dugmartin

I have my own review skill (I think it predates when Claude added theirs) and one thing I'd add to your description is tell it to examine all the code and then, based on the changes, do a multi-role review of the code again using the most appropriate N of the following roles based on the changes: ... (where ... is a long list I have like Senior Engineer, Security Engineer, WCAG specialist, etc). Claude will spawn those reviews in parallel and then consolidate the feedback. I do spec based development so I just have my skill append the issues to the spec so I have a trail of issues and decisions.

I'm curious what it is going to find in my 10 year old Elixir codebase (still in active production use).

I've found a mix of peppered in upper case words where you are effectively yelling at the LLM also gives it a strong signal. It is also a bit cathartic.

I miss pre-COVID prices. Our local diner is now $20+ for a simple breakfast (eggs, toast, bacon, coffee/tea) for two people. Pre-COVID is was ~$10 with tip.

I've heard the rule of thumb in a well run restaurant business is 30/30/30/10:

    1. 30% food costs
    2. 30% labor costs
    3. 30% overhead
    4. 10% profit margin

Its hard to express what it was like in the early/mid-80s (before I had my drivers licence) to bike a few miles to the bookstore at the start of every month and see all the new computer magazine covers for that month. It was so exciting.

I didn't have much money so I stuck with Micro Cornucopia as it had the biggest signal to noise ratio (and before that Rainbow Magazine). I did pickup Computer Shopper later when I started building/rebuilding my mini-tower every few months.

While I'm glad I have the world's information one web page away now I feel like something has been lost.

JWZ is still blocking traffic from HN so you can't click to read this but you can copy/paste it into a new tab or open it in a incognito window:

https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

It is available here:

https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/acli/guides/introducti...

It has a pretty discoverable cli syntax (at least for Claude). I use it in my custom skills to pull Jira story info when creating and reviewing specs.

No, it was just there were no PM filters.

I grew up in small town Midwest and have now lived in tiny town New England for 20+ years. It still bothers me that folks here in New England won’t even acknowledge you on the sidewalk as you pass each other whereas in the Midwest that is a good excuse for a conversation. They haven’t worn me down though, I still say hello at least to each person as I pass and maybe get a mumble back 50% of the time.

Eons ago I developed a site+Windows app called 24Link (I know, horrible name) that let you run a tiny ~50KB web server in your taskbar and point it as a folder on your machine. If you visited 24link.com/{username} you would get a full page iframe that pointed at your IP:port hosting the 24Link webserver and/or a not available message if the app heartbeat failed. It quickly got to around 50K users and I thought with the then inevitable switchover to ipv6 everyone could run it. Alas both 24Link and ipv6 failed to break out but I think something in that vein could still work.

You should look up the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

(Full disclosure - I had to look up the name after remembering it portrayed in the movie Gandhi)

I need Claude to review my HN comments.

I have 30+ years of industry experience and I've been leaning heavily into spec driven development at work and it is a game changer. I love programming and now I get to program at one level higher: the spec.

I spend hours on a spec, working with Claude Code to first generate and iterate on all the requirements, going over the requirements using self-reviews in Claude first using Opus 4.5 and then CoPilot using GPT-5.2. The self-reviews are prompts to review the spec using all the roles and perspectives it thinks are appropriate. This self review process is critical and really polishes the requirements (I normally run 7-8 rounds of self-review).

Once the requirements are polished and any questions answered by stakeholders I use Claude Code again to create a extremely detailed and phased implementation plan with full code, again all in the spec (using a new file is the requirements doc is so large is fills the context window). The implementation plan then goes though the same multi-round self review using two models to polish (again, 7 or 8 rounds), finalized with a review by me.

The result? I can then tell Claude Code to implement the plan and it is usually done in 20 minutes. I've delivered major features using this process with zero changes in acceptance testing.

What is funny is that everything old is new again. When I started in industry I worked in defense contracting, working on the project to build the "black box" for the F-22. When I joined the team they were already a year into the spec writing process with zero code produced and they had (iirc) another year on the schedule for the spec. At my third job I found a literal shelf containing multiple binders that laid out the spec for a mainframe hosted publishing application written in the 1970s.

Looking back I've come to realize the agile movement, which was a backlash against this kind of heavy waterfall process I experienced at the start of my career, was basically an attempt to "vibe code" the overall system design. At least for me AI assisted mini-waterfall ("augmented cascade"?) seems a path back to producing better quality software that doesn't suffer from the agile "oh, I didn't think of that".

We have a small local company that takes bulk book (and cds, dvds, video games, vinyl records) donations. That company has couple of retail used bookstores and also sells both retail and wholesale online but, according to their owner, most of what they get is sold for pulp.

My wife is an elementary school reading teacher and runs a yearly family book night where she takes book donations she gets all year and fills a bunch of portable tables in the gym with kids (and adult) books that are free for the taking. What is left over is taken (by me) to that local company and dumped in huge bins. If you are looking to get rid of a bunch of books I'd also suggest contacting your local schools to see if they take donations.

I think as ai tools actually learn languages that functional languages will win out as they are much easier to reason about.

They got it for cheap. AOL paid $165 billion for Time Warner in 2000. Is Netflix the next AOL?

Remember the old Bjarne Stroustrup quote: "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses."

I forgot where I read it (Steve McConnell?) but the best analogy I've heard for a boss/project leader is to think of your job is moving a house and the bosses job is to be a few streets ahead taking down telephone pole wires so you aren't slowed down.

I agree. There are lots of free AstroJS themes for restaurants that generate static html that you can host somewhere like Firebase hosting for free.

- https://astro.build/themes/details/astropie/

- https://astro.build/themes/details/astrorante/

- https://astro.build/themes/details/tastyyy-restaurant-websit...

Not biblical references but rather Elmer Fudd.

Bugs Bunny called Elmer Fudd "Nimrod" in a 1940's cartoon to sarcastically refer to Elmer as a great hunter. At that time I think most people probably got the biblical reference. Over time that word morphed into meaning something like an idiot to most Americans due to that cartoon.

The same thing happened to the word "Acme" - the coyote in the road runner cartoons bought all his devices from the "Acme Corporation". Acme means the best/peak and it was a sarcastic reference to none of the gadgets ever working. Now most American's think Acme means generic/bad.

They should have kept the name as Nimrod and named the package manager Acme instead of Nimble.

If you are into podcasts Steve McConnell (the author) was a guest a couple of months ago on the pragmatic engineer podcast. My one take away from that podcast was just how young and new in his career he was when he wrote that book.

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/code-complete-wit...

Slower and unstable. I spent a lot of my freshman year in college on Bitnet chat and iirc about every 30 minutes there would be a "netsplit" and a bunch of folks in the chat would disappear. Maybe it was our universities connection, which I think was direct to UIUC. I've posted here before that back then I thought Bitnet chat was magical. Things like being in a chat room with students in Berlin while the wall was falling felt so futuristic to me.

I know this was a joke:

   <div id="root"></div>
   <script src="bundle.js"></script>

   <main>...</main>

I started around the same time. No unit tests but we did have code reviews because of ISO 9001 requirements. That meant printing out the diffs on the laser printer and corralling 3 people into a meeting room to pour over them and then have them literally sign off on the change. This was for an RTOS that ran big industrial controls in things like steel plants and offshore oil rigs.

Project management was a 40 foot Gantt chart printed out on laser printer paper and taped to the wall. The sweet sound of waterfall.

A doctor in my little town created his own open source EMR software in FileMaker:

https://cottagemed.org/p/24/Cottage-Med

His practice also accepts payment in the form of barter: https://cottagemed.org/p/15/About-Our-Practice

You should also remove any students from classrooms whom routinely distract from others' learning.

You can't do this without getting sued (at least in Massachusetts). Source: my wife is a long-time elementary school teacher and my daughter works as a one-on-one aide while she is getting her teaching degree.

I don't want to start of flamewar but the current "push in" model created by educational bureaucrats creates a classroom environment that caters to the "timesinks". When you have a good chunk of the class on IEPs (individual education plans) that must be followed by law the "high flyers" (gifted kids) mostly get ignored due to time pressure.

Add socialization problems caused by COVID and reduced attention spans due to devices and chaos is always eminent. The stories I hear about daily classroom behavior would have blown my mind as a kid growing up in the 70s/80s.

I just wish that gifted kids could get the same access to IEPs that the other tail of the curve gets. However, when you base your educational outcomes on high stakes testing it is just natural to ignore the outliers above the mean and focus on the ones below it.

Again, I don't want to start a flamewar. Everyone has the right to an education.

The "design for unmaintainability" problem has been around for a while. I remember helping a friend change his plugs on this Ford Ranger in the early 90s. The closest two plugs to the firewall required you to climb into the engine bay and basically hug the engine to get your arm into position to blindly get to the plugs. If you look around on YouTube you'll see some crazy mechanic videos where they show things like bolts located in impossible to loosen locations.

Cars used to be simpler to work on because a) they inherently were simpler and b) the engine bay used to have a lot of room to work in. Both of these things are not coming back.

If you would like to visually play with a Markov chain model my non-profit research org built a Markov plugin for, CODAP, our data analysis tool:

https://codap.concord.org/app/static/dg/en/cert/index.html?d...

If you select drawing mode from the first screen shown and then click the "T" icon you can type some text and it will generate a state diagram for you that you can then "play" and examine the output sequences. If you have states that have multiple exit routes you can click on that state and adjust the probabilities of each option.

Confimed. I live in the tiny bit of "moderate" color that is dipping down from Vermont into Western Mass. We are in a drought and the leaves seem to be just drying up and dropping instead of changing colors. I'm hoping the rain this week doesn't just knock them off the trees.