harryf
Joined 16 years ago
Karma
4,993
Submissions
917
Member since
Jul 22
https://harryf.ckscomedy.com
View on Hacker NewsRecent submissions
Comment · 3 months ago
I recently had a mind blowing experience recently building an app with Claude for someone that suffers with autism. Their basic complaint was "I can't work with most software. I think in colors". So I built them an PWA browser-based app designed specifically for the way they think, launched and updated via Github pages, with all data stored locally on their laptop.
Then I did something similar for my son, giving him a targeted job search app specific to his Gen-Z brain responds to, again launched off Github pages as a PWA, but this time with WebRTC to allow iPhone to laptop data syncing.
And along the way I realised there's probably whole host of people for whom software has never really worked. And I can built them things on a highly personalized basis that have only minimal reliance on cloud-based services.
And then I went a bit crazy and created a manifesto which I've done nothing else with https://harryf.github.io/reclaim/ ;)
Comment · 3 months ago
Wow. The book we need should be titled something like "Of Software Teams and Cargo Cults"
"... a book had washed up on the shore... 'Extreme Ownership' ... soon the tribe was worshipping the book"
It happens over and over again in software history. I remember people running around panicking about TDD "But we only have 99.8% test coverage" until eventually it started to get shot down by "Show me the ROI on tests"
Comment · 3 months ago
We are in the age of PWAs. I've created a few where I just host them on Github pages (no backend needed, no hosting costs).
And the P in PWA has become "Personal" ... vibe coding apps with no backend for non-developers for their _personal_ needs e.g. a create a job hunting app for my son specific to the types of jobs he's looking for. If I update it, it updates on his phone plus he can sync to his laptop via WebRTC.
Comment · 4 months ago
Could go nicely with https://auge.franzai.com/ ( CLI on Apple Vision frameworks ) - do the first pass locally. If needed call their API for a more detailed analysis and then _finally_ we produce meaningful alt texts for images in HTML at a reasonable price ;)
Comment · 9 months ago
Google: USD CHF … set graph to max … it’s right there but it’s a slooooow rot.
Swiss Franc is generally very stable so a good yard stick for other currencies over the long term
Comment · 11 months ago
It’s not being driven by the UK. Check out all the other countries in the West rolling out Digital ID and it’s clearly coordinated just from the timing
Comment · 1 year ago
We need to stop using AI as an umbrella term. It’s worth remembering that LLMs can’t play chess and that the best chess models like Leela Chess Zero use deep neutral networks.
Generative AI - which the world now believes is AI, is not the same as predictive / analytical AI.
It’s fairly easy to demonstrate this by getting ChatGPT to generate a new relatively complex spreadsheet then asking it to analyze and make changes to the same spreadsheet.
The problem we have now is uninformed people believing AI is the answer to everything… if not today then in the near future. Which makes it more of a religion than a technology.
Which may be the whole goal …
> Successful people create companies. More successful people create countries. The most successful people create religions.
— Sam Altman - https://blog.samaltman.com/successful-people
Comment · 1 year ago
There needs to a financial equivalent to the Mythical Man Month.
Comment · 1 year ago
What I love about the words enshitification is it’s _almost_ autological. It takes a nice crisp on syllable word like “shit” and ruins it by adding 5 extra syllables. It just doesn’t worse over time, to be truly autological
Comment · 1 year ago
It’s worth (re)watching the 1985 movie Brazil in particular the character of Harry Tuttle, hearing engineer https://youtu.be/VRfoIyx8KfU
Neither government or corporations are going to “save us” simply because sheer short termism and incompetence. But the seem incompetence will make the coming dystopia ridiculous
Comment · 1 year ago
> Good version control habits.
Feel like there's more to this point (plus the documentation). By now we've all see the inverted-U-shaped performance curve when coding with LLMs within a single thread / context: the model starts strong, plateaus as the context fills up, and eventually declines as semantic drift sets in.
Sometimes in this situation, it works better to throw away the current code and re-implement, using what's been learnt so far, than continue working with the current context of having new contexts try to salvage the current state of some code.
Documentation is great as a reflect of the current state of some code but I've had good experiences "re-constructing" the steps taken to arrive at a current implementation by writing commit messages that are intended for an LLM, extract that later, have an LLM use it as a basis for writing a fresh "spec" for some code, that yet another LLM uses to actually write that code.
Git history is a natural place to store that...
Comment · 1 year ago
Better to talk about the Gartner Hype cycle and it's stages compare it to technologies that clearly followed that cycle such as;
- Virtual Reality: big hype in the early 90s (arcades, movies like Lawnmower Man) through to use cases today like surgical training, aviation training
- Mobile video calls: hyped in early 2000's with 3G and pre-iPhone devices. Actually took off with 4G and 5G plus iOS and Android phones
- 3D printing: back in 2013 we were expecting "a 3D printer in every home" ... today valuable in industrial prototyping
Looking back at 2025 we'll be saying "Remember when they said everyone would lose their jobs to AI..."
Comment · 1 year ago
We need to take the focus off cost savings. None of this tech is anywhere near mature enough to replace humans yet.
Far better to focus on enhancing human capabilities with agents.
For example while a human talks to a customer on the phone, AI is fetching useful context about the customer and suggesting talking points to improve the human conversation.
One example of a direct benefit for business using AI this way is reducing onboarding times for new employees
Comment · 1 year ago
It’s fairly easy to get diarizarion working with pyannote.audio and https://huggingface.co/pyannote/speaker-diarization-3.1 with ffmpeg converting the audio first to 16kHz mono WAV file but it really depends a lot on the audio - two person podcast where the speakers allow each other space works but lots of people with overlapping voices on the audio - not so great
Comment · 1 year ago
> fails due to a service high load
It seems to be suffering the HN effect right now. Earlier it was working nicely and pretty much doing everything in the background