recursivedoubts
recursivedoubts on Hacker News
Re:Why Don't We Live in an Art Nouveau World?
on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @09:25AM (#50352378)
Read from bauhaus to our house, by tom wolfe. In america we had the Arts & Crafts movement (e.g. greene & greene) as a native folk form.
It was all killed because two dynamics came together to push "the yale box": corporate america's love of cheap buildings (although the buildings are cheap to build but often nightmares to maintain and use... somebody else's problem) and the ideological purity spiraling post WW2 driven by the academic environment and the rise of abstract architectural criticism over the practical building arts.
post modernism acknowledged the failure of the yale box but, because going back to traditional building forms was unthinkable (of course), had to do ironic kitsch instead
Re:If you love a website, back it up
on Monday November 02, 2026 @11:20AM (#50339142)
one of the great tragedies of my life was when https://buthowdoitknow.com/ went offline, taking the visual emulator with it
i managed to reconstruct (and then improve) it with an LLM:
Re:Pi Is the Last Harness
on Sunday November 01, 2026 @10:40AM (#50326683)
this article is hyperbolic, but pi is very nice, if a little raw for people used to more professional commercial harnesses
i am vibing a harness extension on top of it for our students called catatui:
https://msu.github.io/catatui/
that works w/our free-for-students-and-staff internal models & provides some student-oriented features, and it has worked very well
Re:AI Isn't Replacing SREs. It's Deskilling Them
on Friday October 30, 2026 @01:01PM (#50306793)
if you want a vision of the future, winston, imagine 'X isn't Y, it's Z'... forever
Re:Mossad Has Devices Like the Exploding Pagers in "Every Country You ...
on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @03:52PM (#50264811)
Daily reminder that President Trump was given a golden pager:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/pms-office-confirms-netanyahu-...
Re:
on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @06:26PM (#50173538)
"It's gotta be in my interests, I guess.... its not" --Value Select
Re:Maybe There Was an Egg Cartel After All
on Monday October 19, 2026 @11:11AM (#50153447)
There are two types of advocates for efficient markets: the true believers & the people who manipulate markets. The latter create and fund institutes & academic departments stocked with the former to convince and/or intimidate moderately educated people into disbelieving their lyin' eyes.
Re:Gen Z Is the First Generation Dumber Than Their Parents
on Sunday October 18, 2026 @10:50AM (#50141591)
And, sometimes, they are right.
Re:Now That Information Is Free, What's a College Campus For?
on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @12:07PM (#50073969)
I wrote an essay on this:
https://htmx.org/essays/universities-and-ai/
The primary business value of a university will likely be signaling competence which, ironically, they are in a good position to establish with old school infrastructure like pen-on-paper tests.
The primary social value of a university will be providing a stimulating intellectual environment, which they should get back to doing.
Re:Sorry we made you grind LeetCode
on Monday October 12, 2026 @01:09AM (#50051611)
Continue to pray to Yellowstone. Concentrate on the magma chamber. We can end it here. We can end it for all time.
I think the first thing to do is to recognize the need for forming connections and start working on the skills that foster those. Technical people tend to not be great at softer people skills & communication, so that's something you can start working on. I advise against just starting to reach out to people, that isn't effective usually, but to start working on the skills necessary and start looking for the situations you have access to that do foster connections.
Also, when you are on the other side, recognize that offering connections to unconnected people is a wonderful act of charity.
I'm not sure this is more significant than the industrial revolution, but it is certainly faster. I am withholding judgement until we start to see real world changes beyond symbol manipulation.
I agree there is little moat around code qua code now. I'm not sure that means there will be fewer coders, because the people in the best position to take advantage of this new technology are... coders.
I again agree that code qua code is becoming less valuable, but I think that ironically _understanding_ code (and systems) is going up in value. Complexity still grows super-linearly and so judicious technical decisions will need to be made.
I strongly agree with your last point and I am advocating for a "+CS" track here at Montana State, where non-CS majors can learn enough practical CS to be productive and then excel in their own major. I'm speculating a 3-4 class track with AI/vibe coding as part of it.
Hello all, I wrote this article to help students considering CS as a major.
My own son has just started university studying CS, so I have skin in this game.
I continue to believe in what I've said in this article despite being startled (like most people) by the advances in AI recently.
One thing that I have noticed since writing this article is that the most effective vibe coders are already excellent developers, which I think is in keeping with the themes I discuss here. While I do expect the amount of hand-written code to decline, I think that knowing how code (and technical systems) work is going to continue to be valuable and perhaps even more valuable. I have no crystal ball, but that's what I'm seeing right now.
Re:Car is a smartphone on wheels. Here's who's listening
on Sunday October 04, 2026 @08:25PM (#49959416)
Re:Car is a smartphone on wheels. Here's who's listening
on Sunday October 04, 2026 @08:21PM (#49959390)
You trust car makers to get that right?
You trust state actors to not force them to not get it right?
Re:Car is a smartphone on wheels. Here's who's listening
on Sunday October 04, 2026 @12:16PM (#49955216)
It has been demonstrated repeatedly that modern cars can be remotely hijacked and controlled as well. We really do live in a dystopia.
Re:Writing code by hand is over, forever
on Saturday October 03, 2026 @07:25PM (#49948791)
If you never write the code, you'll never be able to read the code effectively. Also, you will not pick up the ability to reason algorithmically. This is why I tell students that they must write the code in my classes:
https://htmx.org/essays/yes-and/
Leaving aside the power you are giving to the AI companies by entirely giving up on coding. I say this as someone who uses AI extensively, if ambivalently.
Re:Netanyahu claims ability to hack any iPhone and plant false evidence
on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @12:41PM (#49896190)
OK, cool, so did we just eliminate the possibility of using iPhone evidence in any case involving shadow-of-a-doubt?
Re:"They had no concept of a duty of care to their users."
on Sunday September 27, 2026 @11:19AM (#49867410)
They are open source developers, giving away free software as a gift. There is no duty here.
We can speak, respectfully, of how important backwards compatibility is to us, and ask nicely for them to give more of their time to support it when their free sodftware isn't backwards compatible. Perhaps we can even offer to help implement it.
But they have no duty to do so or to "care" for their users. (They have already demonstrated they care for their users, btw, by giving them free software.)
EDIT: I missed an important part of the story, which is that they mutated existing files in a non-backwards compatible manner. That should have been avoided, I understand where the (secondary) author is coming from now.
Re:Socialism's Positive Rating Tops 40% for First Time
on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @12:39PM (#49818767)
Georgism and social credit (canadian, not chinese) are two ideas that the elites better start considering unless they want france 1789 vibes again.
As I say to my left-leaning friends: hey, you know what we should socialize? The money supply. (My right-leaning friends aren't ready for that conversation yet.)
Re:The darker side of being a doctor
on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @09:14AM (#49815599)
Thank you.
Re:Markdown in /src
on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @08:19PM (#49810030)
Hi there. I wrote this as a bit of speculation since I'm seeing more and more agent based coding in my consulting.
One thing to say given some of the comments here: in this approach the stuff in /src/md would be treated as well as stuff in /src/java or whatever: it would need to be maintained as precisely as possible, not just be a stream of development record of what has happened.
I'm also happy to consider that Markdown might not be the right format for this, or that the whole thing is a terrible idea. But I see people saving content in other places (linear, etc.) that drive agents and it just seems like maybe we should keep that stuff close to the generated source.
Re:Ray Ozzie and the Optimism of Being Early
on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @03:51PM (#49807143)
Thank you!
Re:What Capital Never Told You About Rent
on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @12:41PM (#49804118)
No, the theory was based on the idea that money is sterile: it does not in and of itself produce anything, whereas the economy is productive. They were generally not sophisticated enough to understand the exponential curve of compound interest which is obviously incompatible with a finite economy, but long experience showed them that usury lead to wealth concentration and eventual collapse.
Unfortunately today usury is so endemic that people can't see any other way of living, even though debt-free publically issued money is an obvious possible solution to many issues we face today. See social credit (canadian, not chinese)
Re:Ray Ozzie and the Optimism of Being Early
on Saturday September 19, 2026 @09:54AM (#49766625)
why is there no scroll bar in this article?
Re:Most people prefer traditional architecture
on Tuesday September 15, 2026 @02:34PM (#49716809)
We are too rich to be able to afford things like Sears Roebuck houses now.
Re:Tailwind Labs is joining Shopify
on Wednesday September 09, 2026 @09:32AM (#49626265)
It is an age of consolidation.
Re:Ironies of Automation [pdf]
on Saturday September 05, 2026 @03:16PM (#49579725)
This 1983 paper on ironies of manufacturing engineering was referred to me on twitter, and I think it makes many excellent observations that apply to post-AI coding, e.g.:
> By taking away the easy parts of his task, automation can make the difficult parts of the human operator's task more difficult. Several writers (Wiener and Curry, 1980; Rouse, 1981) point out that the 'Fitts list' approach to automation, assigning to man and machine the tasks they are best at, is no longer sufficient. It does not consider the integration of man and computer, nor how to maintain the effectiveness of the human operator by supporting his skills and motivation.
Re:Bob and Van
on Saturday September 05, 2026 @02:57PM (#49579557)
I intentionally try to foster friendships with all sort of different people with obviously different political positions. Many of them are very far left and very far right and very far in a third direction i have trouble articulating, in ways that would shock most normal people.
What I have found is that, accepting the inevitable human flaws that we are all prone to, they are all pretty good folks.