Comment by quantadev
5 months ago
Hacker News has so little capability, almost any experienced developer using a modern AI Coding Agent could replicate the entire thing in a weekend, and perhaps in a single day.
I'm not saying it's bad, or criticizing anyone. I mean it does what it does, and it works, and people like it. But no one should care what technology they're using because there's just nothing impressive going on from a technical perspective.
Good software tends to resemble an iceberg - what you see is just a small bit of what's actually in there. I wouldn't be so hasty in assumptions here.
I should've been more clear that my claim was only about the ability to post messages, have them stored in a database, and then have a tree-view that displays and edits the posts. That's 99% of what users do right? That entire functionality could be done by an AI Agent nowadays in about 10 minutes.
The question would be how many security exploits and other edge cases would be included in that.
5 replies →
I don't get this attitude at all. I would think most programmers/readers are interested in the gears and cogs behind something they use on a regular basis. Especially if the work in web, backend, etc.
I've been coding for 35 years. I love HackerNews. Because it works. And it's all we need. But holding it up as some example of engineering would be silly. It's just a tree editor. I implemented a better tree editor myself today from scratch.
If you want to know what stuff I'm impressed by it's things like Mastodon, Nostr apps, and stuff that does more than edit a simple content tree of nothing but plain text. We can't even upload images. Can't do markdown. lol. It's definitely a "Less is More" app, from two decades ago. Just agree to agree with me on that. It's not an insult to them. It's just an observation.