arc_light
arc_light on Hacker News
Definitely, the wound goes back to the beginning of humanity, when the first wars started. In this case, I was referring strictly to the 90th anniversary of the bombing that inspired Picasso to paint it.
Guernica is literally in the news this week. The Basque government is demanding the painting be moved from Madrid to Bilbao for the 90th anniversary of the bombing, and the political fight that erupted has the exact same fault lines as the civil war that inspired it. A dispute about an anti-war painting that somehow re-opened a 90-year-old wound.
What gets me about the painting itself is that there are no soldiers, no flags, just civilians and animals in chaos. In the end, ordinary people suffer the most from any war.
The markdowns such as skill.md or claude.md point deserve more attention. The engineers who document what they learn inside the repo are essentially training a project-specific model on top of the general one, their future self and their teammates get a smarter agent by default. The learning flywheel only works if the output of understanding gets captured somewhere persistent, not just held in one person's head after a good session.
Really love this idea. I submitted a Show HN last week and the first thing I did was search for it in your history - didn't find it, but would love to. I suppose you choose only the most ranked projects. However, early-stage developers need real, complex feedback. A few upvotes feel good for about five minutes, but a structured and impartial report is way more helpful. That's the kind of thing that can meaningfully change how you iterate. Hope you keep building this.
In the Windows 2000 era, you didn't need a product tour or a tooltip onboarding flow because the UI was self-documenting. If a feature existed, it was in the menu bar. If a shortcut existed, it was underlined.
Today, we’ve replaced functional density with clean whitespace. We hide essential features under hamburger menus and invisible long-presses to make the UI look good in a Dribbble shot, then we wonder why we have to spend millions on UX research to see if users can find the Settings button.
We’ve moved from User Interfaces to User Puzzles. We’re essentially forcing every user to learn a new language for every single app they open. It’s a massive, collective drain on global productivity, all for the sake of brand identity.
The "succeeds just enough to survive" framing is the most honest description of feature debt I've read. Failed experiments are easy to cut. It's the mediocre ones with just enough adoption that become politically impossible to remove.
If you can't name the specific user and the specific moment this feature is better than the alternative, it's not ready to ship.
Solid writeup and impressive experience. You can try Caddy instead of nginx. Automatic HTTPS, dead-simple config, and it proxies to your Go binary in about 4 lines. If you're still manually managing Let's Encrypt certs in 2026, stop. Caddyfile for a Go backend is literally: reverse_proxy localhost:8080 — that's the whole thing.
The issue is that AI doesn't understand human emotion or the way a crowd reacts to a sudden political shift. In the middle of a campaign, people change their minds based on the moment, and no matter how much data you feed it, a machine is always going to be a step behind when things actually start to heat up.
Posted by
arc_light on Thursday April 09, 2026 @09:15AM
from the show-hn dept.
https://thesquare.is/
In 1915 Malevich painted a black square and called it the zero point of art. Everything decorative, everything unnecessary — eliminated. Someone needed to do the same thing to the smartphone.The Square is that attempt.It's a PWA. You install it, pick a daily time, and when the notification arrives your screen becomes a black square with a timer. For one hour you don't touch the phone. If you...
This is so nice and original! You could easily pitch this to a watch brand to pick up the design and functionality.
Posted by
arc_light on Monday April 06, 2026 @11:29AM
from the thesquaremanifest.substack.com dept.
Thank you so much for the advice and the links. It’s incredibly encouraging—and honestly means a lot—to find people so willing to offer support and kind words when you're just starting out.
You’re right; the project is linked to the square. It’s deeply inspired by Suprematism and, naturally, Malevich’s Black Square. I’m planning to launch it next week, and I truly hope the story resonates with those who need it. For me, it’s always been more about the narrative and the philosophy than just the app itself.
If you’re interested, I’d love to share the link here once it’s officially live.
Posted by
arc_light on Friday April 03, 2026 @09:07AM
from the ask-hn dept.
I have a story and a product I believe in, but I’m struggling to find the right space for them. In such a hyper-tech world, I still can’t seem to find the right medium to share my message. Everywhere I try, it feels like I’m just talking to myself in an empty room.
loved the movie! very relevant now
Posted by
arc_light on Thursday April 02, 2026 @09:20AM
from the squaremanifest.bearblog.dev dept.