romankolpak

What’s the alternative? How do you solve the problem of not allowing children into online spaces where they shouldn’t be allowed in?

It's all relative. When I was 20, I'd consider myself old at 36. Now when I am 36, my definition of old has shifted and it's now somewhere past 50. I guess "old" for a person is just that person 10+ years older :)

Hire excellent programmers who spent their lifetime learning how to write good code and build systems, and then the code is easy. Hire some bad ones and watch them struggle and fail and learn why maybe coding is not that easy. AI doesn't change this, it just shifts failure modes a bit since the volume of code produced is now larger, and AI-enabled bad programmers are still bad.

I remember a tennis survey where something like 70% of respondents believed they could win a game against a Tennis pro player (I can't find the source anymore, but it was discussed on Andy Roddick's podcast). If you watch Roger Federer effortlessly and elegantly make beautiful shots, it's very easy to fall into this trap and think -- it must be so easy, right?? Are people falling into the same trap watching Claude Code regurgitate CRUD apps for them?

The scope and complexity of the change is crucial here. There is a sweet spot where spec-driven agent offers great value: the change is small and simple enough that you can describe it reliably with a spec (i.e. you have complete understanding how to do it), while implementing it yourself is a lot more work than writing the said spec plus reviewing and correcting the agent.

For me currently this sweet spot is TINY. It's so small that my usage of Claude Code has dropped to almost none. It's simply more practical to let myself have the agency and drive the development, while letting AI jump in and assist when needed.

Comes to germany, does not like it, makes a picture of a middle finger to Bundestag. This smells like ragebait low effort content I come to HN in order to avoid!

When I was younger I had a few different sources for finding music - a couple of friends who were really into music and I knew they were investing time and searching for it, so I always wanted to hear what they recommend, even if it didn’t match my taste. There was also a curated website and a forum dedicated to alternative genres, like hardcore or post rock and other “edgy” stuff, where I liked to hang out. I knew this is where people really passionate about music gathered and it was interesting to see what they like and what they recommend. It was always driven my community, by people I liked or loved, or trusted their judgement.

Needless to say you get none of that with algorithms. Spotify does recommend some good songs for me regularly and I often add them to “liked” but it’s much lonelier now. Music used to connect me with other people and now it’s just me and my Spotify.

How do you make money by developing a web browser? You build this immensely complex piece of software and then have no choice but to distribute it for free. It seems like with the current browser landscape the only viable business model for companies building browsers is to make your money elsewhere while investing some of it into the browser development.

because of MCP and langchain?

i think we need to come to terms with the reality of coding challenges in the interview process. i know i hate them personally, and dread having to interview again because i'll need to open leet code and remember how to do stupid shit like DFS on a graph, or manipulating linked lists. at the same time, a job opening for a SWE is opening soon in our company and we'll have to somehow filter people, and the job market is such that we'll get MANY applicants, most of them probably wrong for the job. i will probably end up giving them coding challenges (not necessarily leetcode, but some coding challenge for sure), because i need a way to grasp their problem solving and coding skills. i don't know a better way to do it in a condensed time frame of a 1 hour zoom call.

The stories of geniuses suffering from depression and other mental illnesses sure make remarkably interesting reads. It’s a pity he didn’t get psychiatric help, this could have been a boring story of an aging scientist taking care of his plants.

I’m sorry if this is a stupid question, but I want to ask it because I see the same sentiment across HN and other forums and I’m legitimately confused.

If we don’t hijack privacy in messaging, how do we fight crime happening on a message platform? If government doesn’t have access to message contents, what’s stopping criminals from using the platform and never get tracked down? Or proven guilty, since all the proof is safely encrypted? Aren’t we hurting ourselves by being so obsessed with privacy? Again, I apologize for ignorance and am curious

this resonates strongly with me because i just had to nuke an abstraction invented by my colleague, which solved a small DRY issue but introduced a big change difficulty issue.

All we had to do is do some repetitive work for values of a dictionary (stringify and lowercase). We ended up having an abstraction of a dictionary with smart value conversion behaviours, which brought pain every time the business wanted some added custom behaviour (e.g. don't lowercase this property, make human-readable that property, etc). Younger me would keep piling up complexity onto this abstraction. Modern me just duplicated some `str(..).lower()` calls, removed the whole thing and went home happy.

i get the benefit of offloading the admin costs onto your consumers, but, as always, the devil is in the details. i've met both cases where a library should've been a service, and vice versa. this advice is way too broad and abstract to be practical

I'm at my best at writing (code, text, everything) when I'm working remotely. The option to sit down and focus in the apartment all to myself has done wonders to my code and ability to solve problems.

However I'm still a bit unsure how this affects my career. I feel like conventional corporate success depends more on your relationships and politics than the quality of your code and writing. It's really hard to build quality relationships and see the politics and status games people are playing in my company by being a remote worker. I met most of my current network by sitting in the same office with them.

I wonder if this is everyone else's experience too, or maybe I'm just missing something obvious, like scheduling more face-to-face meetings with people.

"too fucked" sounds a bit too extreme, but I agree. it's an interesting problem that we need to learn how to solve - what do you do with people whose jobs have been automated? capitalists won't do shit, so governments need to step in and make sure the portion of the profit from automation progress gets invested into the professional transition assistance programs to those who need it.