Posts tagged with "Hacker News"

Over the weekend I read a comment, I think it was on Hacker News, where someone said they were having fun building things using AI. This was in response to someone saying that using AI took the fun out of programming. In their reply, the person qualified their answer with something along the lines of "the highs are higher and the lows are lower".

I think I agree.

My first ever exposure to any sort of computer was a Sinclair ZX80 that my maths teacher brought into school. After a class he plugged it in and let me and a friend take a look. To this day I still remember looking in the manual, looking at the tutorial, and at some point typing...

When I hit NEW LINE and a 2 appeared on the screen I was thrilled, I was hooked. I'd typed something that appeared on a TV screen and then I did something that made the answer appear on the TV screen. This felt like magic.

I've been hooked on writing code ever since.

In that time the highs have been high, and the lows have been low, but I think it's fair to say that I've been doing this for long enough (it's now 45 or 46 years since I typed that first instruction) that things have settled down. I still get a thrill when writing code, and I still get fed up with it from time to time, but the distance between the two isn't what it once was.

Which brings me back to the comment I read: I think I can safely say that, while properly experimenting with agents, while building BlogMore to test this approach out, I have been through a period of higher highs and lower lows when it comes to how I feel about the code and the project itself. When I kicked off development it was genuinely thrilling to have gone from an empty repository to a comprehensively-working initial version in just a matter of hours. Likewise it was thrilling to have gone from nothing to rebuilding this blog with the tool in just a few days. It would be a lie to suggest that it wasn't fun and exciting to see the result.

But, as I wrote back then, I was also very mindful of how empty the process felt at times, how I missed the whole "flow state" connection to building out the application. There have also been many moments along the way, which I've documented at times on this blog, where I've felt the project was getting stuck down a dead-end with respect to how the code was going.

And then there's all the times Copilot and/or Gemini CLI just plain stopped getting stuff done.

Given this -- given the highs especially -- I can see why some people get totally hooked, go all in, get consumed by the illusion of how powerful these tools are. I can see why they'd buy into and embrace the mindset that trots out the AI-equivalent of the crypto-hype "stay poor" retort to those who display any level of scepticism.

Just a wee catch-up post about OSHit, my terminal-based HackerNews browser. Over the past couple of weeks I've made some small changes, so I thought I'd make mention of what I've done.

As of v0.5.0, which I released earlier today, I've:

• Added a quick way of following links while viewing a comment. While a comment is highlighted you can press l to follow a link; if there's more than one link in the comment a menu will be shown and you can select which one to follow.
• Added support for viewing polls. Polls seem to be few and far between on HackerNews, so when I published the first version of OSHit I didn't have one to hand to test any code against. Eventually one turned up and broke OSHit (on purpose; I wanted to see when that happened) so I could then add the code to load polls and show them. Right now it just shows scores; I might do actual charts at some point.
• Added optional item numbers in the lists; turned on/off with F4.

So far all small things, but handy little improvements. There's still a nice TODO list in the README and I will slowly work through it. Along with tinboard these are two applications that have absolutely turned into "daily drivers", so they're going to get a lot of tweaking over the next few weeks, probably even months.

This is actually the second release of OSHit since I first announced it a week back, and I'll get to that other release in a moment.

I've just published v0.2.0, which isn't a very substantial release, but which bumps the required version of Textual to v0.47.1 and has some fun with the new nested CSS feature.

Underlying the point of this release was me taking a "real world" application of mine and nesting as much of the CSS within it as possible, in part to get a feel for how and when it's useful, but also to give it a proper test in a "proper" application. In doing so I think I've found one bug.

Dogfooding is always a good idea.

The main visible change in this release is I've played around with the look of the comments dialog a bit:

I'm still narrowing this down, but I think I prefer this look to what I started out with.

Another change I made was also to the comments dialog. Before, if you performed the "expand comments" action on a comment card that already had its comments expanded, it would move focus to the first child comment; this was a deliberate choice that felt right at the time. Having used the app for a few days now I've realised that making it an open/close toggle is far more useful. So that's what I've done.

Now... as for the previous release I mentioned above. That was a fun one.

Back when I released v0.1.0 some joker decided that it would be fun to submit the blog post about it to the Orange Site. The comments there went as you'd expect:

• Some riffed off the opening paragraph, ignoring the tool itself.
• Some riffed off the opening paragraph in a self-reflective way.
• Some riffed off the opening paragraph in a "I never see the problem" way.
• One or two did the usual "why even bother building that when $TOOL_OF_CHOICE exists?" dance to show their terminal purity.
• One or two posted genuinely useful links to other similar projects.
• The biggest tree of comments was kind of a fight.

One comment caught my eye though; someone reported having a problem running it. My initial thought on reading it was "my dude, seriously, you're going to report the problem in some random comment on HN rather than raise an issue with the author?!?".

For once I was wrong to be so cynical.

So, yeah, that was the reminder I needed that I'd been intentionally reckless while writing the original code, and hadn't gone back to the API code I'd written and made it behave before doing the initial release.

All of which is to say: if you run into a problem with some FOSS project, be like @mihaitodor. Issue that thing so the developer gets to know about it; don't assume they'll be reading some random comment section, social media site or Discord server!

That and don't make 500+ HTTP requests at once; that might not end well for some.

I know I'm not alone in having a relationship with the orange site that is... weird. I generally dislike the culture there, it's almost impossible to read any of the comments without being frustrated about the industry I work in or am adjacent to and some of the people who inhabit it; but as a link aggregator of stuff I might find interesting... I honestly can't think of anywhere better. So, yes, I've been a fairly avid reader of HackerNews for many years, and have even had an account there for over 4 years.

Given this, for a wee while now, I've been meaning to knock up a terminal-based client for it using Textual.

So after work on Tinboard settled down I got the urge to start a new pet project (not abandoning Tinboard, I'm still going to be tweaking and extending it of course) and finally knocking up that client seemed like the one.

Orange Site Hit is the result.

It's worth making clear from the very start: this is a read-only reader. There is no logging in, there is no voting, there is no posting of things. This is a client built with their own API and it doesn't provide such a thing; at least not now and despite me seeing past promises that this will change, there's no API for doing that sort of thing.¹

The idea of this application is you can run it up in the terminal, check the top, best and latest from the categories provided by the API, perhaps dive off into your web browser if needed, and then got on with other things.

It's there for when you're in the terminal you just need your hit of the orange site.

The main screen of the app revolves around the index of items, most of which are going to be stories. You can see an example of that above. For people who prefer things to be slightly less cramped, I've also added a "relaxed layout" mode too:

From the index you can head off into your web-browser by hitting Enter on any item; if the item is a story that links to somewhere that link will be opened; if it's something more like AskHN, or a job, it'll open the related page on HackerNews itself.

Pressing u with an item selected will let you view the details for the user who posted the item:

If you're the sort of person who wants to torture themselves by reading the comments (oh come on we all do it!), there's a comment reader/navigator too. With an item selected press c and the comment dialog will open:

I think the navigation within that dialog is fine; although I can see some scope for improvement. At the moment it uses a widget-per-comment (actually, it's at least 4 widgets per comment), which is fine and Textual handles that without an issue, even on items with lots of comments, but longer-term I can see me having some fun using the line API to build a super-efficient comment presentation and navigation widget.

That's it for now; it feels like a good v0.1.0 spot to be in. There are a bunch of things I still want to do with it (better cleaning up of the text, perhaps with some markup support so links get handled, etc; plus lots of ways of searching for stuff), but I felt it was in a place where I could start using it.

Anyway, if this sounds like your sort of thing, it can be installed with pip or (ideally) pipx from PyPi. The source is available over on GitHub.