I deploy all my code on linux and have been thinking about switching from windows to linux for my daily driver. But even I dread that. It´s as if linux has tried as hard as possible to make every single little thing as complicated as possible.
imho, user experience is nowhere to be found in the linux landscape. There is very little focus on that. People will tell you try this or that distro. But once you run into a simple problem, it´s often a rabbit hole of a gazilling cli commands to fix it. In the mean time you´re praying to god to not brick something that used to work before.
If I could wave a wand and ban a single class of comments on HN, it would be this. Rambling, non-specific handwaving useless text.
> user experience is nowhere to be found in the linux landscape.
It's ignorant, and its insulting, and it's stupid. You can read one or two KDE blog posts, look at the roadmap for Cosmic, look at the attention Valve has put into Linux and know that sentence is just rude. It's just so frustrating.
> People will tell you try this or that distro.
Dumbasses on reddit will. No one that has a single clue encourages distro-hopping.
I agree with you, that it is irritating when people make sweeping statements that casually dismiss a lot of things as not existing when they do, but it's an endless arguement. Operating systems are not the problem, support is. Just making a good operating system isn't what drives adoption.
reducing _pain_ does. Nerds arent good at empathy, so the response is normally "just read x and use y" and call people stupid if they still cant figure it how to use it
One of the best points here so far is empathy. If nerds even half understood this idea, that what they create, must be a relationship with the user; it must be to get people to feel and understand the benefit of what the creator is offering, that is the single, most important part of all of this! You have to show, don’t tell. Oh sure, you’ll have a few curious people poke at your idea, but without directly offering a Good Experience and to emotionally and cognitively realize the benefit of your creation you are going nowhere fast, generally. Steve Jobs seemed to intimately understand this concept, and it helped put him light years ahead of the competition. First impressions are supremely important, and ongoing impressions which lack pain probably even more important.
Your software or hardware is a relationship with whoever experiences it. You need to curate that relationship and represent it somehow using a fixed thing, software or hardware, and in a way it almost needs to anticipate and read people’s minds . Represent the product factually, so it can do what a person expects, and represent it emotionally so people have a good feeling when they perceive it. Obviously, the technical side must be good to fulfill both of these too. But that is only the first step.
Technology should serve mankind, not the other way around, and people who are too locked into the technical side seem 1000% blind to this idea. They feel excited at their own accomplishment, which is a totally valid by the way, but failed to take it the next step to represent it to other people. Sometimes it isn’t an idea that can be represented well with things as they are, so it’s a non-starter and just a personal project.
At this point in my life, I have a very old house that needs fixing. I have a partner that needs attention. I have my self who needs attention. I have 1.5 jobs that need attention. I have a network of social friends who are worth attention…
Well, it used to be fun a long time ago to go down a rabbit hole for endless hours or days trying to fix things. AI has helped lessen that time too!
My benchmark for a good OS, or a painful one, depending on how you want to look at it, is how often I need to spend an hour or two diagnosing and fixing something. Is that simplistic? Yes. Am I a power user? Only once in a blue moon because I don’t really have to be yet.
Do I learn a little something? Yes. Am I curious to learn? Yes, and no… I have the urgency certainly to fix it because I am frustrated and the system is not doing what I wanted to do…
Speak for yourself. If you find the agentic workflow to be more fun, more power to you.
I for one think writing code is the rewarding part. You get to think through a problem and figure out why decision A is better than B. Learning about various domains and solving difficult problems is in itself a reward.
Same here i'm a decade plus in this field, writing code was by far the number 1 and the discussion surrounding system design was a far second. Take away the coding i don't think i will make it to retirement being a code/llm PR auditor for work. So i'am already planning on exiting the field in the next decade.
I don't understand this perspective. I've never learned so much so fast as I have in the last few months. LLMs automate all the boring rote stuff, freeing up my time to focus exclusively on the high-level problem-solving. I'm enjoying my work more than ever.
To be fair, I might have felt some grief initially for my old ways of working. It was definitely a weird shift and it took me a while to adjust. But I've been all-in on AI for close to a year now, and I have absolutely zero regrets.
I can't believe I used to _type code out by hand_. What a primitive world I grew up in.
I went back to typing myself after a short time, even for the stuff I do rely on LLMs on. I noticed that crucial steps of thinking happen as I type out the code. Letting an agent code, or copying from a chat, versus typing it off manually makes a huge qualitative difference for me. Typing manually is an extreme time saver because of all the issue it lets me catch early on.
At least for me and a lot of others, the mental process is very different between the two. I guess there's a similar dynamic with, e.g., writing a letter to someone vs. dictating it. You prepare differently, think differently. A different text comes out.
Like the author (I forgot which one) who said they once copied an entire classic novel with their typewriter, in order to "see what it feels like to write a great novel." When I first heard it, I thought it was meant as a joke, but there's a lot more truth and sense in that than it might sound like at first.
>You get to think through a problem and figure out why decision A is better than B. Learning about various domains and solving difficult problems is in itself a reward.
So just tell the LLM about what you're thinking about.
Why do you need to type out a for loop for the millionth time?
(a) it's relaxing and pleasing to do something like typing out a for loop. The repetition with minor variation stimulates our brains just the right amount. Same reason why people like activities like gardening, cooking, working on cars, Legos, and so on.
(b) it allows you to have some time to think about what you're doing. The "easy" part of coding gives you a bit of breathing room to plan out the next "hard" section.
You can be directionally right but still lose a whole lot of money as an investor for decades on end even when you're right about the eventual outcome. Predicting future outcomes is orders of magnitude easier than predicting the exact moment/timing. After all, "markets can stay irrational for far longer than you can stay solvent".
This is why Burry, schiff, and a bunch of others keep predicting a collapse for decades on end. They're directionally right, they see a pattern but cant seem to time it right.
My prediction: I think this clusterfuck will keep going until
1. Unbearable irrationality: The US owes more money than there is money in the whole world. Measured using something like global M1 or M2 or something of that nature. Basically the system will need to reach a level of irrationality that even its biggest defenders can't cope with. OR,
2. Demographics: Most boomers die of old age after raiding whatever remains of the treasury.
Coincidentally, if my quick math is right, both of these scenarios are very likely to coincide within the next ~10 years or so. So make of that what you want...
Most boomers will have died of old age but it won't make much economic difference because they're overwhelmingly poor.
Treasury's been broke for a while, their whole life in fact.
Now a small fraction are so well off that there will be some sizable inheritances to be passed down, and that's kind of a crap-shoot as to how much of that might lead to any economic stimulus.
Good call otherwise, 10 years or less sounds about right.
my 2 cents: I'm one of these people that could possibly use your tool. However, the website doesnt give me much info. I'd urge you to add some more pages that showcase the product and what it can do with more detail. Would help capture more people imo.
The institutions have been doing a fine job of destroying all their credibility and utility all on their own for far longer than this new AI hype cycle.
ZIRP, Covid, Anti-nuclear power, immigration crisis across the west, debt enslavement of future generations to buy votes, socializing losses and privatizing gains... Nancy is a better investor than Warren.
I am not defending billionaires, the vast majority of them are grifting scum. But to put this at their feet is not the right level of analysis when the institutions themselves are actively working to undermine the populace for the benefit of those that are supposed to be stewards of said institutions.
I still write vanilla PHP with SQL queries. And with all the modern PHP features, things have never been faster or more joyful to work with.
I honestly feel bad for people who fall victims to complexity. It burns you out when all you need is to keep things simple and fun. Life is too short for anything else.
> I have to assume you have never written a large scale project for the web?
Can I ask, what classifies as large scale project for the web?
I previously created and exited a trading platform that did billions in transactions via our servers with thousands of users streaming real time data. It's certainly more complicated and "larger" than 99.9% of things you'll ever do. So does that qualify?
If so, I can tell you that I did it with PHP and no JS frameworks. Hosted on a couple of VPS servers from digital ocean. From idea to execution to exit in ~9 months.
You know what the weird part is? I see your take repeated over and over by "shovel peddlers" and grifters. And every single time it comes with 0 substance or merit.
The 'I' here reveals that this is indeed not a large scale project, though perhaps impressive. When working on a piece of software with tens of people, using more tooling really does makes sense.
Congrats to you, but yeah the other comments have already said it.
I'm talking about projects that have a lot of people working together across multiple teams where not everyone is even a dev. This is routine with e-commerce. The build will have assets from design teams, copywriters, analytics scripts, etc. and a CMS isn't always the correct or even scalable solution for that. The original commenter I was replying to seems to be stuck in the past. These days it can all be done with a simple CI script, but yeah ultimately that means build tools.
Above all else, like I said in another comment, there cannot be server-side rendering because it deploys to a CDN for hosting. These are projects that require huge amounts of content, but need to stay responsive. The final build result and upload is many files, but the initial load for the site is minimal JS and HTML to render for the user.
> billions in transactions via our servers with thousands of users streaming real time data. It's certainly more complicated and "larger" than 99.9% of things you'll ever do.
Large scale doesn't have to be complicated, but it does need some way to coordinate the effort which means there's a build and there will be requirements that are beyond any one person's control and expected for the modern web.
I want to also point out the obvious that there's insane money being made in e-commerce since it's now the default way to shop for everyone. It's a very common type of web project and if the typical HN web dev is getting paid a decent salary it's likely that the sites they maintain have several orders of magnitude more users than what you're talking about.
Even if LLMs were trained on the answer, that doesn't mean they'll ever recommend it. Regardless of how accurate it may be. LLMs are black box next token predictors and that's part of the issue.
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