Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | baw-bag's commentslogin

You can't debug it in anything other than a mac


This

I have users that have issues with Safari, CSS and Javascripts ones.

I MUST own an Apple device to debug anything.

I'm sorry but as a Free Software Web Developer I can't spend 2K€ on a Mac to just fix a CSS issue.


Frequently, but not always, I can reproduce such bugs using Epiphany [1] or other WebKit based browsers.

That's at least somewhat cheaper when it works.

[1]: https://webkit.org/downloads/


You can buy a refurb Mac mini for €589. Macs haven't started at €2K since the early 90s.


You can also buy a used-like-new one on eBay for half that


When I was making money as a developer I purchased wintel systems to verify my work. I thought of it as the cost of doing business. Many Macs cost less then 2K euros.


A Mac mini is pretty affordable.

Also you can use browserstack.


> I'm sorry but as a Free Software Web Developer I can't spend 2K€ on a Mac to just fix a CSS issue

More like $200-300 for a used M1 mini or Air…

Or free to just run macOS in a VM if you don’t care about breaking an EULA you never signed in the first place…


They are all telling you "Just buy a mac". Exactly the point that you and I were downvoted for saying.


It's really unique and beautiful. I want to see more of this. I grew up with random interactive experiences in Flash, this is far more amazing that those days but we need more of this and less of the form crud crap.


Its not genocide though. Feel free to provide a link to the legal judgement.



You were never an engineer. I'm 18 years into my career on the web and games and I was never an engineer. It's blind people leading blind people and your somewhere in the middle based on 2013 patterns you got to this point on and 2024 advancements called "Vibe Coding" and you get paid $$ to make it work.

Building a bridge from steel that lasts 100 years and carries real living people in the tens or hundreds of thousands per day without failing under massive weather spikes is engineering.


Please if you are in this situation do not take this advice. You just generate massive garbage abstractions upstream. If boolean arguments are out of hand, the problem isn't the boolean.


Isn't that the point? If booleans are out of hand, either you are trying to emulate a state machine or you are lacking enums. Or in case of 20 bool parameters, just make it a struct. Nobody will complain.


Everyone's always trying to emulate a state machine - OOP objects are kind of just an unsafe informal state machine implementation.

Oddly, almost noone has tried providing actual state machines where you have to prove you've figured out what the state transitions are.


It's just so tragic to read it like that but, that's exactly how it is.


It's not that. They changed recently to 100% zoom. It used to be much more fine. Zoom in a little, Zoom out a little. For the past week, it's been max zoom in either direction. Kinda annoying.


Its not true!

I have been playing TimeGuessr for 11 months, I do it before bed.

I have been all over, I personally really struggle between Vietnam and Thailand and got even that wrong with Cambodia. I am simply ignorant but it's not just rich countries.


That's good to know. I just tried another game, and got: Belgium, Denmark, USA, UK, USA. Not exactly the variety I'd hoped for! But I'll try it out occasionally and see if I ever get lucky with an interesting round.


There needs to be some kind of hackernews library or goodread. I have enjoyed many books (and some no so much) but always on the look out for books.


You'd like this then: https://hackernewsbooks.com


That would be fantastic.


I am really struggling with this. I tried Cline with both OpenAI and Claude to very weird results. Often burning through credits to get no where or just running out of context. I just got Cursor for a try so can't say anything on that yet.


It's a skill that takes some persistence and trial and error. Happy to chat with you about it if you want to send me an email.


There is skill to it but that's certainly not the only relevant variable involved. Other important factors are:

Language: Syntax errors rise, and a common form is the syntax of a more common language bleeding through.

Domain: Less so than what humans deem complex, quality is more strongly controlled by how much code and documentation there is for a domain. Interesting is that if in a less common subdomain, it will often revert to a more common approach (for example working on shaders for a game that takes place in a cylinder geometry requires a lot more hand-holding than on a plane). It's usually not that they can't do it, but that they require much more involved prompting to get the context appropriately set up and then managing drifting to default, more common patterns. Related is decisions with long term consequences. LLMs are pretty weak at this. In humans this one comes with experience, so it's rare and an instance of low coverage.

Dates: Related is reverting to obsolete API patterns.

Complexity: While not as dominant as domain coverage, complexity does play a role. With likelihood of error rising with complexity.

This means if you're at the intersection of multiple of these (such as a low coverage problem in a functional language), agent mode will likely be too much of a waste for you. But interactive mode can still be highly productive.


I really appreciate that. I will see how I get on and may well give you a shout. Thank you!


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: