limelight

I switched to Windsurf recently and it's been pretty good for providing a Cursor-like experience; pricing is pretty similar.

I was skeptical of Devin after the launch, but it's been writing most of my code the last few months.

There is just such a disconnect with reality here I am having a hard time thinking the author has done any actual technical recruiting.

There might be a disconnect, but I think it's probably not in the direction you expect.

The vast majority of high-performing engineering teams (good startups, big tech companies) don't hire standard SWEs for specific language/framework expertise. The truth absolutely is that languages are interoperable enough that someone who is smart and understand the underlying principles can get up to speed in a new ecosystem quickly.

It looks like this scammer has been targeting well-credentialed developers for over a month. Here’s a Twitter thread from August: https://twitter.com/searls/status/1534913027795038208?s=46&t...

It's truly baffling how they manage to consistently make the software worse every single release. I was a huge fan of 1Password many years ago (and have been happy to pay for it throughout), but each successive release is more confusing and less reliable.

Exciting to see Rust's power applied to codegen. It's quickly supplanting Go as the tool of choice for these use cases.

No one uses "fuck" in corporate communication either.

Swear words are specifically used to be provocative, so naturally they're not going to disappear. Words like "motherboard" or "whitelist" were historically neutral and primarily used in professional settings, so removal from corporate speech is correspondingly a much bigger factor.

To be clear, I'm not particularly worried or concerned about this. I don't consider it any great loss if we start saying "allowlist" and have happily changed my projects to match. It's not a big deal, and the kind thing to do is to go along with those who do care a lot.

The existence of some unions which don't enforce collective bargaining doesn't negate the fact that most worker unions limit the negotiating power of individuals. In fact, they actively attempt to eliminate it and socially/professionally isolate anyone who prefers to negotiate directly.

Most software developers, even top performers, are not brand name celebrities. If the union forces everyone to follow a contract, they will need to comply. Realistically, tech unions will end up looking a lot more like journalist unions than football stars.

This is explicitly the goal of the new NYT union: they are looking to "begin negotiations for a contract with management."

Some union boss negotiating my employment contract is my worst nightmare. I have friends who work in union companies and they hate the union's policies but are terrified of going against the union bosses.

I wouldn't consider shareholders good or bad, but neutral. The revenue you send them today is compensation for the capital they provided to get the business to where it is today (or, in many cases, liquidity for earlier employees who built the company). They provided meaningful value to secure that revenue stream.

Meanwhile, the union provides no value to the business.

If an AI can do my job, an AI should be allowed to do my job. I don't want a union to "protect" me doing a job which can be automated. That's a waste of human talent and potential.

It is terrible to hold back progress just to provide "make-work" jobs protected by unions. Should we still employ elevator operators?

In a scenario where my job is obsolete, a union would simply delay the inevitable. It might keep the company from replacing me with an AI, but the company would therefore eventually fail to competitors who could. In the meantime, the union would make people miserable and delay progress.

For what it's worth, I completely agree that developer jobs are on their way towards automation. Instead of trying to fight that trend with unionization, I focus on being part of it (building automation tools) and building a capital base.

Yep, I love this workflow.

We use release-please to automatically generate WIP "release PRs" so we can see the exact changelog (for a candidate release) drafted as merges come in.

[0] https://github.com/googleapis/release-please

Realistically, that's what will come from "abolishing" the police.

That's not necessarily a bad thing! A big problem with existing departments is decades of corruption, poor leadership, and entrenched policies. Tearing the department down and rebuilding it from scratch—even if you end up with a similar size as before—gives you the opportunity to remove the excesses/abuse. You can also do things like hiring more specialized positions and firing all the bad officers (because if the department is gone, the union can't protect them).

I've tried tons of diets over the years and keto is by far the only one I've had success with maintaining long term. Even when I take a cheat day, carbs just don't taste that good any more so I end up feeling bloated and go right back on keto.

I don't currently own any furniture. For the past few years, I've been moving every month or two and never acquired any furniture.

Thanks for the detailed reply.

Personally, IKEA fits my lifestyle pretty well as a young urban-dweller. I don't really anticipate having my furniture for more than 5-10 years and their aesthetic definitely matches my preferences.

I've actually looked at some more "premium" stores and really disliked a lot of their merchandise unless it was obscenely expensive (ie. 10x the price of IKEA).

If a project is "important" then it should have business value.

For some developers (including me), working on projects with significant business value is the definition of glamorous. Since there's significant business value, then you should be rewarding people for delivering that value (with bonuses and raises).

If the task does not have significant business value, it's probably not actually important. A lot of maintenance tasks actually fall in this bucket.

they actually have to buy their options

Yup. It honestly astounds me how many people don't factor this into their decision-making. Your only equity compensation on joining is the delta between your strike price and the current market value of your stock. This is often very little, far less than you give up in salary at many companies.

* Plus a full time salary at roughly $120k/year

There's absolutely no way that's correct. It'd basically be pushing csallen to leave (he's an experienced YC founder, MIT grad, and full-stack developer). His market salary is way more than $120k/yr.

I don't understand how anyone could be unsure about that being harassment. It's about as clear-cut as you can get.

He should have been fired the day that surfaced. If someone who worked for me ever did something like that, they'd be out the door pronto. It speaks volumes that he wasn't, to the point which I am irrationally tempted to doubt the veracity of her claims.

Don't proposition anyone in your reporting chain. Don't flirt with them. Don't do anything with them. It's really not that complicated. If you are attracted to someone who works for you (it happens), do the adult thing and ignore it.

I really love these IndieHackers interviews but surprisingly find them somewhat demotivating.

Even the more successful interviewees make less revenue per month than I can make through straight consulting. And they're the success stories—most people (including myself) make far less per month from their products.

How do people keep motivated to work on side projects when consulting is so much more profitable?

How does a neo-Nazi end up with more karma than me on Hacker news?

You should be banned from here. Seriously. Advocating that Jews be "excluded if not eliminated from society" is hate speech.

It greatly disappoints me that the HN moderators apparently think it's okay to leave virulent anti-semitism unchecked.

I am Jewish. I have never been to Israel. America is my home. Why do you want to tear that away from me?

I really commend YC for supporting this. If my startup ever succeeds, I definitely have a duty to give back to the world which has given me incredibly luck (and benefits).

I just took the pledge and realized it would be nice to have a sliding scale based on exit size.

If I have a relatively small exit (<$10M), I would prefer to donate substantially less (maybe 10%) but for a larger exit I would scale up closer to 50%. Obviously I can still donate more if I want to, but it would be nice to pre-commit.

Also, it would be nice to include an option for employees.

I think I still prefere the "feel" of classic websites.

Your hacker biases are showing.

The sites where 95% of people spend most of their time (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.) are all built as single page "applications." Users expect rich interactivity from websites these days and are usually not tolerant of UI refreshes.

The comparison is not to "desktop" applications but to mobile apps. Users expect a mobile app level of interaction. Plus, if you're building mobile apps then it's a lot easier to just reuse those same APIs for a web app.

That being said, if your site doesn't have any interactivity then it does make sense to just render it statically.

It's a funny anecdote, but in practice both supply and demand matter.

JavaScript is both extremely popular and rather well-paid. Why? Almost everyone needs it.

In my experience, RabbitMQ is close to the opposite of reliable.

When I think of reliability, I think of Postgres: it works well, and it's hard to make it not work reliably. With RabbitMQ, it's hard to make it work reliably.

It actually makes a lot of sense.

People will almost never manually type out high security (>20 random characters) passwords themselves. So if someone enters a high entropy password, you can fairly confident that mistyping is not an issue.

Just disregard the segment of your users who don't use password managers?

No, I recognize that most users probably don't use password managers. But I'm not convinced that disabling pasting helps much.

For one thing, I don't actually think it's that common for someone to copy a mistyped password. Browsers disable copying from password fields, so they would have to type it in a third place and copy it into the fields from there. Most users are not sophisticated enough to do that.

Also, if you're someone who uses a password manager, does disabling pasting really make you less secure?

It directly encourages people to use less secure passwords. If I try to manually retype a 50 character password myself, I'm very likely to make an error. This isn't theoretical—I've often purposefully lowered the complexity of passwords for sites with these kind of arbitrary restrictions.

It's too bad 1Password doesn't have an auto-type feature.

I'm well aware of how contract law works.

The law requires that knowingly enter a contract and understand its terms. If this contract had been written such that they didn't realize he could reallocate investments after the fact, then you might have a point.

The law does not protect you from making bad decisions and entering contracts you probably shouldn't, provided you understand the contracts themselves. That would mean a huge majority of contracts are invalid because people frequently and routinely enter contracts which are inadvisable. (For example, subprime loans.)

Not understanding a contract and not thinking through the implications of said contract are completely different things.

The problem is that there's absolutely no incentive for doctors to act ethically. You don't win any points for ignoring drug company marketing.

Vendor marketing exists in all fields, technology included. The difference is that when I'm spending money on a vendor as a tech manager it's coming out of my budget. I have an incentive to make sure that the spending is intelligent and the solution is effective.

Where is the incentive for doctors to do that? They're spending other people's money on other people's problems.

For example, something as simple as: What is more blue? The sky or a lake?

I'm not Blake but I actually can't answer that question. I'd have to ask you what lake and what sky. I've stored some notion of color values for ex. a "stormy" sky and could probably compare that to the color value I have stored for the lake near my childhood home.

The abstract concepts of "sky" and "lake" don't have any color to me though. If you asked me to imagine a plane flying through the sky, the sky wouldn't have a color.