Tuesday June 16, 2026 @11:01AM (#48556347)
As someone who relies on their iPhone for a lot these days, I find this a bit ridiculous. However, as someone who grew up with a Commodore 64 and learned how to code on it at age 6, I LOVE the nostalgic look of it!
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.
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.
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.
Re:Expanding Swift's IDE Support on Thursday April 09, 2026 @09:03AM (#47703184)
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.
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.
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.
Re:Stop Using Face ID on Monday February 09, 2026 @06:26PM (#46953083)
Thankfully, you can disable that feature
Re:Improving the usability of C libraries in Swift on Friday January 23, 2026 @09:21AM (#46732796)
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.
Re:Improving the usability of C libraries in Swift on Friday January 23, 2026 @09:20AM (#46732788)
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.

Re:illumos on Thursday January 22, 2026 @09:13AM (#46719487)
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.
Re:The Anatomy of a macOS App on Tuesday December 09, 2025 @12:33PM (#46207822)
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.
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!
Re:Ralf Brown's Files (The x86 Interrupt List) on Wednesday November 05, 2025 @08:56AM (#45822863)
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!
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
Re:Most RESTful APIs Aren't RESTful on Wednesday July 09, 2025 @08:40AM (#44509338)
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.
Re:Redesigned Swift.org is now live on Friday June 06, 2025 @09:04AM (#44200438)
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.
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.
Re:XTool – Cross-platform Xcode replacement on Monday May 19, 2025 @08:20AM (#44029036)
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.
Re:Cheap blood test detects pancreatic cancer before it spreads on Thursday February 13, 2025 @11:42AM (#43037919)
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.
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.
Re:Ask HN: What ist your AdBlock strategy? on Friday November 01, 2024 @11:09AM (#42017652)
I have PiHole running on a Raspberry Pi 4, along with a couple of home automation services. PiHole acts as my DNS and DHCP servers, and works GREAT! Plus, I'm able to manually block sites on a per-client basis (such as when my kids are on YouTube a bit too much)
8 years cancer free and counting. Here's the truth of it: It's going to SUCK. There's no sugar-coating it. There's no way around it. You're getting poison injected into you and hoping that it only kills the bad stuff. The hospital I was treated at has a world-renowned children's hospital, so, thankfully, the children who were fighting cancer were in a separate building. I would've lost it had I had to see kids fighting alongside me every day. It's a horrible disease, and no child deserves to go through all that. It's incredibly disheartening to think about.

That said, I kept focusing on getting through it. I recognized a lot of people had it far worse than me. My cancer was in a muscle. So, radiation wasn't as bad as it would've been for, say, a brain tumor. Surgery was somewhat painful, but that part of the body can take a beating so it wasn't as bad as it could've been. I tried my best to remain thankful that it wasn't as bad as it could've been.

I mapped out my treatment weeks on a calendar so I could see progress and how much closer I was getting to being done. I focused on my kids and staying strong for them. It was extremely hard on them, so pretending to be positive made it easier on them, which in turn made it easier on me. Lastly, I set a goal. Something to look forward to when everything was DONE. When I told the kids I was sick they, of course, lost it. When everyone stopped crying I said that I think we'd need a big vacation after treatment was over. We settled on Disney World. Talking through it with them and saying, "When this is over..." helped a lot. When we finally did go you could see everyone in the family visibly relax because psychologically the fact that we were there meant things were DONE.

Best of luck to you. Stay strong. Get healthy.

Re:A brief history of Dell Unix on Monday July 22, 2024 @08:10AM (#41033513)
What ever happened to the X.Desktop GUI mentioned in the article? I'd never heard of it before, and the Wikipedia article on it never mentions what happened to it.
No, my cancer was a sarcoma in my left shoulder.
Young-ish cancer survivor here. I would add "9a. Don't ever go to a tanning salon" to this list, per my oncologist. There are genetic factors that caused my cancer, so naturally I was worried about recurrence. Her comments to me? "Do you smoke? No? Good. Don't start. Do you visit tanning salons? No? Good. Don't start." The rest falls into "trying to live a moderately healthy lifestyle". Oh, and definitely #6. If something doesn't seem/look/feel right then have a doctor check it out.
Compiling Java to native code via GraalVM is really amazing. The Quarkus framework supports this, and the startup time and memory utilization is incredible compared to the JVM. I deploy native-built Java apps as AWS Lambdas and the startup time and resource utilization are so much better by comparison.
Re:New GitHub Organization for the Swift Project on Monday June 10, 2024 @07:35PM (#40640568)
Writing server-side Swift in AppCode or CLion was a breeze, too. The interface was so much friendlier than XCode. It's a real shame they discontinued Swift support.
Re: on Sunday May 26, 2024 @09:58PM (#40486986)
Is it safe to assume you’ve written a custom Javadoc renderer? If so, this is long overdue. The existing renderer for Javadocs produces ugly — though functional — results. I’d love to see an alternative rendered implemented to generate something more visually and user-friendly.
Re:Embedded Swift on the Raspberry Pi Pico on Wednesday March 06, 2024 @08:28AM (#39615721)
Couldn't agree more! I find it to be a very elegant language and a real treat to program in. I do mostly Java for work, and wish Swift had the open source ecosystem that Java has. There are so many support libraries and frameworks in the Java world that make it easy to develop complex applications. I wish Swift could say the same.

Older »