schrodinger

First come first served is capitalism in disguise. Someone will automate a tool that watches for these and jumps on them, and the person with the most resources, can get a close network connection, etc will "buy" it.

Same with waitlists.

It's impossible to avoid capitalism!

To those who have used it: is it handy for situations where you have multiple repos that want to share a little code, but it's not worth the trouble of extracting a library, referencing it, publishing versioned releases, updating dependent repos, etc?

And instead just "sync" a code folder from one main repo (perhaps containing common domain models) to other repos?

Basically the Go philosophy that a little bit of copying is better than a lot of dependency?

I don't get it. How do you handle 10k people wanting, say, garden.com, without a free market?

As someone who spent over half a decade using MS SQL Server daily, I have to admit it's a very nice database, and better than Postgres for some use cases. This could be interesting!

Postgres made the foundational design decision that every update is an insert leaving behind a stale row that'll get cleaned up eventually with its MVCC model. It's great for non-blocking read-heavy workflows (presumably the most common), but it suffers for the inverse.

For example, I wrote a simple job queue in Postgres, which had a lot of contention over the oldest rows non-terminal rows. It had many runners trying to either mark a row as completed or claim a row by atomically marking it as started and returning the row's contents (using the "skip locked" functionality). This ran much faster using similar semantics on MS SQL Server or MySQL because they have in-place updates, not an append-only tuple log.

Anyone notice how they linked to a "Hacker News Discussion" on their homepage? It's empty unfortunately, but hey, they tried!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42807210

Interesting point:

""" A popular story that made the rounds a few months ago was “an LLM wrote a web browser in one week, completely autonomously! It’s buggy but it works.” I won’t deny that it’s an impressive demo, but in a practical sense … what was accomplished? We trained on every open-source web browser ever written to produce a version of “git clone firefox” that’s orders of magnitude more expensive, slower, and buggier. """

That would imply that all of the knowledge held with these models is an uninteresting waste of everyone's time. I don't believe that's true.

I could tell it was AI, but it was interesting nonetheless. FWIW, I don't think AI enablement is inherently bad; this can be a game changer for an individual with an interesting thought yet difficulty expressing themselves in written word. (Obviously, it's also created a real problem with the ability to create near infinite well-written content, especially in the case of propaganda.)

I do agree with you that the quotes cited out are literary constructs used by humans, and there's a risk we get trigger-happy in calling out AI-slop. Still, those are just the most obvious tells — there were absolutely other, less notable mannerisms that confirmed it for me. If you interact enough with an LLM, you can become quite good at detecting their output through subtle subconscious cues that are hard to put to words.

I do wonder where some of the tropes came from. Claude tends to say "____ is doing a lot of work in this sentence", yet I don't recognize that as a common construction for humans overall or even a specific community (e.g. journalists). Perhaps I'm just unfamiliar with some vernaculars found in training data. Yet sometimes, it legitimately feels like they've actually developed a lingo of their own — an emergent property.

I find it all truly fascinating (along with other feelings…), and I never expected computers to be able to "understand" language anywhere near the degree we see today. Will it soon plateau, requiring another breakthrough? Or is there plenty of juice left to squeeze?

Maybe this is making a slightly different point (i.e. the usage of immutable physical features as "passwords", which I agree is largely useless), I think we're just entering a post-privacy era. Being around 40, I willingly fed the machine (Facebook) with hundreds of pictures during university, and had I not, my friends would have more than made up for it. It's absolutely possible to photograph every person you pass by every day, and Facebook most certainly has the keys to identify most all of the people. That dystopian combination means that unless you're welling to move to a largely uninhabited place, each of our whereabouts can be largely resolved with technology available _today_ at a completely reasonable cost.

Not only that, almost everyone on this forum walks around with a device that shares their identity and location with unscrupulous companies (cell phone carriers) whose data is available en masse to the government. (N.B. I have an iPhone and appreciate and even _trust_ all the privacy work put into it; however, the cell phone tower thwarts location tracking, and participation in social networks thwarts face tracking.)

I've long thought that rather than try to limit the information about us, we ought to _flood_ the Internet with information about us. Make the data available untrustworthy.

Or, accept it. So long as it remains in the hands of corporations and not solely the government, it guts both ways — a senator can no longer be publicly opposed to same-sex equality legislation while engaging in a homosexual relationship themselves.

AI seems to be pushing us down the former road.

Why wouldn't Robotic AI take over the sex worker industry as well?

Wonder if you could run your password manager in an isolated sandbox that couldn’t provide the secret behind the TOTP, only the current value.

That’s a good point.

Maybe a good compromise is to use 1pw for most TOTP but keep your gmail / iCloud and a few others in an iPhone only app?

Gmail is what scares me the most. It’s basically keys to the kingdom.

Idk if this is intentional or just part of an innocent site that’s unwittingly hosting these but I just got a “we’re verifying your browser” page, as if _I’m_ the suspicious one. Nice social engineering.

IYKYK

Is there any chance you made a typo in this comment? I'm not sure why your manager being long-term would result in less frequent one-on-ones...

I don't understand — I use AI to write email particularly _because_ I care about the recipient, and am confident the resulting email will more eloquently and accurately express my feelings. I'll also often edit it afterwards to ensure it's in my voice. Regardless, I don't think it's fair to presume that my boss doesn't case because an LLM generated the email.

^ This was written 100% by hand. Let's have Claude proofread it and make any suggestions:

I'd argue the opposite — I reach for AI because I care about the recipient. It helps me express my thoughts more precisely and eloquently than I might off the cuff, and I'll often edit the result to make sure it sounds like me.

Presuming that an LLM-assisted email signals indifference seems like a category error. The care is in what you're trying to communicate, not which tool you used to get there. -- https://claude.ai/share/3d3d1a78-381c-4fcf-9354-69b10f2d6f4a

Single inline backticks like `this` aren't recognized (although still useful in my opinion, they just don't change the rendering).

Triple backticks also aren't recognized. However, if you indent by I believe 4 spaces, it formats it in a fixed width font presuming it's code.

Let's try (4 spaces):

    func main() {
        fmt.Println("Hello, HN!")
    }

None for comparison:

func main() { fmt.Println("Hello, HN!") }

As someone who's been a hiring manager for around 7 years, I agree with you, but note that the people who screen resumés before they even _get to you_ very well may be looking for those references.

For my own resumé, I include the stack used at each job which I feel strikes a fair balance.

Same.

If it's something like "Refactored the apartment list service improving P99 Latency from 2s to 180ms", it definitely boosts the resumé in my mind. A good engineer would be measuring their impact and likely have numbers like that off the top of their head.

But if it's like "Increased revenue by $18.7M by reducing time-to-first-interaction latency from 2.3s to 117ms, increasing conversion by 47% and LTV by 28%," with the same fidelity on each bullet, I'm very skeptical.

--

I don't summarily reject AI-written resumés to be clear, as honestly, it's basically a necessity at this point to be competitive with others; it'd be putting yourself at a severe disadvantage on pure principles in a way that has no real positive net effect on society. Even if you disagree with AI resumé screeners, you're only hurting yourself — especially at a time that has the largest impact on your compensation (i.e. negotiating salary at job start is one of the most valuable ways to spend your time since it will pay you back every paycheck).

Though I _do_ tend to question resumés that look like they were written almost entirely by an LLM without the candidate providing significant context and refinement.

This sounds correct. When I implemented push notifications for an iPhone application, I remainder needing to obtain a store a separate token for each device a user has, and subscribing to a feed of revoked delivery tokens. Seemed like an interesting design intended to facilitate E2E encryption for push notifications.

How's it work? Embed tokens and use euclidean distance or something?

Depending on where you live it may not really be relatable to you, but living in NYC -- there are people that will intentionally jay walk on a green light and even _stare you down_ knowing that you will stop and let them pass.

People jay walk when there's no traffic all the time, that's totally fine. This is a totally different act of passive aggression.

It's easy to get caught up in your own hype when you're surrounded entirely by people who always tell you what you want to hear.

I’ve recently begun using my personal domain as my primary email address, with it forwarding to gmail so I can “get out” easily if I ever had a reason. That said, I’ve found Gmail’s service great, their spam filtering highly effective, (although I haven’t surveyed the competition lately so it’s possible their huge advantage no longer exists) and their features pretty user-friendly (eg the one-click unsubscribe as well as a page to view all your subs in one place). I have never felt like they _abused_ the immense amount of data they have about me nor used it for “evil” purposes; only to profit on relevant ads that are at least clearly marked and unobtrusive. I don’t like that they have so much data on me, but I’ve felt like they’ve been transparent about it, so it’s been on me for making a decision eyes wide open. As opposed to Meta and the shady shit they’ve been caught doing...

That said, I’m open-minded and obviously thinking about this given moving to my own domain.

What’s the evil behavior you’ve experienced? I’m down to move off if I’m oblivious to something…

I don't think that ads _have_ to be evil.

When I look at Google, I see a company that is fully funded by ads, but provides me a number of highly useful services that haven't really degraded over 20 years. Yes, the number of search results that are ads grew over the years, but by and large, Google search and Gmail are tools that serve rather benevolently. And if you're about to disagree with this ask yourself if you're using Gmail, and why?

Then I look at Meta or X, and I see a cesspool of content that's driven families apart and created massive societal divides.

It makes me think that Ads aren't the root of the problem, though maybe a "necessary but not sufficient" component.

FYI -- Because of this, Apple made a feature where if you click the power button 5 times, your phone goes into "needs the passcode to unlock" mode.

Whenever I'm approaching a border crossing (e.g. in an airport), I'm sure to discreetly click power 5 times. You also get haptic feedback on the 5th click so you can be sure it worked even from within your pocket.

Writing the code has never been the hard part for the vast majority of businesses. It's become an order of magnitude cheaper, and that WILL have effects. Businesses that are selling crud apps will falter.

But your hypothetical manager who needs employee scheduling software isn't paying for the coding, they're paying for someone to _figure out_ their exact needs, and with a UI that fits their preference, ready to go in no time.

I've thought a lot about this and I don't think it'll be the death of SaaS. I don't think it's the death of a software engineer either — but a major transformation of the role and the death if your career _if you do not adapt_, and fast.

Agentic coding makes software cheap, and will commoditize a large swath of SaaS that exists primarily because software used to be expensive to build and maintain. Low-value SaaS dies. High-value SaaS survives based on domain expertise, integrations, and distribution. Regulations adapt. Internal tools proliferate.

Write it in Go!

What a nice thought :)

I do—all the time. Why not?

I also use en dashes when referring to number ranges, e.g., 1–9