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aidanlister

343 karma · joined October 13, 2013

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aidanlister··on Get an AI code review in 10 seconds
This just sounds like you haven’t worked in a team environment in the last 12 months.

The ergonomics of doing this in pre-commit make no sense.

Spin up a PR in GitHub and get Cursor and/or Claude to do a code review — it’s amazing.

It’ll often spot bugs (not only obvious ones), it’ll utilise your agent.md to spot mismatched coding style, missing documentation, it’ll check sentry to see if this part of the code touches a hotspot or a LOC that’s been throwing off errors … it’s an amazing first pass.

Once all the issues are resolved you can mark the PR as ready for review and get a human to look big picture.

It’s unquestionably a huge time saver for reviewers.

And having the AI and human review take place with the same UX (comments attached to lines of code, being able to chat to the AI to explain decisions, having the AI resolve the comment when satisfied) just makes sense and is an obvious time saver for the submitter.

aidanlister··on Kepler.gl
Oh so exciting!!!

I’ve been looking for an alternative to CARTO, their sales reps are awful and their pricing is wildly expensive and opaque.

aidanlister··on No More Layoffs with a Payoff: It's Time to Freeze CEO Salaries
I’m a CEO, I was not given a magic ring to predict the future when I took the role, I make the best decisions I can as a totally flawed human being.

Businesses have natural expansion and contraction cycles. New products are built and iterated on with a hope of finding product market fit, but most of these endeavours fail.

I am paid to make the hard decisions. Sometimes that hard decision is to scale down the workforce. Yes, it sucks, but a large majority of those impacted end up financially ahead (rehired quickly and one, two or three months ahead because of the redundancy payout).

Penalising a CEO for making hard decisions is a great recipe for stagnant companies. What would have happened to Kodak or Blockbuster if they had a CEO with enough grit to cut the workforce and pivot the businesses before they collapsed?

aidanlister··on Why Ed-Tech Startups Don't Scale (2022)
That’s not “scale”. That’s the opposite of scale.
aidanlister··on MacBook Air, M2 Chip, 8GB RAM: Nothing is open, but half the memory is gone
We have bought 200+ macbook pro’s over the years, but when the M3 air came out we started rolling that out to everyone including developers and it has been a huge success. I would only recommend Pro’s for heavy media editing applications right now. We don’t do any AI/ML stuff yet so not sure how that will change the landscape.
aidanlister··on Interesting Bugs Caught by ESLint's no-constant-binary-expression (2022)
Best is to use recommended despite a few niggles you might have. Second best is shareable.
aidanlister··on Asking for help: We cannot sell our SaaS
How is it different to loom? Who is your customer?
aidanlister··on Ask HN: SaaS operators, what is the cost:earnings ratio of your SaaS?
We call it the 3, 7, and 10 rule.

3% on payment processing, subscription management and collection.

7% on AWS.

10% on product support, account management and retention.

If you’re fast growing this is about right. If you’re starting to slow down then you can afford to spend more time optimising these, eg 2, 4 and 9, giving you a GM of 85% which is elite for a B2B SaaS.

aidanlister··on Tax prep firms shared ‘extraordinarily sensitive’ data about taxpayers with Meta
This argument can be extended to anything, which suggests it might not add any value to the discussion.

- You make Microsoft Excel. Someone uses Excel to leak a million people’s PII.

- You build shovels. Someone murdered someone with your shovel.

- You build an analytics product, explicitly ban collecting PII in your EULA, someone does it anyway.

It’s fun to be outraged and hating on GA is very in vogue at the moment, but this specific incident is just someone (yes, someone, not a nefarious company) using a popular tool incorrectly.

aidanlister··on Don't Take VC Funding – It Will Destroy Your Company
Contrarians are so funny, everything is a hammer.

A bunch of very smart bankers have spent an enormous amount of time doing due diligence on the company you work for and they think that the risk is low and repay-ability is high … but the contrarian always knows better. To them this is a sign that the end is nigh, and they rejoice in the feeling of their beautiful superiority.

aidanlister··on Launch HN: Lago (YC S21) – Open-source usage-based billing
This is very cool! We just built our own internal billing tool for our company after bad experiences with Recurly and ChargeBee. We are B2B and B2E and ChargeBee/Recurly felt very clunky when used for enterprise billing — specifically around usage based billing, discounts, and multiple geographies.

The billing part was easy to build (though of course we under-estimated the effort by 10x), but the reporting is the really tricky part. Revenue recognition, plus simple things like correctly tracking upgrades/downgrades vs expansion/contraction when someone changes plan mid-month.

Is this something that Lago does now or intends to include? I could not see it in the docs.

aidanlister··on Twitter Sues Elon Musk
I think you’d correctly say he bought the company but has not settled, so he does not yet own the company.
aidanlister··on Dashlane tracks its paying customers for ad (re)targeting
Issn’t it just as likely they are tracking you to *avoid* targeting you with ads?
aidanlister··on Google gives Europe a ‘reject all’ button for tracking cookies
That’ll give you visits, not uniques.
aidanlister··on Our vision for location-independent salaries at Buffer
Approximately 63,000 people. See https://buffer.com/revenue
aidanlister··on WebGL 2.0 Achieves Pervasive Support from All Major Web Browsers
“How do you know if someone has disabled JavaScript? Don’t worry” the joke goes … “they’ll tell you”.

There’s always someone in a browser tech thread that has to proclaim their security high ground to the unwashed masses.

In my opinion, these comments do not add value to the discussion and should avoided.

aidanlister··on WLED Arduino WiFi LED Controller
Does anyone know of a compatible ESP32 development board with a built-in microphone and frequency analyser e.g. an MSGEQ7 (for sound-reactive projects)?

Here's their list of compatible hardware: https://github.com/Aircoookie/WLED/wiki/Compatible-hardware

aidanlister··on [dead]
Apparently triple braces signifies something is jewish, so it is even worse than first glance.

What miserable lost soul …

aidanlister··on Bitcoin is a Ponzi
This is not true: you don't invest in something with 20% weekly swings to "maintain assets" against 1-3% inflation. You just don't.
aidanlister··on iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro
Why do people want magsafe back? The new USB-C cord pulls out of the wall if you trip over it ... and the little slot doesn’t get filled with metalic dust any more.
aidanlister··on Why companies lose their best innovators (2019)
Okay, you both made a mistake then. Your mistake does not lessen Cisco’s mistake.
aidanlister··on Show HN: Python package to collect normalized news from almost any website
People don’t know what is fact and what is fiction. Giving 50/50 air time to climate scientists and climate change deniers is on one side presenting facts and on the other total bullshit and saying “hey these are both valid opinions- you decide”.
aidanlister··on HR tech companies laying people off: was it overdue?
Because an A380 costs $432 million and you need a bunch of them to run an airline, where as a restaurant fit out is ~$1M.

You also need to maintain those planes, employ staff across multiple countries and timezones, and comply with insane amounts of legislation for every country you fly into.

Are you seriously comparing that to ... serving food?

aidanlister··on Ask HN: How to properly manage a product roadmap?
Get a piece of paper out and draw a bunch of circles on the left, and a bunch of circles on the right. This is your business team and development team respectively.

Now draw lines between all the circles. Those are your lines of communication without a PM. This is a sad diagram, no one knows the whole story.

Now repeat the exercise but draw an additional circle in the middle of the page.

This time, the lines on the left and right connect to the middle circle. This is a happy diagram, the developers aren’t pulled in a dozen different directions and one person has the whole picture.

That is the role of a PM.

aidanlister··on The trillion-dollar lawsuit against Tether
I'm not sure what you're understanding what the article claims - Bitfinex wasn't just increasing the price on their exchange by showing a fake price.

They created money out of thin air and handed this out to players to buy BTC with. Those players then bought BTC in quantities that drove the price up. They created price-inelastic demand out of nothing (you don't care about the price as much if you're buying them for free).

aidanlister··on $15 minimum wage didn’t hurt NYC restaurants
The product at a restaurant is the experience, not the raw materials.
aidanlister··on Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index
But how many useful transactions? Isn’t the vast majority of that trading and not economically useful activity?
aidanlister··on Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index
Why isn’t it a waste? You say it like it is a fact ... what’s the logic there?
aidanlister··on Amazon AWS had a power failure, their backup generators failed
Wonder no more, the answer is: yes, obviously
aidanlister··on Ask HN: What's your total monthly SaaS spend? What products are you using?
We spend ~$7k/month on SaaS relating to employees.

  Google 20.90
  Travis C 1,494.96
  InVision 150.73
  Base CRM 452.46
  1password 209.78
  Rsync.net 15.27
  Abstract 50.91
  Adobe 79.29
  Balsamiq 12.40
  StatusPage.io 44.38
  Github 10.68
  Balsamiq 0.00
  Zendesk 904.57
  Chart.io 303.21
  Github 157.42
  Hubspot 1,536.15
  Google - GSuite 373.68
  Intercom 155.60
  Xero 141.25
  Browserling 28.98
  Microsoft 26.40
  Slack 337.40
  Open Test 15.30
  Atlassian 628.60
  BuildKite 46.30
We spend a further $8k/month on SaaS relating to customer hosting, eg SaaS subscriptions like SendGrid but not including AWS spend.
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