piratesAndSons

Recently they began showing a download-our-app ad at the top of the site, and it made me wonder: is the website going away soon? Wikipedia was a fixture of the Web 2.0 era, but now websites are changing.Chatbots are taking massive traffic from websites. Young people don’t like reading text; they prefer watching videos and listening to podcasts. Websites are seen as the old way of doing things,...

I sometimes read Show HN, and there is literally no creativity at all: note-taker app after note-taker clone. Everyone is essentially looking at what’s already there, and they say, “Why can’t I create the exact same product, but worse, and add an AI suffix?”There is nothing creative about AI. Show HN might as well be renamed “Prompt HN.” These promoters always say, “Prompting makes me...

As developing software as a skill becomes like flipping burgers in a fast food company, is building hardware for evergreen industries like military and healthcare the only escape for actual engineers, not prompters?Sure, it would be a lot more expensive to bring a product to market and sell, and more likely for a product to fail because of the long sale period. But at least you have a natural...

How hopeful are you for the future? For me, everything seems bleak. The AI owners and their parasitic nature show no sign of stopping — they're grinding working people to dust, relegating us to a state of penury. AI spy glasses and cameras are multiplying in every inch of this land, collecting anything and everything to identify you, whether to sell you something or to feed some policing...

Marketing engineer for marketing people, design engineer for designers, sanitation engineer for janitors — so by that logic, cashier engineer would be next for the people who ring you up at checkout. What is up with this title inflation? Why call yourself an engineer just because you write software? To me, engineers are people who build things and take full responsibility for them — designing a...

In recent weeks, I have noticed a lot of tech companies announcing layoffs due to AI. As this continues, when will you be concerned?Microsoft laying off 10% of their workforce, 15%, 20%, 30%? Google laying off 10%, 15%, 20%, or more?HN readers like to use the cope of "it's just pandemic over-hiring" — when do you think that explanation will no longer hold?When will you say: "Now it has nothing...

It us practically nothing but ai slop

A lot of programmers I read here and elsewhere say LLM isn't going to change much, some say LLM is just going to make them more productive, and some even say not using LLM makes you some sort of relic. What is not debated is that LLM has changed our industry. Programming is a lot more accessible to a lot more people than five years ago. Someone who has never coded anything could sit in front of...

In programming and software, as LLMs become increasingly common, I'm seeing a lot more of the "I don't care how a software product is built, just give me the result" attitude, and then there are people who say they care more about the creativity, the ingenuity, the craft of reaching a specific result. For them, the journey itself is the reward, not the destination.So is this type of person rare...

I always find this statement stupid and nonsensical. The entire point of why freedom of speech was created is to manage consequences from speech. That is the raison d'être of freedom of speech.It is like saying: just because you wore a high quality parachute does not mean you managed gravity. The entire point of a parachute, para (alongside) plus chute (to slide through), is to manage gravity...

I had an idea to eliminate the bot problem, or at the very least make it significantly harder to operate one. Here is my plan.A new web browser built on a new HTTP protocol that accepts a human identity glove using cryptography. Instead of using your fingers directly on a mouse or trackpad, you wear a hardware glove that continuously records your pulse and your fingerprint, your machine...

In recent years, government ID requirements to browse the internet have suddenly become more common. To understand who might be pushing this, consider the following question.Suppose you woke up in the year 2035 and every HTTP request required a valid government ID to accompany it. Without it, you could not view the web document. In that world, who would benefit? What kinds of businesses would...

In recent days, Anthropic and the Department of War have been having a back-and-forth war of words. What surprises me is the people who support Anthropic. Did you forget how scummy this company is? How they violated the copyrights of hundreds, if not thousands, of authors— the vast majority of whom rely on that work for their income?Even if you don’t care about the copyrights of authors, this...

One of the most popular pieces of advice in tech is, before you build a product and release it to the public, talk to people.What do they mean exactly?I think this advice is one of those things people repeat because at the surface level it makes sense. You have a solution for a problem, so find those who have the problem. But when you think about it, it does not make any sense. It is more like...

As software development becomes a commodity thanks to LLM, I wonder why more software developers don't switch to building medical devices to make their careers more secure. Here's why I picked medical devices in particular.1. Natural MoatSince human body hardware is more or less immutable in its most essential parts, you don't have to worry about some LLM hype cycle replacing you. Once you...

It seems to me that Show HN is filled with low-effort see-what-I-prompted-Claude posts—no innovation, no real creation, just yet another copy of a copy. If you’re going to prompt an LLM, at least come up with something original, not the millionth text editor.

As LLM-assisted tools become more popular in programming, have you noticed cloud outages becoming more common? Or am I just noticing it because I’m looking for a pattern?If my theory is correct—if kids nowadays rely on these third-party "coding assistants" and older, legacy programmers retire—could we face a COBOL-like problem again, only worse, now that fewer people know how to write code...

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I am currently working on a small blog built with Flask and Python (community size under 10k). To manage spam, I am considering adopting a policy similar to Hacker News by not allowing users to delete their submissions after a specific period. This approach obviously has pros and cons. However, in the age of AI-generated spam and content scraping by LLM-based tools, freezing submissions might...

As their revenue dwindles due to new technology—such as email reducing the number of letters sent—and increased competition from other shipping companies, I think the USPS needs to enter the payment processing business. Instead of relying on thousands of middlemen like PayPal, Stripe, and similar services, USPS would be a far more reliable and trustworthy option for legal businesses. The fees...

I've noticed people have a low opinion of people who are in military-related work. I know the obvious reason is that the military tends to involve killing sometimes, but that's not what they do all the time. For example, the USA military also has a lot of programs for food distribution, girls' education, and preserving human rights for minorities in all the places the USA was involved...