There’s something refreshing about explicitly saying “this editor exists to delight me, and that’s enough”. The default script now is that every side project should either be open-sourced or turned into a SaaS, even if that pressure is exactly what kills the weirdness that made it interesting in the first place.
Some of the best tools I’ve used felt like they started as someone’s private playground that only later got hardened into “serious” software. Letting yourself park Boo, go build a language, and come back when it’s fun again is probably how we get more Rio/Boo-style experiments instead of yet another VS Code skin with a growth deck attached.
I'm very much for people open-sourcing their projects in terms of releasing the source code. Just don't accept patches or whatever, keep the repos closed
Unfortunately, and I think to great overall harm, GitHub does not let you disable many of the collaboration features. I was just having a discussion today with someone who would be fine open sourcing their code, but is uninterested in any contributions, questions, or community interaction. Since GitHub won’t allow that, their options are to host it somewhere themselves where nobody will see it, or just don’t publish it, which is ultimately what happened.
I have a hobby game up on GitHub. The README explains that it's open source for people to fork it and file issues, but that I don't accept contributions. So far, it seems like that's been very effective.
We don't always have to solve problems with technology. Sometimes you can just tell people things.
It's precisely because of the hobby nature of my projects that I want this feature. Support and collaboration are a lot of work. I have trouble conjuring up enough motivation to work on my projects as it is.
I found working with AI as the code buddy to be motivating (ironically). You get to chat about the project, ask opinions and in general have somebody do the work you don't find inspiring.
AI often doesn't do things your way, but if your doing something for yourself you usually care more about the goal than the technicalities. Also AI working on a hobby code base is less prone to overcomplication since it basically copies what you've wrote yourself.
I had a similar experience. Just chatting about stuff, shooting ideas and concepts back and forth with the AI is quite stimulating. I get to be an obnoxious help vampire without draining other humans of their patience and motivation. It's like having a developer friend with infinite patience to chat with.
In terms of productivity it's having something of a mixed effect. It gives me very clear ideas and direction but at the same time everything just feels done afterwards. All that's left is actually executing the tasks which is... Boring.
I'm not sure I trust ChatGPT to do it for me like an agent. The examples it gives me are never quite right. It's probably a lot better at generating frontend javascript code than programming language interpreter code.
Sponsors can have quite a bit more entitlement then the average github dude. But well, maybe if you lock it down for sponsors the stress level is overall lower.
> Sponsors can have quite a bit more entitlement then the average github dude.
Is this some sort of unwritten agreement? When I was setting up my sponsor page, I explored the sponsor pages of other users for ideas. I don't think there were many sponsorship tiers with special features. Some people offered advertising space on the README, others offered access to an exclusive Discord channel, most just thanked the sponsor.
I'm still new at this so I wouldn't know. I only ever had one sponsor. Happened organically after my work was independently posted here on HN once.
Oh my mistake I was thinking of individual donations, which may be implied as some premium service. I think a company/org sponsor should be more professional.
In theory you can just cancel a sponsor if it doesn't fit. You can turn your back on on donations, but you somehow owe the donators forever.
I hardly get any contributions, questions, etc even though I have published them on GitHub (although some people do watch and/or star them, but I don't really care much how many stars it has).
I think you can disable issues but not pull requests, as far as I know.
It might be helpful to allow to disable pull requests too, and possibly to hide how many stars/watchers there are and hide the list of forks (people could still star, watch, and/or fork the repository, but they would not be listed on that repository if the display of those features are disabled).
Whether or not GitHub accepts these ideas, it can be an idea that other services (e.g. Codeberg) can consider adding such options if they want to do (as well as other things).
Odds are, you’re not going to get any contributions even if you do want them. So they could just upload regardless.
And if the README explicitly says the project isn’t open to contributors nor feature requests, then you’re even less likely to see that (and have a very valid reason to politely close any issues on the unlikely scenario that someone might create one).
The vast majority of stuff on GitHub goes unnoticed by the vast majority of people. And only a very small minority of people ever interact with the few projects they do pull from GH.
> Odds are, you’re not going to get any contributions even if you do want them. So they could just upload regardless.
This is not my personal experience nor the experience of a number of folks that I know personally. I think it's pretty hard to generalize about this.
> The vast majority of stuff on GitHub goes unnoticed by the vast majority of people. And only a very small minority of people ever interact with the few projects they do pull from GH.
So what? It's probably not going to impact you, so it's okay and we just have to deal with it? I reject that logic entirely.
> This is not my personal experience nor the experience of a number of folks that I know personally. I think it's pretty hard to generalize about this.
I think it’s pretty easy to generalise because public repositories are public, so the data is available.
The vast majority of repositories on GH has between 0 and 10 stars and no issues raised by other people.
Even people (like myself) who have repos with thousands of stars and other GH members “following” them, will have other repos with in GH with zero interaction.
> So what? It's probably not going to impact you, so it's okay and we just have to deal with it? I reject that logic entirely.
That’s a really uncharitable interpretation of my comment.
A more charitable way of reading it would be:
“Worrying about a minor problem that is easily remediated and likely wouldn’t happen anyway isn’t a strong reason to miss out.”
If we were talking about something high stakes, where one’s career, family or life would be affected; then I’d understand. But the worst outcome here is an assumption gets proven true and they delete the repo.
Please don’t take this as a persuasive argument that someone should do something they don’t want to do. If people don’t want to share their code then that’s their choice.
Instead this is responding to the comment that your friend DID want to share but was scared of a theoretical but low risk and unlikely scenario. That nervousness isn’t irrational, but it’s also not a good reason by itself to miss out on doing something you said they did want to do.
If however, that was really just an excuse and they actually had no real desire to share their code, then they should just be honest and say that. There’s no obligation that people need to open source their pet projects so they don’t need to justify it with arguments about GHs lack controls. They can just said “I don’t want my code public” and that’s a good enough reason itself.
I use GitHub Actions to affect issues and pull requests also, but to assign them to myself (so that they are visible in searches), not to close them. However, for some reason it does not seem to work properly for pull requests, even though it works for issues.
The obvious solution is to just not use github but that's probably not super easy for people without the resources to just throw a tarball on a server somewhere and link people to it
> The default script now is that every side project should either be open-sourced or turned into a SaaS
I think its worse then that. It seems the narrative is everything needs to be enterprise-scale by default. Those who value small languages and tools, experimentation, self-hosting, and the do-it-yourself mindset are the counterculture.
> created solely for myself; I never had the intention of making it [...] mainstream
This is how many artists have worked. They make something for themself, and one day they show it to someone else ... or they just get the urge to share it more widely, often without the hope that anyone will really be interested. Or they keep it for themself.
I think Tolkien is in that group, for example. But don't get the wrong idea from an extreme outlier: much of the time, others aren't interested, or not many are. Sometimes, nobody is interested until after you've forgotten about it or passed away. Who cares? That's one reason you need to make it for yourself. Also, I think that otherwise it provides much less expression and insight into another person, which is at the core of art. There is a fundamental human need to 'externalize the imagination'.
Several years ago, I wrote an angry email to loved ones about something I’d seen in national news (USA) about my city. A friend replied saying that he thought I should submit it to a local paper. Ended up as an op-ed. Not a major claim to fame, but I was still pleased that someone cared enough about my words to publish.
> This is how many artists have worked. They make something for themself, and one day they show it to someone else
That model depended on personal wealth or (more often) patronage. Because the supply of wealthy patrons was limited, it meant that you had fewer artists pursuing their visions. Everyone else needed to find menial jobs.
Now, we democratized access to patronage, but it means that to support yourself, you need to deliver what gets you the most clicks, not what your soul craves.
I sort of wish we still had both models, but I think that wealthy patrons have gone out of fashion in favor of spending money on crypto and AI.
> That model depended on personal wealth or (more often) patronage.
"They make something for themself, .."
For the vast majority of people this means doing it on the side, in addition to their day-job. I've known a lot of artists in my time and we all have day jobs. You do art for yourself because you love to create, not expecting to make any significant money on it.
Right, which works great if your daytime job is being a professor at Oxford, but maybe less so if your only opportunity is farm labor or other physically exhausting job.
Today, more people have the opportunity to dabble in art than ever before.
Personally I've found it much easier to sustain creative stuff on the side while doing a non-knowledge-based job than a knowledge-based one. Mental exhaustion is much more of a drag than physical. (Though the knowledge-based hours were longer too, which I'm sure was a factor.)
Right, which works great if your daytime job is fighting in the trenches, but maybe less so if your only opportunity is software development or other mentally exhausting job.
There are plenty of impovrished, struggling artists - it's a cliche - and especially unknown ones creating for themselves.
> Everyone else needed to find menial jobs.
That doesn't mean you can't create art. Anthony Trollope worked for the post office. Einstein, who externalized imagination in somewhat different way and attributed much to art, was a patent clerk. New York and LA are filled with waitstaff-artists. A friend hired a moving company that almost exclusively hired artists as movers (I know - they weren't too skinny?).
I sincerely never understood the “starving artist” thing. Everyone needs to be able to provide for themselves. The whole starving artist thing always came across (to me) as someone who refused to work because… art?
Art, like anything else, lines up somewhere between a hobby and a career. Similar to athletes, somehow the cream just rises to the top.
You never hear about “starving athletes” I guess is what I mean.
There are definitely athletes who spend their entire prime years working in the minor leagues trying to get their big shot in the majors and never quite getting there.
It’s a life of constant travel, crazy hours and very little money.
> You never hear about “starving athletes” I guess is what I mean.
Go to the 'hood and see the one returning pro ball player interacting with forty no-money kids trying their hardest to make it.
All of the kids would be better off pursuing a higher-probability-of-success career (including unionized manual labor), but that's not what's happening.
> Art, like anything else, lines up somewhere between a hobby and a career.
Says who? Are you an artist? Many artists say - and I'm know nothing to doubt them - that they can give up art like you can give up food.
> Similar to athletes, somehow the cream just rises to the top.
No idea where you get that about art. Many complain that a lot of shlock rises to the 'top'. And how do we know about the cream that didn't rise? Many artists aren't discovered until they're old or dead - Van Gogh being the over-repeated example. But even Van Gogh!
It's easier in sports - you can win on the field; there's frequent, objective evidence. But that applies to clearly superior elite, who have access to training. With access Messi would probably be on top regardless, but the number of Messis is a statistical error. People who are professional-level but lower down the pyramid, whose names you don't recognize but who make up the overwhelming majority of athletes, often say it depends mostly on relationships. There are plenty of people like them, and if they get a job depends on their relationships with coaches, agents, etc. You hear about athletes that seem perfectly capable, some even good or very good, but getting no calls.
What about anyone who is constantly performing full-time at the highest level of creativity, not particularly underfed, but only financially compensated at a fraction of what would be possible if there was adequate recognition of those abilities?
You know, the kind of recognition that can only come when good fortune also smiles on such a dedicated worker.
I guess not all that many can relate unless they are doing creative work themselves.
But that's always been the first thing that comes to mind when I hear "starving" artist.
> You never hear about “starving athletes” I guess is what I mean.
I mean, just because this isn't a trope doesn't mean it doesn't exist. If you know anything about trying to get into pro sports of literally any type, you'll know that it's a lot of sacrifice for a long time. Most athletes who aren't literally the best in the world aren't paid a huge amount, and have to travel a lot to attend events to make that money.
You do sometimes hear of Olympians in the non-big-pro-league sports whose families make enormous financial and lifestyle sacrifices to let them train and compete.
This explains my entire drive with my work on my canvas library. I wanted to do something different with the way I was presenting my poems on my poetry website, so I went away and built something which would help me do just that. I didn't expect the library to take over the majority of my spare time for over a decade, but then I was having too much fun to stop.
The library's on GitHub and I could spam a link to it here, but it's much more exciting to spam a link to a poem that finally gets to use it - https://rikverse2020.rikweb.org.uk/poem/flaw
If you are actually making it for yourself then it shouldn’t matter. I think sometimes people tell themselves they are doing it for them, but then they start thinking “well what would so and so think”. I know I’ve done it, but once I started actually making things for me, I could feel the difference.
Somewhere online I saw photos of where The Dutchman lived while creating some of the paintings - dirty, dreary, lifeless, depresssing places. To see that all around and to imagine and create the mini-worlds in those painting - with their vivid, wild use of color and texture - is wondrous and wonderful.
I have to assume that someone has no idea what I was talking about, and thought that I was making some kind of ethnic slur. Sheesh. What do they teach, these days? Do people think Moby Dick is some kind of STD?
HN should make an exception and allow the poo emoji. It would save a lot of words and BS, and time-consuming attempts at rationlization, because really that's all some comments have to say: 'I don't like this, regardless of any evidence or reason or merit'. That would be honest - it's not the HN ideal but those comments are and will always be present regardless.
Imagine a comment with a string of poo comments beneath it. It would get their point across and the silliness would save bad feelings and flamewars. @dang should try it on April 1st or something. I'm serious - it would lighten things up a bit around here and, as I said, dispel a lot of white lies and manipulative posts.
If you post poo, that's the only character allowed in that comment, and maybe your only response allowed in that subthread. Also, you can't downvote the parent, and nobody can respond to or vote on a poo post. The UI would just be knowing how to manually enter the correct Unicode codepoint. New and recent accounts can't poop - bathrooms for regular customers only!
(I've now revised this comment about five times as I've refined my idea.)
If the moderators have a record of who's doing the voting, it might even be possible for some form of AI to detect the most habitual negative sources.
It could happen.
For about the last year, about the only time I log in is to upvote somebody, and usually a while after I read their message. It can bug me for some time when it's one where I just can't settle for them being downvoted, or alternatively some upvotes are never enough.
Once logged in the sky can be the limit on my own comments sometimes, as I've mentioned before I guess all I have ever done is now known as responding to prompts.
I thought you meant literal bots. It can't be hard to figure out which accounts are downvoting and even rate-limit it per time period, per discussion, per user downvoted, etc.
"So, I woke up today. Got my coffee, family went to sleep, and I have a free afternoon." What kind of schedule or different timezone does this author have with their family? I am trying to imagine a family that either goes to bed in the early afternoon or a person who wakes up in the evening to start their day.
> I always use the example of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. This game is so well crafted that I know people who don’t even like video games but bought a console just to play it — and once they finished, they sold everything.
I feel like with the part you highlighted and this quote here that we are reading a blog post from an alternate dimension or something.
I sold my Nintendo Switch when I stopped playing with it. Then a year or so later I really wanted to play Breath of the Wild again, because it's just so beautiful, and bought another Switch just for that.
It can be both. You can enjoy family time, and still be happy with alone time. I love getting up at 5 am, when everyone is still asleep and the house is still quiet. But I also love spending time with the family once everyone's day starts. Both are possible.
wanting time away from your loved ones doesn't seem the least bit weird to me.
Like sure you love your wife and kids, but being with them every second of every day is probably too much for most sane people. Especially if you have hobbies that demand a lot of focus time.
> When programming becomes repetitive, the odds of you creating something that makes people go “wow” are reduced quite a bit.
Unless you're working on something with a lot of breadth, of course. A great example is yt-dlp which works on a huge number of sites. The wow-factor is high because it feels like it just works everywhere. That's only possible through a huge number of data parsers, many of which are not terribly different from one another
Yeah I make software that makes people feel something - rage - there are 2 types of software one that no one cares about and software that people use and voice their opinions about :)
I never worked at MSFT, but I did work on a few extremely popular consumer-facing products across big tech that had a negative reputation. One product was super hated feature of a bigger and well-loved service (literally "why can't I turn this off") and the other was perceived to be super useful but poor-quality. I think I can understand the experience of those MSFT employees. They know the reputation, and they're sorry, but they need to work, and everyone fights with the product team.
At the former, I started right after school and was baffled no one I worked with ever used our product. I found it super demoralizing to build something so heavily used but unpopular, and eventually I quit out of frustration. I tried to change the product, and improve features, and frequently met with our product and UX people to no avail. We existed, of course, because sometimes popular free products need to serve business goals (thankfully not ads at least).
At the latter, we just had the challenge of building a complicated product, and with millions of users, you'll always get complaints. I had coworkers who would check reddit every morning and share all the complaints people had and really took it to heart. Of course, we could never properly debug or do anything for these random users, and "at scale" a 0.00001% error rate still meant a lot of disappointed people. It was still pretty demoralizing after a while but at least we could say people found us useful, even if it wasn't "fun".
They might be sadists having the time of their lives. There are few better opportunities in life to get away consequence free with causing pain to a huge amount of people, than working on Microsoft Teams. Not only get away with it consequence free; they're even getting paid for it!
I have not met a single softie who defended the decision to make ctrl shift c the shortcut to start a call in a group chat when ctrl shift v is paste unformatted.
Especially given that the teams client doesn't allow disabling or editing keyboard shortcut.
Microsoft employees may be lazy but unlike Facebook employees (I refuse to call it meta), I don't think they are evil.
Emacs and Emacspeak make me feel something. A lot of something. This kind of "playground" feeling where I can dive into a manual that's just sitting right there. The the entire Emacs is a manual. C-h m and boom, all keyboard commands for that mode are right, feaking, there. No hidden bullcrap, no patchwork HTML tables to drudge through, nothing. And if something doesn't work with Emacspeak, I can Codex it into working. Maybe. Enough to get what I want done, done.
In the best case scenario, professionally writing software is treated like a craft. You produce something useful while applying your skills, with the tools at your disposal. You can write software as an art form, just like woodworking can be both a craft and an art form. A woodworker in an assembly line doing the same thing over and over again to me is not a craftsperson, it is the attitude towards the job that makes it art, craft, or assembly line work.
Too many software projects treat programmers as factory workers, where their primary value is measured in amount of storypoints or Jira tickets finished. Don't get me wrong, you can be a craftsperson and use an issue tracker ofcourse, but if quantity is the only thing management cares about instead of quality, the craft gets lost in the process. Quantity is easy to measure, quality is not.
At the same time treating software like an art is probably not very useful. That code is (typically) not written to be looked at, but to make the computer do something useful.
It's a shame artisinal software sounds so weird, because that precisely describes the level of caring I'd like to see applied to the software I use.
> At the same time treating software like an art is probably not very useful. That code is (typically) not written to be looked at, but to make the computer do something useful.
FWIW you can argue the same for woodworking, a chair is typically not made to be looked at but for people to sit on. I tired to think what inherently makes writing software treated less than a craft than woodworking, but couldn’t think of any.
depends on the kind of software, the visuals are part of the ux and ergonomics. ratio, spacing, how to convey state with just the right amount of visual cues. a chair is not a tool your interact with to create. now there are some software that is like this, you want to start it and forget about it as long as it does its thing while you think about your goal.
Meta, Google, and all of FAANG already did that. They crafted software that made people feel hate, anger, depression, but sometimes joy. It's nice to get those cute animal posts when doom scrolling. It's a nice break from "you're all going to die", "everyone is dumb except you", and "you're powerless".
Joking aside, I do very much agree with the OP. But I also wanted to note how things can get perverted. Few people are actually evil and most evil people get there slowly. What's that old cliché that everyone forgets? "The road to hell is paved with good intentions". The point is to constantly check that you're on the right path and realize that most evil is caused in the pursuit of good because good is difficult to do.
But also I wanted to share a Knuth quote
| In fact what I would like to see is thousands of computer scientists let loose to do whatever they want. That’s what really advances the field
- Donald Knuth
I am fully with him on this. It is the same reason Bell Labs had so much success.
How do you manage a bunch of geniuses?[0]. You don't.
You let experts explore. They already know the best ways forward. Many will fail, but that's okay. In CS one of the biggest problems we have is that we try to optimize everything, but we're also really bad at math. If you want to optimize search over a large solution space with a highly parallelized processor you create a distribution. It's good to have that mean but you need the tails too and that's what we lose. You tighten the distribution when you need focus on a specific direction but then relax it to go back to exploration. But what we do, is we like railroads. We like to try to carry all the groceries from the car in one trip. We like to go fast, but don't really care where. We love to misquote Knuth about premature optimization to justify our laziness and ignore his quotes about being detail oriented and refining solutions.
I think progress has slowed down. And I think it's because we stopped exploring. We're afraid to do anything radical, and that's a shame
[0] Knuth has another quote about programmers not being geniuses lol
> created solely for myself; I never had the intention of making it [...] mainstream
This is a habit I picked up from two people I respect greatly as programmers; Casey Muratori and Jonathan Blow.
Those guys both built their own little lands; Jon went as far as building a new language, a 3D game engine in that language, and has multiple game titles in-flight in the engine.
I have a handful of projects that are similar in spirit. I'm largely the only, and target, user of these projects. It's joyful to work in an environment you control completely. No deadlines, no feature requests, no support tickets, no garbage collector, no language runtime .. just me and the OS having a party.
Do you mean they created their own fictional geographic worlds (or parts of worlds)? That's amazing. Many - including Tolkien, I think - have started that way. Sometimes, the world finds out about it. Robert Louis Stevenson started with a map.
Hah, I should have been more specific. They created programming environments that are entirely their own. Although Jon has created several games which include fictional geographic worlds.
Still, it seems like the same thing to me, just in a different medium. Though the public has a much easier time understanding maps than programming environments.
I haven't gone this far, but I get the same joy out of little side project CLIs and libraries.
In particular I've written a CLI framework and a few apps with it. The apps' requirements stretched the framework's capabilities, so I've rewritten large parts of it over the years.
It's incredibly satisfying to feel myself get better as a developer as I write and consume and improve my libraries.
I'd consider JAI shipped, it's just not publicly available. There are hundreds (maybe thousands?) of developers in the beta at this point. Next time you build a new programming language, 3D game engine, and ship a game, lemme know how long it takes.
Casey's done both Handmade Hero, and Performance Aware Programming. Some of the best programming educational content available, in my opinion.
I’m stuck on the opening sentence. Family went to sleep in the morning so rest of the day is free? I must be missing something but that doesn’t make sense.
That wouldn’t make sense either. They said it was the afternoon, and that they now had the whole day free, the sentence wouldn’t make sense if you swapped “went to sleep” for “are still asleep”. There must be some weird timezone thing that the author expects us to know about them already.
"When programming becomes repetitive, the odds of you creating something that makes people go “wow” are reduced quite a bit. It isn’t a rule, of course. You need to be inspired to make inspiring software."
The purpose of software for other people is not to make them go 'wow'; it's to help them with their jobs to be done. That's it. The software is always in service to the job the user wants to get done. Can that make them go 'wow'? Sure, but you can't..aim for 'wow'. That's the wrong goal.
As far as 'inspiration' goes, I'm with Stephen King:
"Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work."
For those that might disagree (hey, it's HN), I would ask: how do you know when 'wow' occurs? Here's a clue: 'wow' can only happen when something else occurs first. That 'something else' is described above.
Even in the case of a CRUD app, I think it's not bad to aim for a wow. Like "with this new feature, I'll no longer need to do x, y, and z repetitive tasks, great!"
I don't know what you are disagreeing with. Your thoughts are somewhat of a non-sequitur.
> The purpose of software for other people is not to make them go 'wow' ... The software is always in service to the job the user wants to get done. Can that make them go 'wow'? Sure, but you can't..aim for 'wow'. That's the wrong goal.
Did he say in his post that he's talking about software for other people? Is the only purpose of writing software to do so for others?
> The purpose of software for other people is not to make them go 'wow'; it's to help them with their jobs to be done.
Aside from where you've only duplicated something that already exists (in which case why bother?), what kind of software would you be able to create to help me do my job that wouldn't also make me go 'wow'?
Any part of my job that I lack tools to help me with are the parts that seem impossible to have the tools for, so when you defy that understanding, 'wow' is inevitable.
My point (and that of the previous poster) is that "wow" isn't required as an initial property to do anything. Pretty sure the dude who made the first wheel just did something that was useful for him in that situation. He didn't think how he could do something to impress his peers. He maybe wasn't even aware he made the first wheel or something innovative.
Also if I'd dive into how F1 wheels are made, I'd expect I learn stuff that is fascinating and far from boring.
The question asked — paraphrasing to include the context you have added — is how you could create something like a wheel, or a novel adaptation on the wheel like an F1 wheel, without sparking 'wow'? It just doesn't seem impossible. You may not come with the intent to create 'wow', but it is going to happen anyway.
I think straight duplication is quite unlikely. You even say it's inevitable. Which is also confusing. Most code written is probably quite unremarkable, yet useful. Usefulness is a dominating factor, wow has a lot of depends.
Is it? There are many different people selling wheels that are all pretty much indistinguishable from one another. The first one no doubt brought the 'wow'. But when the second person showed up with the same thing, what 'wow' would there be?
Our entire system of trade assumes that duplication occurs as an intrinsic piece, with the only defining difference in that duplication is the effort to make the same thing for cheaper. Otherwise known as competition. Are you suggesting that doesn't happen?
I am stuck with your phrasing. Duplication is for me something like cloning or a perfect copy. Which I think is unusual. You will find a chinese phone that looks like an iPhone but is totally different and magnitudes cheaper.
What you talk about is probably more like mimicking. Offering something that people are used to to get into the market. But every competitor will eventually look for things to make a brand or product different.
What is inevitable, is to diverge from mimicry. So duplicating is an evolutionary process itself.
> Duplication is for me something like cloning or a perfect copy.
That's fair. But if you aren't offering a perfect clone, then you're offering something novel that will 'wow' your customers, no? The market will never take interest in what you are selling if there is no 'wow' factor.
> Which I think is unusual.
You make a fair point that unreasonable terms on intellectual property laws has made it much more unusual than it should be, but isn't unusual historically, and shouldn't be unusual given our system of trade that assumes that clones will be produced. It's the only way most people can participate in the economy (and why they currently feel left out; but that's another topic for another day).
This was one of the best & heartfelt blog posts I have read on the HN so far.
I can relate because of 2 things;
1. I also played a lot of legos during my childhood & loved it.
2. I have a similar "preference" on configurations & shell-profile. (ie. overall setup)
At work, I am the only person who has a personal configuration & automation package (ie. dotfiles) at my director's level organization. (Maybe there is another one or two at most)
Not only that, I also have a nearly complete automation to provision a new machine, virtual or otherwise using the same code. (usually maintained by make && make install)
I update things regularly. It has bunch of "utility" scripts. As it being a $FAANG company, once in a while, here and there, people stumble on scripts/solutions/docs (also markdown). There were even occasional CRs (code-reviews / pull-requests) I received.
This is what my nostalgia for native macos editors rests on. I've wanted to buy Coda despite VSCode and other derivatives being more productive, and where would editors now be without BBEdit, Textmate, Espresso/CSS Edit, which all did particular things very well, given the constraints at the time.
I've done this, but the product I made is prohibited by the terms of service of the application it works with, and that industry is litigious and authoritarian. So I'm never going to release it, or even talk about it.
I think sharing software as free and open source should not be primarily about success, fame, money, or anything of the sort. It's about sharing knowledge and experience with the world.
It does not cost you anything to put your code on the internet; you don't need to use something like GitHub. You can just publicize a tarball. Its about sharing and giving, which is fundamentally not about you.
When people ask you to open source, they most likely want to learn and build on it.
I find that the software that evinces a feeling of admiration in me is itself as devoid of feeling as possible, RE the observation that aesthetics are created out of pure functionality.
The more "sentimental" or "egotistical" a piece of software is in itself, the less I like it. Taken to the limit, the title of the article commands us to generate Skinner boxes to maximize user engagement etc.
I think that would be too reductive. The objective productive factors of software are what give it actual value. The author could have chosen to write "produce useful software", but did not.
Reacting mostly on the title, not the article about software as art/hobby, most software I interact with makes me feel something. Mostly rage, occasionally despair. There has been cases of pleasure or delight, but those are so rare they basically don't count.
Edit: also lots of confusion.
That's how I feel about my commandline Solitaire game (gitlab.com/rpigab/solitaire-cli, playable on Gitlab pages with an AZERTY or QWERTY keyboard), I'm the end user, I like playing it and making it, but that's about it!
Boo is an interesting name for an editor what feature were you looking to make that others didn't have? I like your website by the way, the blue square that turns the mouse cursor into a tracer is a neat effect and makes interacting with your content fun!
Kinda tangential but in the advent of AI I feel like there won’t be a niche for “handcrafted software”.
When quartz watches came up the makers of mechanical watches struggled. Quartz watches are cheaper, more accurate in many cases and servicing is usually restricted to replacing a battery. However some people appreciate a good mechanical watch (and the status symbol aspect of course) and nowadays the mechanical watch market is flourishing. Something similar happened with artificial fabrics (polyester, acrylic) and cheap made clothes, there’s a market for handmade clothes that use natural fabrics.
Nobody (well, barring a few HN readers) will ever care if the software was written by people or a bot, as long as it works.
Or maybe it's like someone saying homecooked meals and professional chefs are outdated because McDonalds exists. Homecooked meals are cheaper and healthier, and professional chefs still make better food. I don't think McDonalds is about to disappear, but I'm pretty sure those other categories aren't about to become obsolete any time soon.
I disagree. It enables more people to build utility software without the pain of writing the boilerplate code for it. This should leave more room for their taste and expertise.
That's how it works for me. I'm currently turning a lot of raw data into a map of Berlin rents. I spend less time figuring out the map API, and more time polishing the interesting parts.
I don't care if a craftsman used hand tools or a CNC to build beautiful furniture. I pay for taste, not toil.
Watches are a horrible example. The rich buy them because they're a status symbol. Rich people aren't going to start retaining teams of software experts just for status.
"Mechanical watches" also aren't exploding at all. When people cite this, they're citing the overall watch market growing, because the market for million dollar watches is being driven by a very small group of collectors. Its also not sustainable, and will die down in ~10-20 years when these old guys finish dying. The average not rich person could not give less of a damn about mechanical watches. There's no great comeback on the horizon
It's laughable that LLMs can be considered more accurate than human operators at the macro level. Sure, if I ask a search bot the date Notre Dame was built, it'll get it right more often than me, but if I ask it to write even a simple heap memory allocator, it's going to vomit all over itself.
> Nobody [...] will ever care if the software was written by people or a bot, as long as it works
Yeah.. wake me up when LLMs can produce even nominally complex pieces software that are on-par with human quality. For anything outside of basic web apps, we're a long way off.
I mean, so do I, if you think about it like that. I just have a much lower chance of successfully retrieving the correct information.
In the comparison I was making with respect to accuracy was that the bot is much more likely to accurately answer fact-based queries, and much less likely to succeed at any tasks that require actual 'thinking'. Especially when that task is not particularly common in the training set, such as writing a memory allocator. I can write and debug a simple allocator in half an hour, no worries. I'd be surprised if any of the current LLMs could.
Making people something for software rather than helping them interact healthily with real people in their surroundings feels irresponsible at this point in time, given all the damage social media, short form videos, and the rest have done to the world at large.
I found it cute until I realised it didn't disappear when you let it finish shrinking, nor if you click the little blue square. Then I found myself annoyed by it and left the page.
> I don’t really feel I need to follow people’s cake recipe for success.
That's great, but then what's the point of this article?
The author is seemingly offering advice about why and how software should be built, but then claims to not follow anyone else's advice. Cool.
Just do whatever makes you happy. If you want to work on proprietary editors and programming languages, go ahead. I would argue that doing that in the open would both improve the projects and make the world a better place, far more than blogging about them does, but this doesn't matter if you're optimizing for personal happiness.
The Zelda example is a good reminder that emotion in software often comes from consistency and responsiveness. Those games feel immersive because the underlying systems behave predictably, inputs map cleanly to actions, and the world reacts without friction. That same principle applies to non-game software too: tight feedback loops and coherent internal rules make tools feel “alive” in a way users notice even if they can’t articulate it.
The title sounds like the Chinese curse of software development.
Fun tidbit: Just to make sure I got it right, I quickly googled the phrase. Gemini's elaboration on the topic truly made me feel something. Gemini's answer:
A "Chinese curse" often refers to the phrase "May you live in interesting times," though it's not actually Chinese but a misinterpreted English saying, while actual Chinese curses involve direct insults like "Cào nǐ mā" (Fuck your mother(sic!))
Gemini conflates two meanings of 'curse'. One is a quasi-ritulistic invocation of some power to change the object's fate. The other is intentionally rude, transgressive words used to attack or humiliate.
I think with tools like Claude code you can more easily tackle niche areas that would benefit from custom crafted features and then using the app would feel like it was purpose built for the specific task at hand. Sure the code might not look hand crafted, but if it works and solves problems in the world...
There’s something refreshing about explicitly saying “this editor exists to delight me, and that’s enough”. The default script now is that every side project should either be open-sourced or turned into a SaaS, even if that pressure is exactly what kills the weirdness that made it interesting in the first place.
Some of the best tools I’ve used felt like they started as someone’s private playground that only later got hardened into “serious” software. Letting yourself park Boo, go build a language, and come back when it’s fun again is probably how we get more Rio/Boo-style experiments instead of yet another VS Code skin with a growth deck attached.
I'm very much for people open-sourcing their projects in terms of releasing the source code. Just don't accept patches or whatever, keep the repos closed
Unfortunately, and I think to great overall harm, GitHub does not let you disable many of the collaboration features. I was just having a discussion today with someone who would be fine open sourcing their code, but is uninterested in any contributions, questions, or community interaction. Since GitHub won’t allow that, their options are to host it somewhere themselves where nobody will see it, or just don’t publish it, which is ultimately what happened.
I have a hobby game up on GitHub. The README explains that it's open source for people to fork it and file issues, but that I don't accept contributions. So far, it seems like that's been very effective.
We don't always have to solve problems with technology. Sometimes you can just tell people things.
Sometimes it may be good not to say anything at all :)
I like the idea of crafting tools that allow the user to accomplish something that would ideally not need software.
Even better if the most prominent feature of a necessarily complex software solution, is the behavior to the user as if it is absent completely.
> GitHub does not let you disable many of the collaboration
I wish they'd allow making issues and pull requests sponsor only. Could enable a business model.
It's weird that this thread argues to keep the fun in hobby projects and you ask for the exact opposite.
It's precisely because of the hobby nature of my projects that I want this feature. Support and collaboration are a lot of work. I have trouble conjuring up enough motivation to work on my projects as it is.
I found working with AI as the code buddy to be motivating (ironically). You get to chat about the project, ask opinions and in general have somebody do the work you don't find inspiring.
AI often doesn't do things your way, but if your doing something for yourself you usually care more about the goal than the technicalities. Also AI working on a hobby code base is less prone to overcomplication since it basically copies what you've wrote yourself.
I had a similar experience. Just chatting about stuff, shooting ideas and concepts back and forth with the AI is quite stimulating. I get to be an obnoxious help vampire without draining other humans of their patience and motivation. It's like having a developer friend with infinite patience to chat with.
In terms of productivity it's having something of a mixed effect. It gives me very clear ideas and direction but at the same time everything just feels done afterwards. All that's left is actually executing the tasks which is... Boring.
I'm not sure I trust ChatGPT to do it for me like an agent. The examples it gives me are never quite right. It's probably a lot better at generating frontend javascript code than programming language interpreter code.
Sponsors can have quite a bit more entitlement then the average github dude. But well, maybe if you lock it down for sponsors the stress level is overall lower.
> Sponsors can have quite a bit more entitlement then the average github dude.
Is this some sort of unwritten agreement? When I was setting up my sponsor page, I explored the sponsor pages of other users for ideas. I don't think there were many sponsorship tiers with special features. Some people offered advertising space on the README, others offered access to an exclusive Discord channel, most just thanked the sponsor.
I'm still new at this so I wouldn't know. I only ever had one sponsor. Happened organically after my work was independently posted here on HN once.
Oh my mistake I was thinking of individual donations, which may be implied as some premium service. I think a company/org sponsor should be more professional. In theory you can just cancel a sponsor if it doesn't fit. You can turn your back on on donations, but you somehow owe the donators forever.
Edit: https://pocketbase.io/faq/
Look at the bottom, just an example how sponsors/donors may affect you.
Fun hobby project with the option to change that if someone offers a big enough bag of money.
Yeah. That option is always on the table.
I hardly get any contributions, questions, etc even though I have published them on GitHub (although some people do watch and/or star them, but I don't really care much how many stars it has).
I think you can disable issues but not pull requests, as far as I know.
It might be helpful to allow to disable pull requests too, and possibly to hide how many stars/watchers there are and hide the list of forks (people could still star, watch, and/or fork the repository, but they would not be listed on that repository if the display of those features are disabled).
Whether or not GitHub accepts these ideas, it can be an idea that other services (e.g. Codeberg) can consider adding such options if they want to do (as well as other things).
Odds are, you’re not going to get any contributions even if you do want them. So they could just upload regardless.
And if the README explicitly says the project isn’t open to contributors nor feature requests, then you’re even less likely to see that (and have a very valid reason to politely close any issues on the unlikely scenario that someone might create one).
The vast majority of stuff on GitHub goes unnoticed by the vast majority of people. And only a very small minority of people ever interact with the few projects they do pull from GH.
> Odds are, you’re not going to get any contributions even if you do want them. So they could just upload regardless.
This is not my personal experience nor the experience of a number of folks that I know personally. I think it's pretty hard to generalize about this.
> The vast majority of stuff on GitHub goes unnoticed by the vast majority of people. And only a very small minority of people ever interact with the few projects they do pull from GH.
So what? It's probably not going to impact you, so it's okay and we just have to deal with it? I reject that logic entirely.
> This is not my personal experience nor the experience of a number of folks that I know personally. I think it's pretty hard to generalize about this.
I think it’s pretty easy to generalise because public repositories are public, so the data is available.
The vast majority of repositories on GH has between 0 and 10 stars and no issues raised by other people.
Even people (like myself) who have repos with thousands of stars and other GH members “following” them, will have other repos with in GH with zero interaction.
> So what? It's probably not going to impact you, so it's okay and we just have to deal with it? I reject that logic entirely.
That’s a really uncharitable interpretation of my comment.
A more charitable way of reading it would be:
“Worrying about a minor problem that is easily remediated and likely wouldn’t happen anyway isn’t a strong reason to miss out.”
If we were talking about something high stakes, where one’s career, family or life would be affected; then I’d understand. But the worst outcome here is an assumption gets proven true and they delete the repo.
Please don’t take this as a persuasive argument that someone should do something they don’t want to do. If people don’t want to share their code then that’s their choice.
Instead this is responding to the comment that your friend DID want to share but was scared of a theoretical but low risk and unlikely scenario. That nervousness isn’t irrational, but it’s also not a good reason by itself to miss out on doing something you said they did want to do.
If however, that was really just an excuse and they actually had no real desire to share their code, then they should just be honest and say that. There’s no obligation that people need to open source their pet projects so they don’t need to justify it with arguments about GHs lack controls. They can just said “I don’t want my code public” and that’s a good enough reason itself.
I use an Action to auto-close any Issue or PR in my hobby repo for same reason: https://github.com/marketplace/actions/repo-lockdown
I use GitHub Actions to affect issues and pull requests also, but to assign them to myself (so that they are visible in searches), not to close them. However, for some reason it does not seem to work properly for pull requests, even though it works for issues.
Or to simply ignore issues and PRs. You don't have to answer people for something you do as a hobby.
Right? I don't see the problem here.
"No one can make you [merge PRs] without your consent." - Eleanor Roosevelt, probably
The obvious solution is to just not use github but that's probably not super easy for people without the resources to just throw a tarball on a server somewhere and link people to it
> The default script now is that every side project should either be open-sourced or turned into a SaaS
I think its worse then that. It seems the narrative is everything needs to be enterprise-scale by default. Those who value small languages and tools, experimentation, self-hosting, and the do-it-yourself mindset are the counterculture.
> There’s something refreshing about explicitly saying “this editor exists to delight me, and that’s enough”.
(Emacs)
> created solely for myself; I never had the intention of making it [...] mainstream
This is how many artists have worked. They make something for themself, and one day they show it to someone else ... or they just get the urge to share it more widely, often without the hope that anyone will really be interested. Or they keep it for themself.
I think Tolkien is in that group, for example. But don't get the wrong idea from an extreme outlier: much of the time, others aren't interested, or not many are. Sometimes, nobody is interested until after you've forgotten about it or passed away. Who cares? That's one reason you need to make it for yourself. Also, I think that otherwise it provides much less expression and insight into another person, which is at the core of art. There is a fundamental human need to 'externalize the imagination'.
Several years ago, I wrote an angry email to loved ones about something I’d seen in national news (USA) about my city. A friend replied saying that he thought I should submit it to a local paper. Ended up as an op-ed. Not a major claim to fame, but I was still pleased that someone cared enough about my words to publish.
> This is how many artists have worked. They make something for themself, and one day they show it to someone else
That model depended on personal wealth or (more often) patronage. Because the supply of wealthy patrons was limited, it meant that you had fewer artists pursuing their visions. Everyone else needed to find menial jobs.
Now, we democratized access to patronage, but it means that to support yourself, you need to deliver what gets you the most clicks, not what your soul craves.
I sort of wish we still had both models, but I think that wealthy patrons have gone out of fashion in favor of spending money on crypto and AI.
> That model depended on personal wealth or (more often) patronage.
"They make something for themself, .."
For the vast majority of people this means doing it on the side, in addition to their day-job. I've known a lot of artists in my time and we all have day jobs. You do art for yourself because you love to create, not expecting to make any significant money on it.
Right, which works great if your daytime job is being a professor at Oxford, but maybe less so if your only opportunity is farm labor or other physically exhausting job.
Today, more people have the opportunity to dabble in art than ever before.
Personally I've found it much easier to sustain creative stuff on the side while doing a non-knowledge-based job than a knowledge-based one. Mental exhaustion is much more of a drag than physical. (Though the knowledge-based hours were longer too, which I'm sure was a factor.)
He started writing his stories long before he was a Professor. It was while he was a young man fighting in the First World War.
Right, which works great if your daytime job is fighting in the trenches, but maybe less so if your only opportunity is software development or other mentally exhausting job.
Bravo lol
There are plenty of impovrished, struggling artists - it's a cliche - and especially unknown ones creating for themselves.
> Everyone else needed to find menial jobs.
That doesn't mean you can't create art. Anthony Trollope worked for the post office. Einstein, who externalized imagination in somewhat different way and attributed much to art, was a patent clerk. New York and LA are filled with waitstaff-artists. A friend hired a moving company that almost exclusively hired artists as movers (I know - they weren't too skinny?).
I sincerely never understood the “starving artist” thing. Everyone needs to be able to provide for themselves. The whole starving artist thing always came across (to me) as someone who refused to work because… art?
Art, like anything else, lines up somewhere between a hobby and a career. Similar to athletes, somehow the cream just rises to the top.
You never hear about “starving athletes” I guess is what I mean.
There are definitely athletes who spend their entire prime years working in the minor leagues trying to get their big shot in the majors and never quite getting there.
It’s a life of constant travel, crazy hours and very little money.
> You never hear about “starving athletes” I guess is what I mean.
Go to the 'hood and see the one returning pro ball player interacting with forty no-money kids trying their hardest to make it.
All of the kids would be better off pursuing a higher-probability-of-success career (including unionized manual labor), but that's not what's happening.
Those are some starving athletes.
Those are big assumptions ...
> Art, like anything else, lines up somewhere between a hobby and a career.
Says who? Are you an artist? Many artists say - and I'm know nothing to doubt them - that they can give up art like you can give up food.
> Similar to athletes, somehow the cream just rises to the top.
No idea where you get that about art. Many complain that a lot of shlock rises to the 'top'. And how do we know about the cream that didn't rise? Many artists aren't discovered until they're old or dead - Van Gogh being the over-repeated example. But even Van Gogh!
It's easier in sports - you can win on the field; there's frequent, objective evidence. But that applies to clearly superior elite, who have access to training. With access Messi would probably be on top regardless, but the number of Messis is a statistical error. People who are professional-level but lower down the pyramid, whose names you don't recognize but who make up the overwhelming majority of athletes, often say it depends mostly on relationships. There are plenty of people like them, and if they get a job depends on their relationships with coaches, agents, etc. You hear about athletes that seem perfectly capable, some even good or very good, but getting no calls.
What about anyone who is constantly performing full-time at the highest level of creativity, not particularly underfed, but only financially compensated at a fraction of what would be possible if there was adequate recognition of those abilities?
You know, the kind of recognition that can only come when good fortune also smiles on such a dedicated worker.
I guess not all that many can relate unless they are doing creative work themselves.
But that's always been the first thing that comes to mind when I hear "starving" artist.
> You never hear about “starving athletes” I guess is what I mean.
I mean, just because this isn't a trope doesn't mean it doesn't exist. If you know anything about trying to get into pro sports of literally any type, you'll know that it's a lot of sacrifice for a long time. Most athletes who aren't literally the best in the world aren't paid a huge amount, and have to travel a lot to attend events to make that money.
In the US, Congress passed a special law restricting the labor rights of minor league baseball players.
You do sometimes hear of Olympians in the non-big-pro-league sports whose families make enormous financial and lifestyle sacrifices to let them train and compete.
That was true for all Olympians before they allowed professionals to compete.
This explains my entire drive with my work on my canvas library. I wanted to do something different with the way I was presenting my poems on my poetry website, so I went away and built something which would help me do just that. I didn't expect the library to take over the majority of my spare time for over a decade, but then I was having too much fun to stop.
The library's on GitHub and I could spam a link to it here, but it's much more exciting to spam a link to a poem that finally gets to use it - https://rikverse2020.rikweb.org.uk/poem/flaw
If you are actually making it for yourself then it shouldn’t matter. I think sometimes people tell themselves they are doing it for them, but then they start thinking “well what would so and so think”. I know I’ve done it, but once I started actually making things for me, I could feel the difference.
If you make it for yourself and no one else likes it, it is of value to you still.
If you make it for others but no one else likes it, it is of value to nobody at all.
> or passed away
A certain one-eared Dutchman comes to mind...
Somewhere online I saw photos of where The Dutchman lived while creating some of the paintings - dirty, dreary, lifeless, depresssing places. To see that all around and to imagine and create the mini-worlds in those painting - with their vivid, wild use of color and texture - is wondrous and wonderful.
I think he sort of lived in his own world. He was def pretty neurodivergent, in some way.
I [sort of] remember a movie, once, that had a kid basically doing a "Don Quixote" on the world, where his vision of everything was kind of wondrous.
Don't remember it well enough to recall its name, though...
I have to assume that someone has no idea what I was talking about, and thought that I was making some kind of ethnic slur. Sheesh. What do they teach, these days? Do people think Moby Dick is some kind of STD?
For elucidation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_van_Gogh
He died a pauper, but his work is some of the most valuable in history.
No complaining about downvotes! lol
Yes, sometimes I can't even guess why. Drunk and missed the target? Those little arrows are poor GUI.
Actually there has been a request to report suspected downvote-a-bots.
If they exist, I would probably be a candidate target for one (or more).
I have a number of Commissioner Dreyfus-level haters. One pops up, from time to time, screeches, and throws poo. It’s kind of cute, actually.
I cry myself to sleep, every night, over it.
HN should make an exception and allow the poo emoji. It would save a lot of words and BS, and time-consuming attempts at rationlization, because really that's all some comments have to say: 'I don't like this, regardless of any evidence or reason or merit'. That would be honest - it's not the HN ideal but those comments are and will always be present regardless.
Imagine a comment with a string of poo comments beneath it. It would get their point across and the silliness would save bad feelings and flamewars. @dang should try it on April 1st or something. I'm serious - it would lighten things up a bit around here and, as I said, dispel a lot of white lies and manipulative posts.
If you post poo, that's the only character allowed in that comment, and maybe your only response allowed in that subthread. Also, you can't downvote the parent, and nobody can respond to or vote on a poo post. The UI would just be knowing how to manually enter the correct Unicode codepoint. New and recent accounts can't poop - bathrooms for regular customers only!
(I've now revised this comment about five times as I've refined my idea.)
How would you objectively identify such a thing? 'I think this downvote is dumb' isn't sufficient, obviously.
If the moderators have a record of who's doing the voting, it might even be possible for some form of AI to detect the most habitual negative sources.
It could happen.
For about the last year, about the only time I log in is to upvote somebody, and usually a while after I read their message. It can bug me for some time when it's one where I just can't settle for them being downvoted, or alternatively some upvotes are never enough.
Once logged in the sky can be the limit on my own comments sometimes, as I've mentioned before I guess all I have ever done is now known as responding to prompts.
I thought you meant literal bots. It can't be hard to figure out which accounts are downvoting and even rate-limit it per time period, per discussion, per user downvoted, etc.
Kafka is another.
"So, I woke up today. Got my coffee, family went to sleep, and I have a free afternoon." What kind of schedule or different timezone does this author have with their family? I am trying to imagine a family that either goes to bed in the early afternoon or a person who wakes up in the evening to start their day.
> I always use the example of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. This game is so well crafted that I know people who don’t even like video games but bought a console just to play it — and once they finished, they sold everything.
I feel like with the part you highlighted and this quote here that we are reading a blog post from an alternate dimension or something.
I sold my Nintendo Switch when I stopped playing with it. Then a year or so later I really wanted to play Breath of the Wild again, because it's just so beautiful, and bought another Switch just for that.
His other hobby is anaesthesia?
Maybe a young child that naps in the day? That doesn’t really give a whole free afternoon though. 2 hours at best.
Or family is the cat.
That is weird enough. But also the fact that he seems to be celebrating that is odd.
Avoiding to spend time with your family shouldn’t be something you enjoy.
It can be both. You can enjoy family time, and still be happy with alone time. I love getting up at 5 am, when everyone is still asleep and the house is still quiet. But I also love spending time with the family once everyone's day starts. Both are possible.
wanting time away from your loved ones doesn't seem the least bit weird to me.
Like sure you love your wife and kids, but being with them every second of every day is probably too much for most sane people. Especially if you have hobbies that demand a lot of focus time.
Have you had children?
Spain probably. Their siestas are as legendary as they are mandatory :)
> When programming becomes repetitive, the odds of you creating something that makes people go “wow” are reduced quite a bit.
Unless you're working on something with a lot of breadth, of course. A great example is yt-dlp which works on a huge number of sites. The wow-factor is high because it feels like it just works everywhere. That's only possible through a huge number of data parsers, many of which are not terribly different from one another
Yeah I make software that makes people feel something - rage - there are 2 types of software one that no one cares about and software that people use and voice their opinions about :)
I was looking for this comment. For example Microsoft Teams and Office 365 make me feel something, but it’s not joy.
I feel bad for the poor souls that are forced to work on software like that. It surely can't be fun
I never worked at MSFT, but I did work on a few extremely popular consumer-facing products across big tech that had a negative reputation. One product was super hated feature of a bigger and well-loved service (literally "why can't I turn this off") and the other was perceived to be super useful but poor-quality. I think I can understand the experience of those MSFT employees. They know the reputation, and they're sorry, but they need to work, and everyone fights with the product team.
At the former, I started right after school and was baffled no one I worked with ever used our product. I found it super demoralizing to build something so heavily used but unpopular, and eventually I quit out of frustration. I tried to change the product, and improve features, and frequently met with our product and UX people to no avail. We existed, of course, because sometimes popular free products need to serve business goals (thankfully not ads at least).
At the latter, we just had the challenge of building a complicated product, and with millions of users, you'll always get complaints. I had coworkers who would check reddit every morning and share all the complaints people had and really took it to heart. Of course, we could never properly debug or do anything for these random users, and "at scale" a 0.00001% error rate still meant a lot of disappointed people. It was still pretty demoralizing after a while but at least we could say people found us useful, even if it wasn't "fun".
They might be sadists having the time of their lives. There are few better opportunities in life to get away consequence free with causing pain to a huge amount of people, than working on Microsoft Teams. Not only get away with it consequence free; they're even getting paid for it!
I have not met a single softie who defended the decision to make ctrl shift c the shortcut to start a call in a group chat when ctrl shift v is paste unformatted.
Especially given that the teams client doesn't allow disabling or editing keyboard shortcut.
Microsoft employees may be lazy but unlike Facebook employees (I refuse to call it meta), I don't think they are evil.
H1-B visas? Their alternative surely isn't better.
DRM software :)
Bonus if its like Sony BMG copy protection rootkit [1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
Right, I noticed my best tools come from solving a problem that I personally hit daily. Generalizing too early made progess slow, and quality drops.
Emacs and Emacspeak make me feel something. A lot of something. This kind of "playground" feeling where I can dive into a manual that's just sitting right there. The the entire Emacs is a manual. C-h m and boom, all keyboard commands for that mode are right, feaking, there. No hidden bullcrap, no patchwork HTML tables to drudge through, nothing. And if something doesn't work with Emacspeak, I can Codex it into working. Maybe. Enough to get what I want done, done.
In the best case scenario, professionally writing software is treated like a craft. You produce something useful while applying your skills, with the tools at your disposal. You can write software as an art form, just like woodworking can be both a craft and an art form. A woodworker in an assembly line doing the same thing over and over again to me is not a craftsperson, it is the attitude towards the job that makes it art, craft, or assembly line work.
Too many software projects treat programmers as factory workers, where their primary value is measured in amount of storypoints or Jira tickets finished. Don't get me wrong, you can be a craftsperson and use an issue tracker ofcourse, but if quantity is the only thing management cares about instead of quality, the craft gets lost in the process. Quantity is easy to measure, quality is not.
At the same time treating software like an art is probably not very useful. That code is (typically) not written to be looked at, but to make the computer do something useful.
It's a shame artisinal software sounds so weird, because that precisely describes the level of caring I'd like to see applied to the software I use.
> At the same time treating software like an art is probably not very useful. That code is (typically) not written to be looked at, but to make the computer do something useful.
FWIW you can argue the same for woodworking, a chair is typically not made to be looked at but for people to sit on. I tired to think what inherently makes writing software treated less than a craft than woodworking, but couldn’t think of any.
depends on the kind of software, the visuals are part of the ux and ergonomics. ratio, spacing, how to convey state with just the right amount of visual cues. a chair is not a tool your interact with to create. now there are some software that is like this, you want to start it and forget about it as long as it does its thing while you think about your goal.
Sometimes with software the reat art has nothing to do with anything the user sees.
that is true, a lot of gems are forever hidden under the hood
Joking aside, I do very much agree with the OP. But I also wanted to note how things can get perverted. Few people are actually evil and most evil people get there slowly. What's that old cliché that everyone forgets? "The road to hell is paved with good intentions". The point is to constantly check that you're on the right path and realize that most evil is caused in the pursuit of good because good is difficult to do.
But also I wanted to share a Knuth quote
I am fully with him on this. It is the same reason Bell Labs had so much success. You let experts explore. They already know the best ways forward. Many will fail, but that's okay. In CS one of the biggest problems we have is that we try to optimize everything, but we're also really bad at math. If you want to optimize search over a large solution space with a highly parallelized processor you create a distribution. It's good to have that mean but you need the tails too and that's what we lose. You tighten the distribution when you need focus on a specific direction but then relax it to go back to exploration. But what we do, is we like railroads. We like to try to carry all the groceries from the car in one trip. We like to go fast, but don't really care where. We love to misquote Knuth about premature optimization to justify our laziness and ignore his quotes about being detail oriented and refining solutions.I think progress has slowed down. And I think it's because we stopped exploring. We're afraid to do anything radical, and that's a shame
[0] Knuth has another quote about programmers not being geniuses lol
My saying is that if you want to be able to herd cats, you need to be cat yourself.
That can require so much experience most people could never imagine it could be accomplished at all.
But if so, you could then herd geniuses, as long as they were also cats :)
When you single-handedly have to cover a lot of bases, you do what you have to do.
> created solely for myself; I never had the intention of making it [...] mainstream
This is a habit I picked up from two people I respect greatly as programmers; Casey Muratori and Jonathan Blow.
Those guys both built their own little lands; Jon went as far as building a new language, a 3D game engine in that language, and has multiple game titles in-flight in the engine.
I have a handful of projects that are similar in spirit. I'm largely the only, and target, user of these projects. It's joyful to work in an environment you control completely. No deadlines, no feature requests, no support tickets, no garbage collector, no language runtime .. just me and the OS having a party.
> Those guys both built their own little lands
Do you mean they created their own fictional geographic worlds (or parts of worlds)? That's amazing. Many - including Tolkien, I think - have started that way. Sometimes, the world finds out about it. Robert Louis Stevenson started with a map.
Hah, I should have been more specific. They created programming environments that are entirely their own. Although Jon has created several games which include fictional geographic worlds.
Still, it seems like the same thing to me, just in a different medium. Though the public has a much easier time understanding maps than programming environments.
Agreed
I haven't gone this far, but I get the same joy out of little side project CLIs and libraries.
In particular I've written a CLI framework and a few apps with it. The apps' requirements stretched the framework's capabilities, so I've rewritten large parts of it over the years.
It's incredibly satisfying to feel myself get better as a developer as I write and consume and improve my libraries.
Blow hasn't shipped anything in 10 years. I think Casey as well
What if he ships a game and a programming language by the end of next year? In 2 years? In 5 years?
I think if he ships a game and a programming language in any of those timeframes I will be very impressed. I also think it is likely.
Looks like his Sokoban game releases 2026- he just uploaded a trailer: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OIxuGF6CwnU&pp=2AEAkAIB
I'd consider JAI shipped, it's just not publicly available. There are hundreds (maybe thousands?) of developers in the beta at this point. Next time you build a new programming language, 3D game engine, and ship a game, lemme know how long it takes.
Casey's done both Handmade Hero, and Performance Aware Programming. Some of the best programming educational content available, in my opinion.
Also .. so what?
In so far as it makes me feel the relief, awe, and pleasure of picking up a good tool, then by all means.
The mouse trail made me feel something else.
I’m stuck on the opening sentence. Family went to sleep in the morning so rest of the day is free? I must be missing something but that doesn’t make sense.
Did the author chloroform them?
I think English isn't their first language. I believe they mean "are still asleep".
That wouldn’t make sense either. They said it was the afternoon, and that they now had the whole day free, the sentence wouldn’t make sense if you swapped “went to sleep” for “are still asleep”. There must be some weird timezone thing that the author expects us to know about them already.
babies? nap time?
I don't know what the article was about because I got distracted, but the mouse animation looks great!
Dread is a feeling.
There's definitely software that wants to make people feel dread. Mostly horror games and Atlassian applications.
Yes, that's a good one! Many skilled programmers working in corporations like to go for this one.
Snarky reply but most software today makes me feel very strong feelings :'(
I see node_modules I get angry.
Also, anything electron induces a strong sense of "where did we go wrong?"
Also, mobile-ish interfaces on desktops. Ugh!
I know what you mean.
Before the iPhone came out, mobile used to handle desktop websites better than desktops handle lots of modern sites now.
Lots of software is crafted to make me feel rage
Crafted ? More like: if it compiles, ship it.
I would say both, but socalgal is one of those who are sensitive to this.
The business plan seems to often be one of fomenting rage with plenty of people not feeling like it is happening at all.
I agree with the title, but disagree with this:
"When programming becomes repetitive, the odds of you creating something that makes people go “wow” are reduced quite a bit. It isn’t a rule, of course. You need to be inspired to make inspiring software."
The purpose of software for other people is not to make them go 'wow'; it's to help them with their jobs to be done. That's it. The software is always in service to the job the user wants to get done. Can that make them go 'wow'? Sure, but you can't..aim for 'wow'. That's the wrong goal.
As far as 'inspiration' goes, I'm with Stephen King: "Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work."
For those that might disagree (hey, it's HN), I would ask: how do you know when 'wow' occurs? Here's a clue: 'wow' can only happen when something else occurs first. That 'something else' is described above.
That’s overly reductive. You’re making a CRUD app? Absolutely. You’re programming a new effect for a laser setup in a club? Less so.
Even in the case of a CRUD app, I think it's not bad to aim for a wow. Like "with this new feature, I'll no longer need to do x, y, and z repetitive tasks, great!"
I don't know what you are disagreeing with. Your thoughts are somewhat of a non-sequitur.
> The purpose of software for other people is not to make them go 'wow' ... The software is always in service to the job the user wants to get done. Can that make them go 'wow'? Sure, but you can't..aim for 'wow'. That's the wrong goal.
Did he say in his post that he's talking about software for other people? Is the only purpose of writing software to do so for others?
> The purpose of software for other people is not to make them go 'wow'; it's to help them with their jobs to be done.
Aside from where you've only duplicated something that already exists (in which case why bother?), what kind of software would you be able to create to help me do my job that wouldn't also make me go 'wow'?
Any part of my job that I lack tools to help me with are the parts that seem impossible to have the tools for, so when you defy that understanding, 'wow' is inevitable.
> Aside from where you've only duplicated something that already exists (in which case why bother?)
If we had stopped reiterating on the wheel our cars would drive on wooden logs.
Of course, a wheel doesn't duplicate a wooden log. The wheel most certainly 'wow'-ed people when it was first introduced.
But if you release a wheel today, same as any other wheel you can already buy, don't expect much fanfare.
My point (and that of the previous poster) is that "wow" isn't required as an initial property to do anything. Pretty sure the dude who made the first wheel just did something that was useful for him in that situation. He didn't think how he could do something to impress his peers. He maybe wasn't even aware he made the first wheel or something innovative.
Also if I'd dive into how F1 wheels are made, I'd expect I learn stuff that is fascinating and far from boring.
The question asked — paraphrasing to include the context you have added — is how you could create something like a wheel, or a novel adaptation on the wheel like an F1 wheel, without sparking 'wow'? It just doesn't seem impossible. You may not come with the intent to create 'wow', but it is going to happen anyway.
I am confused on your use of "duplicating".
I think straight duplication is quite unlikely. You even say it's inevitable. Which is also confusing. Most code written is probably quite unremarkable, yet useful. Usefulness is a dominating factor, wow has a lot of depends.
> I think straight duplication is quite unlikely.
Is it? There are many different people selling wheels that are all pretty much indistinguishable from one another. The first one no doubt brought the 'wow'. But when the second person showed up with the same thing, what 'wow' would there be?
Our entire system of trade assumes that duplication occurs as an intrinsic piece, with the only defining difference in that duplication is the effort to make the same thing for cheaper. Otherwise known as competition. Are you suggesting that doesn't happen?
I am stuck with your phrasing. Duplication is for me something like cloning or a perfect copy. Which I think is unusual. You will find a chinese phone that looks like an iPhone but is totally different and magnitudes cheaper. What you talk about is probably more like mimicking. Offering something that people are used to to get into the market. But every competitor will eventually look for things to make a brand or product different. What is inevitable, is to diverge from mimicry. So duplicating is an evolutionary process itself.
> Duplication is for me something like cloning or a perfect copy.
That's fair. But if you aren't offering a perfect clone, then you're offering something novel that will 'wow' your customers, no? The market will never take interest in what you are selling if there is no 'wow' factor.
> Which I think is unusual.
You make a fair point that unreasonable terms on intellectual property laws has made it much more unusual than it should be, but isn't unusual historically, and shouldn't be unusual given our system of trade that assumes that clones will be produced. It's the only way most people can participate in the economy (and why they currently feel left out; but that's another topic for another day).
This was one of the best & heartfelt blog posts I have read on the HN so far.
I can relate because of 2 things; 1. I also played a lot of legos during my childhood & loved it. 2. I have a similar "preference" on configurations & shell-profile. (ie. overall setup)
At work, I am the only person who has a personal configuration & automation package (ie. dotfiles) at my director's level organization. (Maybe there is another one or two at most)
Not only that, I also have a nearly complete automation to provision a new machine, virtual or otherwise using the same code. (usually maintained by make && make install)
I update things regularly. It has bunch of "utility" scripts. As it being a $FAANG company, once in a while, here and there, people stumble on scripts/solutions/docs (also markdown). There were even occasional CRs (code-reviews / pull-requests) I received.
Love how the mouse trail effect is using O(1) memory no matter how fast you move the mouse so it won't blow up your browser.
Genuine question: What else would it do? The mouse trail is a history of coordinates, so that should be linear, right?
This is what my nostalgia for native macos editors rests on. I've wanted to buy Coda despite VSCode and other derivatives being more productive, and where would editors now be without BBEdit, Textmate, Espresso/CSS Edit, which all did particular things very well, given the constraints at the time.
I love that essay.
I tend to do things the same way. I write software that I want to use.
I do tend to go "all the way," though. Making it ship-Quality, releasing it on the App Store, providing supporting Web documentation, etc.
Makes me feel good to do it.
I always used to say "My dream is to work for free."
Livin' the dream...
I've done this, but the product I made is prohibited by the terms of service of the application it works with, and that industry is litigious and authoritarian. So I'm never going to release it, or even talk about it.
I think sharing software as free and open source should not be primarily about success, fame, money, or anything of the sort. It's about sharing knowledge and experience with the world.
It does not cost you anything to put your code on the internet; you don't need to use something like GitHub. You can just publicize a tarball. Its about sharing and giving, which is fundamentally not about you.
When people ask you to open source, they most likely want to learn and build on it.
i remember making the switch from atom to vscode felt so cold
i can’t explain what, it wasn’t just the colour scheme
atom was objectively worse on performance and a few other things i forget, but it felt so good to use
JIRA makes people feel something
Looks like they disabled the mouse effect thing everyone is talking about, for the articles. So if you want to see it, go to the homepage of the site.
I find that the software that evinces a feeling of admiration in me is itself as devoid of feeling as possible, RE the observation that aesthetics are created out of pure functionality.
The more "sentimental" or "egotistical" a piece of software is in itself, the less I like it. Taken to the limit, the title of the article commands us to generate Skinner boxes to maximize user engagement etc.
I don't think it's too reductive to suggest that what you're liking is also "a feeling," just a different one than you were thinking about?
I think that would be too reductive. The objective productive factors of software are what give it actual value. The author could have chosen to write "produce useful software", but did not.
Reacting mostly on the title, not the article about software as art/hobby, most software I interact with makes me feel something. Mostly rage, occasionally despair. There has been cases of pleasure or delight, but those are so rare they basically don't count. Edit: also lots of confusion.
That was the thought when I designed https://dianazink.com
That's how I feel about my commandline Solitaire game (gitlab.com/rpigab/solitaire-cli, playable on Gitlab pages with an AZERTY or QWERTY keyboard), I'm the end user, I like playing it and making it, but that's about it!
> Craft software that makes people feel something
You can easily induce rage by shipping it full of bugs :)
Like Microsoft, who continues to craft software which makes me feel anger.
Boo is an interesting name for an editor what feature were you looking to make that others didn't have? I like your website by the way, the blue square that turns the mouse cursor into a tracer is a neat effect and makes interacting with your content fun!
rage after moving my mouse on that site...great work !
Kinda tangential but in the advent of AI I feel like there won’t be a niche for “handcrafted software”.
When quartz watches came up the makers of mechanical watches struggled. Quartz watches are cheaper, more accurate in many cases and servicing is usually restricted to replacing a battery. However some people appreciate a good mechanical watch (and the status symbol aspect of course) and nowadays the mechanical watch market is flourishing. Something similar happened with artificial fabrics (polyester, acrylic) and cheap made clothes, there’s a market for handmade clothes that use natural fabrics.
Nobody (well, barring a few HN readers) will ever care if the software was written by people or a bot, as long as it works.
Or maybe it's like someone saying homecooked meals and professional chefs are outdated because McDonalds exists. Homecooked meals are cheaper and healthier, and professional chefs still make better food. I don't think McDonalds is about to disappear, but I'm pretty sure those other categories aren't about to become obsolete any time soon.
I disagree. It enables more people to build utility software without the pain of writing the boilerplate code for it. This should leave more room for their taste and expertise.
That's how it works for me. I'm currently turning a lot of raw data into a map of Berlin rents. I spend less time figuring out the map API, and more time polishing the interesting parts.
I don't care if a craftsman used hand tools or a CNC to build beautiful furniture. I pay for taste, not toil.
I think you're agreeing, not disagreeing. I also misread the comment originally.
Emphasis mine:
> there won’t be a niche
Watches are a horrible example. The rich buy them because they're a status symbol. Rich people aren't going to start retaining teams of software experts just for status.
"Mechanical watches" also aren't exploding at all. When people cite this, they're citing the overall watch market growing, because the market for million dollar watches is being driven by a very small group of collectors. Its also not sustainable, and will die down in ~10-20 years when these old guys finish dying. The average not rich person could not give less of a damn about mechanical watches. There's no great comeback on the horizon
> Nobody (well, barring a few HN readers) will ever care if the software was written by people or a bot, as long as it works.
That is probably true. But all evidence to date is that if the software is written by a bot, it won't work. That is why people will care.
This is a bad analogy.
> more accurate in many cases
It's laughable that LLMs can be considered more accurate than human operators at the macro level. Sure, if I ask a search bot the date Notre Dame was built, it'll get it right more often than me, but if I ask it to write even a simple heap memory allocator, it's going to vomit all over itself.
> Nobody [...] will ever care if the software was written by people or a bot, as long as it works
Yeah.. wake me up when LLMs can produce even nominally complex pieces software that are on-par with human quality. For anything outside of basic web apps, we're a long way off.
> if I ask a search bot the date Notre Dame was built, it'll get it right more often than me
With both of you doing research in your own ways, you'll get it right more often (I hope).
I meant without looking it up
The bot always looks it up, in a way.
I mean, so do I, if you think about it like that. I just have a much lower chance of successfully retrieving the correct information.
In the comparison I was making with respect to accuracy was that the bot is much more likely to accurately answer fact-based queries, and much less likely to succeed at any tasks that require actual 'thinking'. Especially when that task is not particularly common in the training set, such as writing a memory allocator. I can write and debug a simple allocator in half an hour, no worries. I'd be surprised if any of the current LLMs could.
I agree. I was just making a tangential point with a bit of exaggeration; sorry if it seemed to distract from your main point.
If you look up the factual question in a quality source, you'll be more accurate than the bot which looked at many sources. That's all I meant.
So the proof for your claim is two counterexamples?
I believe OP’s intent was that for software, normal users don’t see or understand what’s under the hood so how the software is built doesn’t matter.
The point is that "normal users" don't care about niche hobbies in general either.
Exactly. I thought my last paragraph made it clear that software is not like the other couple of things.
Very interesting, I learnt Rust for the same reason: having fun doing something that I need and learning new things in the process.
Good luck for your new project!
Craft software that makes you feel something.
Love the mouse cursor, it made me feel happy.
Does feeling anger count? If so, then Google search is nailing that!
Making people something for software rather than helping them interact healthily with real people in their surroundings feels irresponsible at this point in time, given all the damage social media, short form videos, and the rest have done to the world at large.
habitually move my cursor while reading things... so Feels Bad for sure
Circus Ponies Notebook.
That was a look into a world we steered away from.
I was missing Rapha news since he left social media
The guys at palantir really took this to heart
case in point: the lil mouse-snakey-animation-thing on your homepage is excessively satisfying and making me feel lots of things
I found it cute until I realised it didn't disappear when you let it finish shrinking, nor if you click the little blue square. Then I found myself annoyed by it and left the page.
Software… is not where I turn to feel something
Windows 11 makes people feel something.
No, not like that.
> Craft software that makes people feel something
We have Microsoft, Google, Apple. This is enough pain. We don't need more.
> I don’t really feel I need to follow people’s cake recipe for success.
That's great, but then what's the point of this article?
The author is seemingly offering advice about why and how software should be built, but then claims to not follow anyone else's advice. Cool.
Just do whatever makes you happy. If you want to work on proprietary editors and programming languages, go ahead. I would argue that doing that in the open would both improve the projects and make the world a better place, far more than blogging about them does, but this doesn't matter if you're optimizing for personal happiness.
Does anger count?
Not if you want to stand out from the crowd.
The Zelda example is a good reminder that emotion in software often comes from consistency and responsiveness. Those games feel immersive because the underlying systems behave predictably, inputs map cleanly to actions, and the world reacts without friction. That same principle applies to non-game software too: tight feedback loops and coherent internal rules make tools feel “alive” in a way users notice even if they can’t articulate it.
The title sounds like the Chinese curse of software development.
Fun tidbit: Just to make sure I got it right, I quickly googled the phrase. Gemini's elaboration on the topic truly made me feel something. Gemini's answer:
A "Chinese curse" often refers to the phrase "May you live in interesting times," though it's not actually Chinese but a misinterpreted English saying, while actual Chinese curses involve direct insults like "Cào nǐ mā" (Fuck your mother(sic!))
Gemini conflates two meanings of 'curse'. One is a quasi-ritulistic invocation of some power to change the object's fate. The other is intentionally rude, transgressive words used to attack or humiliate.
I think with tools like Claude code you can more easily tackle niche areas that would benefit from custom crafted features and then using the app would feel like it was purpose built for the specific task at hand. Sure the code might not look hand crafted, but if it works and solves problems in the world...