HN user

jeromechoo

304 karma
Posts14
Comments48
View on HN

Not that we need more anecdotal evidence but I’ve long felt a certain restlessness and inability to think creatively somewhere in the early afternoon. I work from home with my wife. I’ve eliminated lunch, coffee, and a ton of other variables. The one variable that finally had a distinct effect to my mental state was opening a window.

I’ve had mine for months and I still use it far more than my kindle for the sole reason that it fits in my pocket. It’s still a conscious choice to pull it out over doomscrolling TikTok on my phone though.

BMED2013 and it was still the same in my years. The culture has shifted a bit amongst professors though. After sophomore level classes I remember that professors will often just email you their textbook if you asked (a lot of times they’ll offer to “work it out”with you if you can’t afford the textbook).

Even if the clients go closed source and forked, there's still the very serious issue of closed app ecosystems on iOS and Android. It's one thing to self-host a Vaultwarden instance, it's another entirely to pay Google and Apple $100 a year to publish your own app.

You knew. And you signed off anyway. Because the alternative was losing the job, and the job was the mortgage, and the school fees, and the visa, and the version of yourself who'd fix it later once things stabilized.

I felt the pang in my bones reading this. All of us peons are just wading through this brave new world trying to do what we know is right but ultimately having no choice but to give in to life's needs.

I think many developers worth their salt will argue the same. Cloud is and has always been a shortcut to buying your own hardware. Local models will get better and smaller. Qwen3-coder-next runs on a Spark and is as capable as Sonnet 4.5. Bonsai released a 1-bit model yesterday.

I also like the freedom of not having to ration a daily allowance of tokens.

A simple web we own 5 months ago

What does “bringing (RSS) back properly” entail in your eyes?

It’s still alive. Many sites still use it. Many people still subscribe to those sites. RSS reader apps are still being created to this day.

All Look Same? 5 months ago

15/18 on food. Been to and eaten at all three countries. It was mostly instinct TBH. I’m not sure I can point out exactly what characteristics make a particular picture of food Korean/Chinese/Japanese.

That said I really love food. I cook all 3 types often and go out to eat all 3 types (and even regional variants) quite frequently.

This is an American-centric POV. I can’t speak for Europe but in many parts of Asia payments are most commonly done as a transfer of digital cash rather than credit. Whether it’s “consumer friendly” is not particularly relevant. People already accept it as a way to transact and there’s very little reason to switch to credit cards.

Bunny Database 6 months ago

parse.com was my last straw building on "as a service" startups because of this. DaaS is not even particularly good for hobby projects anymore given how easy it is to work with sqlite.

My experience of 100% agentic coding has been roughly the same as yours. That said, starting an agent off on a task has been the single most productive step I have introduced to my workflow in awhile.

95% of the time the code doesn't even build but it gets all the jigsaw pieces in place and it's a million times easier to start deleting and moving pieces around than to start from scratch.

Building an index is easy. Building a fresh index is extremely hard.

Ranking an index is hard. It's not just BM25 or cosine similarity. How do you prioritize certain domains over others? How do you rank homepages that typically have no real content in them for navigational queries?

Changing the behavior of 90% of the non-Chinese internet is unraveling 25 years and billions of dollars spent on ensuring Google is the default and sometimes only option.

Historically, it takes a significant technological counter position or anti-trust breakup for a behemoth like Google to lose its footing. Unfortunately for us, Google is currently competing well in the only true technological threat to their existence to appear in decades.

I’m sure this is great on desktop but lack of mobile support today is kindof a bummer. It doesn’t even degrade gracefully.

I got a $1500 quote to replace a stuck thermostat in my car from my local mechanic. After some Youtubing I was able to replace the part myself with $150 in parts.

I got a $5000 quote to fix my AC 2 summers ago and no amount of Youtube was able to help me DIY a fix.

Maybe in the long term there will be more HVAC techs than auto mechanics. Somehow I don't think that's likely.