News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

biql

Re:Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX on Saturday August 29, 2026 @12:50PM (#49491375)
One thing I see is design often getting worse, tasteless, how small but important details are just not thought out.
Re:Is it all just vapourware? on Sunday August 09, 2026 @06:32PM (#49236874)
> I regularly see people claim that they are now 10x more productive with LLM code generation, and I just wonder where all the code is.

Perhaps the biggest issue hasn't been the speed of development all along but people working on wrong things, hence why progress isn't as evident. LLM helping to build something that isn't needed faster isn't going to productivity more visible.

Re:Home alone: Remote work, isolation, and mental health on Saturday June 06, 2026 @07:07PM (#48429964)
The difference is in office work it happens by inertia whereas socializing outside requires practicing agency.
Re:AI agents are starting to eat SaaS on Monday December 15, 2025 @09:53AM (#46275285)
There are already plenty of SaaS that offer open source version as a way to push to the cloud and charge for hosting, maintenance, support and some extra features. In that way, a working code have already been commoditized and those companies didn't disappear.
Re:Vibe coding is mad depressing on Thursday December 11, 2025 @01:30AM (#46228311)
This. First I try it just a little to do a boring part. It feels great. The boring part that was holding me is gone and all it took was a little instruction. The dopamine hit is real. So of course I will try it again. But not so fast. It needs to be corrected to make everything aligned with the architecture. And as my requests get bigger, it needs more and more corrections. Eventually correcting everything becomes too tedious, and accepting is just too easy, and so I lower my standards, and soon enough lose track of all the decisions. The branch is now useless as I don't want to debug or own this code I no longer understand hence I start over. I want work to felt like a training session where you get fairly rewarded for your efforts with better understanding, not like a slot machine where you passively hope it gets it right next time.
Re:Cloudflare is down on Friday December 05, 2025 @04:12AM (#46158656)
How about: internet that is actually decentralized.
Re:The IDEs we had 30 years ago ... and we lost on Sunday October 19, 2025 @07:12AM (#45633435)
I had to use Borland when studying but never really liked it. Later I tried Notepad+ with console for the first time and everything clicked. There is a console for compiling and running and there is a text editor for editing. It was the flow that made sense.
Database is one of those places where it's justified, I think. Application containers do not need the same level of care hence are easy to run yourself.
Re:Why I Chose Elixir Phoenix over Rails, Laravel, and Next.js on Thursday October 16, 2025 @01:54PM (#45608560)
Just curious, what libraries did you miss in particular compared to Go?
Re:I almost got hacked by a 'job interview' on Wednesday October 15, 2025 @07:46PM (#45599775)
Not sure about windows but I solved it for myself with basic provisioning script (could be an ansible playbook also) that installs everything on a fresh linux vm in a few minutes. For macos, there is tart vm that works well with arm64 (very little overhead compared to alternatives). Could be a rented cloud vm in a nearby location with low latency. Being a neovim user also helped not to having to worry about file sync when editing.
With such constraints, it should also be possible to compile it into a native binary, and then it is very similar Crystal.
Re:Ruby's official documentation just got a new look on Sunday August 25, 2024 @04:18AM (#41345511)
Sadly, the typography looks too neglected for the time when there is such an abundance of templates and fonts.
Sounds like social coaching has all the attributes of an untapped business niche. The question is, if there is just a obvious pain, why there is such a shortage of solutions. I think it could be because of the stigma associated with this issue or because people affect by it lack genuine interest in solutions as people are usually happy to pay for all kinds of self-improvements.
I think it needs to know every conversation that happened in the company to provide meaningful feedback that is above generic coding suggestions. But then it makes onboarding new people and getting them familiar with the project much easier. Businesses will have a lot of incentives to do that.
Re:Tests Are Bad for Developers on Sunday November 05, 2023 @03:40PM (#38155441)
So they lie about estimates because they afraid to miss their chance to delivery buggy mess. But doesn't it do more harm to the reputation in the long term?
Trying Gleam that also runs on Erlang VM but has static types, a fast compiler with Rust-style elaborate error messages made me hopeful about how much nicer this experience can be when static types are added to Elixir too.
Re:Natural language is an unnatural interface on Tuesday June 27, 2023 @11:25PM (#36501889)
Exactly. It doesn't need extra buttons in the UI, it needs a giant context window to contain all the important info about your life or a business and the tools for gathering and maintaining that context. Then merely saying that you are seek becomes enough to autocomplete the rest of the actions including sending an email.
This is my thinking too, yet for some reason, 90% of job desciptions insist the candidate has N years of experience with M stack. As if someone who was building websites with Rails for 10 years is somehow not qualified for building the same websites with Symphony.
There should be a standard way for all browsers to tell sites whether they accept cookies or not. There is no reason every user should deal with this banner manually for all sites.
I really don't want to create a habit of talking in a dry and somewhat commanding manner and have it slip into regular life.
I think it's possible that in the end, AI will make everyone wealthier nevertheless. Just like people today posses the level of conveniences unimaginable to the elites of the past, in the form of smartphones, global delivery, cheap flights, instant access to information, etc. Being able to afford an unlimited, available 24/7 health-related consultation for $20/mo is also wealth and so is being able to single-handedly create an app that would otherwise require a team of 10.

Also, it seems to be that information that is helpful just doesn't like to be contained. Comparing with StackOverflow, its popularity didn't make developers less likely to participate in the community. Instead it made programming more approachable to a much larger pool of people and more software were created, which made our life easier. If something is intended to be used only for consumption (media) it tend to say closed. But if something can become a building block for others, people generally seem to want it to spread.

Re:Smol Developer on Wednesday May 17, 2023 @04:55AM (#35972766)
As someone who considered giving up on programming due to wrist pain from typing, this is my dream as well. I also prefer to work independently or in small teams, and the amount of things that could be tackled this way is surely increasing. There is no reason why programming shouldn't to be more about thinking and less about typing.
Re:The Leverage of LLMs for Individuals on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @09:09AM (#35886812)
I see limited context and the lack of sandbox dev environment is the main obstacle on way to have more sophisticated usage and faster feedback loop. The value would be greater if it could know everything about the code base, business requirements, related documentation, and, it could even avoid a lot mistakes by simple running type checks and the tests and correct itself before giving the answer.
They do help with promotion by giving "top rated" and "raising talent" badges and work history. Hard to say how much value and leverage it really gives and whether it worths all the downsides.
I wonder if the lack of libraries in a new language is just a few ChatGPT-integrations away. After all, Crystal is so similar to Ruby. I bet as soon as context/environment aware ChatGPT tools/agents that can compile / run tests / apply fixes until it works are available, this will become the reality: "Create this Ruby library but for Crystal" and in a few hours you can include it in your Crystal project.
Next realisation: publishing ChatGPT generated content became useless because people use ChatGPT instead of search.
Re:Coding Jobs and GPT-4 on Thursday April 13, 2023 @02:40PM (#35560083)
Writing code is one thing, owning it and having responsibility is another. But can we build tooling for this to on top of LLM too? This won't happen overnight but it will certainly happen gradually, I don't see why not. By owning it, I mean, upgrading libraries, fixing bugs, writing tests, running tests, fixing tests, and maybe even adding features.

It's totally possible to make LLM write actually good code that can be maintained using normal software engineering practices.

Of course there will still be a need for a human touch, such as knowing limitations of LLM and possible workarounds and understanding business requirements.

Re:I’ve been single all my life on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @08:13PM (#35549011)
Travelling changed the perspective so much of me, I realised that a lot of things I was hesitant to do or even thinking was directed by the unpalatable attachment to the static environment.
Re:I wish GPT4 had never happened on Monday April 10, 2023 @01:39PM (#35514961)
Imagine the world where everything is fully automated. You arrive at a city, order a self-driving taxi, do a self-check-in at the hotel that is managed by robots, order a food that is cooked by robots, using ingredients delivered by robots, grown in farms managed by robots. The hotel itself was 3d printed and the city district was planned by an AI algorithm optimised for economic utility. How many iterations are there before this is the reality? It would probably take a century before something like this is the norm.
Re:OK, it’s time to freak out about AI on Thursday March 16, 2023 @10:17PM (#35192055)
It's the power that is scary, the power that you cannot control. It changes the balance completely. With AGI, humans are no longer in charge, therefore are irrelevant.

Older »