BillFranklin

I reckon Sony get a few more years of even more profitable rent seeking before the EU regulates them like Apple’s App Store and forces a game purchase to be valid on all platforms it’s playable on.

There are some pretty callous comments on this thread.

This is really sad. Suchir was just 26, and graduated from Berkeley 3 years ago.

Here’s his personal site: https://suchir.net/.

I think he was pretty brave for standing up against what is generally perceived as an injustice being done by one of the biggest companies in the world, just a few years out of college. I’m not sure how many people in his position would do the same.

I’m sorry for his family. He was clearly a talented engineer. On his LinkedIn he has some competitive programming prizes which are impressive too. He probably had a HN account.

Before others post about the definition of whistleblower or talk about assassination theories just pause to consider whether, if in his position, you would that want that to be written about you or a friend.

I found the same - market is actually getting worse (if HN is representative of the market). This month there were more job seekers on HN than jobs for the first time since 2014.

https://bilbof.com/posts/tech-hiring-is-bad-right-now

Quicker to type and scan! Though I admit this is preference, delimiters would work fine too.

Parsing works the same but is based on a simple regex rather than splitting on a hyphen.

euc=eu central; 1=zone/dc; p=production; wkr=worker; 1=node id

Thank you! The cloud servers are sufficiently cheap for us that we could afford the extra flexibility we get from them. Hetzner can move around VMs without us noticing but in contrast they are rebooting a number of metal machines for maintenance now and for the last little while, which would have been disruptive especially during the migration. I might have another look next year at metal but I’m happy with the cloud VMs currently.

I didn’t touch on that in the article, but essentially it’s a one line change to add a worker node (or nodes) to the cluster, then it’s automatically enrolled.

We don’t have such bursty requirements fortunately so I have not needed to automate this.

Thanks, hadn’t heard of pigsty. As you say, I had to use nvme ssds for the dbs, the performance is pretty good so I didn’t look to get metal nodes.

I read about 30 LLM papers a couple months ago dated from 2018-2024. Mostly folks are publishing on the “how do we prompt better” problem, and you can kind of get the gist in about a day by reading a few blogs (RAG, fine tuning, tool use, etc). There is also more progress being made for model capabilities, like multi modality, and each company seems to be pushing in only slightly different directions, but essentially they are still black boxes.

It depends what you are looking for honestly “the latest things happening” is pretty vague. I’d say the place to look is probably just the blogs of OpenAI/Anthropic/Genini, since they are the only teams with inside information and novel findings to report. Everyone else is just using the tools we are given.

I stopped using GitHub copilot. I really didn’t like my train of thought being interrupted.

I have heard more comprehensive “leave the thinking to us” tools like cursor give better results.

Personally I think if your tools or projects are so dull that you require an AI to use them, perhaps you need sharper tools or more interesting projects.

To be fair to them, they have done a significant amount of work to design the network to be open to competing servers, and I think it would be quite tricky to unpick that. In comparison to successful networks like TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, ATP gives a far fairer playing field and Bluesky hasn't done anything (aside from taking funding) to suggest they're not going to run with it.

You are right that they could change their architecture so that their Relay is more trusted or blocks others in some way, once they capture the market. I am not sure what guarantee they could give with the current ATP arch - perhaps a committee would help, but other social networks have no incentive to support ATP.

It looked like a PR stunt

RateHighly | Founding Growth Marketer | REMOTE | Full-Time | Significant equity

RateHighly (https://ratehighly.com) is a marketing tool for B2B SaaS. We’re profitable and started charging customers 4 months ago.

It’s fully bootstrapped so far. I’m a developer and built it myself. I’m looking for a growth marketer with a track record to come on board and focus on marketing.

This is a great opportunity for someone who wants to design and execute a marketing strategy from square one.

To apply please email me (Bill) at [email protected] with the subject “Growth marketer” with some details about why you’d be a good fit. The interview process will be two video calls with me.

If you apply I guarantee you’ll get a personal reply - not a form response with no feedback.

Depends why you are doing outbound for a low ARPA product.

What problem is cold email solving, and will it eventually solve it? If the product is good enough for the initial customers, I’d switch to marketing and inbound sales.

One reason to stick with cold email is if the product is not good enough yet, so you need to chase people to talk to you and get them to help you improve it

Cold email by definition is not inbound interest.

You can still do cold email don’t get me wrong. But generally for a low ARPA service (<$2k) you want the product to be simple, self-serve, and for customer acquisition to be mostly inbound (ergo from marketing efforts, not outbound emails). Low price points require low CAC, and outbound sales is generally not.

From Apollo, which sells an outbound sales tool: “As a benchmark, try to achieve at least a 20%-30% win rate by closing 2-5 deals per month per rep”. If you have a full time sales rep chasing 5 $100/year deals per month they will close $6k/year. At $1k ARPA they might close $60k/year - after paying salaries you’re not making a profit.

Obviously this doesn’t apply in the early stages, but after you have N customers. Chasing outbound sales for a low price point product is just a recipe for low/slow growth.

Personal network to get the first 20 - literally going to meet people and helping them set up over coffee, then marketing for the rest. The audience were SaaS founders mostly, since it's a marketing tool for SaaS SMEs.

What's important is after you get the first N customers, the way you acquire customers will likely change. You'll exhaust your personal network eventually. Knowing your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is important and so is having a good understanding that the value/price of your product dictates what kind of sales/marketing you can do.

Things like cold emailing are fine for your first few customer development calls, but generally if your deal size is less than $1-2,000/year then (with exceptions) you should stop doing this after you get the first customers.

I run a low price point SaaS for SMEs (avg price is <$100/month), so this required switching from just messaging people I knew, to getting SEO, word of mouth, and the viral loop working. Outbound/inbound sales is not economical at that price point.

This would be a tremendous amount of steel for the size of building they are creating.

Crude steel production in 2023: 18.88 billion mt. 20% = 3,776,000,000 metric tons.

If you just laid that on the ground in 1 meter square blocks it would cover a 481km² area (steel mass=7850 kg/m³). If you made a 1m² block tower, it would be enough to reach the moon, wrap around it, and start heading back.

Their original planned area is 26,500 square km, though this has been scaled back to 1.5km long.

I struggle to see how 481,019 m³ of steel will fit in an area 1.5km square without being the largest and tallest building ever constructed. If you just made a block of pure steel in that 1.5km square area it's going to be 320m high (about half the height of the world trade center across an area the size of 40 Manhatten blocks).

+1 Fred's book is great -- I learned Erlang using it

Yes I hope they’ll find a solution and get re-elected. In some cases changes to frameworks require a 1 year consultation (planning permission to change planning permission rules!) so I am sure it will take years to see an increase. My point was their changes announced so far seemed bitty and wouldn’t address much of the issue.

The problem is hard! Even if you do build 500k homes a year (2x current) in places people don’t want you to build, it will still take 15 years to catch up, and they might be voted out before then because voters don’t want it.

This is pretty bleak reading for a resident of the UK! It's a good explanation for why there's stagnation (generally not allowed to build here). I'm a fan of their work (see the housing theory of everything [1] which is also good).

I'd be interested to read what they think can be done about the planning issue. The new government hasn't really come through on their promise to address it. They ran out of low hanging fruit pretty quickly. They're focusing more on rental reform rather than on supply. Gov modified the NPPF in odd ways (e.g. reduced targets in London, where need is highest). They set up a panel to look at new towns which will report back in a year.

This bit at the end made me laugh:

> it need simply remove the barriers that stop the private sector from doing what it already wants to do

Unfortunately these supply-side policies causing stagnation are representative of what our ageing population actually wants. The average 50+ voter thinks demand is too high and should be cut until supply catches up (in 33 years) [2][3].

[1]: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every... [2]: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/trackers/the-most-import... [3]: At the current rate of house building it would take 33 years for the UK to reach France's current dwelling to person ratio, assuming UK's population growth stops.

Someone got a $10m bounty in another crypto platform Wormhole

This is great to hear, though I'm curious why photos on your phone / pinterest would be relevant to a recommendation system? Surely the biggest signal would be what Spotify already uses: the features of various relevant factors (your previous listening sessions, your current session, what other similar sessions look like, etc.), that said, their recommendation system is surprisingly terrible given how much easier music recommendations must be versus video, yet YouTube seems to have had this nailed for 15+ years whereas Spotify's "Discover Weekly" is so bad.

> I come up with an idea of generating playlists from images. Images that you shot on your phone yourself, or that you found on Pinterest, or a painting that you really like and feel inspired by.

This is genuinely interesting! Do you send the images to an LLM with a prompt like "generate a list of songs that would go well with this"?

This might help you: https://bilbof.com/migrations/table

I mined HN last year for all migrations. You can filter by various fields like technologies etc. The table will probably be most useful since it links off to the blog posts etc

Higher is more jobs

It is indeed, judging by the HN Who Is Hiring / Wants To Be Hired comment ratio [1].

[1]: https://github.com/bilbof/whoishiring-ratio

I think they were trying to stop resellers price gouging during the chip shortage crisis. On ebay you could buy Pis for well over what they were available for on first-party sites (just like PlayStation 5s!).

As a counterpoint, they let me buy Pis as an individual, but I had to send in a picture of myself with a dated piece of paper like a Reddit AMA to prove I was legit.

FWIW there are Pi alternatives without the branding, but usually for the super low price point mini-PCs you are after you need to go to China to firms like Beelink...

> Like what?

Not sure what this is in response to, sorry.

I appreciate there are projects which will hit no limits with the Hotwire/stimulus/turbo mix. I’ve worked on them before and would choose Hotwire when appropriate (eg for government services Hotwire is perfect).

The SSR vs CSR debate is quite tired and played out at this point, and doesn’t lend itself to thoughtful threads… While hotwire does make it easier to do SSR with progressive enhancement, for some projects it’s easier for me to just build a single “enhanced” experience with React (for performance, ecosystem, and IME UX).

I’ve been using Hotwire for a greenfield project for the last year. The hotwire framework they’ve created is pretty nice but I miss React and will probably choose it for my next project.

Not just because it’s decoupled from the backend api. The React/Vue ecosystems have a lot more useful open source components, and you can build faster, more cache friendly front ends, among other benefits.

I agree React is more complex, but as with many things if you are gonna need it then it’s great to have started with it.