HN user

karpour

214 karma

meet.hn/city/at-Vienna

Socials: - github.com/karpour

---

https://mstdn.social/@karpour

Software engineer and cartoon artist from Vienna/Amsterdam

Posts1
Comments88
View on HN

It's so refreshing to see a proper website these days, no js, no cookie banners, just hypertext. Your part about still enjoying programming really resonated with me. I still get so much joy out of programming after 20 years of doing it, it's still just as exciting to learn new things, and I am definitely not running out of new things to learn.

I would absolutely love to teach programming to non-programmers. I have also been offered a job at the technical school where I graduated. But remembering how uninterested the vast majority of my classmates were back then discouraged me from even trying. I guess what I'd want is a teach a room full of people excited to learn about programming.

This really makes clear how boring web design has become. 99% of websites use the same standard layout, there's almost nothing distinct or exciting about any of the designs. I remember web design being an art form, with books being printed with the best designs... I'd visit brand websites just to look at the design itself, even if I wasn't interested in what they were selling.

Of course not all is bad, but I'd love to see some creativity again, it seems like almost no one dares to break the norm anymore.

In Eindhoven, NL, there is a similar system without app. At night traffic lights are red by default, if sensors in the pavement detect an approaching car they turn green in time. If there are no other cars you never have to stop. Great system and has been there for a decade at least.

I recently tried looking up something about local tax law in ChatGPT. It confidently told me a completely wrong rule. There are lots of sources for this, but since some probably unknowingly spread misinformation, ChatGPT just treated it as correct. Since I always verify what ChatGPT spits out, it wasn't a big deal for me, just a reminder that it's garbage in, garbage out.

Writing a complete API client for the Internet Archive in Typescript, with proper documentation, proper typing, unit tests and integration tests, so people can have a proper library for both front-end and back-end applications.

I would say a big difference of the Internet around 2000 and the internet now is that most people shared information in good faith back then, which is not the case anymore. Maybe back then people were just as uncritical of information, but now we really see the impact of people being not critical.

I never really trusted dentists, and I was validated when I went to a new dentist my brother recommended. It turned out that dentist had an accident and had a temporary substitute.

He took x-rays and showed me on the x-rays that I had 4 separate cavities under fillings that needed to be replaced on 4(!) different appointments.

I have dentist anxiety, so I went to a different dentist in hoped of doing it all at once. He did another x-ray and told me there was no sign of cavities and that I should come back in 6 months.

In retrospect I should have reported that first dentist for fraud or something.

I say go for it. Most websites are bland and forgettable. Every startup site looks the same these days.

I'm not saying we need to go back to the absolutely wild early 2000s designs, but I feel like there is a need for beautifully designed websites that don't look like the standard responsive page layout of the past 10 years.

JSChronicle 3 years ago

Yeah, Javascript/ECMAscript history is actually very interesting, this contains barely any information.

As a senior developer: Experience. The output from ChatGPT isn't perfect, but it's good enough to point one in the right direction. The code it outputs is mostly garbage that a good developer would never put into production, but what it does fairly well is finding the relevant bits of documentation.

Example: Using a small part of a new, big, unfamiliar library. Rather than digging through the library docs, I can ask ChatGPT about it, which often points me to the relevant parts, which I then can still confirm in the official docs.

I picked a big public instance and I think I never even got a follow from someone on that instance, despite having 600 followers. All interaction is with people from other instances. Of course you can join a tiny instance with a specific topic and check out people's profiles, but does it close you in? Not more than joining a facebook group does.

I'm baffled by how how many web developers have the attitude of "React projects are too complex, let's put another layer of abstraction on top of React to simplify things". Of course, usually for things that should never have been React to begin with. Anyway, good for that guy that he discovered Vanilla HTML and CSS late in his career, but I also don't see how this is front page worthy.