YHK - yet another hacker news clone

That said, as a counter-point, there were also applications such as WriteNow which was ~100,000 lines of hand-coded assembly, which was quick and performant even on an 8MHz 68000 Mac Plus --- it flew on a 25MHz NeXT Cube (it was originally developed as a possible advanced MacWrite/replacement for it if it didn't ship, then was contracted by NeXT to make a bundled word-processor)

https://www.folklore.org/The_Grand_Unified_Model_The_Finder....

I, for my part, as much as I dig a little 70s and 80s retro stuff, would never ever want to go back.

Since it was much harder to make stuff, you really had to architect it well or otherwise it would simply fall apart. For example in assembler you need discipline in your calling conventions, layout and so on, otherwise it just corrupted, you needed to follow sensible naming conventions otherwise it degenerated into unreadable label spaghetti and so on.

Nowadays it's the other way around, the micro level is so much better due to libraries, code reuse, LLMs and better languages/tools, you can use highly sophisticated data structures and functions at your fingertips. In exchange, you can afford to skimp on architecture because computers are fast anyway, and the programming languages don't let you make a huge mess. (Most don't have unstructured goto/jumps, can't corrupt memory accidentally, etc.)

However, this has the cost of making larger programs a nightmare to maintain and systems suffering from a "death of thousand cuts" i.e. on the micro level all is well but when you look at the entire system it's a sprawling unreliable mess. This is where rewrites often happen ;)

If the complaint is vibe coding makes bad software, I largely believe it, but I absolutely believe that vibe arguing makes tissue paper arguments. “Everyone knows” and “it’s obvious” are flimsy things to rest arguments on.

I’m writing dramatically better software for all the reasons this post says obviously make worse software.

Testing has gotten much easier, and bug fixing has gotten much easier. I looked at a pre-AI project I did a couple of years ago: test to code LOC was 0.15:1. The projects I work on now are around 1.3:1. The old project had no accessibility considered at all, the new ones are nicely done aria and beyond. Old project is stuck on old libraries because upgrading is a major pain. New projects take new libraries (after cooldown) no matter the effort.

So I’m left thinking that perhaps some people, too lazy to use the new powers of new tools, churn out the same or worse quality code/essays.

But I am seeing a lot of very high quality software that simply wouldn’t have been possible before, and I believe the same could be done with essays by leveraging these tools to research and find real data beyond “it’s obvious”. But that does take a lot more work.

If it's getting worse, one can logically deduce that it used to be better

If it used to be better, why are you saying it used to be much worse? You cannot have it both ways unless AI already fried your brain.

...and if we are actually heading the wrong direction, why does it matter that we haven't regressed fully quite yet. AI is pushing us towards regressing fully. It's only a few miserable humans ranting about wanting a future filled with hope

If anything, software 'may' be getting worse due to non-programmers (vibe coders) releasing things they have no business making in the first place.

Everything used to be horrible.

There were a few gems of good UI and functionality but they were rare and either got snuffed out by bigger companies like Microsoft or bought out and then forgotten.

Now, everything is more horrible than it should be.

It's like airplanes: Just barely 100 years ago, nobody could even dream that a common person could fly across the world to anywhere within hours.

Now we have planes and spaceships but they cram you in like cattle to squeeze into tiny inhumane chairs for hours..

The biggest companies in the world with hundreds of employees and billions of dollars still can't fix their software.

Google is still anal about dark mode if you're not signed in. Some other major apps don't even have dark mode even though it's been almost a decade since major operating systems supported it.

YouTube still hinders iOS's picture-in-picture feature.

Facebook still doesn't have iPad-native versions of their apps.

There's so much shit in apps with millions of users that hasn't been fixed for years.

And goobers act as if AI could possibly make it worse.

The code I wrote was ugly yes, but vscode back when I wrote it was nowhere near that miserable.

The other day google docs started freezing, It got stuck on the creating sheet state.

Youtube is making my fans spin recently just because I am hovering over the play button.

God forbid you use a lesser known SaaS tool. I started a trial on a platform and it kept asking me to start trails because I suppose the modal system was just trash.

The list is endless.

Things just don't work as intended and I know hn gets very offended when you're critical of AI but I couldn't care less honestly because I have my own data. Vibe code slop is slop no matter how good you are with your "orchestration". Oversight is a side effect of vibes and no ambition.

The author then kids in [0] that the most popular software in Debian was editors to edit X86Config but...

I fully agree that Windows was an horrible crashing piece of crap back then. Linux was a godsend to me (installed it in the early Slackware days).

Armed with Emacs and LaTeX, on Debian 1.1 then 1.2, I wrote a 440 pages book (published by an editor).

Linux was already rock stable solid, while Windows was a crashing PoS.

Linux was so solid that I'd also run it on my laptop (and back then all laptops were crappy). When I was late I'd let LaTeX convert the files to .dvi (IIRC) and the PostScript while driving to my editor. We'd then the PostScript file to the printer at my editor.

It was something else then Windows.

As for Windows, yes, I was using it too.

And the absolute best software I ever got back then was Ghost, way before Norton bought them (it then became Norton Ghost). That allowed me to take a full dump of the Windows partition and then restore it at will from that partition, when Windows would invariably become unusable.

When I discovered Linux, suddenly I had a stable system that didn't need to be re-installed every other day. There's a reason the world is powered by Linux and companies like Google weren't built on Windows.

And I also had a small consulting gig (for little SMEs) where I basically had a business installing brand new Windows systems for the clients and all their stuff (like Outlook) and then immediately imaging the entire disk.

Because the only guarantee was that Windows would be borken rather sooner than later.

TFA is right and Microsoft has always produce mediocre shit.

It's hard to say if the BSOD'ing Windows of yore was even shittier than the ad-infested, surveillance, behemoth Windows of today. Both are equally bad IMO.

Because the day Microsoft shall product a product that doesn't suck is the day they'll start producing vacuum cleaners.

I remember these! I could not figure out why it never seemed to make the computer faster and actually made it slower. TURBO was even written in italics to imply speed.

I suppose for some short time it may have actually overclocked the CPU, until the default clock speed caught up. After that, the turbo button was a lie.

Edit: Maybe I have it backwards, it sounds like on some machines it might have been in the underclocked condition when it was off. I just remember disappointing results with the machine that I used.

Mandatory EULA must be banned. Any device must be usable and provide all features advertised without accepting an EULA.

What popular consumer software today matches the incredible extensibility of Winamp?

Who is developing fun tools like Coverflow, which was popular enough that Apple incorporated it into iTunes.

You actually do see some of this today but it’s almost entirely limited to software tools, because software devs are willing to spend a little more effort on the tools they use because they know their users can just develop an alternative otherwise.

AI might change this, but well crafted software was genuinely disappearing for the past decade and a half.

I worked in early AAA in the late 90s, and it's true that games were often quite rough around the edges. But they were also often biting off WAY more than they could chew, inventing genres and innovating like crazy, often in messy ways that didn't always work. But that meant players were often also routinely and genuinely surprised by the experiences they encountered in even big budget games.

He lists a bunch of quality of life and balance issues that were fixed in Diablo 3 compared to Diablo 2... but, well, Diablo 2 was obviously _important_ in ways that Diablo 3 wasn't. It's a much greater game.

And lurking in the background is the hard fact that often the progress with software (certainly game software) entailed turning to much better software engineering standards, using much better external libraries or game engines with much larger teams, and relying on much more process to capture and filter all those rough edges... and along the way, you've built a much, much larger team with a much larger burn rate, and so all those experiments and innovations become much more dangerous and need to be corralled and controlled and mostly stifled, and as the cost of all this to build skyrockets your entire game design _has_ to focus on your business model and your microtransaction story and your live services first and foremost, because you've boxed yourself into a corner where that cash flow issue is the central fact of your game / software design.

(I experienced this evolution first hand in the FPS space)

All of which is to say, I think there are multiple different axes at play here for evaluation, and it's probably fair to say that software _undefinably_ was much worse in the past along some of them... but not all of them. And there are probably deep tensions and tradeoffs between some of those axes.

I think this entirely discussion really is muddied, though, too, by the fact that hardware got radically better over this entire arc as well, and so many programming techniques in the past that made software more brittle or crash prone hinged on memory and computation optimizations techniques that really had nothing to do with the software culture of then or now. It was just a response to the realities of the hardware.

Maybe choice might come back when some talented kindergartener or junior high schooler who doesn’t know any better comes along and kickstarts the process all over again?

A user of alternative systems from the 1980s, early 90s…

For instance: an AI-assisted developer can probably make a pretty decent basic text editor, but let's say they need to make an entirely new type of app, then I think the new app will lack polish or finesse because no one has made that before. Or AI can help find bugs in mature, well-written code but what if someone needs to write a new kind of app? Then there's a lack of polish again...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

I'm truly horrified all that data is online somewhere.

On the end he said to me: you don't seem impressed...

He didn't knew a thing he was talking about technically. Barely even the db used ( postgres).

He mentioned sha256 but doesn't know rainbow tables exist. If I would mention it to him to use a salt, he would probably break every login.

It's under NDA. Lol