<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: searls</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=searls</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Wed, 21 Oct 2026 06:09:47 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=searls" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by searls in "It's still ok to enjoy programming"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I enjoy puzzles as much as the next guy. But I can just pick up a crossword or sudoku or something and get that mental stimulation elsewhere. The thing I always found vexing about programming was that the puzzle-solving was a prerequisite to getting anything done. Now that the two are decoupled, I'm a lot happier.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 20 Oct 2026 14:42:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50167185</link><dc:creator>searls</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50167185</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50167185</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by searls in "It's still ok to enjoy programming"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes. This is much closer to how many people are experiencing it and why the OP's suggestion of letting people practice it as an unpaid hobby doesn't address their issue.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 19 Oct 2026 17:14:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50155060</link><dc:creator>searls</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50155060</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50155060</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by searls in "It's still ok to enjoy programming"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I suspect that many of the loudest voices pushing back against AI coding tools never practiced programming as a hobby or saw it as especially fun, and the fact their job is changing won't make them start now.<p>I think just about everyone in the industry appreciated hand-typed programming as a job, because it was a pleasant enough craft to practice and for a solid couple of decades programmers were treated extremely well in comparison to the vast majority of other careers out there.<p>Today, juggling a bunch of agents to do what you want them to do, figuring out how to verify their work, remediating problems, and spreading yourself thin cognitively—all the while looking over your shoulder at an increasingly precarious job market—is notably less pleasant for a lot of people. It sounds and feels a lot more like an engineering or product management role—something a lot of programmers would never in a million years have signed up to do voluntarily.<p>I'm probably an 8 out of 10 on the cooked scale—I'm juggling a suite of ten iOS apps and haven't written or read a line of code in over a year—but I get where these people are coming from. I think the suggestion that they can reclaim what they've lost in this new job they've been loudly expressing distaste for by adopting a new unpaid hobby will ring hollow to them.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 19 Oct 2026 16:05:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50154094</link><dc:creator>searls</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50154094</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50154094</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by searls in "How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>… which would only exacerbate the computational disparity they're operating under.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 09 Sep 2026 11:23:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49624632</link><dc:creator>searls</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49624632</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49624632</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by searls in "SwiftUI After 7 Years"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'll be honest, I struggled to get much done with SwiftUI each of the last four years but this summer I started 4 greenfield iOS 27 apps on SwiftUI and it's genuinely been pretty delightful and none have required escape hatches to UIKit/AppKit.<p>I get people are upset, but the edge cases and frustration in no way feel like fundamental failures—just stuff they haven't gotten around to yet. Yes, they should have gotten to them all sooner but that doesn't convince me they won't eventually.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 03 Aug 2026 11:43:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49154460</link><dc:creator>searls</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49154460</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49154460</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by searls in "Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I've been using agents to develop Mac and iOS apps for over a year now and I would say this post is bad advice, particularly because the excellent Xcode MCP requires Xcode to be running. The MCP tool gives you faster, better access to a number of functions for which xcodebuild is much slower and much chattier and a number of others (like the #Preview generation and rendering) that aren't possible at all while Xcode is closed. Also, in Xcode 27, the MCP & built-in agents are able to drive simulators with DeviceHub extremely well. (If you haven't been following, DeviceHub replaces Simulator.app and as far as I can tell, it's actually scrutable by agents without relying on hacking at the accessibility APIs with tools like axe.)<p>Xcode MCP is not perfect, by any stretch (stupidly, it issues a permission prompt on every single agent launch—something I defeated with a Keyboard Maestro hack to auto-accept it), but Xcode 27 is such a huge leap forward in the ergonomics of vibe coding with Xcode that I've actually stopped dealing with the MCP and (after an afternoon of futzing) have started using the app's own agent UI for driving Codex because that harness better steers the model to take advantage of the tools available.<p>All of this redounds to two things: faster feedback and more robust verification. The two things that matter most.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 14 Jul 2026 04:00:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48902153</link><dc:creator>searls</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48902153</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48902153</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by searls in "Rubish: A Unix shell written in pure Ruby"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Akira showed me this work in progress in January and I was pretty amazed by it, but I have to be honest—as someone who prides himself on clever OSS repo names, he just absolutely put me to shame. English as a second language but he's a first class punner.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 23 May 2026 13:00:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48247301</link><dc:creator>searls</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48247301</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48247301</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by searls in "LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Read this:<p>> Every time any of LinkedIn’s one billion users visits linkedin.com, hidden code searches their computer for installed software, collects the results, and transmits them to LinkedIn’s servers<p>And thought, "no way in hell this gets by Safari."<p>And then, under "The Attack: How it Works":<p>> Every time you open LinkedIn in a Chrome-based browser<p>Shocker. If you use a Chromium-based browser, you should expect to be trading away your privacy, IME.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 02 Apr 2026 14:46:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47615226</link><dc:creator>searls</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47615226</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47615226</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by searls in "Kagi Small Web"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm glad to see this comment and the parent comment and the grandparent comment voted so near the top. I've had the same experience.<p>I honestly would love to be able to give my Kagi key to the ChatGPT or Claude clients (or more realistically, configure a proxy) just to have it be their primary tool for searches—respecting my site rankings/lists</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 17 Mar 2026 15:59:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47414486</link><dc:creator>searls</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47414486</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47414486</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by searls in "Claude Code is being dumbed down?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>LOL, no, dumbing down was when I paid two months of subscription with the model literally struggling to write basic functions. Something Anthropic eventually acknowledged but offered no refunds for. <a href="https://ilikekillnerds.com/2025/09/09/anthropic-finally-admits-claude-quality-degradation/" rel="nofollow">https://ilikekillnerds.com/2025/09/09/anthropic-finally-admi...</a><p>I care A LOT about the details, and I couldn't care less that they're cleaning up terminal output like this.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 11 Feb 2026 20:43:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46980631</link><dc:creator>searls</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46980631</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46980631</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by searls in "Railway (PaaS) global outage"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>lol, just yesterday a friend asked me if he should move his business to Railway from Heroku. Welp.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 11 Feb 2026 16:37:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46977154</link><dc:creator>searls</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46977154</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46977154</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by searls in "Ex-GitHub CEO launches a new developer platform for AI agents"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This feels a bit like when some Hubbers broke off to work on PlanetScale, except without the massively successful, proven-to-be-scalable open source tool to build off (Vitess).<p>If you're approaching this problem-space from the ground up, there are just so many fundamental problems to solve that it seems to me that no amount of money or quality of team can increase your likelihood of arriving at enough right answers to ensure success. Pulling off something like this vision in the current red-ocean market would require dozens of brilliant ideas and hundreds of correct bets.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 10 Feb 2026 16:53:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46962763</link><dc:creator>searls</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46962763</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46962763</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by searls in "Intel will start making GPUs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Agree, extremely poorly reported out across numerous outlets.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 04 Feb 2026 18:08:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46889321</link><dc:creator>searls</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46889321</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46889321</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by searls in "Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is true of the CLIs that start with `xcode` but not of the CLIs that start with `swift`. As `swift-format` and `swift-test` have come into their own, they're just as reliable as any other language ecosystem. And the difference is indeed staggering. I wrote this guide last summer on extracting all your app's code into a (nonsensically necessary) Swift package dependency simply so you can test it with Swift Testing <a href="https://justin.searls.co/posts/i-made-xcodes-tests-60-times-faster/" rel="nofollow">https://justin.searls.co/posts/i-made-xcodes-tests-60-times-...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 03 Feb 2026 21:10:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46877338</link><dc:creator>searls</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46877338</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46877338</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by searls in "Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is madness. Some stories actually have good guys. I don't know Adam directly, but we have plenty of second degree connections. I've benefited immensely from his work, have never heard anyone say a single negative thing about him, and I genuinely believe he's done more to push the web forward with Tailwind than the larger players have done (certainly more than Facebook did with React and Google has done with Angular/AMP/etc).<p>Reflexively assuming that unanimous positive sentiment towards someone is itself an indication of a problem is exactly the reason people are writing posts as recently as (<i>double checks</i>) _yesterday_ titled "65% of Hacker News Posts Have Negative Sentiment, and They Outperform" <a href="https://philippdubach.com/standalone/hn-sentiment/" rel="nofollow">https://philippdubach.com/standalone/hn-sentiment/</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 07 Jan 2026 19:29:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46531281</link><dc:creator>searls</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46531281</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46531281</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by searls in "Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>FWIW, "write markdown, publish to my static site, and cross-post to social media" is exactly what I built POSSE Party to do. All your site needs is an Atom feed to read from <a href="https://github.com/searlsco/posse_party/blob/main/docs/feed.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/searlsco/posse_party/blob/main/docs/feed....</a><p><a href="https://justin.searls.co/atom.xml" rel="nofollow">https://justin.searls.co/atom.xml</a> gets flung to 8 social accounts</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 05 Jan 2026 21:15:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46505072</link><dc:creator>searls</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46505072</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46505072</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by searls in "Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>POSSE Party (<a href="http://posseparty.com" rel="nofollow">http://posseparty.com</a>) supports syndicating YouTube Shorts and Instagram reels, but trying to syndicate longer form video just didn't make sense IMO</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 03 Jan 2026 19:23:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46480470</link><dc:creator>searls</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46480470</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46480470</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by searls in "Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I created POSSE Party because I had similar concerns. Truncation and spacing are highly customizable. You can add a posse:post sidecar element containing JSON that formats exact presentation for each platform exactly as you want it. The built-in truncation can be configured at the account level. And how you count characters, naturally, differs by platform, which the app handles pretty well.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 03 Jan 2026 19:19:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46480422</link><dc:creator>searls</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46480422</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46480422</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by searls in "Anthropic: You can't change your Claude account email address"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>OpenAI doesn't let you change your email address, either.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 20 Dec 2025 23:36:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46340749</link><dc:creator>searls</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46340749</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46340749</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by searls in "OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It would be funny if OpenAI turns for-profit, faceplants, and then finds new life (as Mozilla did) as a non-profit sharing its tools for free.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 02 Dec 2025 21:12:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46126937</link><dc:creator>searls</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46126937</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46126937</guid></item></channel></rss>