I'm a big fan of Amazon (UAE), in the sense that I buy stuff from Amazon almost every week. Having said that, in the last year or so, I found myself returning items more and more often. I get books damaged in shipping, wrong color items, wrong size shoes, empty boxes without the actual item, all sorts of weird failure modes. Marketplace sellers are definitely a big factor. As a response, lately I find myself thinking defensively when ordering from Amazon, like "what can go wrong", and pondering whether I should go out and find this in a store, buy from the brand's online store, get it off Ebay, etc.
- on non-supported browsers (eg. mobile) don't render the app, show a message instead
- Shift + Home/End for selecting text doesn't work
- Ctrl + N for a new page doesn't work
- things like the above ^, while it may be trivial, will turn off people who will not spend more than 10-20s to evaluate
- you're refer the simplicity of text files, but the editor is not fixed width, it's more like a Markdown-ish editor, closer to Google Docs with its default styles
- when typing - it creates a list, but the list's left margin (where the - starts) is not aligned on the overall left margin of the page, it's very annoying to me
- to me, this is too far away from the simplicity of a text file — this comment, I'm writing it up in Sublime in plain text, and then I'll copy it to Chrome/HN, but I wouldn't do it in your tool — I love being able to Alt-Tab to Sublime, hit Ctrl+N to get a new "file" which is a temporary/ephemeral workspace for typing text, typing and getting sasisfying fixed-width readable text, and then copy/pasting it to my destination, which almost always has a less pleasant editor
- eg. I also write my non-trivial ChatGPT conversations like that ^
- one of the few exceptions is Google Docs, I can directly work into that
- the reason I ended on Google Docs: after a few minutes of playing around, it's not clear to me how using your product would be significantly better for me than using Google Docs for notes (which I don't) — I can use GDocs to write roughly Markdown-equivalent structure, and there's plugins to import/export Markdown — and GDocs is backed by Google, has a working editor, apps, multi-user support, commenting, Google ecosystem integration, etc.
> Shift + Home/End for selecting text doesn't work
> Ctrl + N for a new page doesn't work
One thing that's weird is that things like that are so easy for me to implement it's just sugar on top. Honestly I would just love to have a few folks tinkering with it saying hey it needs these few things. Just hard for one dev to think of all the things!
> where 3 years ago they would have had to buy Photoshop and learn how to use it
This seems to imply that a significant fraction of Adobe revenues is from private individuals who pay monthly fees just to occasionally do image edits with Photoshop and similar tools.
This was my (hopeful) first thought on seeing this; his recent posts have been Quake-related. I do hope this is a harbinger of another installment. His others have been excellent.
Working at a non-tech regional bigco, where ofc cloud is the default, I see everyday how AWS costs get out of hand, it's a constant struggle just to keep costs flat. In our case, the reality is that NONE of our services require scalability, and the main upside of high uptime is nice primarily for my blood pressure.. we only really need uptime during business hours, nobody cares what happens at night when everybody is sleeping.
On the other hand, there's significant vendor lockin, complexity, etc. And I'm not really sure we actually end up with less people over time, headcount always expands over time, and there's always cool new projects like monitoring, observability, AI, etc.
My feeling is, if we rented 20-30 chunky machines and ran Linux on them, with k8s, we'd be 80% there. For specific things I'd still use AWS, like infinite S3 storage, or RDS instances for super-important data.
If I were to do a startup, I would almost certainly not base it off AWS (or other cloud), I'd do what I write above: run chunky servers on OVH (initially just 1-2), and use specific AWS services like S3 and RDS.
A bit unrelated to the above, but I'd also try to keep away from expensive SaaS like Jira, Slack, etc. I'd use the best self-hosted open source version, and be done with it. I'd try Gitea for git hosting, Mattermost for team chat, etc.
And actually, given the geo-political situation as an EU citizen, maybe I wouldn't even put my data on AWS at all and self-host that as well...
Promotions are always discussed in the context of "How to get promoted?". In my opinion, an important angle is left out of these discussion and conversations: do you really want to get promoted? is it worth it?
To make it simple binary, I think there are 2 kinds of promotions:
A. the kind where you pretty much continue doing what you were doing before, but with a nicer title and more money
B. the kind where the new role will put you into a whole new situation, which may or may not be a good fit for you
People always assume it'll be like 1., but there are certain career inflection points where this is not true. Approximating these in 3 minutes of typing:
1. Going from junior IC levels (where others work extra hard to support you, and are doing much of the work with you, for you) to mid IC levels.
2. Going from IC to becoming a manager.
3. Going to executive level.
4. Going to board-level executive level.
Note: I'm putting aside the handful of tech companies where people can stay on the technical track and still get ahead; at most companies you end up going into management, if for no other reason to avoid an incompetent outside hire to end up as your boss..
In the above list, 1. is of course desirable and unavoidable, but the rest should be thought over hard, for many months, and should be considered a major life decision.
Eg. recently I'v been promoted from Sr. Director (a non-executive management role) to VP (an executive manager role) — I didn't ask for it, it was a result of a re-org — and it's been super tough. Completely new rules, new crowd, new worries, but with all the worries of my old job..
As a people manager I constantly have staff ICs telling me they want to get promoted to become a Director, and I always tell them — from the bottom of my heart — enjoy the "simple life" of IC-ship while you can, once you go over to management [at any bigco], things will be much less fun. Because, if coding and building things is fun for you, then managing PIPs, procurements, vendor engagements, and corporate politics in general will not be fun.
As someone around 50y, and that much rather stay an IC than anything management, although it is unavoidable up to a point, due to mentoring and having a senior role, so far the only way to avoid being dragged into full management has been either leave the company, or being honest regardless of the possible outcome, that is what I plan to do if forced into it.
Apparently it is quite hard to pass the message that not everyone has a lifetime goal to land in management, which is a quite hard thing to fight against because in many countries, as computing is seen as yet another office job unlike the SV glamour of FAANGs, where you only succeed in life by becoming a manager.
Well, and that's a major part of the problem: Even if you continue doing better and better work in your current job, you will never get paid more for it. If you want more pay, you have to seek a promotion, and the only jobs that get paid really well are management jobs.
Frankly, this smells a lot like a continuation of the old feudal mindset, where the people who tell other people what to do are considered to be more worthy, more valuable, better people, than the people who just...make things with their hands.
There's really no inherent reason why the person who is coordinating my team should be considered to be more valuable than me. And there's certainly no reason why the organization should consider me qualified for that position just because I do this one really well: management is a different skillset, that one doesn't naturally gain just by doing a non-management job really well. (And I can say this with some certainty, because I have seen both very good and very bad managers, and the difference is night and day. Not just on the morale of the people they're managing, but in the results of what they create.)
> This repo contains a version of Anthropic's original performance take-home, before Claude Opus 4.5 started doing better than humans given only 2 hours.
Was the screening format here that this problem was sent out, and candidates had to reply with a solution within 2 hours?
Or, are they just saying that the latest frontier coding models do better in 2 hours than human candidates have done in the past in multiple days?
> the most popular UI system (especially for AI models)
Like others earlier in the thread I'm symphatetic to this company/project, but your code/project being referenced often in AI output in itself doesn't imply that the thing needs to be a business.
bash, curl, awk, Python code with numpy imports, C++, all sorts of code is constantly being generated by AI, doesn't mean curl or numpy should be its own company, or that the AI Labs need to fund them.
As other fave written, making $1M+ already feels like a lot, maybe this shouldn't be a company, just 1-2 people who have a great time supporting this thing. I wonder if curl or awk have that kind of funding even..
Apparently they have an annual budget of ~$10M. From the contributors, it's easy to recognize the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (so Meta), Google, MSFT. This is great.
Having said that, I'd still say that $1-2M for a CSS library seems more than enough. Not everything needs to be "scaled"..
That’s the All Modern Digital Infrastructure relying on a dependency a Nebraskan has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003 one: https://xkcd.com/2347/
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