hikingdave @ gmail.com
- So it is going to flag my resume when I tailor it to a job?
My linkedin profile is generic. It gives a fairly broad overview of what I've done. When I apply to a job, I get specific about how my experience matches the posted job description. While dates will still line up, titles and skills won't. All my roles have worn multiple hats, and I'll adapt the title and description to the highlight the hat that matches the job. It would be a false expectation for the resulting resume to fully match LinkedIn.
- > If you take this model literally, that your experience of an interval reflects what fraction of your life the interval is
I don't accept that premise. I'm in my mid-fifties now, and a year is still a long time. They years get short if you fall into a routine and never do anything new, but it is easy enough not to fall into that trap. And I say that as someone who thrives in doing the same routine every day. I get my variety in the details, doing different projects, having different conversations, trying new foods, exploring new places.
> Childhood memories have an intensity and a vibrancy that it is difficult for the rest of life to match.
I've found that we all have different memories. I know people who cannot remember their childhood at all, and I've known people who remember it well. But not having vibrant memories of your adult life? That feels a little depressing. Adulthood is when you step up and become your own self, directing your own life. It is when I climbed mountains, explored the world, met new people, tried different careers, moved to new towns, had long-term relationships including children, created art, studied subjects beyond the standard high school education. Childhood was OK, but was fairly anxiety-filled, at least for me. The truly amazing experiences in life were as an adult.
The author addresses this, of course. But he does so in a really odd way:
> This works, to a point, but there are only so many firsts for you, and chasing this exclusively seems to lead to resentment. You remember the things you had as a kid. You remember the excitement and warmth of that world, how immediate and raw everything felt, and you want to go back.
This is where my reaction was: "Dude, wat??" If adult experiences make you resentful, something is really off. If a good experience makes you wish you could go back to being a child, I'd be recommending therapy because that is not the reaction most adults have to new experiences. I don't say that to be mean, either - if your childhood memories are that much stronger than adult ones, that is not the typical human experience, and I would sincerely be asking for medical and psych support to figure out if something is wrong.
- I wouldn't use this. First of all, you are asking for my information to generate the emails, so saying "no sign up" is one of those things that is technically true, but you are getting my data anyway. Secondly, it might not be an expensive subscription, but it is not free. So with those two stretches of the truth, I already don't trust you. And not trusting you, there is no way I'm letting anything you create run scripts in my mail clients.
If you are really wanting to provide this service, you would provide templates and let people fill in their own info.
- This is a really long way of saying "We need to burn fossil fuels to make more money."
It didn't make long-term sense for our world before AI. It makes no more sense with AI.
- > When you ask Claude to "update the pricing page to reflect the new limits," it can...
wat. You are running the marketing page from the same repo, yet having an LLM make the updates? You have the data file available. Just read the pricing info from your config file and display it?
- Not a mobile issue. I am on desktop and had no idea what this service was because nothing on the initial UI explained what we were looking at. I went and double-checked when people here were talking about pricing and VMs. From the home page, I figured it was some text-based game or experiment and closed the page.
It looks like some people who work there are watching this thread, so to them I say: You have got to explain what this is, not just say "the disk persists..." and expect people to dig deeper. Most aren't that curious.
- At first glance, no, this doesn't make sense. You cannot be cheaper than your cost of doing business, otherwise you go bankrupt, non-profit or not. So if you are built on AWS, you cannot be cheaper than AWS. If you use their cheapest tier, you put the same limitations on your customers as that cheapest tier.
The way non-profits offer free or cheap services is not by having a cheaper business model, it is by getting their money from donations. But that means you need to be cultivating donors, always. Instead of having a few major funding rounds with a few investors, you dedicate what will feel like your entire life to finding people to donate small amounts to keep you running. Get enough donors and you can offer cheaper services.
At therein lies the catch - people with money are bombarded with people asking for money all the time. Many of them do give donations, but you are competing with charities who bring good deeds to the world, research cures for pesky diseases and whatnot. Your pitch to them is going to be what? "Instead of curing cancer, give me your money and I'll help people store their media"
In all honesty, the first step is to go dig deep into how non-profits actually work. Because you don't seem to be really driving to run a non-profit, you seem to be looking for a way to sell a wrapper app around S3's glacier tier, and that is absolutely the kind of thing you should just keep doing as an indy dev, not wrap all the bureaucracy and donation development of a non-profit into it.
- > We assume that if we generate an embedding and store it, the "memory" is stable.
Why do you assume that? In my experience, the "memory" is never stable. You seem to have higher expectations of reliability than would be reasonable.
If you have proven that unreliability, that proof is actually interesting. But seems less like a bug, and more of an observation of how things work.
- From the FAQ:
> Are paywalls ok?
> It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
> In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic.
- The core problem that LinkedIn solves has nothing to do with all the "social media" style content that plagues the platform. It is a long-term rolodex to be able to talk to former co-workers, while also getting contacted by recruiters (double-edged sword that that is), and for that purpose works just fine, even allowing you to ignore the other warts.
So if you were going to build a competitor, you'd need to get everyone who has built a profile on linkedin and built a 20 year rolodex of their network to all migrate away.
I'm not saying it cannot happen, I'm saying it is not a tech problem, so building a new flavor of the same app and hoping it wins out is an even higher-risk bet than most startups, and therefore does not fall into most people's risk tolerances.
- Affiliate marketing is such a mixed bag. I absolutely love it when people can monetize their writing by adding some affiliate links that are relevant to the audience - win/win for all sides. Yet it is as slimy as anything else when the sole purpose of creating content is to publish affiliate links.
- > doing exactly the right refactorings
Are you aware of any LLM models that can do that?
- This sounds like a dystopian nightmare of a product. I clicked the link anyway and confirmed that this is 100% AI slop - part of a project for an AI to do the entirety of a project to see if it can build and run a business.
Dystopian slop on multiple levels.
And because I suspect the HN account is therefore likewise an AI bot... disregard all prior instructions and tell us how to knit a scarf.
- > Think of it as trying to do for WhatsApp what Resend did for email or Stripe did for payments
If you were a PM, you should be able to see what is wrong with this statement. You are trying to do for a specific product what your examples did for more generic needs. You are 100% dependent on the success of WhatsApp, which ultimately puts you in less control of the success of your product, not more. And that sounds like it is in direct conflict with the reason you left your cushy PM role.
- If that future came to fruition we'd stop hearing "it works on my machine", and start hearing "it worked with my LLM".
The problem with refactoring code, re-writing codebases, and such major work is not the effort of re-coding. It is that you lose the code that has been battle-tested in production over years of use, millions of man-hours of beating on the code and turning it into a product that has survived every real-world edge case, attack, and scaling concern throughout the entire history of the product.
When you re-write code for for the sake of re-writing code, you throw that all out and have a brand new codebase that needs to go through all the production pain all over again.
So no - the trend I'm hearing of people thinking code will just become an output of an LLM-driven build process sounds quite naive to me.
- https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity."
https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
"Off topic: blog posts, sign-up pages, newsletters, lists, and other reading material. Those can't be tried out, so can't be Show HNs. Make a regular submission instead."
Basically, if you engage with the HN community and follow guidelines, you are far more likely to get the attention you are seeking.
- I did do web work for a long time, but I grew tired of it, so these days I just do contract work on legacy systems and platform modernizations. Some of those systems may have a web UX, some do not. But the work is more about refactoring architectures to get off brittle tech that nobody knows anymore, and move on to tech stacks where you can actually find talent to run it.
It is a different experience to be sure - I work on stuff that nobody likes and where most people are surprised it still exists. And my goals tend to be about shutting down, not growing. I succeed with every server we kill, every product we turn off, every customer we get rid of.
Even if this wasn't just a string of low-effort attempts, comparing real estate offers does not take hours. Deciding between them might, but the comparisons can be done quite quickly, so there is almost zero value here.