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ibash

883 karma · joined May 19, 2013

islam.sharabash@gmail.com
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ibash··on New Withings Users Must Pay $99/Year for Apple Health Syncing
I bought a bodyfit scale in September and rely on Apple health syncing for syncing to a nutrition app. I’m grandfathered in, but this means I can’t share the scale with family and have it sync. So going to try and return it. Sucks because it was the closest in body fat to my dexa scan.
ibash··on Why don't more developers “use the platform”?
I feel like it’s a historical accident. In the past the platform couldn’t do it all, and if you wanted a dialog you had to use a library. Developers were trained to reach for libraries when they needed something like a dialog.

Then react came along and all developed learning web development after react had little to no knowledge of the platform. They were taught that touching the DOM was a bad thing to do.

That’s about it. Even now when I advocate for vanilla css I get the side eye and “tailwind and shadcn should be the default”. I get it, it’s what most people are familiar with, even if it’s worse than the platform.

ibash··on Unreal Agent
I think you nailed it. I have my own agent harness that's designed with inspiration from erlang/elixir. It seems to be a natural fit for indeterministic output and failures.
ibash··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)
I just tried to install this and got the message: "This application requires iOS 26.0 or later."

I'm an iOS 18 holdout, any chance of a backwards compatible app?

ibash··on macOS needs its grid back
That’s one framing, here’s another:

The next CEO of Apple is someone that cares about quality. (As evidenced by how good the hardware is)

ibash··on Energy return in running shoes explained (2025)
Feel free to keep trying shoe models until you find the right one. It took me 25 pairs of shoes from amazon to find one that fit right (mizuno wave rider in wide).

Running shoes are converging on two designs: maximalist shoes with a long foam and a narrow foot, or “barefoot” shoes. Which means it’s harder than ever to find something that fits if neither of those work well for you.

ibash··on Obsidian plugin was abused to deploy a remote access trojan
lol we told you plugins were insecure years ago. I distinctly remember getting flamed in your discord because I said that they had full disk access. Too little too late.
ibash··on Anthropic installed a spyware bridge on my machine?
No, it’s more like “installing software installs files on the system”.

That’s not new by any means. It’s no different than zoom installing a native audio plugin for the os, or other software creating files on the system.

ibash··on Anthropic installed a spyware bridge on my machine?
That’s not spyware, that’s just how native messaging is designed to work. You have to put a manifest there if you want the native messaging to work later.
ibash··on Whats Up with Claude Lately?
Aha! Same for me. A telling sign to me is it will take him 2-3 turns of “that’s not right” before he’ll say “let me do this properly…” and do what I original requested.
ibash··on Very Important People
It’s not celebrity worship, it’s trying to show the absurdity of celebrity worship.
ibash··on Claude Advanced Tool Use
Better than rest is a low bar though. Ultimately agents should rarely be calling raw rest and graphql apis, which are meant for programmatic use.

Agents should be calling one level of abstraction higher.

Eg calling a function to “find me relevant events in this city according to this users preferences” instead of “list all events in this city”.

ibash··on Do not put your site behind Cloudflare if you don't need to
Kamal + cloudflare tunnel is a neat setup.
ibash··on Alchemy
AI is having the same effect on art as the iPhone did on photography.

There’s a lot more photos now, most of them mediocre, but some exceptional.

It does become harder to filter great photography from noise.

ibash··on Collaboration sucks
Except, they have one person in the ear. Not 4-5, not people giving opposite opinions, not drive by takes.

By the time a race engineer is communicating with a driver all of that has been shaken out. Specific concrete options are given to the driver, and usually only one.

ibash··on Most Americans say 'Arabic numerals' should not be taught in school (2019)
This is one of those meaningless trivia questions.

Its not bigotry nor is it clever. It’s just word play.

ibash··on US may cut air traffic 10% by Friday without shutdown deal, sources say
This is very French!
ibash··on Ask HN: What's the best way to build agents in Oct 2025
Pydantic ai is pretty good. There were some growing pains as it moved towards 1.0, but going forward the API should be mostly stable.

It does have slightly more complexity than I’d like, but most of the design decisions are sound and the code is easy to read.

ibash··on Composer: Building a fast frontier model with RL
Very cool, congrats!
ibash··on UIs Are Not Pure Functions of the Model – React.js and Cocoa Side by Side (2018)
Influencer marketing is a big part of the problem here.

The best practices engineering influencers shill are geared towards shipping a todo list quickly, and no thought is given towards maintainability.

ibash··on UIs Are Not Pure Functions of the Model – React.js and Cocoa Side by Side (2018)
But if you advocate for this now, newer engineers think you’re doing it wrong.
ibash··on Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k
The thing is the prices are all made up anyway. The hospital hallucinates prices, so they don’t blink an eye when an llm does the same.
ibash··on Journalists turn in access badges, exit Pentagon rather than agreeing new rules
Because it's interesting. We don't need to censor everything.
ibash··on What is “good taste” in software engineering?
I disagree. The ability of someone to read code doesn't grow exponentially, after a few years of experience everyone hits the same plateau. More years of experience does not mean you can understand more complex code.

That is to say, if you target "readable to the majority of engineers with 3-4 years of experience, without them getting confused" then you've hit the mark.

ibash··on Less is safer: Reducing the risk of supply chain attacks
> Obsidian plugins have full, unrestricted access to all files in the vault.

Unless something has changed, it's worse than that. Plugins have unrestricted access to any file on your machine.

When I brought this up in discord a while back they brushed it aside.

ibash··on React is winning by default and slowing innovation
Disagree. Hooks took one problem and reshaped it, they didn’t actually solve the problem.

With hooks you still need to think about lifecycle, side effects, and state, but the syntax changes.

The real solution is overall application design and thinking through architecture, but unfortunately that’s higher effort than “just use hooks bro”.

ibash··on AI for Coding: Why Most Developers Are Getting It Wrong
That’s not quite right.

The tools are going to get better, and it’s going to lift everyone while doing so. But it will vary across task.

The bottom tier of engineers will have improvements to their code.

The top engineers will move faster. Top engineers will still be great at what they do.

—-

The same thing is happening in music. Everyone gets lifted but on different dimensions.

ibash··on AI for Coding: Why Most Developers Are Getting It Wrong
I don’t think it’s a craft thing, I think it’s a speed thing. Senior engineers are faster in their existing workflows.

I’ve found ai tools most valuable for:

1. Quick “how to do x in y” language

2. Large scale refactorings that are mostly mechanical.

This still takes a bit of guidance to get the right output (and breaking down the refactoring an into multiple steps). But it does speed things up when I would touch 40-some files. I still review all the code.

ibash··on DaisyUI: Tailwind CSS Components
The evolution of the tailwind enthusiast is almost complete. Soon they’ll rejoin the old heads who never liked tailwind.
ibash··on Ask HN: What is the best way to learn 3D modeling for 3D printing?
Use onshape, it’s so much nicer to use something browser based than desktop based. If you’re a student it’s free.

Watch 2-3 onshape tutorial videos and then just dive in trying to make parts for yourself.

If you’re new to 3d printing you’ll soon learn that what you design doesn’t always print right. Welcome to creating things in the real world. This is part of the learning experience (and why you need to learn by doing).

Onshape also has a bunch of public cad designs, so you can look at how other people made things to learn (sort of like reading source code to learn).

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