Like everything, it depends, but yeah- "hitching your cart to a rocketship" is an important class of situation where it may be good to integrate with a dependency

I asked chatGpt to find out which company you are referring to:

> Someone mentioned a company that is located at "5251 Westheimer". Which company could this be?

There are several companies located at 5251 Westheimer Road, Houston, TX 77056, United States, so I'm unable to determine which specific company the person you mentioned is referring to without further context. Some of the businesses located in that building include restaurants, retail stores, and offices.

> It is or was a software company.

I apologize, but without a specific name, it's difficult to determine the exact software company located at 5251 Westheimer Road in Houston, TX. There are many software companies located in Houston and it's possible that the company has since moved or changed its name.

You may consider reaching out to the person who mentioned the company for additional information or searching online for software companies located in Houston, TX to see if you can find a match.

> It was apparently a big company, big enough to develop a lot "in house".

If the company was big enough to develop a lot of software in-house, it's possible that the company you're referring to is Compaq. Compaq was a large computer company that was headquartered in Houston, Texas and was one of the largest suppliers of personal computers in the world. The company was acquired by Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 2002.

However, it's important to note that this is just a possibility and I cannot say for certain that this is the company the person you mentioned was referring to without additional information.

* * *

Compaq has moved a few times since 1995 and being absorbed by another megacorp.

But, to be clear, was absolutely never at 5251 Westheimer.

Nor, to the best of my knowledge, were any software companies or restaurants or retail. It's an office building that was primarily leased by my former employer, which another commenter correctly noted was TeleCheck.

your own post is the real counter-example.

Has dang ever ruled on the appropriateness of this situation, where someone just redirects AI-generated output to their comment (absent any evaluative substance and on a digression from a digression fully unrelated to the discussion of AI)?

It strikes me as a bad-faith way to farm for low-effort internet points, but I'm just some idiot on the internet so I'll have to satisfy myself with a down-vote, a mild complaint, and a minute or two of wasted time.

I've definitely seen this in the wild -- certain accounts here post long-winded responses that at first glance seem very technical and hard to understand, but after a closer reading reveal it's just a mismatch of jargon intermixed with tangents.

See here, for one example: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Cullinet

The AI generated bullshit spam that will soon invade the net will appear here first. I've been ranting about openly-AI-generated content, profiles and comments on this forum before, to deaf ears and sneers calling me a Luddite.

I am quite tired of reading "I asked ChatGPT x and they said:", and it's been around for just 3 months.

Dang is quite equanimous, so I doubt he will take an open stance for or against it, but I dream he'd just come out and say "chill it with the GPT people. This place is for thoughtful discussion".

How did you get "certain sounding comment" from "However, it's important to note that this is just a possibility and I cannot say for certain that this is the company the person you mentioned was referring to without additional information."

I had a similar experience working for a company that had, essentially, developed their own in-house web templating language and programming system. They'd started before PHP or any of the other server-side programming languages had caught on, and while a decision to use a homebrew system may have been justifiable in the '90s, when the only real alternative was Perl/Mason, by the time I joined (2009), it was long overdue for them to have moved on to an industry-standard solution. PHP. Python/Django. Ruby/Rails. Even classic ASP would have been preferable to the mess of C++ and XML they were using.

Frankly, I think the article, like a lot of Joel Spolsky's writing, has aged like milk. For example:

    If you’re developing a computer game where the plot is your competitive
    advantage, it’s OK to use a third party 3D library. But if cool 3D effects
    are going to be your distinguishing feature, you had better roll your own.

Except, if you look at modern games, even ones with very high performance effects, that's not what they do. They use one of a rather small number of 3D engines, like Unreal or Frostbite. It turns out that developing cool 3D effects is far easier if you have a battle-tested performance optimized framework helping you. CD Projeckt Red abandoned its own in-house engine (REDengine) in favor Unreal 5 for future development, in no small part due to the issues that they ran into trying to extend that engine for a massive open-world game like Cyberpunk 2077.

What changed is that 3D effects are no longer a distinguishing feature for games. By now, all modern AAAs look stunning, super-realistic is not as much of a selling point. Instead, you point with art, content and game play, most of which is very much developed in house.

The short version of the article is "don't outsource your core competency" and that very much holds true today.

Cyberpunk 2077 seems to be a very standard AAA game in terms of both gameplay and looks. It makes sense to use an established, popular engine there. It's also a perfect example of yet another somewhat forgettable experience.

Factorio or The Witness might be better examples of games that did/are doing novel, exceptional things and their engines were developed in-house. And it shows. The unique look and feel, the smoothness, depth, coherency etc.

The comparison is maybe unfair though. We're basically comparing a product focus with an art focus. Artists _must_ do things their way. Risk and cost are secondary. Success is a bonus. In a more survival oriented world you have to weigh these things differently.

What you describe above seems more like a problem with clinging to legacy and missing the world around them rather than developing things in-house. It should be obvious, but the thing you do in-house has to provide you unique advantages over the main-stream. That comes with costs and only works if you have the stomach to be honest with yourself.

> Factorio or The Witness might be better examples of games that did/are doing novel, exceptional things and their engines were developed in-house. And it shows

I dont think The Witness really required a custom engine, except that Mr. Blow had a team that could (and it might've been easier for them). Ditto with factorio tbh.

If a game like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antichamber could be done in unreal engine, most other games could've been done with it. The fact is, understanding the engine is harder than writing your own, and for some programmers, they'd rather write their own simply because they won't have to read someone else's code.

IJWTS that I paid my mortgage with Mason for a number of years in the early 2000s, and really loved it AT THE TIME.

On the one hand, there was no attempt to generate your DB code. OTOH, since you had to write it yourself, it was easy to tune.

100% agree with this take re: gaming, but his overall point -- if your value-add in the marketplace is X, you'd probably better build your own X -- is more true than not. Games blur that, but at the end of the day nobody buys games PURELY for the 3D side of things. They're looking for story and gameplay at least as much, and (for me at least) probably MORE than technical beauty.

he said - your core business - does infrastructure count?

I've seen internal dependencies come to be so poorly understood that they might as well be external.

> 5251 Westheimer (<-- if you know, you know)

Is TeleCheck really all that mysterious?

Not to you. ;)

When were you there?

This applies to choosing external dependencies as well. Startups that chose FlowTypes over Typescript are struggling right now.

What Flow lacks in community adoption, it makes up for in speed for a large codebase. Not feeling much pain yet (though I am worried about it).

> And the first place that this damage showed up was in personnel. To be productive there, you had to know a ton about the internal tools that existed ONLY at 5251 Westheimer (<-- if you know, you know), which meant those skills were useless in the marketplace that was rapidly moving towards open-standards based development, etc., or at least using commercial databases.

The other side of the coin here is that a team with some NIH code (if it is well engineered, modern, maybe open sourced or on its way to open sourcing) can use it to attract and retain certain engineers who might want to eg work on building a database or a compiler.

Now of course it's a pretty fine balance but I've worked at one non tech company that had basically no internal software projects whatsoever, and their engineering culture was abysmal. I think in that case they couldn't have made good software anyway but the fact that everything they did was pieced together from a handful of commercial vendors meant that there was no interesting code to write at all! For example, we were encouraged to report bugs to upstream paid support but never attempt to fix them, because they didn't want to deal with internal versions of software or open source licensing. I didn't stay for very long.

It's a balancing act and the balance is different based on the size of the companies and the specific product.