bluehatbrit

Not all banks have physical locations, not everyone has the ability to get to the ones which do.

You can't walk back from the existing expectation and ease of use we have today. It's just not going to happen, people will opt for the current path because it's easy and seems good enough to them.

Most normal people don't even know this whole thing is going on. They don't know the difference between http and https other than "it's secure".

If we want to improve on this, it has to come with the current level of ease of use at a minimum.

There are a lot of people out there who really just don't like programmers, and would like to see them have less influence.

I don't mean that in the sense of "the world is against us". But the Googler walkouts from yesterday years were pretty embarrassing for a lot of executives and MBAs.

The culture has also never been kind to people in adjacent professions. I've met many designers and PMs who feel programmers are difficult to work with and walk over everyone else.

I think there are a lot of people out there who got one reason or another are excited that programming is now more accessible without the programmers.

There's the more positive angles as well, such as small businesses who've struggled to afford bespoke software. Now it's available to them cheaply, or at least cheaper than before.

This stuff isn't just a tool to make a carpenters life easier like a bench saw. It's available to everyone who's wanted a new wardrobe without the time and cost of something bespoke or hand made. AI is IKEA flat pack furniture. Cheap, easy, and surprisingly good.

I understand you made BetterWhispr and Handy would be a competitor, but if you're going to dunk on them it would be good to add some real detail and reasoning. It's okay if you just didn't get on with it, but this is HN where we want to hear about design decisions, trade-offs, and the motivation for building this over using one of the many alternatives.

I've not used either and I'm sure they're both great, but just saying an alternative is bad isn't particularly useful to anyone here.

So beyond LinkedIn, what sort of channels are you using now? Is it basically all about paying influencers?

Mostly, yes! They use a very specific clay from a producer which went out of business a few years ago. They've bought up all the stock they can and use that clay for pretty much all of the character puppets, along with other materials. There was a great documentary on the BBC a couple of years back which went behind the scenes and talked about how they make and use the puppets.

Of course! I don't see how anyone could expect to excel at a craft without also studying the work of others.

This is where AI concerns me for people who are juniors in their field (software or otherwise). You get quick answers which don't help with learning, and it's very easy to never read the code. It's like a very tempting drug that stunts growth but feels like progress.

I'm a hands on engineering leader for a team of about 20 engineers and I've been spending the past 6 months trying to get my team to understand just this.

On Friday we had a coffee hour to share how we've been working recently and they all seemed perplexed at the workflows I've been adopting. It seems natural to me as someone who's been a manager for some time now, but very alien to all those who've never gone down that path.

That's not to say my workflows are superior, but they're extremely different to some of my teams now. In reality it's just leaning heavily on things like prds, limiting communication between agents, etc.

I've been using elixir professionally and for hobby work for the past 7 years now. Language models are damn good at it, and have been for some time.

The language isn't huge, the documentation has always been very good, and the patterns extremely consistently across the community. I almost wonder whether it's smaller community has been a benefit, as LLMs have been trained on a tighter set of code samples.

I can't speak for Ruby or PHP.

That assumes that they do actually believe it's a mistake. They didn't explain the reasons they've gone for this architecture in much/any detail. I'd be interested in hearing them talk more about that in the future.

Perhaps you or I would make a different decision based on the aims that lead them there. But there isn't enough information to say whether or not their decision was a mistake, even if it has lead to a peculiar bug. It may be perfectly legitimate and we just don't know some of the constraints they had.

This is also my view. These sorts of roles can have a very high impact and be very successful if everyone feels like they're rowing in the same direction.

The people in those roles need make people feel like there is value in seeking their input. They also need to find ways to say yes that helps things happen in the right way, rather than stopping them entirely.

This happens naturally in organisations where security is valued by everyone. InfoSec / CIO roles can operate very successfully and deliver a lot of value. As soon as people lose faith and see them as the "no" team, they start trying to hide from them.

There are lots of ways to create this but it's as much about the people in the role, as it about the organisation itself. If either are skeptical about the other, it falls apart very quickly.

I've got two small projects on the go right now!

The first is a piece of small charity / business governance tech. I'm a trustee of a small charity in the UK, and my wife has been a senior leader of one in the past as well. All the governance tools are super expensive and aimed at businesses with large boards. They're not very suitable for smaller charities who just need something to help them maintain and publish policies, track key structure changes, and governances cycles.

So I'm working on a small bit of SaaS which helps those organisations to stay organised, and walk them through particular processes. The two big benefits are:

1. An audit log of all actions taken across policies, risk registers, board member terms, key information submissions, etc. So you can always see who did what when. 2. A calendar + reminder system which does things like prompt the Chair when someone's term is coming to an end, and auto-populates upcoming meeting agendas.

It's been useful for the charity I work with, I don't really expect it to be a big thing but the hosting cost of ~£40 a month is already saving me a lot of time. I'd like to see if I can get it in use by a couple of other organisations though.

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The other is a data toolkit for UK secondary schools. We have quite a complex way of assessing a schools outcomes for students called "Progress 8". The spec for it is published by the DfE, but there isn't really a tool out there which will do the calculations so a lot of schools either work from complex spreadsheets or wait for the DfE's announcements with the league tables.

My father is a Director of Schools Performance at a Multi-Academy Trust and this seemed like something we could pair up on. He's got a very comprehensive spreadsheet which does the initial calculations, and some continued analysis but it's not very easy to use and making tweaks can take days.

I put together a prototype project which would take in a csv of pupil results and spit out all the Attainment 8 and Progress 8 results. The next step is to wrap it up into a nice web app, and do further analysis. I'd like a school to be able to see things like the Marginal Contribution of each subject and such.

Again, this isn't something I expect to sell to many people. Schools in the UK have no money going spare right now, but it's been a fun venture into the world of data.