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kevdoran

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I feel like I was totally on board until the conclusion about one fast system and one stable one. It's not really possible in practice, once a customer starts paying for something, even a vibe coded app by a sales person, it's now a stable system.

The thing breaks, the salesperson says "can you check this out?" then disappears and we're back to where we started.

I don't even find this very new: many companies I've been at have tried to spin-off a "fast" team to sell stuff.

To my students 3 months ago

It feels almost unethical to train you as computer scientists only to send you out into a world where entry-level computing jobs...

lol.

We millennials are in a position to start giving advice the way boomers used to do with us, now that school is looking more like a couple decades ago instead of just one.

But, unlike those boomers, we don't watch the nightly news: we snort it from a tiny screen all day long from sources hyper engineered to feed off our anxiety.

So we give all this super pessimistic advice.

"Back in my day, I got a job at google right after college and it was awesome! My code was elegant! You guys are FUCKED!"

I agree that AI is creating mega changes, many very bad, but that doesn't mean that it's a good idea or even true to tell GenZ people they're fucked. We don't know if they're fucked.

I think they could have a ton of fun with software and I think it's OK to be encouraging about that.

I read this yesterday and thought "only a matter of time for us". We use Wise twice a month and have for a couple of years.

Today I was surprised to find out that matter of time was 12 hours, as I logged in and see:

"We've temporarily blocked your Wise account. We're missing important information from you."

When I click the link, it says: "That address doesn't look right" and shows my business address. That is right.

There's no way to contact nor do anything other than change the address. I of course don't want to change the address, because it's my business address. Lol.

Having used many of the 'Toyota Corollas' to build web apps, do any others feel a little pang of frustration that, here in 2025, teams have the choice of using TypeScript on both the client and the server and choose not to?

"Use this other language I know for the backend, it's the [reliable car model]. It's the {Latin, Swahili, English} of the programming world. It's JVM, it's PHP, it's Python, it's Ruby, it's C#'"

I feel that after a decade of jumping between systems, TypeScript is now the "good enough" language. We have to use it on the client. Now we can use it on the server.

The weird side-projects vibes node libraries had in the 2010's have matured into fully supported production systems in the 2020s.

And I've never been happier. It's a fine choice for the backend, and it's not really optional on the frontend. Which is important: like a lingua franca, TS/JS is not optional in a web app. This is not an attribute which PHP shares.

Hey there to any early stage founders considering a freelancer but looking for some initial advice:

I am a freelance full-stack engineer/fractional CTO, and helping people consider their approach to freelancers is one of my favorite engagements.

tl;dr: get a founding engineer’s tech plan for your early stage startup • takes 2 weeks • $350 • happens over email • techplanletters.com

Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank

Funny enough, I recently opened a Chase business checking because of this "bank not bank" news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40480159

I still have a different business checking with a Mercury-like fintech provider. Chase freezes accounts, Fintech startups go under.

Chase already froze my business credit card once. I had to send them a deed of a house that I had already sold. It made little sense.

On the fintech bank side, my biggest client cannot make transfers to that account. Their payment system throws an error when they try to ACH to it. That plus the news about Synapse going under made me want a chase.

So I don't really know what to do. I now have multiple business accounts, multiple personal accounts. I want to find like a good credit union maybe?

What's clear is being in small business requires building tolerance for money uncertainty that wasn't as necessary when I was an employee.

I feel for the author. That all sucks. I enjoyed the 'Yuppie Nightmare' reference. Many thanks for sharing.

There are a lot of AI startups that fall in the category of LLM API consumers (Anthropic/OpenAI wrappers). Or, as I heard the CTO of one of them joking, "we're actually more EC2 wrappers than OpenAI wrappers".

The problem we often hit when building apps on top of LLMs is managing LLM context windows (and sometimes swappable LLM providers). For which you need different types of worker/consumer/queue setups.

TypeScript is amazing for building full-stack web apps quickly. For a decade my go-to was Django, but everything just goes so much faster with endpoints & frontend all in the same place. But, finding a good job/queue service is a little more of a challenge in this world that "just setup Celery". BullMQ is great, but doesn't work with "distributed" Redis providers like Upstash (Vercel's choice).

So, in a roundabout way, an offering like this is in a super-duper position for AI money :)

Bubbles 4 years ago

anyone else make a giant scary bubble to take over the page