Hacker News Reader

etotheton Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

They had 8 people total: 3 founders (who is still there), 1 businessy/partner program person (who is still there) and 4 devs, 3 of which were laid off.

They now have 5 people total - 3 founders, the business person, and 1 other dev, which according to Adam’s podcast was the first dev they hired.

etotheton Let's call a murder a murder

You may be correct (and I hope you are), but speaking anecdotely, I have several friends & acquaintances on the right who justify pretty much any actions taken by the admnistration (including this one). Many of the supporters of this administration are religious zealots who see left wing thinking and people as just about the most evil thing out there. To them, the end (fewer “radical” left wing thinkers) justifies the means.

etotheton Tell HN: Merry Christmas

           *       
          /^\ 
         /* *\
        /+@o* \
       /o*+*o+*\
      /* @+*o@+*\
     /+*o*+@*o*+*\
    /@o+*o@+*o+@o*\
   /*+@o*+@*o+*o@+*\
  /o*+@o*+@o*+@o*+o*\
 /@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@\
          |||
          |||

etotheton Vibe coding creates fatigue?

I 100% agree. It's been incredible for velocity and the capabilities and accuracy of the models I've been (mostly from Anthropic) have improved immensely over the last few months.

etotheton Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free

I’ll start off by saying that the model Y is one of the best mid-level cars I’ve driven so the issues I mention below are worth the tradeoffs to me.

In my experience, Tesla navigation can be pretty bad when navigating my large urban city. During peak traffic times it often tries to send me down roads that are notoriously known for traffic backing up. Most times when I end up following those suggested routes, my ETA essentially becomes meaningless.

I’ve found Google, Waze, and Apple maps to be a lot better in this respect.

I do miss having CarPlay. That’s not to say I think the music integration you mentioned is bad, but I find the overall UI in my model Y to be a bit confusing - and the lower icons seem to sometimes randomly change from what I have them set as.

etotheton Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

From the article: "What I find really interesting about this change on Apple’s part is how it seemingly goes against their own previous human interface guidelines..."

Welcome to Apple of the last decade. As an avid user of many Apple products, this has been extremely frustrating to experience. Hopefully Alan Dye's departure will see at least partial return to obeying Apple's own HIG.

etotheton The "Mad Men" in 4K on HBO Max Debacle

On an Apple TV with first gen Homepods connected it is incredibly laggy. Specifically rewind and fast forward take sometimes up to 10 seconds to respond. And even then they never seem to get me to the correct location. It’s pretty maddening.

etotheton Homeschooling hits record numbers

I went public schools growing up and never imagined homeschooling as an option when I eventually had children of my own, but my kid was not the same in their school after the pandemic. Coupled with how ideologically focused the public schools in my state have become over the last few years, homeschooling them was an easy decision.

etotheton PHP 8.5

I’ve made my living amd career off of PHP and I enjoy its modernization.

Coding in PHP can be a lot like playing the guitar or writing poetry: many people can do it, but it’s easy to do very badly.

etotheton Honda: 2 years of ml vs 1 month of prompting - heres what we learned

This is exactly what Devin (https://devin.ai) is designed to do. Their deepwiki feature is free. I’ve personally had decent success with it, but YMMV.

etotheton Marko – A declarative, HTML‑based language

To each their own. This syntax actially resonates with some people, which is why template-based frameworks like Vue and Svelte are also popular. In fact, at first glance this reminds me a lot Vue in some of its approach and syntax.

BTW - with Vue you can use entirely JSX of you dislike HTML component syntax (I don’t know enough about Svelte to know if it allows the same).

etotheton Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

A cheaper Mac Mini? $599 for the entry level is a pretty great deal (assuming you view macOS and the ecosystem as a feature and not a bug).

Genuine question: is there a comparable Windows machine in a mini desktop form factor at a similar or lower price?

etotheton Why engineers can't be rational about programming languages

This is often the real driver in these decisions. A previous company I worked at had an API written in modern PHP with Laravel. Traffic wasn’t very heavy on most days and we could autoscale when it was required. It worked great and we hadn’t encountered business problems that couldn’t be fairly easily solved within the ecosystem. However, one of the execs on the business side knew some other exec at a big tech company who told our guy that “PHP can’t scale”. So then we get questions if we should we consider rewriting, if we’re using the “best” language for our needs, etc. They wanted to plan for some theoretical future that they couldn’t even define from a business sense.

Sure, it’s good to be aware of future business needs so that we, as technical people, can be asking the right questions to prepare for what that future may look like, but that almost never means a decision about language x over language y. It’s much deeper than that.

etotheton The AirPods Pro 3 flight problem

I recently went into an Apple store to try the new 3’s with my 2’s ready for a side-by-side comparison. I had heard mixed reviews about sound quality, fit, and the ANC. I was prepared to hear at best an incremental improvement, but boy was I surprised. To my ears, the sound stage is so much wider and the ANC is noticeably better. The fit is definitely different though and it took a bit of trial and error to get the correct size tips.

etotheton Armed police swarm student after AI mistakes bag of Doritos for a weapon

The corporate version of "It's a feature, not a bug."

etotheton Why the push for Agentic when models can barely follow a simple instruction?

It doesn’t “know” anything.

etotheton AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1

They have been pushing me and company extremely hard to vet their various AI-related offerings. When we decide to look into whatever service it is, we come away underwhelmed. It seems like their biggest selling point so far is “we’ll give it to you free for several months”. Not great.

etotheton AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1

Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.

It’s likely that, like many organizations, this scenario isn’t something Reddit are well prepared for in terms of correct error messaging.

etotheton Claude Skills

Not saying you’re wrong, but can you cite a couple of examples?

etotheton Claude Skills

I think this can’t be overstated and I see it my day-to-day working with developers on AI enablement.

If you are good a writing, documenting, planning? etc. - basically all the stuff in the SDLC that isn’t writing code, you’ll probably be much more effective at using LLMs for coding.

etotheton Claude Skills

These are good points and I generally agree with you.

My guess is that, as I understand it, Anthropic’s belief is that subagents are usually not the proper tool for most tasks. In their guides and videos about proper use of subagents, they seem to really try to steer you toward “workflows” rather than subagents.

Maybe it’s time they rethink the overall strategy so that each new concept doesn’t have to be its own distinct feature (skills, plugins, marketplaces, subagents, etc).

https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-effective-age...

etotheton Why the push for Agentic when models can barely follow a simple instruction?

I recommend you check out Andrej Karpathy’s 2 YouTube videos on how LLMs work (they are easy to find, but be forewarned they are long!). Once one digs in deeper it becomes clear why a model today might fail at the task you described.

Generally speaking, one of the behaviors I see in my day to day work leading engineers is that they often attempt to apply agentic coding tools to problema that don’t really benefit from them.

etotheton Vibe engineering

Hear, hear.

etotheton US companies replaced 40k+ US tech workers with H-1B visa holders: White House

Not relevant to the topic, but how do sites expect you to read articles like this on your phone when they have 50% of the screen taken up by ads, many of which slide onscreen as you scroll, covering part of the content you were reading? This is so intrusive I couldn’t finish reasing it.

I know they have to have some way to pay the bills, but does this technique really work where people get so frustrated they decide to subscribe rather than close the site like I did?

etotheton 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing – MIT report

https://archive.is/bdi7b

etotheton US AI Action Plan

The design of this website is horrendous. Poor information density, inconsistent vertical spacing, haphazard font choices, lists that aren’t lists, and more.

etotheton The $25k car is going extinct?

I recently needed to buy a car and my criteria was essentially I wanted least expensive new car on the market (I know I could have gone used but for this particular need I wanted a new car). The number of new vehicles that start under $20k is slim pickings. There are, what, maybe 3 in the US (if you don't count a couple that are discontinued)? And once you get into tax and title, you're going over $20k anyhow. Plus, with interest rates as they are, I don't know how the average person in Amercia affords a new vehicle these days.

etotheton Claude Code for VSCode

I’ve used Cursor a good deal and also CC. The CC JetBrain extension replaces my code in the IDE, shows me a preview ans allows me to confirm, decline, etc. Am I missing something super specific about Cursor’s behavior? It doesn’t seem that practically different to me.

etotheton Claude Code for VSCode

This is precisely what the CC extension does, no? At least that’s how the extension behaves in JetBrains IDEs.