HN user

samsolomon

5,640 karma

Co-founded SidePrize (aka PrizePicks)

Early Product Designer at Salesloft

https://solomon.io/

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mattstromawn.com 1mo ago

High-Agency Strategy

samsolomon
5pts0
www.macrumors.com 2mo ago

Perplexity's New Mac App Brings Personal Computer to Pro Users

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www.nytimes.com 2mo ago

Iran war has drained U.S. supplies of critical, costly weapons

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39pts71
www.cnn.com 3mo ago

Allbirds shares soar 600% as it pivots from footwear to AI

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27pts9
solomon.io 4mo ago

Product Design in 2026

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www.macrumors.com 4mo ago

Apple's New MacBooks Have a Keyboard Change You Might Have Missed

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www.axios.com 4mo ago

Hegseth to meet Anthropic CEO as Pentagon threatens banishment

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www.youtube.com 5mo ago

Toledo Derailment Rescue [video]

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solomon.io 5mo ago

Zen Hacker News

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solomon.io 5mo ago

What We Can't Control (2016)

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grid-paper.daverupert.com 5mo ago

Printable Grid Paper

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www.youtube.com 5mo ago

Laracasts: I'm Done [video]

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3pts1
linear.app 7mo ago

Design is more than code

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primer.style 7mo ago

GitHub no longer uses Toasts

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www.levels.fyi 8mo ago

Front-Loaded Vesting

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matthewstrom.com 11mo ago

The product design talent crisis

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ia.net 1y ago

Liquid Glass Design or Kitsch?

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notanotherceo.substack.com 1y ago

Salesloft's Kyle Porter on Organizational Health [video]

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architizer.com 1y ago

Rethinking School Design

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www.iconian.com 1y ago

Iconian Fonts

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toucharcade.com 1y ago

TouchArcade Is Shutting Down

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airtraveldesign.guide 2y ago

Air Travel Design Guide

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tokyotoilet.jp 2y ago

The Tokyo Toilet

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rauno.me 2y ago

Contrasting Aesthetics

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solomon.io 2y ago

Designer News Is Dead

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solomon.io 2y ago

2023 Year in Review

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www.thebignewsletter.com 2y ago

It's Time to Nationalize and Then Break Up Boeing

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danwang.co 2y ago

College as an incubator of Girardian terror (2017)

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2pts0
bittersoutherner.com 2y ago

My favorite restaurant served gas

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46pts45
www.veale.co.uk 2y ago

Wake and Light Therapy

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The AirPods Effect 1 month ago

I've done the exact same. I frequently take walks and walk places and often used that time for an audio book or podcast. A zen revelation has been taking these walks and not bringing my phone. It's my daily meditation.

Honestly, I'm pretty bullish on Apple and AI. I think there move is in local, open source models. These are getting better and better for generic ChatGPT—type tasks. I'm kind of waiting for Apple to ship their own Ollama. And it's going to be a huge win for both them and consumers.

Well, this guy isn't training models in his basement—if that's what you're looking for?

I think the point of this article is that AI enables people to do so much more? Much of marketing is creating engaging content and AI allows people to create more than ever.

On one hand this is so impressive. On the other it seems like a company selling drugs or medical services using misleading/generated photos and reviews is not great and extremely risky.

This must largely be going into testing and generating marketing content? I am extremely curious about his processes.

I've often thought along similar lines. I've found that indecision is almost always worse than a bad one. Very few choices are so decisive that you can't course-correct later.

That mindset has served me well both personally and professionally.

Not this community's opinion on agents, but I've found it helpful to check the lmarena leaderboards occasionally. Your comment prompted me to take a look for the first time in a while. Kind of surprising to see models like MiniMax 2.1 above most of the OpenAI GPTs.

https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard/code

Also, I'm not sure if it's exactly the case but I think you can look at throughput of the models on openrouter and get an idea of how fast/expensive they are.

https://openrouter.ai/minimax/minimax-m2.1

RTS for Agents 6 months ago

Man, I could see the next Total Annihilation / Supreme Commander-like game where rough orders/instructions are given to commanders and they carry out those commands.

The scale of those games was already nuts, but that would 10x things.

12-step programs do treat the underlying illness—fear, resentment and negative coping mechanisms for dealing with those things. That’s why basically all 12-step and addiction-recovery programs are the same.

Life is hard. People fall back on bad habits and many won’t even realize that it’s happening until it their life is in ruins. If that has happened to you there are often no more second chances.

So for some they may be able to recover and have a drink every now and then. However, if your life has become upside down enough to enter a 12-step program, it’s often because there were no other options.

Alcohol in AA is viewed as an allergy—a lifelong illness. Someone may have recovered and dealt with their fears and resentments. That doesn’t mean they won’t slip back into negative coping mechanisms though.

For an alcoholic, it takes vigilance every day.

Hard question to answer without more details, but I've got a bit of general guidance for B2B sales:

* Know your ideal customer (ICP)—or have a decent idea. Find companies that match that profile.

* Find the right people at those companies. Go on Linkedin and find 3-6 people you think could be decision makers at that company.

* Research those people and figure out how your solution might work for them (RHO).

* Reach out to those people. Communicate what you think their pain point might be and how your solution will help them. Try and get them to agree to a discovery call.

* If they are interested, you'll need to figure out who the decision makers are for buying. If the timing is bad, ask when they renew and reach out again 3-6mos to see how their currents solution is treating them. If they aren't interested, DQ them and move on. Guarding your time here is valuable.

I'm assuming you're a founder or early on. The other comments around MEDDPICC, MEDDICC and other sales methodologies are worth a look, but may be over optimizing if you're still trying to win your first deal.

A bit of background—I was one of the first product designers hired at Salesloft. I've spent a decade building software for sellers.

Honestly, the JIRA example points out one of the main cases where I'm not exactly sure how to replace a toast. You don't have to be on the board to create a ticket in JIRA—so it may not be obvious in context.

I understand there are accessibility issues, but if the thing I am attempting to create will not be visible on the current view, what's the best approach?

Honestly, the same could be set for a large list or Kanban board. Just because of the number of records it may not be evident that the intended action occurred.

I’m the design leader for an enterprise software company and would love to get rid of toasts. Places where feedback is immediate don’t need them and simple forms can probably be fine with a banner or alert.

Reasons that toasts are difficult to get rid of:

- Easy for developers to implement consistently.

- Providing feedback where actions are taken on elements not on the screen (like bulk actions on a data grid, or within our workflow).

- Dense UIs where actions are taken frequently and injecting an alert or banner to be dismissed adds a ton of work for users. Also, causing the UI to jump isn’t great.

Would love to hear solutions to the above.

While most seemed to prefer Counter-strike, my childhood gaming was dominated by an Unreal Tournament mod called Tac Ops. While the games looked similar, the mechanics felt very different than Counter-strike. It was a much faster-paced game.

There were a ton of servers with wacky mods. I spent a ton of time on the low-grav servers. There were also some that made the top-scoring player huge. Those odd game modes were a blast.

EDIT: Also looks like people are still playing!

https://www.gog.com/dreamlist/game/tactical-ops-assault-on-t...

https://tactical-ops.eu/

I think you're right, the roles will exist for some time. But I think we'll start to see more and more overlap between engineering, product management and design.

In a lot of ways I think that will lead to stronger delivery teams. As a designer—the best performing teams I've been on have individuals with a core competency, but a lot of overlap in other areas. Product managers with strong engineering instincts, engineers with strong design instincts, etc. When there is less ambiguity in communication, teams deliver better software.

Longer-term I'm unsure. Maybe there is some sort of fusion into all-purpose product people able to do everything?

SaaS Is Dead 11 months ago

I have mixed thoughts on this post. I’m a pretty senior product designer. V0, Gemini and these other tools Can build pretty impressive prototypes. I am repeatedly asked how I am using these AI tools in my workflow. The answer is—I’m not really.

These tools are a novelty now. But I do think these will improve drastically in the next 5 or so years. When they have more context about the existing code base and design system and customer issues I think we’ll see a big leap forward.

Does that mean SaaS is dead?

Maybe small CRUD apps with few users? I think a lot of people on this forum miss that with enterprise software, business are buying processes. The software is just the codified way to execute on that.

AI is already making these processes different. But I think we’re probably going to see more SaaS to replace old and support new processes.

I work on design systems for an enterprise software company. I was talking with one of the engineers on the team about how great it would be if there were better built in browser-based solutions for things like autocomplete, select and multi-select.

I mean in the future there are probably no PMs, Designers or Engineers. All those roles are going to converge. There will be a bunch of people that build and manage the software that creates software.

The AA big book, as it is known. It's actually a small, but very thick book. It's the basis for all twelve step programs.

The main exercises related to my comment are writing out resentments as they occur—who/what wronged you, why that hurt and what part we may have played. Same with fears—what they are, how do they affect us.

Honestly, a lot of it is so simple, but it really forces you to think about these things.

As an aside—my therapist encouraged me to go pretty deep into twelve step literature. The core of it is dealing with fears and resentments. So many damaging behaviors start as coping mechanisms for dealing with these issues.

I was pretty skeptical initially, but it turns out I also have a ton of fear and resentment that I never thought existed. My stubbornness strikes again! But if you're able to deal with and process your fears and resentments and then switch bad coping mechanisms to good ones—that will improve your life substantially.

A lot of it has been surprisingly eye-opening to me.

I agree with the general sentiment—over-optimizing for design can both be a poor use of time and lead to less than ideal solutions.

I don't really agree that Figma is forcing designers into a box. The author feels like there's an ideal workflow—a quick sketch that gets translated into code. There's no ideal workflow. It completely depends on the delivery team.

That sketch to code flow probably works well with a small team that is used to working closely together. I've been working with most of the engineers on one of my delivery teams for five years. Frequently, I don't need designs at all! I can just write a JIRA card and because we are so used to working together many times they can pick up on the desired result.

Unfortunately, when the product org gets larger you get a lot of designers and engineers and delivery teams that don't spend a lot of time together. You need the clearest representation of those components—often documented down to the exact props that should be implemented. That is exactly how many enterprise software organizations are using Figma. Design and code components have props (for visual changes) that mirror one another.

Overall, Figma is geared pretty well to how many product orgs are delivering software.

Uxn 2 years ago

As a product designer, I don’t fully grasp everything the folks at 100r make.

I’ve followed them for a couple of years. From what I can tell they have a ton focus and are serious about craftsmanship.

Nothing else to add—just admire people good at making things!

I imagine at some point you’ll be able to take your phone to any screen and use it as a desktop computer. Obviously there are a lot of UI differences for touch vs keyboard interfaces, but it feels like that’s going to be the future at some point.