dmkirwan

It requires us to sign up to try it. Can you share a demo video or allow us to try it without signing up?

Does anybody have a good sense of how impactful this will really be? I've grown cynical over the years after plenty of big announcements but very little in the way of big action.

What a legacy. I watched an excellent documentary on this man a few years back[0]. He donated massive sums of money (up to $1 billion) to third level institutions in Ireland, all on the condition of anonymity. I would love to see an assessment of the return that this investment had on Ireland and the world.

On institution benefited from the lion's share of this: University of Limerick. I recall the then-President of the university saying in an interview that he was under extreme pressure to reveal the source of investment as there was a significant drug problem in the city at the time and people were speculating it was the proceeds of crime! Another story that came out years after the fact was that he once invested millions in third level education in Ireland on the condition that the government match it, which they reluctantly did.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMcjxe8slYI

Obair mhaith! Not what I was expecting to see on Hacker news this morning. How does it work? Are you translating Irish speech to English text and sending to chat gpt? Are there API's that can transcribe Irish speech?!

In many parts of Europe, a heart attack used to go like this:

1: 112 call to an ambulance

2: Ambulance arrives, takes an ECG and gives aspirin and GTN

3: Paramedics drive to the emergency department

4: ER doctor identifies the patient is having a heart attack, and pages cardio

5: Cardio decide the patient needs a stent and they bring them to an OR to have it fitted.

In each of these steps, the patient could go into cardiac arrest and likely will not survive.

Today it looks more like this:

1: 112 call happens, the call taker follows a protocol that asks the caller to administer aspirin if appropriate while the ambulance is on the way

2: Ambulance arrives, takes an ECG, identifies a heart attack and transmits the ECG to a cardiologist, all while treating the patient

3: Cardiologist thinks the patient would benefit from a stent, so the paramedic begins transporting the patient and administers whatever pre-operation drugs the cardiologist wants (this would normally happen at step 5 in the previous example)

4: Patient is brought direct to the OR (or PPCI as they're specifically called here) where the cardiac team are waiting around the table for the patient

It's so efficient. I'm not up to date with the latest research on this but just the time savings alone must have saved so many lives. Treatment starts far sooner and all unnecessary steps are removed.

Previous HN post on this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35167004

We've added a bunch of new features based on feedback since the last time:

- We have a team that can assess submissions now to save companies time.

- We published our assessment rubrics for each test so companies can use this to save time, if they wish to assess submissions on their own.

- We've added a whole lot of new tests. Some can be done in any language, some are more specific (rust, react, C#, Java, etc.).

- Add an activity log to give reviewers an insight into the timeline a candidate followed for their interview.

One part of this that we've yet to truly crack is pricing; in the background we're offering various different pricing models that each work well for certain companies but haven't found a one-size fits all yet.

I assume you're not interested in hearing the obvious ones (zero to one, lean startup, etc., etc.) so I'll recommend two.

At the early stages when you're defining your strategy? "Good strategy/bad strategy" by Richard P. Rumelt. "Strategy" is thrown around a whole lot in business, often by somebody who is talking about a goal, as opposed to how to reach it. This book can get a little repetitive but the overarching teachings are valuable and will serve you well throughout your entrepreneurship journey.

After the startup phase (growth/acquisition)? I recommend "The messy middle" by Scott Belsky.

I have no affiliation with Intercom but I was taken aback by how much better this bot appears to be compared to any chat bot I've seen before. They have an interactive demo on the link I shared there to test it out and I've been unable to break it thus far. With chat GPT version 3, it would regularly "hallucinate" where it would confidently provide wrong answers. That doesn't seem to be the case here, which was probably one of the biggest blockers to businesses adopting it for their web messaging.

Intercom cofounder Des Traynor's announcement: https://twitter.com/destraynor/status/1635705915595685902

I built a similar one to test job descriptions for non-inclusive language[0]. These tools are helpful , particularly for people who are not native English speakers. I use open source tools like retext-equality[1] and retext-profanities[2] to help catch non-inclusive language. Inevitable there will be strings that are mislabeled or just plain wrong as many of these tools aren't capable of understanding context ("communicate clearly" is often flagged as "clearly" can be superfluous or patronising in certain contexts).

Also - kudos for open sourcing it. I look forward to contributing and using the library.

0: https://devscreen.io/inclusive-language-check 1: https://github.com/retextjs/retext-equality/blob/main/rules.... 2: https://github.com/retextjs/retext-profanities/blob/main/rul...

Edit: I have just noticed that this hasn't had any commits in 3 years, and no releases for much longer than that. OP: are you the author of the library? It would be good to hear what the plans are for it.

The major one that came to mind were cloud providers (AWS, CGP, Azure, etc.). Even if you manage to build in resilience to a major outage, I'd wager that many services your business depends on will not have the same levels of redundancy.

Good idea to make a throwaway account for this question.

If I were in that situation I'd send a get well soon card and flowers. I wouldn't call or visit. Usually the only thing you have in common is work, so you're left to speak about either work or their heart attack. The latter is not really your business and the former is something they shouldn't be worrying about right now, so keeping these gestures one-way is a nice way to say "we're thinking of you and hope you get well soon" without the risk of putting them in an uncomfortable situation.

Good luck, and I hope they make a full recovery.

A lot of the reporting that I read about this event showed an astonishing lack of critical thinking. As the linked article says, two things would have to have been true:

1: The aircraft entered into free-fall (i.e. falling at ~9.81m/s) at a low altitude and recovered within 1425ft. This would mean the wings were fully stalled and there was no drag or lift forces on the airframe while it was falling.

2: None of the many passengers on board felt the need to share it on social media.

Both of which are highly unlikely. I'd like to see the report of what actually happened, but I'm not sure if that will be forthcoming since it's a voluntary safety report. I'm not sure if they're treated similarly to NTSB investigations where the reports are made public.

What (presumably!) was built as a joke will actually help me a lot. For my side-project (devscreen.io) we have to make lots of realistic coding tests and pull requests with bugs in them for candidates to work on as part of a technical interview. It's actually more time consuming than you'd think to intentionally insert bugs into code in a way that isn't super obvious, so thank you!

I've done this. It was the right decision for me and I have no regrets. However, it is a personal decision and I'm not going to try to convince you one way or another. Rather, I'll share two posts below by Charity Majors which helped me to come to a decision (I'm surprised they haven't featured in this thread yet!). They're well thought out and it helped me to consider all of the impacts that the decision will have.

The engineer-manager pendulum: https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum...

Questionable advice - is there a path back from CTO to engineer? https://charity.wtf/2022/07/29/questionable-advice-is-there-...

If you were shocked that this is only happening now, I'd highly recommend reading or listening to the book "Invisible Women" by Caroline Criado-Perez. She highlights instances of this across many industries. I think that it's particularly relevant to software engineers, or anybody else who has a chance of unintentionally introducing bias into a system.

Similar here, except we had d3.js mixed in there also. We went back and forth on the decision to buy highchart (we were a small startup with limited $$$) but honestly it paid for itself immediately and the built in accessibility helped us meet our legal requirements there with zero effort.

My main complaint is that their pricing is a little odd. Charging per developer doesn't work well for us when we sometimes have 5 devs working on the data vis and other times there are none.

I was going to respond saying that you should be strict about declining meeting outside of working hours and protect your time, but then I remembered that my company is not every company and this may not be supported or possible. It does sound like you are overworked and the company may be poorly managed in this regard.

I think your best options are to speak with your manager about it or start looking for other jobs with better work-life-balance. The companies you are looking for certainly do exist!

This is very cool. I love that it can be self-hosted! It looks super easy to use, too. Spinning up a pull request environment sounds like a great help.

It shouldn't need to exist but unfortunately interviewing is still a separate skill that engineers need to learn.

People can get so caught up in the numbers on a dashboard or AB test that they forget that there's a human on the other end that just got duped into a 4 figure expense. Gross indeed!

I couldn't agree more. Most interviews assess your ability to interview well, not do the job well. Stanford even run a class on the software engineering interview! I'm currently working on a product to help companies to build realistic interviews, and I'm seeing some other startups focus on this too, so hopefully it will become a thing of the past.

The Stanford course, for the curious: https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs9/

The product we're working on: https://devscreen.io

The rails docs are excellent, actually! I was surprised at how bad the node.js docs were, but the documentation for express.js is good enough that I didn't find myself referencing the node docs a whole lot.

C# and .NET have been pretty easy to develop in, but the documentation was very poor I thought. Maybe I just didn't find it, but it lacked a good example walkthrough like you get with Rails. Next up is a Swift backend using Perfect[0]!

[0] https://github.com/PerfectlySoft/PerfectDocs

Was there anything in particular that made this click for you? If you have any resources to share I'd love to see them.

I've been learning a lot, fast, by trying to build out the same (very simple) full-stack web application in using different frameworks. Different backends, different frontends and different databases. Admittedly, I've been doing this for slightly more than one week. It's been a lot of fun, I must admit. It's interesting to see the different quality levels in documentation, availability of help on StackOverflow, and tooling.

I'm not approaching it with any real goal other than to see how some other frameworks work but it feels very worthwhile.

I fully agree. We don't have anything in place at the moment to stop users from adding private projects that take a huge amount of time to complete, but we are going to spend time on helping to guide customers away from that situation. I think a large reason for people spending lots of time on code projects boil down to two things: 1) the people who create the test never actually do it themselves, and only estimate how long they think it will take, and 2) Companies don't give enough guidance on what is needed and what isn't. If it's too open-ended then how does a candidate know when to stop?

We made the decision early on to aim for solutions that work well for both the candidate and the company, but where they conflict, go with what will work best for the candidate. This may seem counterintuitive from a business perspective, but it has served us well and, I think, it is the best way to go long term. Ultimately if we can give a great candidate experience then that's good for the business too.

+1. I used to take the same position as ffhhj on this and I learned the hard way to talk to customers first before doing anything. I'm not saying that building in stealth mode without talking to customers can't work, I just believe it greatly reduces your chances of success.

Incidentally, I think the equally common advice of "solve a problem that you have yourself" is coming from the same place: you can't solve a problem without understanding your users.

The main question I have after reading this is: what 'bargain' is the author referring to? Apps change their logos all of the time, as is their right. The timing of this post is coincident with pride month, and many companies changing altering their logo to use the pride colors. I disagree with the suggestion that changing the color(s) of the logos and icons hinder the user's ability to find the app. A rainbow version of Dropbox's icon isn't going to make it any harder for me to find the Dropbox app and it might just make under-represented groups feel more seen.

I think the more general topic of brands taking political stances is worthy of debate, for sure. I tend to think it's fine. If I agree, great. If I don't, then I can choose spend my money at a company whose values align better with mine.

To put myself at ease I ask myself two questions: how long can I live with solely on my savings & investments? And how long, conservatively, would it take me to find work if I lost my job tomorrow?

It sounds like you've had good financial habits during the good times and have a good chunk of money saved and invested. That's a great place to be. If you lost all of your income sources tomorrow, would it take you long to find another job? ANY job? There are still lots of tech jobs out there, but there is also an abundance of service work in many cities that they cannot fill. That could be enough to cover expenses, though you probably won't save.

Aside from the above, I would recommend seeing a therapist to help you navigate this time in your life.

I've seen this in a lot of places that I've worked. I find myself coming back to Des Traynor's talk at the Web Summit[1] when thinking about process. One point that hits home is hist quote that every process will slow us down, and some will make us better. Organisations need to have a natural resistance to new processes, and a willingness to drop ones that are no longer serving the business.

Anecdotally, I see this a lot in organisations that have various operations teams (product ops, design ops, recruitment ops, etc.). It is often the responsibility of these teams to create processes and frameworks for other teams to work within. I think there's less willingness to push back against these teams when they want to introduce new processes than if, say, a single product manager(or designer, recruiter, etc.) proposed a new process.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQjhrLYww7c

Congratulations on the launch! I don't have much constructive feedback, other than the custom launch plan idea resonates well with me. It's something that other vendors miss IMO.

I have two questions if you don't mind:

1: onboarding is something that users should do once only. Unfortunately, engineers only see it once also. It's easy to forget there's an onboarding flow in your app as you build it. Do you have mechanisms in place to detect if somebody releases a breaking change? For example: an element you expected to exist is now gone, a url has changed, etc.

2: Can you share how you came up with the problem and if the product evolved over your time in YC? I think most engineers or PM's have had to think about onboarding at some stage so I'm curious about that.