jwitchel

"I'm gonna have to science the shit out of this."

Fantastic work!

I was looking for a dead on feature for feature exact replica including look and feel. You are 100% correct there are some excellent tools and libraries that duplicate most (all?) of the features. But I was playing around with the idea of what it would take for a perfect replica (for science of course). Turns out it's really hard even if you jump start it with those libraries and an existing reference implementation.

That was the point of my comment... Robust commercial software is hard.

I recently asked Claude to duplicate Google Docs. It practically threw up. I tried to have it write a plan, decompose it, deobfuscate it.

It gave me all sorts of reasons why this was a terrible idea. I've never seen it resist a task so directly and relentlessly.

It knew.

One point worth considering is that tools like Jira and Salesforce have dozens of screens and modals. But you only ever look at one at a time. So the enormity of the ask "duplicate Jira" is hard to see in its totality.

With Google docs, the entirety of the tool is almost one screen. It resists decomposition. So the true gravity of the request is more in your face.

You say you want to duplicate Asana or Service Now or Jira or Zendesk? Great, here's the keys to the car, a tank of gas, and a quarter to call me on a payphone when you get there. Oh wait payphones don't exist anymore...but it doesn't matter because you're never getting there.

These software platforms are built by thousands of engineers over more than a decade of dedicated work. They are they way they are for reasons. To think someone can duplicate them with some clever prompting is to completely fail to understand the scale of the problem at hand.

Kagi is awesome. And frankly, it's the end game. Just pay for your search full stop. The original 1990's assertion that "information wants to be free" and all that related nonsense never really passed the laugh test.

Being able to search the web is critical to day-to-day life. Why wouldn't you pay for it? I pay for all sorts of dumb stuff I barely use. I use Kagi every day.

Because I am paying for their service, I know that they are trying to provide me the best service they can - we are aligned. I want to pay for good service, they want to get me good service.

I pay for Kagi not because of political value system. I pay for it because it's just better than Google. I encourage you to try it. It's night and day.

Oh this is one I can answer. I was the co-founder of Prosper an early p2p lending company. Your problem is a relatively easy one.

Go find one or two companies with a lot of packages. Focus on delivering packages whose delivery time is not critical (say 7 days) and whose registered value is low (say $500 or less). Focus on deliveries that are just outside of ubers practical range (say LA to SFO).

Find a bunch of uber drivers who are already reliable. Over pay them to make runs. If they screw it up have them drop the package off at a ups store and over night it as a catch all.

Do 1,000 packages to get your logistics worked out. Don't market or launch or promote until you have it nailed.

Then find 10 more companies with lots of packages. Your goal is to develop profitable routes (e.g. 5 packages per car) and customers who are delivering 1000s of packages a month.

Your pmf is about reliably servicing one geographic region at a time like yelp and LinkedIn did.

Do not try and roll out a national service day one.

Do not focus on people shipping packages. Not enough repeat business.

Do not take high stakes runs day one.

One big advantage is your ability to do small heavy objects. Ups and FedEx are very weight sensitive.

This is a great incredibly well written piece. Nice work showing under the hood build up of how a db works. It makes you think.

Look a rural electric coops like www.lpea.coop if you want a battle tested approach to an org structure that resists the inescapable profit dynamics of a corporation.

AI slop for all its banality may give us enough noise in the signal to accomplish exactly what the author is asking for.

As the dead web continues to emerge, content looks less like apples on a tree and more like sand on the beach.

And the act of looking for a misshapen grain of sand becomes absurd.

Been using Kagi for about a year (paid). Best money I ever spent. I did a google search recently... Yuck.

I want a calm internet. I ask it answers. No motive. No agenda. Just a best effort honest answer.

I've been using Kagi search for a while now and frankly it's fantastic. Google looks like AOL to me now.

These guys are doing great work and this news product is exactly what I want... Once a day hit. What is happening in the world? As far as pmf goes they hit the mark for an old fart like me.

Usually the observation that “a widely used thing is objectively bad” is strong market signal for entrepreneurial opportunity in a big tam.

I for one would welcome a set of deeply integrated ui improvements in a Mac that included a better file manager, better window management, better desktop search, a contact manager just that worked, a messaging client that just worked, audio and camera controls that just worked, a calculator that didn’t suck, etc.

I’d pay at least $100 a year for that tool set.

Just the worst propaganda. A whole website devoted to "Tesla Bad. Musk Bad"? Seriously guys.

Context ...

https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatalit...

And the inevitable despair of being smart in Milwaukee.

You are not alone. There are a lot of startups working to solve this problem: https://ttconsultants.com/top-10-battery-recycling-startups-...

However, you're doing the right thing. It's important to not let the great become the enemy of the good. Yes, there is work to be done to make batteries zero impact. But no matter what's happening in the world of batteries it is nothing compared to the extraordinary destructive force of coal, oil, and gas globally.

https://acespace.org/blog/2024/01/12/top-10-oil-and-gas-indu...

https://www.miningreview.com/coal/the-top-10-coal-mines-of-t...

Flat Earthers rejoice!

At the risk of being cancelled and banned, I think Trevor Noah pretty much summed up the situation in Solano County ... https://youtu.be/QhMO5SSmiaA

Despite these very exciting data points you can watch California systematically push against these trends:

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/new-california-ru...

People engineering solutions for the win.

The rumble in the jungle. Ali vs. George Foreman, 1974.

https://youtu.be/9bRiFEvxlp8

Pepperidge farm remembers the same types of dismissals when Netscape first come about. "I already have a compuserve account", "It's just a bunch of geeks talking about Frank Zappa", "You can't DO anything with it".

It's hard to perceive clearly what you're looking at when a new thing comes along precisely because it's new. I think GPT3 fits that.

It's Netscape. A messy buggy rapidly evolving piece of software that's opening up new ideas faster than it itself is iterating.

Anyway, what else you gonna work on? Yet another lightweight typescript framework for making web apps? Heh.

Yawn. But omg Penelope Scott! Skip the article listen to the song...

https://youtu.be/LpxT9TLGoLI

Most open water distance swimming takes the tides into account.

Here's an article that gets into it a bit with some data to boot...

https://evanmorrison.com/swim/posts/manhattan-swim-tides/

+1 And to pile on a bit here... part of learning to be a good engineer is learning how to give good constructive feedback. If you are creating real risk of truly hurting someone with your feedback (in a PR or a code review for example) then it's you who are at fault for tone deafness not them for being thin skinned.

Giving and getting feedback is hard. It's a skill and it doesn't come easily to most. Sometimes hurting someone's feelings is inevitable, but starting from a place of "toughen up buttercup" is really self-serving and counterproductive.

There is always someone better than you, and always someone worse. Always someone who knows something you don't, and always someone who can learn from you.

It's not a binary choice. We can and should have both. We can also provide constructive feedback and at times criticism both without risking hurting their feelings. Again, the point is time and place.

Fair enough, but context matters and there are two that matter here: (1) The subject was the tech and the engineer not biased media narratives, and (2) HN is a forum that so many people look up to. So if you want to context switch to a discussion about the media (a worthy subject BTW) post a new thread; let's not do it on a thread that is spotlighting interesting tech from a promising engineer.

Robert Sansone, great job!

So many young prospective engineers read HN every day. Let's find comments that are encouraging or thought provoking or point readers in helpful directions Like @londons_explore did.

Bringing the beatdown is bad for everyone. Especially bad for young engineers. This kid is impressive, straight up impressive. Let's encourage him and others like him. HN shouldn't someone's supervillain origin story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqMCYdqaFCQ&t=41s

Hate Suzuki. Hate VW. Tesla is extraordinary.

https://worstbrands.com/worst-car-brands/

I stayed in software and specifically fintech software where I spent most of my career.

There are aspects of renewables that require certification or licenses depending on your country (electrical work for example). But most of the work does not.

I came to terms with the belief that it was important for me to try and help with what I viewed as the critical problem of our time.

I just couldn't sit on the sidelines any more.

After that leap it was simply aligning my personal skills with various opportunities until I found a good fit. I looked broadly for a while: reforestation, fintech, residential installations, real estate, utility scale, training, open source, enterprise software, venture, etc. And I'm fundamentally an entrepreneur and a capitalist so I looked for problems through that lens.

But for me that process began with the same basic question every engineer has almost every day: "What is the problem, and what can I do to help fix it?"

Energy is fundamentally an economic problem so you're looking for places that reduce the incremental cost to deliver a kWh of renewable energy consistently over a long period of time. There is a shocking amount of soft costs (lawyers, permitting, financing, insurance, monitoring, sales, etc.) in renewables. Software can help with a lot of that. Fintech too.

The scale of our global energy infrastructure is incredible so small gains can have outsized impacts. I encourage you to just dig in.