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It's a very cool little game! One suggestion: could you make it so you can noodle around on the keyboard without submitting the answer and then once you've worked it out, have a submission mode? Right now, it's frustrating that if you enter a wrong note, it shows a message, so you can't experiment on the keyboard to try to work it out.

I find that I use it on isolated changes where Claude doesn’t really need to access a ton of files to figure out what to do and I can easily use it without hitting limits. The only time I hit the 4-5 hour limit is when I’m going nuts on a prototype idea and vibe coding absolutely everything, and usually when I hit the limit, I’m pretty mentally spent anyway so I use it as a sign to go do something else. I suppose everyone has different styles and different codebases, but for me I can pretty easily stay under the limit without that it’s hard to justify $100 or $200 a month.

Not exactly the same, but Massive Attack had some facial recognition software running in the background during a concert to illustrate how pervasive modern day surveillance is: https://petapixel.com/2025/09/17/band-massive-attack-uses-li...

I wrote my own flashcard app and had a very basic import from Anki feature and I have to admit that I underestimated how Anki handles it. My first attempt at import was very naive and sort "flattened" the imported data into simple front/back content. It lost a lot of fidelity from the original Anki data.

After investigating the way Anki represents its flashcards a bit more, I can really appreciate the way Anki uses notes, models, and templates to essentially create "virtual cards" (my term).

I suspect other people creating their own flashcard apps underestimate the data model Anki uses and have a hard time matching their own data model with Anki's, which may be why decent import options are hard to find. If someone wants to support Anki deck import, they have to essentially use the same data model to represent notes and models (plus cloze deletions). I'm now adopting Anki's model for my flashcard app for better import fidelity.

Regarding the SQLite data format, I was thinking it would be great if there were a text-based format instead for defining the deck and its contents as that would make it much easier to collaborate on shared decks on GitHub, like you suggest. It would be great to have a community work on essential flashcard decks together in an open format that encourages branching and collaboration. I know some groups do this with Anki decks, but I can't imagine the SQLite file format makes it easy to collaborate.

I don't think it would be that hard to come up with a universal text file-based format for a flashcard deck that supports notes, models, templates, and assets. For instance, we could have each note placed in its own text file and have the filename encode the a unique ID of that particular note. Having unique identities for everything would make it easier to re-import updated decks to apply new updates if you had previously imported the deck. The note files could also be organized into sub-folders to make it easier to organize groups of info that should be learned together.

I think a lot of times, people are here just to have a conversation. I wouldn't go so far as to say someone who is pontificating and could have done a web search to verify their thoughts and opinions is being lazy.

This might be a case of just different standards for communication here. One person might want the absolute facts and assumes everyone posting should do their due diligence to verify everything they say, but others are okay with just shooting the shit (to varying degrees).

Exactly, it was the first thing you'd do when you launched Word. Nowadays, the only option available would be "See less of Clippy" and he'd be back in the next session.

This is a lot of fun. The vibe is so perfect.

"Ask HN: Do I exist?"

> This feels like a $10 solution to a 10¢ problem. Just pinch yourself and move on to shipping something useful.

https://news.ysimulator.run/item/1679

I don't think this is a serious test. It's just an art piece to contrast different LLMs taking on the same task, and against themselves since it updates every minute. One minute one of the results was really good for me and the next minute it was very, very bad.

I bet we could draw a throughline of the overly-dramatic writing style to TED Talks and all the way back to Steve Jobs' presentation style. The pregnant pauses. The short sentences. The holding back on making point for effect. All traced back to early-2000s product launches.

> I’ve never even able to make a mobile app before. My skillset was just a bit too far off and my background more in the backend. > Now I have a complete app thanks to AI. And I do feel a sense of accomplishment.

AI is such an existential threat to many of us since we value our unique ability to create things with our skills. In my opinion, this is the source of immediate disgust that a lot of people have.

A few months ago, I would've bristled at the idea that someone was able to write a mobile app with AI as that is my personal skillset. My immediate reaction when learning about your experience would've been, "Well, you don't really know how to do it. Unlike myself, who has been doing it for many, many years."

Now that I've used AI a bit more, like yourself, I've been able to do more that I wasn't able to before. That's changed my perspective of how I look at skills now, including my own. I've recognized that AI is devaluing our unique skillsets. That obviously doesn't feel great, but at the same time I don't know if there's much to be done about that. It's just the way things are now, so the best I can do is lean into the new tools available and improve in other ways.

Programming really is fascinating as a skill because it can bring so much joy to the practitioner on a day-to-day problem-solving level while also providing much value to companies that are using it to generate profit. How many other professions have this luxury?

As a result, though, I think AI taking over a lot of what we're able to do has the dual issue of making your day to day rough both as a personally-enriching experience but also as a money-making endeavor.

I've been reading The Machine That Changed the World recently and it talks about how Ford's mass production assembly line replaced craftsmen building cars by hand. It made me wonder if AI will end up replacing us programmers in a similar way. Craftsmen surely loved the act of building a vehicle, but once assembly lines came along, it no longer made sense to produce cars in that fashion since more unskilled labor could get the job done faster and cheaper. Will we get to a place where AI is "good enough" to replace most developers? You could always argue that craftspeople could generate better code, but I can see a future where that becomes a luxury and unnecessary if tools do most of the work well enough.

Ooh yeah, the DMC must've been used in the Super Mario 3 soundtrack. I remember the steel drums (?) in that sounded so good for an 8-bit game.

I agree. I had an SMS growing up and always noticed the music sounded "cheaper" than the NES, almost childish. I think it really was just the square waves making everything sound the same. The NES had more interesting output with its triangle and sawtooth wave output and it gave it more edge and character.

Yeah, super shady. Perhaps they're collecting data points for a product or else generating content for a blog post about how lonely building solo is.

I asked it this in a conversation where it referenced my city (I never mentioned it) and it conveniently left out the location in the metadata response, which was shrewd. I started a new conversation and asked the same thing and this time it did include approximate location as "United States" (no mention of city though).

I just tried this and it definitely knows your general location. I asked it for the "best fried chicken near me" and it used my city. Gaslit me as well when I told it it had access to my location and its response that it used Google and Google provided a "default search location".

Obviously it can figure out location by IP, but the lying is insulting and creepy. The fact that lying would likely work for non-technical people is even worse.

It's disappointing to see their responses. All obviously LLM. I'm assuming there's a real person behind the original post as that doesn't feel like LLM and maybe they're just not sure how to respond.

For the OP, if you're truly asking the question, respond using your own words. The LLM responses are devoid of any value.

Yes, definitely. It's something you do just have to get used to, though, if you want to work on something solo for a long period of time.

Bouncing ideas off others and getting excited by someone seeing my work and seeing someone else create something is something I miss a lot. Being in meetings and having to deal with policy and bureaucracy I don't miss at all. You kind of have to lean into the pros of working alone (having agency, being able to pivot and move quickly) and remember what you're avoiding (bureaucracy, corporate culture) to fuel yourself beyond the product itself.

Be sure to get out of the house regularly during the work week. Being inside all day and not interacting with others can make you a little nuts even if you don't notice it. I know that there are days I'm not productive and it's usually because all I've been doing is working alone and I'm hitting my mental limits. Even going for a walk makes a difference to wake me up a bit.

> Would this have worked just as well if a person was the one doing this?

I'm not sure how you want to quantify "just as well" considering the AI has boundless energy and is generally designed to be agreeable to whatever the user says. But it's definitely happened that someone was chatted into suicide. Just look up the story of Michelle Carter who texted her boyfriend and urged him to commit suicide, which he eventually did.

This is interesting because the LLM provides enough of an illusion of human interaction that people are lowering their guards when interacting with it. I think it's a legitimate blind spot. As humans, our default when interacting with other humans, especially those that are agreeable and friendly to us, is to trust them, and it works relatively well, unless you're interacting with a sociopath or, in this case, a machine.

It's a bunch of things. In the old days, if you bought software in a box for your OS (let's say DOS), you didn't expect it to need to be updated. It also continued to work just fine and maybe you didn't update your OS that frequently or had security issues to worry about. Nowadays, iOS gets updated every year and APIs get deprecated, and users update, so you have to maintain the app after initially shipping it.

A lot of people also expect the software to add features over time. In the old days, you'd ship a brand new major version and charge people for that and stop working on the old one. With the App Store, I suppose you could technically abandon the old version and sell a whole new version, but then all your old users will be annoyed if the app is removed from the store or no longer works when they update their OS. You could gate new features behind a paywall, and I know some apps do this, but then it adds to the complexity of the app as you have to worry about features that work for some users but not others.

I think people also expect software nowadays to be cheap or free, I think due to large corporations being able to fund free stuff (say gmail) by other means (say ads or tracking users). That means users would balk if you asked them to pay $50 for your little calendar app, so if you did ask for a one-time payment, it would be $5-$10, which is nowhere near enough to recoup whatever time you spent, unless you hit it big. Hitting it big nowadays with an app is difficult since there's so much competition in the App Stores and everyone has raced to the bottom to sell apps for pennies.

I don't think it's quite social media as most people think of it. I treat it more like a message forum.

To me, social media is a broadcast type of media where people are posting for their specific followers and people are following individuals, so you end up with people posting specifically to get more followers (maybe not initially, but it's what fuels further posting).

Hacker News is social, but I don't go here to follow individuals. I usually don't even look at names of who's commenting.

It's probably just aesthetics. Those colors are more commonly used in illustration and design, so they tend to get labeled. There might be some perception involved in there as well as it's easier for our eyes to pick apart the more pastel colors from each other than the darker colors from each other.

I suspect some of this is due to the fact that the programmers consenting to do free work already have well-paying jobs, so they have the freedom and time to pursue coding as a hobby for fun as well. Graphic designers and UX designers are already having a hard time getting hired for their specific skills and getting paid well for it, so I imagine it's insulting to be asked to do it for free on top of that.

That said, I don't think it's as simple as that. Coding is a kind of puzzle-solving that's very self-reinforcing and addictive for a certain type of person. Coders can't help plugging away at a problem even if they're not at the computer. Drawing, on the other hand, requires a lot more drudgery to get good, for most people anyway, and likely isn't as addictive.

I wouldn't go so far as to say it was "never" about the graphics. There was definitely a sense of wonder when I first saw Wolfenstein 3D, then Doom, and later Quake. It was the graphics that got you first and made you think, "Oh wow, I can wander around this world?!" Thankfully, they were fun games as well.

I think what's getting people interested in this project is the sense of wonder they get from the visuals. Who knows if they can deliver, but there's something about how this looks that gives me a sense of wonder.

Thanks for the suggestion. I don't use LLMs for everything and do still copy-paste a lot from existing projects where I have an established pattern.

LLMs can be a lot faster if you're tossing together an initial prototype with a lot of UI. I could type it all out or copy-paste bits and pieces, but just giving a few sentences of what I want and letting it go build is much faster.

This is how I feel about it too. I got into programming because I liked making software that did interesting things for me. I enjoyed learning new languages and techniques to improve my programming skills to make software better, larger, faster, but after having been doing this in some capacity for 30 years, I find I'm often doing the same things to create these solutions, so I'm not necessarily learning new things all the time. The typing out the code part becomes something that just has to be done to get to the solution, but doesn't necessarily make me better or bring me joy.

Using AI has been exciting because I can now just focus on designing the user experience and architecture at a high level and do less of the typing out stuff by hand. I still have to steer it in the right direction, though, because it does make mistakes but it does beat just typing it out by hand.

I wrote my own app (Minders) and use it to write long and short entries here and there. I made the UI look like Twitter (replies, likes, hashtags, media, link previews), so I kind of use it as a dumping ground for bookmarks and images too. It's chronological and filterable, so it's easy to find stuff later.

I was never into the journaling where you're prompted with a question or try to investigate your feelings and state of mind, so it works for me. Sometimes I'll dump what I'm thinking of my life and how my day went and sometimes I'll just post a random link I thought was really interesting.

You're right, I forgot about the Pi 500 which was already that price. Still, it doesn't answer my question about who this is for.

Is their strategy to branch out to more premium prices? Did they see enough uptake of the Pi 500 that they figured there's enough of a niche to want to pay $200 for a bit more?

It's just interesting to me that they started out making cheap little educational devices that were great for the price and now they're making $200 devices. I understand there's a profit-making side to Raspberry Pi now that they're not strictly just a charity, so this must be some long-term bet.

I'm confused as to why they decided to build this when they already previously built the Raspberry Pi 400 keyboard all-in-one for under $100. As a casual observer, I don't know who they've built this $200 machine for. A cheap all-in-one for education totally makes sense, but this is a bit too much. Maybe someone more in the know can help us understand what direction the company's going?

It's frustrating because the content here looks like it could be good. It feels like it was thrown together quickly. If you click the "Chapter 1" it just takes you a page with just the chapter title on it. Seems like they split the book into sections and fed each section into a template and said good enough.

The highlighted links are incredibly off-putting, like buying a second-hand book that someone has already highlighted. The readable text is so narrow and small, but the sections are so short that you immediately hit the massive "Buy a Book" upsell banner at the bottom, which distracts you. All of this makes it hard to focus on the text itself.

I'll never understand sites that have way too many links in their articles. Am I mean to click away as I'm reading a paragraph? Do you want me to stay on the article or do you want me to be distracted and go somewhere else?