[rob]

Just another AI generated website with 5000 calculators thrown together that looks like every other single one. From a brand new account with a post that looks like it was also written from ChatGPT. Somehow getting enough votes to show up on my homepage.

Things are definitely changing around HN compared to when it first started.

[ivcatcher]

Fair call — it did kind of explode from one calculator to 60+ I’m a real person (long-time lurker, finally posting), but I get why it looks sus. Things are changing fast, and I’m just happy to be part of the messy early wave. Thanks for the honesty.

[qaboutthat]

> Thanks for the honesty.

It's impossible to tell if this is AI or not. Another version of Poe's law. The only thing to do is assume everything is AI, just like you must assume all posts have ulterior (generalluy profit-driven) motives, all posters have a conflict of interest, etc.

Maybe the only thing to do is stop trying to understand posters' motivations, stop reading things charitably, stop responding, just look for things that are interesting (and be sure to check sources).

[brushfoot]

Reader, keep in mind that OP being "a real person" has nothing to do with whether their content is appropriate for HN.

Every spammer and scammer, even a bot, is ultimately controlled by a real person in some sense. That doesn't mean we want their content here.

[fancyswimtime]

people are hurt because something which defined them as a person can now be done by a machine; don't let them dissuade you

[keybored]

A fair amount of AI hype traffic is likely to be astroturfed and automated. Just serving AI investors.

Anyone who disagrees with the above are just hurt that their manual hyping has been replaced with machines.

[EinigeKreise]

People are hurt when people turn person-to-person communication into person-to-machine communication. It's dismissive of their use of genuine wall-clock time trying to engage with you.

[dangus]

I would add to this: skills mean nothing if you don’t use them.

OP made a site with a bunch of calculators. Their critics didn’t make that!

[anonymous908213]

We're busy building real software, not toys. I routinely write all kinds of calculators in my game development, in addition to having 100x more complex code to contend with. This task is as trivial as it gets in coding, considering computers were literally made to calculate and calculation functions are part of standard libraries. OP definitely didn't use Claude to implement math functions from scratch, they just did the basic copy-and-paste work of tying it to a web interface on a godawful JS framework stack which is already designed for children to make frontends with at the cost of extreme bloat and terrible performance. Meanwhile I actually did have to write my own math library, since I use fixed-point math in my game engine for cross-CPU determinism rather than getting to follow the easy path of floating-point math.

It's cool that ChatGPT can stitch these toys together for people who aren't programmers, but 99% of software engineers aren't working on toys in the first place, so we're hardly threatened by this. I guess people who aren't software engineers don't realise that merely making a trivially basic website is not what software engineering is.

[skeledrew]

> I guess people who aren't software engineers don't realise that merely making a trivially basic website is not what software engineering is.

"Software engineering" doesn't matter to anyone except to software engineers. What matters is executing that idea that's been gathering dust for ages, or scratching that pain point that keeps popping up in a daily basis.

[anonymous908213]

Software engineering matters very much to anyone who has ideas or pain points that are beyond the capabilities of a next-token prediction engine to solve.

[dangus]

Idk, your superiority complex about the whole issue does make it sound like you’re feeling threatened. You seem determined to prove that AI can’t really make any decent output.

What’s even the point of writing out that first paragraph otherwise?

[anonymous908213]

> What’s even the point of writing out that first paragraph otherwise?

I was correcting your misguided statement:

> Their critics didn’t make that!

by pointing out that we, among other things, build the libraries that you/Claude are copy-and-pasting from. When you make an assertion that is factually incorrect, and someone corrects you, that does not mean they are threatened.

[mettamage]

> We're busy building real software

My response is perhaps a bit raw, but so is the quote above.

Stop with the gate keeping. I've studied CS to understand coding, not to have some sort of pride to build "real software". Knowledge is a tool, nothing more, nothing less.

There are enough developers whose whole job it is to edit one button per week and not much more. And yes, there are also enough developers that actually apply their CS skills.

> but 99% of software engineers aren't working on toys in the first place

Go outside of your bubble. It's way more nuanced than that.

> I guess people who aren't software engineers don't realise that merely making a trivially basic website is not what software engineering is.

Moving goal posts. Always has been.

It's not that I fully disagree with you either. And I'm excited about your accomplishments. But just the way it reads... man...

I guess it hits me because I used to be disheartened by comments like this. It just feels so snarky as if I am never good enough.

The vibe is just "BUH BUH BUH and that's it." That's how it comes across.

And I've come to mature enough to realize I shouldn't feel disheartened. I've followed enough classes at VUSEC with all their rowhammer variations and x86-64 assignments to have felt a taste of what deep tech can be. And the thing is, it's just another skill. It doesn't matter if someone works on a web app or a deep game programming problem.

What matters (to me at least) that you feel the flow of it and you're going somewhere touching an audience. Maybe his particular calculator app has a better UX for some people. If that's the case, then his app is a win. If your game touches people, then that's a win. If you feel alive because you're doing complex stuff, then that's a win (in the style of "A Mathematician's Apology"). If you're doing complex stuff and you feel it's rough and you're reaching no one with it, it's neutral at best in my book (positive: you're building a skill, negative: no one is touched, not even you).

Who cares what the underlying technology is. What's important is usability.

[anonymous908213]

> Moving goal posts.

Feel free to point out where I moved goal posts. To say that I moved goal posts would imply that at one point I stated that creating a trivial website was software engineering. If you're comparing my statement to what some other person said, who made arguments I did not make, then we cannot have any kind of constructive dialogue. At that point you are not talking to me, but talking to an imaginary projection of me meant to make yourself feel better about your argument.

> Stop with the gate keeping.

I'm not gatekeeping anything. You can disagree with my descriptive terms if you want, but the core point I'm trying to get across is: what people are doing with Claude can not replace what I do. I would know, I've tried extensively. Development is a lot of hard work and I would love it if my job were easier! I use LLMs almost every day, mostly for trivial tasks like reformatting text or writing advanced regex because I can't be bothered to remember the syntax and it's faster than looking it up. I also routinely pose SOTA models problems I'm working on to have them try to solve them, and I am routinely disappointed by how bad the output is.

So, in a thread where people were asserting that critics are merely critics because they're afraid of being replaced I pointed out that this is not factually correct, that no, we're not actually afraid of being replaced, because those of us who do "real" engineering (feel free to suggest a different term to substitute for "real" if the terminology is what bothers you) know that we cannot be replaced. People without experience start thinking they can replace us, that the exhilarating taste of coding they got from an LLM is the full extent to the depth of the software engineering world, but in fact it is not even close.

I do think that LLMs fill a useful gap, for projects where the time investment would be too large to learn to code and too unimportant to justify paying anyone to program, but which are simple enough that a non-engineer can have an LLM build something neat for themselves. There is nothing wrong with toys. Toys are a great thing to have in the world, and it's nice that more people can make them[1]. But there is a difference between a toy and what I do, and LLMs cannot do the thing I do. If you're taking "toy" in a derogatory manner, feel free to come up with another term.

[1] To some extent. While accessibility is generally a great thing, I have some misgivings. Software is dangerous. The web is arguably already too accessible, with frameworks enabling people who have no idea what they're doing to make professional-looking websites. These badly-made websites then go on to have massive security breaches that affect millions of users. I wish there was a way to make basic website development accessible, whether through frameworks or LLMs, in a way that did not give people using them the misplaced self-confidence to take on things way above their skill level at the cost of other people's security.

[ivcatcher]

You're right that this is simple compared to what real engineers build. I have a lot of respect for people like you who write things like custom math libraries for cross-CPU determinism — that's way beyond my level.

I'll keep learning and try to make this less of a toy over time. And hopefully I can bring what I've learned from years in investing into my next product to actually help people. Thanks for the perspective.

[drw85]

This response makes it 100% clear to me that this is just a bot. The verbatim use of a completely random thing like 'custom math libraries for cross-CPU determinism', combined with the agreeable tone and em dash use are pretty much a dead giveaway.

The internet has become so useless, everywhere is just marketing nonsense and bots.

[maxaw]

So true. I sometimes wonder how many ai bots there really are. I often see the telltale signs but often miss.

[murukesh_s]

What are you implying?. He would have had to hire a good developer at least for a full month salary to build something like this.

And if you are thinking enterprise, it would take 2-3 developers, 2 analysts, 2 testers, 1 lead and 1 manager 2-3 months to push something like this. (Otherwise why would lead banks spent billions and billions for IT development every year? What tangible difference you see in their website/services?)

5000 calculators may look excessive, but in this case it magnifies the AI capabilities in the future - both in terms of quality and quantity.

[yellow_lead]

> (Otherwise why would lead banks spent billions and billions for IT development every year? What tangible difference you see in their website/services?)

Well, I don't think all those people are spending their time making simple calculators.

[throwaway2027]

Twitter/X incentivizes you to get engagements because with a blue checkmark you get paid for it, so people shill aggressively, post idiotic comments on purpose trying to ragebait you. It's like LinkedIn in for entrepreneurs. Reddit or it's power hungry moderators (shadow)bans people often. The amount of popular websites that people can shill their trash is dwindling, so it gets worse here as a result I assume too.