bcx

Their homepage, https://lina.sh/, reminds me of the early days of the internet. Are webrings back in fashion? Or is this just a group of old school folks keeping the nostalgia alive?

14X at github's scale is unlikely an easy problem to solve.

Additionally, there is a strategic reason to be the repository for all code, free, or not which is likely at conflict with reliability goals.

(e.g. they could get rid of their free tier which would improve reliability at the cost of allowing a new competitor to be the repository for all new AI driven code)

The long term strategic benefit of being the home to all code (or most of it) is enormous. They are likely balancing that strategic goal with what is seen as short-term internally as reliability.

Link worked for me, but dupes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46282133

Incredible timeline - also helpful to understand the OpenAI side.

1) OpenAI is valued at 300B (as of March 31st) https://openai.com/index/march-funding-updates/

2) OpenAI recently raised 40B from SoftBank and others.

3) Windsurf is getting roughly 1% of OpenAI's valuation.

OpenAI needs to keep moving fast to outpace MS, Google, and others -- and I think we can all agree that agentic coding is a major trend -- that is likely to keep growing really fast -- and super high leverage in that the folks doing the coding are well paid -- and more likely to be early adopters than any other field. (e.g. if openAI wants a fast way to grow beyond $20-$200/month, owning a tool like windsurf is a good move)

Some folks have been speculating the cash/equity split. I'd be confident whatever number they arrived at de-risks things for windsurf, and preserves the right amount of cash on hand for openAI.

Even if OpenAI is burning 10-20B a year, with the recent raise would buy them between 1-2 years, and given the pace of AI development that's a pretty long time.

A few questions:

1) How do you know the new place can’t match the counter offer?

2) why do you think the folks who hired you for less than your current salary would not understand sticking at your current job for 25% more and a role change?

3) if you took the raise/counter and it wasn’t fulfilling would you be willing to take a job paying 30% less 1 year from now? Why or why not?

4) why did you want to work at the other company you just signed and offer letter for?

We’ve lost candidates after their current employer drastically increased their salary. It happens, normally before an offer letter is signed.

I am always curious about how companies like this end. For fun I did some basic research on archive.org.

It appears that around 2015 the headquarters for make music moved from MN to CO. https://web.archive.org/web/20140703151047/http://www.finale...

This is around the same time that Greg (who wrote the blog post joined Make Music Inc), who also happens to live in Boulder. https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregorydellera/details/experienc...

Previously Greg was president of Alfred.com (https://www.linkedin.com/company/alfred-music-publishing-co-...)

My guess is there was likely some move behind the scenes to boost revenue, and keep the business running initiated by a founder, or board member, which resulted in hiring Greg, relocating the headquarters from MN to CO, and probably also shifted the future of makemusic.

would be an interesting read :)

https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregorydellera/details/experienc...

Cumberland also happens to be where the Chesapeake and Ohio canal tow path terminates, and is a really nice 168 mile mostly off road dirt bike ride all the way to Washington DC. It has been extended all the way to Pittsburgh. So if you were into biking, Cumberland could be kind of a cool place to hang out.

Employee in question took Muni + Walked. I biked and did a baby bullet from Menlo Park.

My estimates could be off by ~10 or so minutes it was a while ago.

Useful context: Open ai had 11 cofounders. Schulman was one of them.

Schuman was not the original head of ai alignment / safety he was promoted into it when former leader left for Anthropic.

Not everyone who’s a founder of an nonprofit ai research institute wants to be a leader/manager of a much more complicated organization in a much more complicated environment.

Open Ai was founded a while ago. The degree of their long time success is entirely based on their ability to hire and retain the right talent in the right roles.

It’s been a while since we had sf offices, but back when we did sf had a pretty aggressive additional payroll tax and gross receipts taxes.

I’d imagine this is likely a factor in the decision.

I know for a while they were waiving some of these taxes for companies who set up offices in certain parts of the city. E.g. zendesk got a big tax break for its market street location near the tenderloin.

As for commutes, I’d be pretty curious to know how many folks who work at Twitter actually show up to their offices every day, especially in eng roles. Even with a return to office mandate I can’t imagine this not becoming more hybrid over time (of course I’ve never worked for musk or his managers — but I’d assume that if folks are high output he would not care how often they were in the office).

Even commuting within sf can be kind of a pain it took our folks 50 minutes from both areas in the mission and Menlo Park to get to an office in South Park.

I’d be curious to know:

- how folks who work at X think about this move?

- how much remote work will be allowed?

- tax savings.

- lease savings.

I’d bet getting rid of sf tax nexus was a key piece of the reason.

I agree.

If you are selling ANY product, customer experience is part of what you are selling. Apple gets this better than practically anyone else.

BUT, as a small business owner you are forced to make decisions about where to allocate your limited resources. In your case (and in mine) customer service likely created word of mouth referrals, retained customers, and future expansion opportunities.

I guarantee you that there are many businesses where folks somehow think customer service is merely a cost center to be eliminated. For the folks who are already in that boat, AI arguably will likely be better than their outsourced callcenters.

When will they swing back to seeing the bigger picture, and realize their business is only as valuable as the customer relationships they build?

I think support is going to get worse before it gets better.

From a quick glance the chatbot described in this post it is clearly moving through a dialog tree and not LLM based. The outsourced support agent is likely also just moving through some sort of script. I don't think the chatbot necessarily made the experience much worse than typical AT&T support.

I think the big challenge with promise of AI chatbots (not in this example though), is that somehow you can just replace your entire support team with a bunch of bots, and free up your reactive support team to do other things. We (Olark: https://www.olark.com) have definitely seen this in our customer base and try really hard to walk people back from this perspective, but even then we are going to see more and more unstaffed chat solutions (e.g. every drift bot ever, and most intercoms) before things swing back to some hybrid of AI and humans.

That said, a very simplified version of the way I think about how AI chatbots and what the future of support looks like might help you:

1) Big enterprises (or regional monopolies) who are mostly monopolies selling to consumers, where they have to just be good enough that regulators don't come after them (or sometimes compete on price (AT&T, Comcast/Xfinity, Verizon, power company)), these folks will always offer the cheapest support they can get away with.

2) Companies that still win business with human relationships. These folks will likely over index on AI and provide worse service if they BELIEVE that they are winning business based on some sort of non-relationship based factors.

3) Small businesses with small teams wearing multiple hats all the time, where providing AI support lets them offer a better service than they'd be able to provide (e.g. we now can answer 50% of questions 24/7 instantly). They will over index on AI until it hurts the bottom line.

I still believe human relationships matter, and figuring out how to create hybrid bot / human customer service to enable humans to do their best work is still huge unsolved opportunity.

Additionally, you could hire other people to read them, dividing the task into whatever manageable chunks or even having multiple people read the same parts for agreement.

In the days before good software transcription I saved a ton of time I grad school by splitting up interviews and using mechanical Turk or up work ( can’t remember which one, to transcribe 1 minute snippets, and then took another pass)

I am bootstrapped founder who built a B2B product that lives in the bay area.

I think your intuition is spot on, that living in SF is probably not the best way to save $$. That said, a few thoughts.

1) I'd recommend going somewhere where you can get coffee with your customers, so if you are picking a new location, being able to in person meet up with folks who are using your product and love it ... especially in the early days ... can make a difference between giving up on your dream and keeping going.

2) You can live cheaply in the bay area, but it's kinda of crazy. We did it with about ~30-50K - ignoring opportunity cost - 4 cofounders, no car, and more or less shopping at CostCo until we made enough $$ to pay ourselves anything. Rents have gone up, but I think it's likely still possible to get something off the ground while keeping cost of living low -- probably not living in SF though -- perhaps a suburb, or San Jose.

3) If you do plan on selling to startups, I doubt there are too many places where you'd be able to do as much door-to-door sales as you could in SF.

In short, I'd recommend picking location based on your target customers as #1 priority if your goal is to build a successful business.

If your #1 goal is to not work in tech again, and focus on your own stuff -- there are a lot of other places to live that are far cheaper, think -- a small college town somewhere rural -- you might have a 10-20 year runway if you have 2-5 in the bay area.

Many folks on hn live in California in the. San Francisco Bay Area, and enough of them like to drive down the coast on route 1 — a fairly famous scenic road in the us, that we are all excited this section is open again.

Does this kind of news belong on hn.. I guess that’s for the voters

This is a good time to remind everyone that tomorrow, May 16th is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) (https://accessibility.day), and that there are over 176 events worldwide going on to celebrate the process we are all making at improving accessibility in our products -- any plenty of learning opportunities for beginners and experts.

Have you considered chromeOS for the pc, I’ve had pretty good luck with it as an is for kids, and you can lock a lot down with family controls

I was really hoping this article was going to about how someone was able to turn their cable modem into a sales development representative (SDR), because of the absurdity :). I was pleasantly surprised by the actual article: SDR (software defined radio).

I still think it's reasonable to have Apple consider building a car. Their core competency is in design, integrated platforms/ecosystems, and outsourced manufacturing.

Assuming that they could use their supply chain expertise to simplify and outsource manufacturing, the cars of the future likely looks more like a software enabled consumer electronics device than a consumer mechanical device, and there are some really neat things you could do in that ecosystem that only apple could pull off (cutting edge design coupled with high end finishes, and a software ecosystem with a self-driving car as a new platform).

That said, it's likely not the right market timing for Apple to bring an electric car to market.

Much of the sf area old money comes from folks selling tools into the gold rush, for example Folgers started serving coffee to miners, Levi’s selling jeans, Wells Fargo.

Looks like total revenue in the 990 was 910K, so 910/membership is likely in the 10K/year range assume only 100 members.

"According to Villa Taverna’s most recent 990, which lists the club under a different name, it raked in more than $700,000 in membership dues and $130,000 in initiation fees in 2021, along with nearly $80,000 in contributions."

I wonder how much of these plastics are environmental in general, for example if these plastics are in organic unpackaged fruit — it’s very likely environmental (e.g. microplastics in the water) as opposed to something in the processing for sale.

We should have some data on environmental plastics since the 1960s/70s. Would be interesting to see a graph.

It's a nice tech demo. I like the bot builder UI, and this format as a way of testing an idea, curious to see you post about your waitlist numbers.

Especially given I doubt this audience I doubt is your ideal audience.

My recommendation (in addition to the specific technology advice on this thread) is to connect (or help him connect) with an organization that helps blind folks adapt to blindness and specializes in using and training folks in using assistive technology.

If you are in the Bay Area, an organization like lighthouse for the blind would be a good place to start: https://lighthouse-sf.org/about/getting-started/ -- there are many regional organizations similar to this filled with good people who want to help.

Or: https://nfb.org/programs-services

Organizations like NFB and Lighthouse for the blind offer rehabilitation services and training, and might be able to provide some recommendations as well.

Also, you likely already know this, but there are many degrees of legal blindness, so the technology tooling varies based on specific challenge to overcome, and only 10% of the blind population knows braille.

If you really want to go down the technology rabbit hole, the CSUN conference in March is like the CES for assistive technology: https://www.csun.edu/cod/conference/sessions/

Assistive tech is a pretty fascinating area. I expect this area to grow as we have more aging tech savvy folks who want to keep using technology as they age.

If I recall the original FISA warrants were part of the US Patriot Act, which was one of the greatest increases in domestic surveillance in US history and brought about as an immediate response to 9/11.

I haven't followed what it's been up to over the last 12 years, but it's nice there was actually some expiry in there. Certainly the US intelligence apparatus existed pre 9/11. Would FISA courts and secret warrants have prevented 9/11, who knows. Did all the agencies get a rubber stamp in everything they ever wanted in response to 9/11 under the guide of patriotism, during a period of intense groupthink -- likely.

While your point is valid, the researchers in the paper cite evidence from other studies that intermediate fasting reduces calorie intake.

I think the OP has a pretty reasonable point, intermediate fasting, restricts calories to certain hours, calories restriction in general restricts calories to a quantity.

Probably worth exploring the citation to know how well this holds.

“Evidence shows that limiting the eating window to 6 to 10 hours within a 24-hour period naturally reduces energy intake by 200 to 500 kcal/d”.

I linked to full txt above if you want to dig

My tldr: intermittent fasting is easier to adhere to than calorie restriction.

Or in plain English: it’s easier to get someone to eat less by getting them to limit windows in which they eat than to ask them to eat less and keep the same routine.

Tre = intermittent fasting Cr = calorie restriction

The TRE group reported being adherent with their eating window a mean (SD) of 6.1 (0.8) days per week (87% of days) over 6 months (eFigure 2 in Supplement 2). In the CR group, 17 participants (68%) reported being adherent with their prescribed calorie goals during the 6-month trial (eFigure 2 in Supplement 2). Participants in the TRE group reported finding their diet intervention easier to adhere to compared with CR group participants (eFigure 3 in Supplement 2

Full text: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

Seems like most local planning offices would have a lot of training data, possible even publicly accessible via foia

I like this idea, but any sophisticated attacker will ignore the Bluetooth names and just pull vendors off the MAC addresses. Though it would be interesting if you can define the Bluetooth MAC addressees in software to match your fake names :)