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2,139 karma · joined August 25, 2021

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65··on Warren Buffett steps down as Berkshire Hathaway CEO after six decades
Have you ever considered that some people enjoy investing?

Imagine if I said "there are so many more worthwhile things to do than painting" if some famous artist retired.

65··on On privacy and control
This reminds me of the old meme:

> Tech enthusiasts: My entire house is smart.

> Tech workers: The only piece of technology in my house is a printer and I keep a gun next to it so I can shoot it if it makes a noise I don't recognize.

65··on Replacing JavaScript with Just HTML
It feels like some variation of this post gets submitted here every week.
65··on Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?
Patternmaking for Menswear wad immensly helpful for teaching me how to create my own sewing patterns. But like anyone on HN, I draw my patterns with software I made.
65··on Salesforce regrets firing 4000 experienced staff and replacing them with AI
I've always found it much quicker to just... do the work myself. AI slows me down more than anything.
65··on How I Left YouTube
I must say, life is a lot easier as a software engineer outside of Big Tech. It seems like a bit of a pressure cooker to me.
65··on Avoid Mini-Frameworks
Everywhere I've worked that uses DynamoDB, someone will invariably write a bunch of abstraction functions that become very annoying to debug, to add functionality, and can break an entire app if changed.

DynamoDB is admittedly very verbose, but it's almost always worth it to keep your CRUD operations written within the SDK rather than as an abstraction.

65··on I'm returning my Framework 16
To be fair I once spilled water all over my Macbook's keyboard. It wouldn't boot for weeks afterward. I got a new computer and then checked back a few months later and my Macbook was magically able to boot.
65··on I'm just having fun
The cutesy writing style is a bit irritating, plus the article is one big ego stroke.

Could you, HackerNews reader, imagine yourself writing something like this? No? It's because you're not a narcissist.

65··on I program on the subway
Eh. My preferred subway activity is to listen to music and stare at the ground. I don't know... do I really need to stare at my computer screen every waking moment?
65··on CSS Grid Lanes
NYTimes.com comes to mind...
65··on CSS Grid Lanes
Safari became the new IE for a while, the amount of problems I've had with Safari CSS animations and SVGs is endless.

It's good they're trying to not make Safari suck as much.

65··on Please just try HTMX
On the contrary, I've built some very complicated apps with Alpine and it handled the use cases every time. You are right with string methods creating it hard to click to go to the function in your IDE, but I'vd never had a problem with state management. Perhaps it depends on the setup.
65··on Please just try HTMX
Do not use HTMX for anything other than very simple CRUD apps. The vast majority of the time you'll be wishing you had client side two way data binding and state management. If you want "simple and not React", just use Alpine.js. It has way better ergonomics and features than HTMX and can do essentially everything HTMX can do.
65··on Working quickly is more important than it seems (2015)
I generally go very quickly when doing personal programming projects since I'm usually the only user of my software, but I always end up shooting myself in the foot and have to rewrite sloppy code, which ends up taking more time. Which is fine, since I have no timeline.

At work though it's much faster to be more methodical writing software. Fewer QA headaches.

65··on Ask HN: Is building a calm, non-gamified learning app a mistake?
Do you personally use your own app?

This is the biggest, easiest predictor of software success. If you're not using your own app every day, there's no reason for other people to as well, save for network effect type apps.

65··on Purdue University approves new AI requirement for all undergrads
Seems mostly knee-jerk reactionary more than anything. I'm sure this is to justify hiring even more administrators.
65··on The true story of the Windows 3.1 'Hot Dog Stand' color scheme
People who are more likely to customize their app are more likely power users, therefore they're going to engage with the app more anyways.

Why would someone changing app colors to ones they specifically chose make them use the app less? There is no logic in that statement.

65··on My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file (2020)
My productivity app is a sketchbook and a pencil, if anyone knows what those are.
65··on Bruno Simon – 3D Portfolio
The unique UX of the site, driving around in a 3D car, is what makes this site go viral on occasion. If it were "good" UX, e.g. a standard portfolio site, no one would care and this guy wouldn't be as well known as he is. Therefore the UX is good.
65··on Pebble Index 01 – External memory for your brain
Even if the battery lasts "years", it still seems wildly irresponsible to make this a single use device. I suspect this thing will get very few sales because it's single use.
65··on Desperately Seeking Squircles (2018)
Oops, looks like Figma forgot to remove the alpha on their equations, because they're unreadable in dark mode.
65··on Nook Browser
It's nice, but it feels like Yet Another Browser.

I'm interested in seeing all the new browsers that will come out in the next few years that are based off Ladybird. Or alternatively what Ladybird will enable in terms of customization. I think the days of Chromium/WebKit/Gecko forks are numbered.

65··on Making RSS More Fun
This is a hard problem to solve. Basically what people want is an addictive way to consume high quality text.

I have made my own RSS readers with things like filtering, creating feeds from pages (e.g. the APNews.com home page), rendering the page itself with custom CSS/Javascript, etc.

Except I don't really use my RSS feed I spent months making because the firehose of random articles just does not work. I like The Atlantic as much as everyone, but do I want to read _every_ article? No.

Why is Reddit and Hacker News addictive? Because of the social component of it. So the author is on the right track with the insight to make it more like StumbleUpon. But... why bother when you can just go read Reddit or Hacker News? RSS readers are fundamentally lonely.

The non-social solution to "addictive internet text" to me is the research part of finding information you're curious about. I frequently will read something or think of something and go down this Wikipedia rabbit hole, trying to find more information. This is way more engaging than reading a random news article. The question is how to create discovery that leads to more discovery, where the user can find the information themselves (something like how people go down the Ancestry DNA rabbit holes). This way you don't need a social hook to build something "addictive." But how to get there is something I'm still trying to figure out.

65··on Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025
My guess? Code written by AI
65··on Everyone in Seattle hates AI
Strangely I've found the only people who are super excited about AI are executive level boomers. My mom loves AI and uses it to do her job, which of course has poor results. All the younger people I know hate AI. Perhaps it's also a generational dofference.
65··on Don't push AI down our throats
Oh how I'd like the AI bubble to pop already when ROIs don't justify the cost. I like AI for things like getting recommendations or classifying images. And yet execs feel the need to force every possible use case down our throats even if they don't make any sense or make quality worse.

E.g. Programming - and I do judge not only those who use AI to code but execs who force people to use AI to code. Sorry, I'd like to know how my code works. Sorry, you're not an efficient worker, you're just making yourself dumber and churning out garbage software. It will be a competitive advantage for me when slop programmers don't know how to do anything and I can actually solve problems. Silicon Valley tech utopians cannot convince me otherwise. I don't think poorly socialized dweebs know much about anything other than their AI girlfriends providing them with a simulation of what it feels like to not be lonely.

65··on Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost
My theory is public state schools will become much more prestigious, as non extremely rich kids will find spending $75k on tuition to just not be worth it when you can go to your local state flagship for a fraction of the price. Plus, most of the most prestigious schools in other countries are public schools (e.g. UT and UBC in Canada, Oxford and Cambridge in the UK).

As an example, when I went to college tuition prices were already ridiculous. I got in to some good schools but ended up going to my local state flagship purely because of price. I was able to pay off all my loans and have a good job as a software engineer. Compared to my brother who went to a private school, he is 3 years older than me and makes the same amount of money as me, and is still paying off his loans.

Of course where I live in NYC there's still this smugness from those private university grads when they hear where I went to school. As though the US News and World Report rankings are some kind of way of deciding your self worth. Wow, you school is ranked #36 and mine at #42? You must be a smarter and more valuable person than me! Except... we work at the same place and live in the same area. But I don't have any loans to pay. I guess for some people it's not about the cost.

65··on Show HN: Real-time system that tracks how news spreads across 200k websites
I think you will need to filter out wire services like AP and Reuters, as I'm seeing stories that are mostly republished wire stories on random websites.
65··on Migrating the main Zig repository from GitHub to Codeberg
No wonder they moved to Codeberg. Those kinds of projects tend to do the ol' move to Codeberg for whatever reason. If I had to put an analogy to it, Codeberg is like Kick and Github is like Twitch.
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