https://notado.app/feeds/jado/software-developmentNotes on what makes good and bad software development experienceshttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46625436
Corporations should start paying their fair share, they've scammed society enough.]]>developmentlicensingopen-sourcesoftwaresource:hnWed, 14 Jan 2026 23:35:16 +0000shimmanhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46622482
Then you jump on to a place like Reddit or HN and you have people mostly supporting the status quo. Of course people are going to do open source more than they should. And then if they complain later on, you will say they chose to make it open source. Reinforcing the status quo by blaming the individual.]]>developmentlicensingopen-sourcesoftwaresource:hnWed, 14 Jan 2026 20:24:32 +0000skinnymuchhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46588672
This implementation gets one thing most Metro clones miss, i.e the typography as structure paradigm. In Win8, there were no divider lines or heavy drop shadows to denote hierarchy. The hierarchy was defined strictly by the weight and size of the font.

We spent the last decade drifting back into glassmorphism and mica materials (win11) because people missed the comfort of texture but from a pure information density and rendering performance perspective - the flat, monochromatic 2D plane of windows 8 is a nice tangent. It removed the cognitive load of decoding the UI chrome for touch users.

ps: I'm impressed by the constraint of using native Qt/C++ here instead of taking the easy route with electron or QML/javascript bindings for everything.]]>designdevelopmentsoftwaresource:hnuser-experiencewindowsMon, 12 Jan 2026 18:12:15 +0000Fiveplushttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=464737372. Make your auto closing and locking logic based on that label (eg the label-actions github action)
3. As a maintainer, remember to remove the label when creating an issue!]]>developmentgithubsoftwaresource:hnuser-experienceSat, 3 Jan 2026 18:42:12 +0000rarkinshttps://orib.dev/nofun.htmlartificial-intelligencedevelopmentsoftwareMon, 29 Dec 2025 22:51:50 +0000https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46367336
They needed Windows games to run on Linux so we got massive Proton/Wine advancements. They needed better display output for the deck and we got HDR and VRR support in wayland. They also needed smoother frame pacing and we got a scheduler that Zuck is now using to run data centers.

Its funny to think that Meta's server efficiency is being improved because Valve paid Igalia to make Elden Ring stutter less on a portable Linux PC. This is the best kind of open source trickledown.]]>developmentgaminglinuxsoftwaresource:hnTue, 23 Dec 2025 22:46:19 +0000Fiveplushttps://toot.yosh.is/@yosh/115707133909245963
No but like seriously: without Rust's diagnostics there is just no way it would have been able to escape research project status. Let alone be able to attract the community it has.]]>developmentrustsoftwareFri, 12 Dec 2025 17:48:20 +0000yoshhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46224168developmentsoftwaresource:hnWed, 10 Dec 2025 23:06:28 +0000lijokhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46125620
I know they claim they work, but that's only on their happy path with their very specific AMI's and the nightmare that is the neuron SDK. You try to do any real work with them and use your own dependencies and things tend to fall apart immediately.

It was just in the past couple years that it really became worthwhile to use TPU's if you're on GCP and that's only with the huge investment on Google's part into software support. I'm not going to sink hours and hours into beta testing AWS's software just to use their chips.]]>awsdevelopmentsoftwaresource:hnTue, 2 Dec 2025 23:15:37 +0000ZeroCool2uhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46080933
Full text search or even grep/rg are a lot faster and cheaper to work with - no need to maintain a vector database index - and turn out to work really well if you put them in some kind of agentic tool loop.

The big benefit of semantic search was that it could handle fuzzy searching - returning results that mention dogs if someone searches for canines, for example.

Give a good LLM a search tool and it can come up with searches like "dog OR canine" on its own - and refine those queries over multiple rounds of searches.

Plus it means you don't have to solve the chunking problem!]]>artificial-intelligencedevelopmentsoftwaresource:hnFri, 28 Nov 2025 21:36:11 +0000simonwhttps://ziglang.org/news/migrating-from-github-to-codeberg/developmentgithubjavascriptsoftwareThu, 27 Nov 2025 05:25:24 +0000https://lobste.rs/s/ta9886/open_source_has_too_many_parasocial#c_rrbrpt There is no supply chain here because there is no supplier.

Yes. I've gotten in many arguments with people (even heavy OSS people!) about this point. I sometimes use the word "vendor" here: an OSS project is not a vendor. They're completely separate concepts (you can have OSS and a vendor relationship, but they're separate, one doesn't imply the other).

Utilizing OSS software on its own without a separate non-OSS contract and expecting literally *anything* is akin to finding some fruit on the ground, getting food poisoning, then blaming the ground. The ground doesn't care. OSS maintainers aren't obligated to care. It's completely meaningless.

And when I say "expecting anything" above I mean expecting literally *anything*. The code may work. It may not. The tarball may be compromised, it may not. The code may break in the future if it does work, it may not. You're guaranteed absolutely nothing except freedom (definition of which depending on the license).

That being said, it's amazing that most OSS maintainers really, really care. They try hard to quack like a vendor as much as possible, but this is all good will. And the good will has been mistaken for obligation (and resulted in entitlement) far too often, nowadays.

In some of the arguments I've gotten into, people have argued that there is a social contract and therefore some obligation. I disagree. As noted above, I think it's laudable that a lot of maintainers really care, but I think it's overly burdensome to push a social contract onto the relationship. It's one thing if a maintainer decides to say this, but by default, no.

Point being, if you want any guarantees other than freedom, pay a vendor. If you aren't paying a vendor, you're the vendor!]]>developmentlicensingopen-sourcesoftwaresource:lobstersMon, 24 Nov 2025 22:55:55 +0000mitchellhhttps://bsky.app/profile/davidgerard.co.uk/post/3m2tn7wose22p
There are no ethical use cases for LLMs at this point in time. Maybe when the bubble has popped thoroughly. Not before.]]>artificial-intelligencecapitalismdevelopmentsoftwareworkFri, 21 Nov 2025 13:33:08 +0000davidgerard.co.ukhttps://lobste.rs/s/p9i6g3/open_source_developers_are_exhausted#c_gnlqgm
[1]: https://github.com/sponsors/tokio-rs]]>developmentlicensingrustsoftwaresource:lobstersFri, 21 Nov 2025 05:01:04 +0000thombleshttps://lobste.rs/s/gj8uup/static_web_hosting_on_intel_n150_freebsd#c_ljgklo
The company where I work (an ISP) has most new projects on Linux with Kubernetes, like many other companies I guess, but a decade age (2013-2015 I think) they had a project which was based completely on SmartOS and people who worked there told me it was very good.]]>developmentnetworkingsoftwaresource:lobstersThu, 20 Nov 2025 02:23:24 +0000aarroyochttps://mas.to/@gabrielesvelto/115575628315926615
We've known how to build completely reliable computer systems for decades. When things fall apart, it's not because we don't know how to do it, it's because cutting corners has become the norm.]]>capitalismdevelopmentsoftwareworkWed, 19 Nov 2025 14:30:57 +0000gabrielesveltohttps://huijzer.xyz/posts/123/do-not-put-your-site-behind-cloudflare-if-you-dontcloudflaredevelopmentnetworkingsoftwareTue, 18 Nov 2025 16:26:36 +0000https://lobste.rs/s/t37jcs/my_next_chapter_with_mastodon#c_kb61tgactivity-pubdevelopmentmastodonsocial-mediasoftwaresource:lobstersTue, 18 Nov 2025 14:56:33 +0000gcupchttps://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/115567658673660955
That kind of human-to-human feeling of “we did our best because we care about the strangers who use this tool” just seems almost like an act of radical defiance in this Era of Enshittification. I appreciate it so much.]]>developmentsoftwareTue, 18 Nov 2025 00:28:57 +0000inthehandshttps://lobste.rs/s/uq95l0/i_work_for_evil_company_outside_work_i_m#c_vk5fpb
It's as the old saying goes: it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. One could reasonably argue that the people who know the least about technology are people who work in tech.]]>artificial-intelligencedevelopmentsoftwaresource:lobsterstechMon, 17 Nov 2025 16:54:37 +0000scrapshttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45941097
If, instead, you only act on a percentage of requests, you can add noise in an insidious way without signaling that you caught them. It will make their job troubleshooting and crafting the next iteration much harder. Also, making the response less predictable is a good idea - throw different HTTP error codes, respond with somewhat inaccurate content, etc]]>artificial-intelligencedevelopmentscrapingsoftwaresource:hnSat, 15 Nov 2025 22:39:37 +0000thephyberhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45937166
PS: the first step towards feeling why such research is so important is when you start customizing productivity shortcuts on your existing keyboard. Then you understand that the input device in front of you can be more than a stupid typewriter. From there you start interrogating your interaction with machines. [and then you are addict, and you end up designing your own device :)]]]>developmentmusicproductivitysoftwaresource:hnSat, 15 Nov 2025 15:56:20 +0000lolivehttps://m.mtlynch.io/@michael/115538492543985760}}` and on first build, it downloads the profile image, name, tweet content, and timestamp and renders that, and it works forever. I keep finding broken tweets on my Hugo site because Twitter's rate limiting something or the user deleted their tweet. I've resorted to just screenshotting, which feels sloppy.]]>developmenthugosoftwareFri, 14 Nov 2025 16:07:57 +0000michaelhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45913437 So you're saying that it is impossible for a large company to somehow use native toolkits to draw text bubbles and emojis??

One weird thing about software development is that there are plenty of things which motivated individual developers can achieve which large companies can't even write the requirements for, let alone achieve.]]>developmentsoftwaresource:hnThu, 13 Nov 2025 15:07:06 +0000pjc50https://midwest.social/comment/21131181
As a convenient side effect: If you use AI to spam people with bug reports, you’re basically DDoSing them… unless they then decide to use AI to help triage the avalanche. And wouldn’t you know it, Google just happens to sell AI to help you solve this problem they made for you!

“Nice FOSS project you got there. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.”

And also also: If FOSS in general turns into a ghost town… where are you gonna turn to get that boilerplate code you need to do a common task? That’s right, AI baby! All roads lead to boiling the Great Lakes so Nvidia can pay itself back.]]>artificial-intelligencecapitalismdevelopmentsoftwareWed, 12 Nov 2025 06:21:38 +0000kibiz0rhttps://lobste.rs/s/uclead/opinion_piece_on_zig_design_choices#c_zelmym
Disclaimer that I obviously like Zig, but I apply this framework to anything and its not out of being defensive about the OPs dislike of Zig, which I have no problem with on an individual basis.]]>developmentsoftwaresource:lobstersTue, 11 Nov 2025 14:16:29 +0000mitchellhhttps://hachyderm.io/@jakehamilton/115529159667165025artificial-intelligencedevelopmentsoftwareTue, 11 Nov 2025 04:35:08 +0000jakehamiltonhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41841873
A static site generator that has somehow managed to be more inconvenient than many CMSes.]]>developmentgohugosoftwaresource:hnSun, 9 Nov 2025 01:02:00 +0000rodgerdhttps://infosec.exchange/@masek/115507451151625748
orphean task: when you almost succeed, but lose everything the moment you turn around to check your progress.

daedalean task: when you’re forced to design something brilliant and functional… that you yourself will inevitably become trapped inside.

medusan task: when your project becomes so horrifying that everyone involved freezes in place rather than deal with it.

tantaline task: when success is right there, but bureaucracy or budget cuts keep snatching it away at the last moment, forever.

pandoran task: when fixing one small issue unleashes a thousand new ones, but hey — at least there’s still hope somewhere in the ticket backlog.

odyssean task: when the assignment technically has an end, but it’s buried under so many side quests that you forget what the original goal was.

narcissian task: when the entire effort is about maintaining appearances rather than achieving anything of substance.

promethean task: when you give people a powerful new tool that could transform their work — and are punished eternally for doing so.

orestian task: when the mess you’re cleaning up is the direct result of the last cleanup you performed.

thesean task: when the only way to finish is to disassemble everything piece by piece — until you’re no longer sure if what’s left is the same project you started.

achillean task: when your work is flawless except for that one fatal oversight that will, inevitably, destroy you.

penelopean task: when you diligently undo by night what you accomplish by day, just to keep the stakeholders pacified.

midasean task: when everything you touch turns into paperwork, compliance documents, or gold-plated nonsense nobody actually needs.

gordian task: not intended to be actually done, but violence is the answer.]]>developmentsoftwareworkSat, 8 Nov 2025 04:32:02 +0000masekhttps://mastodon.social/@pojntfx/115510993313684867developmentsoftwareFri, 7 Nov 2025 23:33:45 +0000pojntfxhttps://lobste.rs/s/b20vrz/comptime_as_configuration#c_vdju3fdevelopmentsoftwaresource:lobstersFri, 7 Nov 2025 21:28:14 +0000spacejamhttps://lobste.rs/s/oftb3t/free_software_scares_normal_people#c_uab66h 80% of the people only need 20% of the features

The problem is that the people developing the software likely belong to the other 20%...

I think we shouldn't consider such software as "be a tool for anyone to use easily", but more like "hey, I build this tool for my use case, you are free to use it as well and modify it as you see fit".]]>developmentsoftwaresource:lobstersTue, 4 Nov 2025 17:34:30 +0000oliverpoolhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45800349developmentlannetworkingself-hostingsoftwaresource:hnMon, 3 Nov 2025 15:56:14 +0000zeppelin101https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1on3zb4/comment/nmua03w/developmentsoftwareMon, 3 Nov 2025 15:36:13 +0000Secure_Maintenance55https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1ojmwd9/comment/nm518eo/developmentsoftwareFri, 31 Oct 2025 21:05:58 +0000MehYamhttps://lobste.rs/s/vd7dgj/normalize_identifying_corporate#c_ufrklwdevelopmentlicensingopen-sourcesoftwaresource:lobstersWed, 29 Oct 2025 19:03:49 +0000henrycatalinismithhttps://bsky.app/profile/tante.cc/post/3m4bzlpxpk224capitalismdevelopmentsoftwaretechWed, 29 Oct 2025 01:48:28 +0000tante.cchttps://lobste.rs/s/gti2pe/more_than_dns_14_hour_aws_us_east_1_outage#c_ahl0yp
A better model is the “swiss cheese” model, which observes that in a complex system the parts can be variously degraded or have weaknesses while the system as a whole continues to work. A failure occurs when the broken parts (the holes) happen to line up in an unfortunate manner.

This model leads to a broader analysis that looks for contributing factors, like accident investigation reports. It was pioneered by air safety; you can see it in rail and industrial accident reports too.]]>complexitydevelopmentsoftwaresource:lobstersTue, 28 Oct 2025 15:05:55 +0000fanfcalibre://search/_?q=title:Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop: The Heart-Warming Korean Sensation author:Hwang Bo-ReumcapitalismdevelopmentsoftwareworkWed, 22 Oct 2025 01:35:04 +0000Hwang Bo-Reumhttps://mas.to/@maaretp/115349087226030614
It’s a poor phrase for the idea that you are degreeless. And there’s nothing wrong with skipping formal education.]]>developmenteducationsoftwareSun, 19 Oct 2025 15:51:47 +0000maaretphttps://twitter.com/isamlambert/status/1979337340096262619?s=12developmentsoftwareSat, 18 Oct 2025 17:21:44 +0000isamlamberthttps://twitter.com/owainkenway/status/1978744460218372397?s=12developmentlicensingopen-sourcesoftwareThu, 16 Oct 2025 20:25:35 +0000owainkenwayhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45603913
1. They co-opted the free software movement and made it more business friendly.

2. They convinced people that Open Source is pure and software that isn’t Open Source is unclean.

3. They convinced a bunch of developers that their definition of Open Source that was specifically crafted to protect business interests is canon.

4. They convinced a well meaning subset of those developers to police the other devs and pressure them to release their software under big tech approved licenses.]]>developmentlicensingopen-sourcesoftwaresource:hnThu, 16 Oct 2025 14:04:17 +0000sarchertechhttps://surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/10/08/the-illegible-nature-of-software-development-talent/
For both hiring and promotion, decision-makers have a legibility problem. This problem will inevitability lead to a focus on details that are easier to observe directly precisely because they are easier to observe directly. This is how fields like graphology and phrenology come about. But just because we can directly observe someone’s handwriting or the shapes of the bumps on their head doesn’t mean that those are effective techniques for learning something about that person’s personality.]]>developmentsoftwareworkSat, 11 Oct 2025 15:57:11 +0000https://toot.cat/@zkat/115129958258018665
We’re doing this to ourselves too, you know.]]>capitalismdevelopmentlicensingsoftwareSun, 28 Sep 2025 15:29:13 +0000zkathttps://infosec.exchange/@munin/115255243923655500
Hollow Knight gave the members of Team Cherry generational-wealth levels of resources. They had no need to release another game in order to keep food on the table - they did so because they chose to, and they took their time around doing it, and by and large people are extraordinarily happy with the results.

The whole concept that people "need" to be threatened with starvation and homelessness to "keep them motivated" - something I've seen seriously argued many times in the past - is a traumatic narrative that the actual evidence (look at every single study on unconditional basic income!) counters.]]>capitalismdevelopmentgamessoftwareWed, 24 Sep 2025 16:21:20 +0000muninhttps://old.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1nf3l94/the_death_of_specialization/ndts32s/
Software is such an immature and goofy field, and there is so much absolute jank garbage out there especially on the web.

The quality of software in general has been absolutely tanking in the last decade too. Some of the web apps I have to use at work are just “broken”. I ran equivalents decades ago that actually worked, were lightning fast, and felt professional.

With AI it’s going to get a lot worse.]]>developmentsoftwareFri, 12 Sep 2025 17:58:09 +0000ChineseAstroturfinghttps://lobste.rs/s/rzskjk/i_think_i_m_done_thinking_about_genai_for#c_l9x7we
Life is hard, but doing The Work (in whatever subject(s) that is for you) is one way to find solace and unmediated joy. It’s not just any work (hence the capitalization), but work that is good for me to do. I can apply myself to a challenge, work with other people to build things, and learn more about it in an endless cycle. It’s an infinite game. Anything that gets in the way of that cycle is harmful *for me:* more management than dev, politicking for better titles, even screwing around with my dev environment for too long. It’s about the work of shipping, refining, and learning. When that gets out of balance I become highly vulnerable to anxiety.

Where do LLMs fit there? Certainly not in the core loop! Part of The Work necessitates some time spent frustrated: that’s a primary indication of learning (and very easy to forget). I’m okay with them at the periphery of it, or sometimes spitballing things with them.

But there’s a real joy to applying your skills, working through frustration and feeling stuck, and gaining confidence that I would never want to outsource to an LLM. It’s essential for human flourishing.]]>developmentsoftwaresource:lobstersFri, 6 Jun 2025 01:25:46 +0000mattgreenrockshttps://datagubbe.se/usab2/
This applies to a multitude of other professional software titles used in actually productive work, whether it's photo editing, CAD, software development or corporate management.]]>designdevelopmentsoftwareuser-experienceTue, 20 May 2025 23:46:59 +0000https://datagubbe.se/usab2/designdevelopmentsoftwareuser-experienceTue, 20 May 2025 23:45:15 +0000https://datagubbe.se/usab2/designdevelopmentsoftwareuser-experienceTue, 20 May 2025 23:44:12 +0000https://matklad.github.io/2025/05/20/open-source-cant-coordinate.html
The underlying force there is the absence of one unified baseline set of APIs for writing desktop programs. There’s no single entity that can coordinate the API, in contrast to Windows and MacOS.]]>developmentlinuxmacossoftwarewindowsTue, 20 May 2025 18:26:43 +0000https://lobste.rs/s/my2zbb/stack_overflow_is_almost_dead#c_pkjaz1
It’s just another enshittification story, isn’t it? StackExchange.com was a product in search of a business model, driven by volunteer labor incentivized by egoboo and cynical manipulation of the very human desire to help others. Like so many others, the business got hooked on cheap VC money. At that point, the decision to prioritize optics for potential investors over everything else (and in particular, the needs of the user base) was actually *rational*, and their fate was sealed.

If we ever collectively rebuild a thing like that, we should take care not to repeat the same mistakes. I think the best thing we could do with such a gamified question-answering paradigm is break it into a thousand little unmonetizable pieces and scatter it to the wind.]]>capitalismdevelopmentsoftwaresource:lobstersstack-overflowFri, 16 May 2025 18:57:23 +0000minimaxhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44006650
But also, the culture of Stack Overflow has changed significantly over the years. It used to be a place where anyone could ask a question and get help with a problem ... and it was amazing.

Today, you're far more likely to have your question downvoted, flagged as a duplicate (of an unrelated question), or attacked in the comments by overzealous responders (and once that happens, good luck on actually getting help). Your odds of actually getting help on the site are only a fraction of what they once were.

And I'm not just saying this as some SO newbie: I've been using the site since beta! As someone who has used it that long, the change in quality is undeniable.]]>capitalismdevelopmentsocial-mediasoftwaresource:hnstack-overflowFri, 16 May 2025 18:57:04 +0000hungryhobbithttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44007633
The general platonic ideal is "have the product automatically fix the issue" => "provide short documentation within the product if the problem can be explained with just a paragraph or two of content" => "link to a targeted doc that deals with this exact problem if it takes more than a few paragraphs to explain"

A lot of time, my work as a technical writer is advocating to update the product (or updating the product myself) to do the first two steps, rather than just jumping immediately to the last step. Startup people often refer to this as "the perfect product requires 0 documentation." When teams always resort to fixing product issues with docs, your docs start to get huge and complicated. We technical writers often refer to this as "putting docs lipstick on the product pig."]]>developmentrustsocial-mediasoftwaresource:hnFri, 16 May 2025 17:20:38 +0000kaycebasqueshttps://old.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1km9jml/ways_to_get_a_second_income_as_dev/msa9b3e/capitalismdevelopmentsoftwareworkWed, 14 May 2025 21:13:57 +0000oupablohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43955613developmentsoftwaresource:hnSun, 11 May 2025 21:35:13 +0000pelagicAustralhttps://notashelf.dev/posts/curse-of-knowingdevelopmentsoftwareTue, 6 May 2025 19:09:10 +0000https://notashelf.dev/posts/curse-of-knowingdevelopmentsoftwareTue, 6 May 2025 19:08:42 +0000https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43890764
The AI conversation tends to split folks along similar “passionate engineer craftsman” vs. “temporarily embarrassed billionaire” lines.

[1]: https://www.history.com/articles/industrial-revolution-luddites-workers]]>artificial-intelligencecapitalismdevelopmentsoftwaresource:hnMon, 5 May 2025 18:22:52 +0000pixelreadyhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43857771
Plus, at the risk of too much head-shrinking, I've never gotten the impression that tech workers liked each other very much. There's a lot of disdain in the industry, for the guy who uses that language or framework or operating system that I think sucks. You don't see that so much with, say, truckers. There may be some good-natured rivalry based on truck brands or long-haul versus short-haul, but not the real disdain you see in tech.]]>capitalismdevelopmentsocialismsoftwaresource:hnThu, 1 May 2025 14:24:15 +0000aaronbaugherhttps://www.anildash.com//2025/04/19/ai-first-is-the-new-return-to-office/capitalismdevelopmentsoftwareworkWed, 30 Apr 2025 15:48:58 +0000https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43843209appledevelopmentsoftwaresource:hnWed, 30 Apr 2025 15:35:07 +0000RandomWorkerhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43820610
The other side of all this academic brownie points via papers (and doing reviews, which has become "brownie points for gatekeeping") is that most academic software is not only unmaintained, but actually unusable. They rarely even compile, and if they do, there is no --help, no good defaults, no README, and no way to maintain them. They are single-use software and their singular use is to write the paper. Any other use-case is almost frowned upon.

One of the worst parts of Academic software is that if you re-write it in a ways that's actually usable and extensible, you can't publish that -- it's not new ("research") work. And you will not only have to cite the person who wrote the first useless version forever, but they will claim they have done it if your tool actually takes off.

BTW, there are academics who don't follow this trend. I am glad that in my field (SAT), some of the best, e.g. Armin Biere and Randal Bryant are not like this at all. Their software is insanely nice and they fix bugs many-many years after release. Notice that they are also incredibly good engineers.]]>academiadevelopmenteducationsoftwaresource:hnMon, 28 Apr 2025 13:51:44 +0000zero_khttps://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1k80cdx/comment/mp2givr/
Most programming jobs don't give us a chance to really practice our craft, and at heart that's what we really want to do.]]>developmentsoftwareworkSat, 26 Apr 2025 05:01:42 +0000delenochttps://bsky.app/profile/mgattozzi.dev/post/3lnisdhprjs2qdevelopmentsearchsoftwareWed, 23 Apr 2025 18:20:49 +0000mgattozzi.devhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43763766artificial-intelligencedevelopmentsoftwaresource:hnTue, 22 Apr 2025 16:30:05 +0000michelpphttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43652999
If you're designing a consumer-oriented web service like Netflix or Spotify or Instagram, you will probably add in some user analytics service, and use the insights from that analysis to inform future development. However, that analysis will aggregate its results over all your users, and won't pick out the enthusiasts, who will shape discourse and public opinion about your service. Consequently, your results will be dominated by people who don't really have an opinion, and just take whatever they're given.

Think about web browsers. The first popular browser was Netscape Navigator; then, Internet Explorer came onto the scene. Mozilla Firefox clawed back a fair chunk of market share, and then Google Chrome came along and ate everyone's lunch. In all of these changes, most of the userbase didn't really care what browser they were using: the change was driven by enthusiasts recommending the latest and greatest to their less-technically-inclined friends and family.

So if you develop your product by following your analytics, you'll inevitably converge on something that just shoves content into the faces of an indiscriminating userbase, because that's what the median user of any given service wants. (This isn't to say that most people are tasteless blobs; I think everyone is a connoisseur of something, it's just that for any given individual, that something probably isn't your product.) But who knows - maybe that really is the most profitable way to run a tech business.]]>developmentsoftwaresource:hnFri, 11 Apr 2025 14:35:29 +0000cjs_achttps://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1jvh6vo/facet_rust_reflection_serialization/mmby28q/
It'll result in better compile times and a better UX every time — time will tell what the runtime performance looks like, but I'm optimistic.

serde had the misfortune of being good enough, early enough. The whole Rust ecosystem standardized against it, even (and especially) for use cases that weren't particularly well suited for serde.

serde is good at one thing: deserializing JSON-like languages. And even then, I have qualms with it.

For anything columnar, anything binary, anything urlencoded, args-shaped, for manipulating arbitrary values in a templating language, etc. — serde is shoehorned in, for lack of a better, more generic derive.

I believe Facet is that derive :)]]>developmentrustsoftwareThu, 10 Apr 2025 05:40:48 +0000fasterthanlimehttps://hackers.town/@rafial/114304953006175216
The "transformational" technology of LLMs is so obviously anti-useful that CEOs must resort to threats and coercion to get their rank and file workers to go anywhere near them.]]>artificial-intelligencedevelopmentsoftwareWed, 9 Apr 2025 00:21:43 +0000rafialhttps://old.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1jtjc4b/how_does_apple_coordinate_hardware_and_software/mlvsb0e/
- The company is functionally organized. For example, rather than separate graphics driver teams for the phone, the tablet, the watch, etc. they have a single graphics driver team for *every product*. This helps keeps products in sync and is probably the single greatest reason why Apple's products feel cohesive between each other. Most other hardware companies end up creating product lines that feel marginally integrated. It also facilitates teams learning in the long-term (if you had a huge problem with one product line, the learnings are disseminated to other product lines).

- Slow releases. Apple releases software once/twice a year (depending on how you measure it). The "standard" tech industry practice of releasing fast/frequently doesn't mesh well with hardware. The software has more of a chance to bake with the actual hardware. This is of course a tradeoff, since you lose release velocity.

- *No PMs*. Apple doesn't have product managers (they have what other companies call program managers/TPMs).

- Instead of PMs, that function is mostly fulfilled by a centralized design team (the famed team Ive used to run). This means product decisions emanate from a relatively small org at the center of the company. It also means hardware decisions are made with the software in mind, since it's the same design org that does it all. Most tech companies tend to be more "grassroots" where responsibility is more dispersed, and where teams/orgs jockey against each other to influence the product. The centralization of product *massively* reduces decision churn.

- *Way fewer decision makers overall*. Far fewer people have product decision authority as the result of the above. This means decisions are often made between just a few people, rather than large committee meetings. It is shocking/impressive/insane how many massive decisions are made just between 2-3 leads without a 50-person sitdown as it typical at other FAANGs. Decisions are extremely efficient (with some downside risk). It is a company where your internal rolodex is *extremely important* if you hope to be influential.]]>appledevelopmentsoftwareTue, 8 Apr 2025 18:06:07 +0000potatolicioushttps://lobste.rs/s/lak6et/why_i_stopped_using_ai_code_editors#c_f162ed I don’t want to sound elitist, but if you don’t want to learn to go beyond vibe coding, maybe coding isn’t for you.

It’s not elitist, it’s just a fact. Being a viber for life will keep you at the bottom of the greasy pole earning bottom-pole salaries. We are out of the era of $160,000/year SV entry-level job handouts - programming is now real work for realistic pay. If you don’t enjoy it or at least tolerate it more than the next thing, why are you here? This life is brief and you should become an ophthalmologist or struggling artist instead.]]>artificial-intelligencedevelopmentsoftwaresource:lobstersFri, 4 Apr 2025 14:11:48 +0000WilhelmVonWeinerhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43563216
My grandpa once said something that seemed ridiculous but makes a lot of sense: that every workplace should have a “heavy” who steals a new worker’s lunch on the first day, just to see if he asserts himself. Why? Not to haze or bully but to filter out the non-fighters so that when management wants to impose quotas or tracking, they remember that they’d be enforcing this on a whole team of fighters… and suddenly they realize that squeezing the workers isn’t worth it.

The reason 1950s workplaces were more humane is that any boss who tried to impose this shit on workers would have first been laughed at, and then if he tried to actually enforce it by firing people, it would’ve been a 6:00 in the parking lot kinda thing.]]>capitalismdevelopmentsoftwaresource:hnworkThu, 3 Apr 2025 01:31:03 +0000zusammenhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43562875 In the last years you often have some manager where you basically have to justify every thing you do and always a huge pile of work that never gets smaller. So you just hurry through your tasks.

This has been my exact experience. Absolutely everything is tracked as a work item with estimates. Anything you think should be done needs to be justified and tracked the same way. If anything ever takes longer than the estimate that was invariably just pulled out of someones ass (because it's impossible to accurately estimate development unless you're already ~75% of the way through doing it, and even then it's a crapshoot) you need to justify that in a morning standup too.

The end result of all of this is every project getting bogged down by being stuck on the first version of whatever architecture was thought up right at the beginning and there being piles of tech debt that never gets fixed because nobody who actually understands what needs to be done has the political capital to get past the aforementioned justification filter.]]>capitalismdevelopmentsoftwaresource:hnworkThu, 3 Apr 2025 01:28:44 +0000p1neconehttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39519291
The biggest beneficiaries of open source software are massive corporations such as Google, Facebook, etc.

By being worth more than what they pay for it, open source is the largest transfer of value from the working class (software programmers) to the capital class (the owners of these corporations).]]>capitalismdevelopmentlicensingopen-sourcesoftwaresource:hnTue, 25 Mar 2025 17:40:09 +0000RcouF1uZ4gsChttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43469494
on contradiction is an apt choice of essay to look to here.

i wasn't going to speak on twenty enemies because i haven't read it before, but after reading five pages or so i went back to a section that had stuck with me only to discover it was the same one the author had pulled as the first quotation. not exactly where i would have expected to stumble across this, but here we are. again, thank for you calling out that this was more than the milquetoast drivel i had assumed it to be from an uncharitable reading of the title alone.]]>developmentlicensingopen-sourcesoftwaresource:hnTue, 25 Mar 2025 13:55:07 +0000nagaiaidahttps://drawohara.io/dojo4/archive/program-like-you-give-a-damn/developmentrubysoftwareMon, 24 Mar 2025 03:45:52 +0000https://lobste.rs/s/ib6oyf/why_did_you_need_change_8_files_add_one#c_fwzbmn
If it takes edits to eight files to add a checkbox that’s an architectural design smell for me. I know there are plenty of systems out there that work like that but I’ve never found myself regretting working on systems that manage to avoid that level of multi-file complexity.

These days I much prefer a project with a few large files than a project with hundreds of tiny ones. My ideal change involves editing code in two files: an implementation file and an accompanying test file.]]>developmentsoftwaresource:lobstersSun, 23 Mar 2025 19:39:05 +0000simonwhttps://lobste.rs/s/patoqt/what_comes_after_github_actions#c_zdnciodevelopmentsoftwaresource:lobstersSat, 22 Mar 2025 15:19:59 +0000matkladhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43422368
The most frustrating thing about dipping in to the FE is that it seems like literally everything is deprecated. Oh, you used the apollo CLI in 2022? Bam, deprecated, go learn how to use graphql-client or whatever, which has a totally different configuration and doesn’t support all the same options. Okay, so we just keep the old one and disable the node engine check in pnpm that makes it complain. Want to do a patch upgrade to some dependency? Hope you weren’t relying on any of its type signatures! Pin that as well, with a todo in the codebase hoping someone will update the signatures.

Finally get things running, watch the stream of hundreds of deprecation warnings fly by during the install. Eventually it builds, and I get the hell out of there.

It’s just nuts to me the degree to which FE development as a whole seems to embrace the breaking change, the deprecation, etc. I’ve been working on a large rust project for nearly four years and in that time there have been a few minor breaking changes in or of third party libraries, but only one major breaking change that required significant changes to our application. Meanwhile in JS it seems like you can’t go more than six months without having to rewrite something. It’s bananas.

Okay, rant over.]]>developmentjavascriptsoftwaresource:hnThu, 20 Mar 2025 17:58:04 +0000mplanchardhttps://toot.cafe/@art_codesmith/114189540363775758capitalismdevelopmentopen-sourcesoftwareWed, 19 Mar 2025 15:54:24 +0000art_codesmithhttps://toot.cafe/@art_codesmith/114189529691827513capitalismdevelopmentopen-sourcesoftwareWed, 19 Mar 2025 14:32:01 +0000art_codesmithhttps://twitter.com/jasonbosco/status/1901766688565043273?s=12
I gave them my usual spiel about how/why we've chosen not to raise VC despite inbound interest, we're fully revenue-funded and happily profitable, etc.

Then they tell me that the actual reason they asked me this question was because another vendor they had relied on had raised VC in the past, and then shutdown recently because they couldn't pull together their next VC round.

This was quite something because, in the past, when I used to get the "Are you VC funded" question, it would come from a position of customers trying to size us up and validate our financial viability. Now the same question seems to be coming from a position of customers trying to determine how much of a risk they're willing tolerate when doing business with VC-funded companies.

As much as VCs like to glorify VC-backed companies, rug-pull after rug-pull in VC-backed SaaS I think has made customers pretty wary of VC-backed companies.]]>capitalismdevelopmentsoftwareTue, 18 Mar 2025 23:48:30 +0000jasonboscohttps://mastodon.social/@Daojoan/114179751576301199capitalismdevelopmentsoftwareusaMon, 17 Mar 2025 21:08:02 +0000Daojoanhttps://lobste.rs/s/miyoai/review_helix_after_1_5_years#c_pti4o1
I’ve tried to use it a few times and I can tell that noun-verb with multiselection is just *so much better* than verb-noun! But it’s also missing critical things I need like a scripting system (which is different from a plugin system!) and autocommands. I’m hopeful that eventually it’ll be something that can replace Neovim for me! Or that someone will make a complete noun-verb system for neovim that’s close enough.]]>developmenthelixsoftwaresource:lobstersvimMon, 17 Mar 2025 20:39:48 +0000hwaynehttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43364229
1. Staged rollout of firmware updates. It’s common practice for apps and software but for some reason it’s less common with firmware. Rolling out to 1% (or less, depending on scale) of devices and waiting a day is cheap insurance. Side note: Build a good relationship with customer service people so you hear about these things immediately.

2. A failsafe firmware reset back to factory state. Some sequence that resets the device completely back to the way it was when it came out of the box, firmware included, as a last resort. In conjunction, your automated tests need to confirm that every factory firmware you’ve ever released can update to the latest firmware.]]>developmentsoftwaresource:hnFri, 14 Mar 2025 17:27:51 +0000tomstokeshttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42811330
IMO the point of a tiling wm is to make it easier to manage windows, so something that requires manual splitting and rearranging is unacceptable (I may as well manually drag around windows!). Proper automatic tiling wms like dwm and awesome are missing in Wayland.

Or, "were" missing, there are now some promising ones like Hyprland but they still have rough edges.]]>developmentlinuxsoftwaresource:hnTue, 11 Mar 2025 18:09:57 +0000Ferret7446https://merveilles.town/@nasser/114143741460834273capitalismdevelopmentsoftwareTue, 11 Mar 2025 15:16:50 +0000nasserhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43277444
CDK/Pulumi/Yoke is optimised for being easy to write, but code should be optimised to be easy to READ.

Sure, cdk/pulumi/yoke lets you write the most clever and succinct construction you can compose in your favourite language.. however, whoever comes across your clever code next will probably want to hit you, especially if it's not a dev from your immediate team, and especially if you have succumbed to blurring the lines between your idk code and your app code.

If they instead come across some bog-standard terraform that maybe has a bunch of copy-paste and is a bit more verbose... Who cares? Its function will be obvious, there is no mental overhead needed.

On the flipside Helm templating is an absolute abomination and i would probably take anything over needing to immerse myself in that filth, maybe Yoke is worth a look after all. But the REAL answer is a real config language, still.]]>developmentsoftwaresource:hnterraformThu, 6 Mar 2025 16:08:34 +0000akdor1154https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243545
In fact, that's more or less what iOS was for a long time, and I loved every second of it.

Once you have a good feature set, you can spend years and years ironing out 100% of the bugs and vulnerabilities and you'd build a rabid fanbase of crotchety tech-saturated users like me. I want something that Just Works.]]>appledevelopmentsoftwaresource:hnMon, 3 Mar 2025 17:02:08 +0000FredPrethttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243674appledevelopmentmusicsoftwaresource:hnMon, 3 Mar 2025 17:01:30 +0000tbesedahttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43161095
> When you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than your ability. Your tastes only narrow & exclude people. So create.

I won't bore you with the blog post I wrote in response, but the gist is that writing (and equally importantly, publishing) is a way of getting outside of your own head to think of a audience. We do it all the time as children but somehow as adults we seem to think we need permission to create something for the public. This has never been true and is doubly not true on the internet.

So write something and don't worry if nobody reads it. That is not the point. That act of writing will have sharpened a little piece of your brain.]]>creativitydevelopmentsoftwaresource:hnwritingMon, 24 Feb 2025 17:00:42 +0000AndrewStephenshttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43126405
But that's not how the argument is used in practice. In practice this argument is used to justify bloated apps, bad engineering, and corner-cutting. When people say “users don’t care about your tech stack,” what they really mean is that product quality doesn’t matter.

Yesterday File Pilot (no affiliation) hit the HN frontpage. File Pilot is written from scratch and it has a ton of functionality packed in a 1.8mb download. As somebody on Twitter pointed out, a debug build of "hello world!" in Rust clocks in at 3.7mb. (No shade on Rust)

Users don't care what language or libraries you use. Users care only about functionality, right? But guess what? These two things are not independent. If you want to make something that starts instantly you can't use electron or java. You can't use bloated libraries. Because users do notice. All else equal users will absolutely choose the zippiest products.]]>developmentsoftwaresource:hnFri, 21 Feb 2025 16:11:14 +0000gizmohttps://lobste.rs/s/zbb947/zed_now_predicts_next_edit_with_new_open#c_6olhmd
Don’t get me wrong: I want my tool to make it easy to make mechanical changes that touch a bunch of code. I just don’t want the process to do it to be a magical heuristic.]]>developmentsoftwaresource:lobstersFri, 14 Feb 2025 15:03:38 +0000conartist6https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43029567
Nix on its own doesn't fully resolve supply chain concerns about binaries, but it can provide answers to a myriad of other problems. I think most people like Nix reproducibility, and it is marketed as such, for the sake of development: life is much easier when you know for sure you have the exact same version of each dependency, in the exact same configuration. A build on one machine may not be bit-exact to a build on another machine, but it will be exactly the same source code all the way down.

The quest to get every build process to be deterministic is definitely a bigger problem and it will never be solved for all of Nixpkgs. NixOS does have a reproducibility project[1], and some non-trivial amount of NixOS actually is properly reproducible, but the observation that Nixpkgs is too vast is definitely spot-on, especially because in most cases the real issues lie upstream. (and carrying patches for reproducibility is possible, but it adds even more maintainer burden.)

[1]: https://reproducible.nixos.org/]]>developmentnixossoftwaresource:hnWed, 12 Feb 2025 21:29:26 +0000jchwhttps://www.pastagang.cc/blog/kill-the-user/developmentsoftwareFri, 7 Feb 2025 13:16:05 +0000https://fosstodon.org/@josefbacik/113923628287548056developmentlinuxsoftwareThu, 6 Feb 2025 17:06:02 +0000josefbacikhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42949010 Yes, you guessed it, let's go with Electron and CoffeeScript.

> The main tech stack is still CoffeeScript, but we changed the UI framework from React to Riot.js.

> I've installed Babel, Mocha, ESLint, and added libraries via npm.

> I've rewritten my entire code base from CoffeeScript to ES6.

> The introduction of MobX, a state management library, and the introduction of Flow, a type checking system.

> So I rewrote everything in TypeScript, including my own libraries.

> Anyway, I'll be replacing my own components like Button and Toolbar with Material-UI ones.

> It's time to rewrite everything to styled-components.

> It's time to rewrite everything to useXXX.

No wonder why these software projects (personal as well as professional ones) are 6 years late. It may be a good learning experience, but a terribly inefficient way of developing software.]]>developmentjavascriptsoftwaresource:hnThu, 6 Feb 2025 05:28:48 +0000beryilmahttps://bsky.app/profile/htmx.org/post/3lhcowxqko22n
when transferring HTML you are transferring exactly the data needed to render the UI on demand in a single request

often *more* efficient than constructing the UI via a series of general purpose data retrievals + a client side templating system!]]>developmentsoftwareTue, 4 Feb 2025 13:33:24 +0000htmx.orghttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42931680
Thats just HN though, a subset of redditors who are gonna "change the world" and also become a billionaire with their CRUD app.]]>developmentsocial-mediasoftwaresource:hnTue, 4 Feb 2025 13:13:21 +0000everyone