But why? Why add a manual, less accurate step instead of just using HA and solving it once? Steaming takes 20 minutes, a quick wash is ~1h, a boil wash more like 4h.
Why do I want only my phone to have a notification? Why do I want it to override other settings and go off at a set time rather than when I choose to interact (as a notification would)?
You can absolutely solve this in other ways, but adding an automation into HA for notifying me about forgetting to setup the dishwasher took a few minutes max and I only had to do it once.
I'm not saying don't use HA - you do you. I get the alure of home automation and I'm glad you're finding it useful. All I'm saying is that the argument that 'the phone timer might be wrong therefore use HA' is a false dichotomy. You know what kind of wash you've selected and you know how long it takes roughly - you wrote it in your comment :-) It takes a few seconds to set a timer for that plus 10% for variability.
> ... adding an automation into HA ... took a few minutes max
... plus the hours it takes to setup and maintain HA and the machine its running on and the wireless hub and the dishwasher... etc. I bet you won't save back the total time spent across the whole lifetime of the system. That's not the only measure of success and that's fine.
My pro tip is one of my girlfriends scrunchies stolen and put on my wrist - annoys me intermittently and therefore repeatedly reminds me to check the laundry.
I think this is quite a strange argument. Any technical show-and-tell in the form of 'I wrote a cool implementation of such-and-such algorithm' is obviously much less impressive if someone/something else wrote it, but that's always been true, and I think the Show HN format is largely used for tools or products that someone has created, in which case what's more interesting is the problem it solves and how it solves it. It's exactly as you say with your hypothetical biochemist; they've been looking for a tool like this! I don't think they spent much time worrying about how it was written or what the REST API would look like.
There is a proliferation of frameworks and libraries supplying all kinds of mundane needs that developers have; is it wrong for people Showing HN to use those? Do libraries and frameworks not lower the barrier to entry? There have been many cases of 'I threw this together over a weekend using XYZ and ABC', haven't there? What's interesting is how they understand the domain and how they address the problems posed by it - isn't it? Sure, the technical discussion can be interesting too but unless some deep technical problem is being solved, I don't care too much if they used Django or Flask, and which database backend they chose, unless these things have a significant impact on the problem space.
> the barrier of entry has been completely obliterated
I was very interested in 3D graphics programming back in the DOS days before GPUs were a commodity, and at that time I felt the same about hardware accelerated rendering - if no-one needs to think about rasterisation and clever optimisation algorithms, and it's easy to build a 3D engine, I thought, then everyone and their dog will make a game and we'll drown in crappy generic-looking rubbish. Turns out that lowering barriers to entry doesn't magically make everything easier, but does allow a lot more people to express their creativity who otherwise would lack the knowledge and time to do so. That's a good thing! Pre-made engines like Godot remove an absolute ton of the work that goes into making a game, and are a great benefit to the one-man-bands and time-strapped would-be game designers out there whose ideas would otherwise die in the dark.
You seem to be insisting on arguing against arguments that have not been made and ignoring the whole point of the original post.
I am having to repeat the beginning of my previous comment:
>>The trigger for the [original] post was about post-AI Show HN, not about about whether vibe-coding is of value to vibe-coders.
The topic is: The drop in quality of post-AI Show HN. It is specifically about this community. Please read the context the OP has referenced in their own post:
Instead of adressing the specifics of that post you seem to ignore the points that were made there and seem to prefer to talk about why vibe-coding solutions should be interesting to pre-AI programmers. Ok, let's go there.
>if no-one needs to think about rasterisation and clever optimisation algorithms, and it's easy to build a 3D engine, I thought, then everyone and their dog will make a game and we'll drown in crappy generic-looking rubbish. [Turns out that's not the case.]
Here in this context, you are confusing "easy" with "non-human". Specifically, when people here decry the banality and tediousness of perusing and reviewing vibe-coded solutions by "everyone and their dog" the emphasis is on and their dog. Let's be clear, a non-deterministic non-human entity that is coding something by approximating the intentions of a human is not the same thing as a human developing a 3D engine or SDK end-to-end with human intentionality no matter how "easy" coding a 3D engine has become. So it leaves it to the HN reader to figure out what level of ownership the human poster has over their 90% vibe-coded solution. It's no surprise that HN readers, when alerted to the possibility via a Show HN post, would rather just vibe-code a solution themselves if they are interested in the problem space instead of engaging with the Show HN post itself. When hard-pressed, I can think of very few instances where programmers would not prefer to vibe-code there own solution instead of test-running and reviewing someone else's AI slop. Some of the casual statistics that the original posters have bothered to look at seem to bear this out.
Sorry, with respect I think you've missed the point of my comment (which was a reply to your comment, and not a reply to the original post).
You asserted that
> pre-AI, what was impressive to Show HN readers was that you were able to actually implement all that you describe in that sentence by yourselves...
and latterly
> ... HN readers, when alerted to the possibility via a Show HN post, would rather just vibe-code a solution themselves if they are interested in the problem space
and my point is that I disagree - the implementation of an idea in terms of the actual coding is far less interesting to me (and my assertion is: by extension, less interesting to the average reader) than the implementation in terms of the behaviour of the thing. Perhaps you're concerned about someone opening Claude Code and typing "Write me an application that does XYZ" but it's pretty obvious that so far that doesn't produce anything useful, and I think is more of a problem for sites like Stack Overflow where an answer is a small singular thing rather than an entire system.
There is a spectrum between 'writing it all yourself' and 'YOLO vibe-coding' and if you're only arguing about the latter end of the spectrum then, sure, those tend to suck, but I don't think we're really at risk of being drowned in those projects; that's a kind of slippery-slope argument. This is why I talked about 3D graphics; I earlier feared the 'YOLO 3D game' projects taking over, and that just hasn't happened. I believe we (humans) had similar discussions around the time that typewriters and the printing press were invented - 'if you're not handwriting your ideas then you're not really thinking!' but the ideas are the point, not the process of writing them down.
Lol, I just care a lot about saving as many lives as I can; the most effective charities I've been able to find good evidence on save one life for $6–8k. If Watsi had a credible claim at being able to save lives 10x cheaper I would redirect my entire donation budget to them!
That said, once again, Watsi is great. I really appreciate all the hard work they've put into making this happen—this is orders of magnitude more impressive and impactful than most projects I've ever seen!
There was a link posted here that showed some hernia surgery in Malawi costing 400$ , some others listed via links at 160$ to 1000$.
I honestly have no idea about healthcare costs in countries like that, but assuming the main cost is a surgeon, the reported median salary for surgeons in Sweden is between 110-150k usd yearly. Assuming 200 working days a year and available for something like 4 surgeries a day on average that goes to about 137 usd per surgery. Adjust for Malawi being a far cheaper country but addition of more staff and a cost of 400$ for a relatively minor surgery doesn't seem too far fetched if there isn't middlemen taking a cut (actually googling it seems like middlemen can take a fairly large cut even with those costs).
I don't know, personally I think it's a bit weird for any mentor to expect recognition for their mentee's success. Surely the success itself is the reward? Pay it forward and all that. I would hope any parent would be adult enough not to feel like their child was stealing the spotlight from them.
You could look at this in at least two different ways. 1) journalism, and how it’s a better story if the kid is a self-contained genius; or 2) having youth be thankful for mentoring, and to understand little in life is achieved without others’ assistance.
I don’t consider that the parent comment is seeking to “steal the spotlight”; just that it’d be a more realistic appraisal of how success is achieved.
I'm not interested in guessing what your opinion is, I'm hoping you'll share it. I don't think you'll be unfairly judged; of course if you are actually being racist then it's not unfair for anyone to call that out. I don't feel like 'society' has decided not to talk about certain things to avoid name calling; I've personally only heard that kind of phrase coming from someone who holds a racist opinion but doesn't like the label, but I'm always opening to broadening my mind. Enlighten me!
I think we are at the point where we both know which groups are meant. I assume that you live in the USA, which has strong free speech and privacy laws, so you don't need to worry. The rest of us are not that lucky, so the best we can get away with is hinting and hoping no one takes close attention.
> Look, there are at least dozens of us who like and enjoy programming for programming's sake and got into this crazy industry because of that.
You and me both, and I truly sympathise, but really we were just lucky that we could enjoy our passion at work.
> It's even more depressing to see folks on HACKER news boost the "programming never mattered" mentality that's taken hold these last few years.
Delivering stuff to customers for money is always what we've been paid for; that's not new, it's just that perhaps many of us didn't really pay much mind to that in the past. That's perhaps why there's traditionally been so much complaining about artificial deadlines and managers and sales teams; many of us also didn't really notice that the programming was never the thing that our employers cared about; it is just a link in a long chain from idea to income.
The way I'm looking at our current situation is this: I spent my whole career and much of my free time learning to become a great furniture maker, and I take a lot of pleasure producing functional and elegant items. Now someone has handed me some power tools. I can mourn the loss of care and love that goes into hand-crafting something, but I can also learn to use the tools to crank out the good-enough cabinets that my employer wants me to make, focussing on the more abstract elements of the craft and doing less of the laborious stuff. I think I can still take pleasure and pride in my work in this way, and personally I find the design aspect of software development to be a lot of fun. I can still hand-craft things sometimes too; there will no doubt always be important difficult parts of a project that would take as long to describe to an LLM as they would to write by hand, at least for those of us with sufficient experience of the latter.
I can also, hopefully, finally knock out some of those side projects that I have had on my list for many years but never had time to make. I would prefer that those things existed in a less than perfect state, than that they were perfect but only in my head :-)
> A new way, a better way.
The autumn winds blow.
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