Will swe's be squeezed; yes. But I don't think everything will just be magically done by these models. Right now the wheels are completely off the wagon as we see more and more vibe coded apps going live with fatal security vulnerabilities, privacy issues. The act of putting pen to paper, will change, the positions will change, but I don't think these models are a silver bullet.
Nothing has been so simple until now, and it seems strange that we just get to a certain point and then all of our problems are now just solved, completely. From my experience until now, at my current start-up, it has reduced our need to hire a tad, but not too much. However, I've also seen early stage start ups needing to hire because they started out building a product, and it became too much to handle, it is anectodal and current, I'd just find it strange that we just end up automating ourselves away, my own role has sort of turned into an AI enablement for the rest of start up, mostly C-level, business, pretty much everyone else than swe's. There is potential but mixed success for now. Agent's a good enough to build something that works, but not good enough to build the right solution.
I had a guy that ended up building a local dashboard in perl (the only thing claude could find on his mac) and wanted to distribute it to his colleagues. Engineers sometimes forget that normal people don't usually work in the unknown, they will solve problems in any way they known, in this case a airdropped folder of perl code sent to each other.
What is apparent from windows in my opinion is a lack of direction. Ask for feedback when something falls outside of common sense, you ask for feedback when you need another point of view. But windows is currently failing at the most essentials, these should be apparent inside Microsoft as well, and should've been for the last few years.
It is not that everything should stay the same, that is one choice, but there needs to be a steward that says, hey our right click menu on the desktop has an SLA of 100ms to open, it doesn't matter which features you put in there, if something causes it to be slow, kill it.
Can I access basic apps that are table stakes for an OS, an editor, screenshots etc without popups for unrelated nonsense. If you fail at that, then as a user I get confused. I am used to just being able to note down some text, why am I asked to transcribe with Copilot or login to microsoft.
It is clear that the adoption of Copilot was measured in activations, and as such was pushed in as many places as possible, simply because they needed all that exposure to meet their targets. Windows was not just a product but a funnel to other offerings and that cannibalized windows even more than it was previously.
I've got a slight bias, as I haven't had windows installed in about 10 years, but when I've helped my family with their issues, it is clear how much of a shitshow it actually is.
I am 100% behind this. I've been browsing hackernews since I started in tech, it is the only forum i regularly browse, and partake in. Simply because the quality of submissions and conversations are so high. There has been more AI related articles this part year, and it only seems ramping. I personally haven't found the AI part of the comments as big of a deal but dang and tom might be doing more than I realize on that front.
Though I do wish we'd see less AI related posts on the front page, they simply aren't sparking curiosity, it is the same wrapped in a different format, a different person commenting on our struggles and wins with AI, the 10th software "rewritten" by an AI.
At this point there nearly should be a "tax" on category, as of this moment I count 8-10 related posts on the front page related to AI / LLMs. It is a hot field, but I come to hackernews, to partake in discussions about things that are interesting, and many of those just doesn't cut it, in my opinion.
The dynamics of content production are shifting hard right now. Things that used to signal something interesting are being generated in minutes with little thought. It's getting democratized, but also commoditized.
It's too soon to know how this is going to shake out, so we should resist the temptation to impose rules prematurely. And we should especially not do so out of resistance to change (when has that ever worked out?)
But we'll do what we need to do to keep our heads above water. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/showlim. I figure pragmatics are fine as long one keeps adjusting.
> It's too soon to know how this is going to shake out, so we should resist the temptation to impose rules prematurely.
alternative view. it is going way too quickly and premature rules can be reduced if the actual damage is less than theexpected model.
You can always make things easier, its much harder to rebuild a community that hass been destroyed.
> And we should especially not do so out of resistance to change (when has that ever worked out?)
You saying that in a website with a UI straight out of the 90s is really fucking funny. Cause HN is a perfect example of resistance to change working out. Facebook chased every trend and failed (the social media, meta as an ad platform is doing ok), tech blogs chased trends and failed. This place said "nah this is good", and is still here.
> The dynamics of content production are shifting hard right now. Things that used to signal something interesting are being generated in minutes with little thought. It's getting democratized, but also commoditized.
That's true, but it also means that Show HN has less value than it used to: the SNR is falling off a cliff :-(
I planned to post a Show HN for a new product I want to launch (all human written by myself, with only the GEO docs vibed currently), but not sure now that any decent/quality product will ever get air. All the oxygen is being sucked out by low-effort products.
> If you (or anyone) have ideas about other pragmatic measures we could take, we're interested.
Suggestion: Make it clear and explicit in guidelines and FAQ that this forum is for human conversation and that writing/editing post or comment by LLM or automated posting is bannable offense.
Second and similarly, "vibe-coded" should have no place on Show HN and this could be made much more explicit.
Invisible text that will serve as a honey pot for LLMs is one thing to try. Imagine a comment where half of the words are marked as invisible by CSS, the other half has letters rearranged, but at the HTML level all the words look the same. LLMs will have to render pages which is a lot more expensive.
1.) Rendering pages is table stakes for an AI headless browser tool, and 2.) most of the LLM comments probably come from copy and pasting to ChatGPT, not from autonomous agents.
maybe you guys already do this, but what about having a line of text near the submission fields that says "If you are submitting a Show HN post, please do not post an AI generated version, it degrades the quality of submissions (or it makes it harder for others to submit high quality content, or something like that)
I know when I see those guidelines show up in reddit submission forms, i respect that because I see what the sub exactly wants..
You'll be fine. I don't want to say much specifically because it'll just end up as extra steps on some "how to promote your project on HN" checklist somewhere.
> But we'll do what we need to do to keep our heads above water. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/showlim. I figure pragmatics are fine as long one keeps adjusting.
Is this page meant to be discoverable normally, or is it just there to host a message for those who encounter the restriction?
Will removing the incentive, which is the upvotes, help reduce this spam? You can disable public access to the points gained by a new account (or may be for every account).
Or if the ranking that's attractive to spammer, may be try experimenting with randomizing order of comments in a discussion.
What I hope not to see is the Reddit method of "Oh you made a new account? Cool. You can't post anywhere and you can't post until you've posted catch 22"
I feel the same and find myself extending it beyond forums. I've started skipping over articles about AI more and more from authors I normally enjoy reading because so few of those articles end up being particularly interesting or insightful.
AI is obviously an important topic but it has been discussed to absolute death the past couple years and very few people have anything useful to add at this point. Things will of course evolve and change in the near term but someone speculating that maybe this will happen or that will happen isn't very useful.
Given the risks and unknowns I think we should collectively be treating it as a major risk to our economic and national security, and figuring out how to mitigate the downside risks without stifling the upside. But most of the people in power have zero interest in doing that so we're all going to YOLO this in real time.
> Though I do wish we'd see less AI related posts on the front page, they simply aren't sparking curiosity, it is the same wrapped in a different format, a different person commenting on our struggles and wins with AI, the 10th software "rewritten" by an AI.
Exactly. I feel like HN has never been this boring. Enough of the slop, let’s talk about interesting stuff again!
If you haven't yet checked it out, I'd recommend taking a look at Tildes for similarly high quality submissions/conversations as on HN. It really is such a breath of fresh air compared to most other platforms.
Just had a look, it is pretty interesting, just from the few times I've checked the frontpage there was some interesting articles to me. with a variety of topic. Great suggestion!
I personally joined HN because of various AI discussions.
Comparatively, other sites such as Reddit, Twitter and YouTube just shill content, applications or products. A ton of the posts on Reddit are just AI written ffmpeg wrappers which no one should care about but apparently people do...
Upgrading to Sequoia was a mistake, and so was upgrading to Tahoe.
I like new and shiny software, but these two releases aren't great. Outside of a good amount of bugs. It is wild to me that Apple can't even get their own UI consistent.
Apples own apps are pretty much the only things you can't close. Finder: can't quit. System settings, somehow doesn't expand horizontally (are we still in the 2000s apple?) I haven't felt the liquid glass or whatever too much on the laptop, but I just used one of my family members Iphone today, and man it was distracting, it seems crazy that contrast has gone out the window.
But especially the bugs. Apple should really take a release that is just bug fixing. I had to switch out Spotlight because it kept trying to want to index my entire system, which is hard when you work in both Rust and typescript projects (lots of small files).
Seems like a very balanced take on forking Minio. I don't have high hopes for the future Minio, but as mentioned it is more or less feature complete, good enough for most use-cases.
I was searching for a fairly simple replacement for s3 for testing. I'd been using Minio for a while now, and simply ended up implementing my own on top of Postgres. Fun intersection given the post. (Note, I know it isn't optimal, but as I always have Postgres available it fits well, and I don't have high storage needs, just the api compatibility)
I considered it a while ago, but I wasn't totally clear on Read-After-Write. Which was the primary reason why I choose to just implement my own for testing.
I'll probably give GarageHQ a more serious look again.
I think connect-rpc[0] strikes a good balance between normal http apis, and gRPC. It allows protobuf as json. So you could think of it as an opinionated http api spec. A health check would be just a call to an url /something.v1.MyService/MyMethod -d { "input": "something }.
it works really well, and the tooling is pretty good, though it isn't that widely supported yet. Rust for one doesn't have an implementation. But I've been using it at work, and we basically haven't had any issues with it (go and typescript).
But the good thing is that it can interoperate with normal grpc servers, etc. But that of course locks it into using the protobuf wireformat, which is part of the trouble ;)
He probably means when I took VC funding in 2019 and started to rip apart the framework to try build a platform and business. The 2-3 years after were very chaotic.
My goal was never to serve the community but instead leverage it to build a business. Ultimately that failed. The truth is it's very difficult to sustain open source. Go-micro was never the end goal. It was always a stepping stone to a platform e.g microservices PaaS. A lot of hard lessons learned along the way.
Now with Copilot and AI I'm able to go back and fix a lot of issues but nothing will fix trust with a community or the passage of time. People move on. It served a certain purpose at certain time.
Note: The company behind connect-rpc raised $100m but for more of a build system around protobuf as opposed to the rpc framework but this was my thinking as well. The ability to raise $10-20m would create the space to build the platform off the back of the success of the framework.
Obligatory "this is why I love HN" but even for that standard, this is is an incredibly open account, thank you for the insight and sorry it hasn't seemed to pan out quite how you hoped. Still sounds like you got your bag, built something cool, and have your "micro" share of Internet legacy, so not too bad eh?
Using connectrpc was a pretty refreshing experience for me. Implementing a client for the HTTP stuff at least is pretty easy!
I was able to implement a basic runner for forgejo using the protobuf spec for the runner + libcurl within a few days.
I've got a wireguard setup from phone or tablet to my workstation. Using mosh with zellij and I can do all the development I want. Whether it is restarting a machine, or actually writing code, using claude code etc. It works really well
I think it fits quite well. Kind of like the rust standard lib runs on the cpu this does partially run on the gpu. The post does say they fall back on syscalls but for others there a native calls on the gpu itself such as Instant. The same way the standard lib uses syscalls on the cou instead of doing everything in process
Nothing has been so simple until now, and it seems strange that we just get to a certain point and then all of our problems are now just solved, completely. From my experience until now, at my current start-up, it has reduced our need to hire a tad, but not too much. However, I've also seen early stage start ups needing to hire because they started out building a product, and it became too much to handle, it is anectodal and current, I'd just find it strange that we just end up automating ourselves away, my own role has sort of turned into an AI enablement for the rest of start up, mostly C-level, business, pretty much everyone else than swe's. There is potential but mixed success for now. Agent's a good enough to build something that works, but not good enough to build the right solution.
I had a guy that ended up building a local dashboard in perl (the only thing claude could find on his mac) and wanted to distribute it to his colleagues. Engineers sometimes forget that normal people don't usually work in the unknown, they will solve problems in any way they known, in this case a airdropped folder of perl code sent to each other.
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