Hacker News

Article URL: https://sfstandard.com/pacific-standard-time/2026/02/27/pst-amjad-masad-silicon-valley-contrarian/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47240627

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

Article URL: https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2026/02/28/file-extensions-bash/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47240615

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Hey HN,

We just launched a new landing page for Spidra (spidra.io) and I thought to share because we now have a sleek modern UI.

You may ask. What is Spidra? Well, it's an AI-powered web scraping platform, currently in public beta.

If you are conversant with using scraping packages or using other traditional scrapers, they break constantly. When a site redesigns, your selectors stop working.

Instead of CSS selectors, with Spidra you just describe what you want in plain English. For example, "Extract all product names and prices." The AI figures out where that data lives on the page and pulls it, even if the layout changes next week. We call it AI Mode.

What's included: - AI Scraper and AI Crawler (single pages or full domains) - Action sequences in plain English: click, scroll, type, wait. No selectors needed. - Built-in CAPTCHA solving, residential proxy rotation across 45+ locations, session and auth handling - REST API with async job polling so you can chain scrapes, loop results, build proper pipelines - Push results to JSON, CSV, Slack, Discord, Airtable, Google Sheets, or your own webhook

This is for developers building data pipelines or AI agents that need fresh web data. We also have a no-code playground for less technical users.

You can test Spidra on the free tier with 300 credits (no credit card needed).

I look forward to hearing what you think about our new landing page and the Spidra product. I am also happy to answer anything about how we handle anti-bot systems, the architecture, or how we compare to other tools in the space.

Try it: https://app.spidra.io/signup Docs: https://docs.spidra.io

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47240613

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

I feel like I’ve lost my ability to learn because of AI. It is now so easy to generate code that it feels meaningless to focus and spend time crafting it myself. I am deeply sad that we may be losing the craftsmanship side of programming; it feels less important to understand the fundamentals when a model can produce something that works in seconds. AI seems to abstract away the fundamentals.

One could argue that it was always like this. Low-level languages like C abstracted away assembly and CPU architecture. High-level languages abstracted away low-level languages. Frameworks abstracted away some of the fundamentals. Every generation built new abstractions on top of old ones. But there is a big difference with AI. Until now, every abstraction was engineered and deterministic. You could reason about it and trace it. LLMs, on the other hand, are non-deterministic. Therefore, we cannot treat their outputs as just another layer of abstraction.

I am not saying we cannot use them. I am saying we cannot fully trust them. Yet everyone (or maybe just the bubble I am in) pushes the use of AI. For example, I genuinely want to invest time in learning Rust, but at the same time, I am terrified that all the effort and time I spend learning it will become obsolete in the future. And the reason it might become obsolete may not be because the models are perfect and always produce high-quality code; it might simply be because, as an industry, we will accept “good enough” and stop pushing for high quality. As of now, models can already generate code with good-enough quality.

Is it only me, or does it feel like there are half-baked features everywhere now? Every product ships faster, but with rough edges. Recently, I saw Claude Code using 10 GiB of RAM. It is simply a TUI app.

Don’t get me wrong, I also use AI a lot. I like that we can try out different things so easily.

As a developer, I am confused and overwhelmed, and I want to hear what other developers think.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47240612

Points: 2

# Comments: 4

Article URL: https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2026/03/01/tilde-dash/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47240611

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Article URL: https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2026/03/02/small-delay/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47240608

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Article URL: https://research.contrary.com/report/the-case-for-specialized-ai

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47240101

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

Article URL: https://fungiboletus.github.io/MicroColourGPT3000/generating-colour-palettes-randomly.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47240091

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Article URL: http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47240084

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Article URL: https://rubyonrails.org/2026/3/3/planning-center-newest-contributing-member

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47240076

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

Article URL: https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php?topic=73549.0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47240067

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Article URL: https://www.edisonresearch.com/podcasts-lead-am-fm-in-spoken-word-listening-marking-a-first/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47240050

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Article URL: https://books.radbouduniversitypress.nl/index.php/rup/catalog/book/Robust-Verification-Stochastic-Systems

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47240049

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Does anyone have a jacket for sale? I lost one and I'm looking for a replacement. Ideally L or M. Will pay well

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47240046

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Article URL: https://www.psypost.org/broad-claims-about-gender-and-behavior-fall-apart-when-studies-include-ethnically-diverse-samples/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47240044

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Article URL: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/03/downdetector-speedtest-sold-to-it-service-provider-accenture-in-1-2b-deal/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47240042

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

BlokJS is a ~9KB (gzipped) reactive UI framework with components, routing, and a built-in store. No build step, no dependencies, no virtual DOM - just a library in one js file.

Reactivity uses ES Proxies with automatic dependency tracking - reference a property in your view and updates happen automatically. Components are plain objects, no JSX or templates needed. Async methods automatically get reactive loading/error states.

I built this because I wanted a framework where I could prototype and ship frontend without bundlers or config - something closer to how backend development feels.

Live example (task board with auth, drag-drop, routing): https://maleta.github.io/blokjs/examples/task-board.html#/lo...

Source: https://github.com/maleta/blokjs

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47240032

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Article URL: https://rosswintle.uk/2025/10/software-can-be-finished/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47240026

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Article URL: https://boringops.sh/pillars/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47240022

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Hello everyone, I built Bearprompt because I wanted a simple prompt library that doesn’t require an account and doesn’t store anything on a server.

All prompts are saved locally in your browser (IndexedDB).

My main goal was that users can interact with it easily and fast. You open the prompt library and by just clicking the card of the prompt, you have it copied in your clipboard and continue with your work.

Happy to hear some feedback :)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47240020

Points: 1

# Comments: 0