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feifan

673 karma · joined March 12, 2013

@FeifanZ on Twitter

Building tools for developers to rapidly navigate, search, and edit code across repos and codebases that are too big to fit in your head @tanagram_. Previously @stripe.

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feifan··on JetBrains reported a net financial loss first time in its tracked history
> Now we are considering scrapping it

Turns out, it was probably good that nobody spent time reviewing it.

feifan··on Grok 4.6 scores 61 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index
being a public company forces a lot of trust and transparency bc otherwise shareholders will sue you into oblivion
feifan··on Lovable raises $400M Series C
many such cases in Anthropic's product portfolio
feifan··on Lovable raises $400M Series C
Lovable sponsors Tanstack but Tanstack is an independent project
feifan··on After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand
> Feedback helps, right. But if you've got a problem where a simple, contained feedback loop isn't that easy to build, the only source of feedback is yourself. And that's when you are exposed to the stupidity of current AI models.

That's exactly the point. Modern coding agents aren't smart software engineers per se; they're very very good goal-seekers whose unit of work is code. They need automatable feedback loops.

feifan··on Eat Real Food
Cultural reflex probably; lentils and tofu are displeasurable to most Americans
feifan··on Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)
this assumes the application is hosted as SaaS, but if the application makes sense as a personal/"desktop" app, that likely wouldn't matter.
feifan··on Tanagram: Tools for complex codebases, inspired by 5 years of building at Stripe
Thanks Mahmoud! Does the code review aspect of this demo resonate more with you than the authoring part?
feifan··on Tanagram: Tools for complex codebases, inspired by 5 years of building at Stripe
Thanks! Getting all the possibly-relevant related code isn't too hard; the hard part is filtering down to what's relevant. So I think specific use cases (e.g. "how do I get from a known entry point to some method/property/etc") is gonna be key.
feifan··on Ask HN: Former Employees' RSUs at Risk After Startup's IPO
> The company has stated that if we do not prepay the taxes by March 15, 2025, the RSUs will be permanently forfeited

Is it clear whether you'd forfeit your entire grant, or just some subset of shares that would correspond to a tax/withholding percentage?

feifan··on iOS indie app development looks like
Positioning/messaging matters a lot!
feifan··on The average CPU performance of PCs and notebooks fell for the first time
I'd suspect some sort of economic factor, or sampling … e.g. just people with lower specs submitting and bringing down the average
feifan··on 3M heads to trial in ‘existential’ $143B forever-chemicals litigation
I read that sentence as saying someone came up with a cost estimate of $142.7b to clean up everything, and then there's a comparison to 3M's $53b market cap for scale/comparison.
feifan··on Notes on Vision Pro
> Apps like Bear, Reeder, Anybox, Things 3, make switching devices seamless

I think Apple's whole point is that they provide the APIs so that apps can do this themselves. Which, yeah, is a bit disappointing; I'd love to have a 100% fidelity, flick-to-another-device type of Continuity built into the OS, but the APIs are at least a starting point.

feifan··on Ask HN: Suggestions to host 10TB data with a monthly +100TB bandwidth
Consider storing the data on Backblaze B2 ($0.005/GB/month) and serving content via Cloudflare (egress from B2 to Cloudflare is free through their Bandwidth Alliance).

(No affiliation with either; just a happy customer for a tiny personal project)

feifan··on Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
I'm working on an app to browse a codebase as a list of constructs — classes, methods, etc. It matches how I think about code: as a database of named entities, in which the implementation is often an afterthought — unlike text editors, in which constructs of various types, along with their implementation, all kind of look the same. It's still a very early project, but here's a short recording of some of what I've built so far[^0]. It's been a great way to learn SwiftUI, the Language Server Protocol, and FSEvents as well!

[^0]: https://twitter.com/tanagram_/status/1652164856563507200

feifan··on Solid-State Battery Has 2x the Energy–and No Anode
I've seen data showing ~70% recovery on a Model 3, but I also can't find the source :/
feifan··on Transformer architecture optimized for Apple Silicon
The part that Siri is bad at will be commoditized — someone will open-source a GPT-4-level language model. And Apple's moat will be being able to run that on-device with all the attendant benefits (privacy, zero marginal cost to the company, availability in more scenarios, etc)
feifan··on ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time
A well-adjusted person should be able to signal some degree of confidence about what they're saying ("I know that…", "I think that…", "Maaaaaaybe…", etc). That's an anspect that ChatGPT doesn't have.
feifan··on Pixelmator Pro gets a magical, AI‑powered Deband feature
Is your photo library on a spinning hard drive or USB drive? I had this problem before which the setup, and it went away when I moved my library to my internal SSD.
feifan··on The Tesla Semi cab from the practical POV of someone who drives trucks
I understand and partly agree with your sentiment, but "offsetting" technologies/components are all over the place. E.g. combustion engines also need mufflers, catalytic converters, etc.
feifan··on The Tesla Semi cab from the practical POV of someone who drives trucks
Cost-per-mile is cheaper from electricity than from diesel, and it's expected to have lower maintenance costs too (fewer moving parts, no oil changes, etc)
feifan··on The Tesla Semi cab from the practical POV of someone who drives trucks
The displays have downward-facing cameras covering what looks like the blind spots next to the cab
feifan··on SPACs collapse as $11B of deals are called off within an hour
It depends on your time horizon. Lots of people deride Chamath's SPACs, but several of them traded well above their initial $10 price for 1.5+ years until the market started dropping at the beginning of this year.
feifan··on Ask HN: Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme?
I do feel a warm, fuzzy sense of satisfaction when I get to light up all the cores on my workstation … but that might just be from the heat of the Xeons ;)
feifan··on Thoughts about Twitter
Both are true — if a team can figure out how the reduce the need for human intervention, they generally will. In the limit, what's left is the really-hard-to-anticipate/automate stuff.
feifan··on ExtensionKit
One example that I use often — the Photos app on Mac has a built-in editing interface, but also supports extensions that allow third-party apps (e.g. Affinity Photo and Pixelmator) to take over that whole UI and present their editing UI inside the Photos app.
feifan··on How to succeed at Meta
You'd probably want to look for small companies making something that impresses you (which may or may not be public). Hopefully they stay small for a while and preserve that culture.
feifan··on Show HN: Maiao, Stacked Diffs for GitHub
> Identify which of the files should be modified first.

I'm curious how many software engineers work this way — i.e. you need to make a big change, and you can determine a sequential order in which to make changes?

My working style is mostly jumping back-and-forth across all the relevant files and tests as I go, realizing new things that I need to change, and iterating until it all works end-to-end.

Am I the outlier, or is Maiao's expected workflow the outlier?

feifan··on Show HN: Figr.app – a multi-user, notepad style calculator (desktop app)
The hard thing about plain-text is that you quickly run into domains/problems that are too complicated to easily represent as plain-text. When that happens, you run into problems: the text representation becomes really verbose (e.g. XML) or exhaustingly terse/unergonomic (e.g. LaTeX, IMO), and you can only build anemic tooling.
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