Swizec

Because the operator told the computer not to do something so the computer decided to do it. This is a huge security flaw in these newfangled AI-driven systems.

Imagine if this was a "launch nukes" agent instead of a "write code" agent.

> And worth noting that in a sane world, a broad 10% productivity improvement across industry would be a once-in-a-lifetime, headline-making story, not a disappointment

The biggest risk in software development is building the wrong thing. Digging yourself into a hole 10% faster is _worse_. You now have more backtracking to do!

You have a lot more flexibility around those downswings at 40 than you do at 80. For example you could retire but continue doing work that brings you joy and also happens to make money. A lot of people in this situation start lifestyle businesses or do consulting work, for example.

At $4mm in a market account (not 401k), you also have the option to take out margin loans at shockingly low interest. This gives you untaxed cashflow without touching your principal. 160k untaxed is a lot more cashflow than the same number in salary or retirement distributions.

> Apparently his FIRE number is $40M

> it can reflect a level of anxiety about the cost of living

I think a lot of people (especially young) just haven't done the actual math. Or have lifestyle desires beyond basic not-working.

You can FIRE living in SF for $4M. This gives you $160,000/year basically in perpetuity. If you do it right, there's little to no income tax on that money so 160k should be plenty enough for a 1-person income. 4-person families survive (in SF) on less household income than that.

But yeah a 4M exit is definitely not classic ferrari or even flashy lambo levels of wealth.

I’m not saying it’s a curse, I’m saying it’s a webapp. Because the person I’m replying to used it as an example of something you can only build as a native app.

> In the meanwhile VSCode has become the most used editor by developers and it's not even close

Correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t VSCode an Electron app? ie a webapp shipped together with a stripped down browser

I know that GitHub Codespaces open as a full VSCode editor in my browser so I always assumed it was the same code.

> "Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships."

If you get the architecture wrong, everyone complains. If you get it right, nobody notices it's there.

Good branding is recognizable without the logo, especially to the target audience.

For HN, macs are a good example. You can remove all the apples and we’ll recognize the laptop.

My Triumph motorcycle has a similar property. You could remove all the logos (there’s just 2 stickers anyway) and even my girlfriend who is not into bikes will recognize it by the engine sound alone.

Kitchenaid and Smeg appliances have a similar property. BBC hides all the logos and you can still recognize the standup mixers in their baking shows.

> If an org wants to fix the incentive, I think the question to ask in reviews isn’t “how big was the thing you built,” it’s “did you make the system easier to change next quarter.”

This has been my personal mission and motivation to go into management. I see my job as making sure engineers are rewarded for building the simplest thing that works.

So far the best way to align incentives that I've found is a simple policy: We'll ship whatever you want, but we know your phone number and you're on-call for your systems. At least 2nd tier on call.

It's a little mean but you'd be surprised how quickly engineers start simplifying stuff when they feel like they can't get anything done because someone's always asking questions or triggering alarms about that weird thing they built 3 months ago.

> A lot of system design interviews are accidentally training people that the goal is to draw more boxes until the interviewer nods. The more senior move is usually: start simple, instrument, set thresholds, and only then add machinery

I do the system design interview. The easiest way to fail is to over-design the solution. I am going to ask deep probing questions and you better have answers. My favorite answer is when people go "Oh yeah you're right, this box doesn't add any value, we can remove".

I agree. What counts as a positive signal for "scope" really very much depends what you're hiring for.

When looking for a manager type, people under management are a decent proxy. When looking for the world's greatest postgres optimization expert, some version of queries-per-second is prob the metric you want.

Or realistically if I needed the world's greatest Postgres expert (and could afford them), I would go talk to experts in the field and ask "Who's the best postgres person you know?" and work from there. At that point your resume is but a formality.

It gives me more insight than a blank resume with just job titles.

The rest we can hash out in interviews, reference checks, and reaching out to mutual network connections at higher levels. Nobody gets hired just off their resume.

That is to say: All line items are verifiable if we care enough. Tech is small :)

> Do you mean literally "Scope: blabla" for each occupation?

No I mean

> Tell me what you did, for whom, what was the impact.

It's really that simple. Just tell me what you did at your job. What was it that you worked on. Why did it matter. Did you own a workstream (or 5), code monkey all day, own a critical service, play code janitor, ... what did you do?

Yes. Which is why it's important to put scope on your resume.

I can't know you ran a 30 person scale up unless you tell me. It doesn't have to be in those words exactly, usually it's tied to ARR or rounds raised or something you can easily talk about that translates across companies.

I've seen resumes with titles like "Lead Engineer" who under that title put something like "Hired 45+ people to run <huge systems> at <company you've heard of>". That person has more scope than the 30-people CTO in your example :)

PS: 30 people isn't even that many for a whole company. That's a Series A startup with early signs of product-market-fit. It's common to see a ratio of 10 employees for every 1 engineer in the company.

> Interesting, you've got it absolutely the wrong way around.

Maybe. That's why you need to put your scope on the resume :)

I had a CTO title 15 years ago. The complexity of what we were building was a joke compared to what I own now as a lowly "tech lead manager". And in fact back then I wouldn't even be able to comprehend how complex things can get.

> When hiring, titles are basically ignored

As a hiring manager, this is completely accurate. I don't look at your title, I look at your scope. Tell me what you did, for whom, and what was the impact. That's all I care about.

We all know that Senior Principal Architect Engineer at 3-person startup is somewhere around junior to mid-level at a real company. Whereas some poor schmuck at a larger company with a title like "Senior Engineer I" probably owns and runs more impressive systems and works with more stakeholders than that 3-person startup will see in a year.

You have to mess up pretty badly for this to happen. Most people would be a lot less worried what others think of them if they realized how rarely the do.

The reality is that most people are too busy thinking about themselves to spend any time thinking about you or a random little interaction that didn’t land

The risk does not involve lasting consequences. Just don’t make things a big deal and people will mostly follow your lead.

> Most people who are "sitting in front of rectangles, moving tiny rectangles"

Hey dude these are my emotional support rectangles!

Truth is, anything can be meaningful. We make our own meaning and almost anything will do as long as you believe in it. If optimizing rectangles on the screen makes you happy, that’s great. If it doesn’t, find something else to do.

Software development jobs are up 10%. Jobs in general are down 6%

https://x.com/perborgen/status/2025890393166917857

Just the current reality in SFBA. People have spilled some 2 trillion dollars onto the area in the past 2 years. A lot of that is going to software engineers as everyone tries to shove AI down consumers' throats.

> Nice severance; but in this job market, holy shit.

I just talked to a bunch of recruiters (we're hiring) and their main piece of advice was: The market is crazy. Move fast. We're seeing people getting jobs within days of starting to look, bailing on offers after signing because they got a better offer somewhere else, etc. 24 hours is the longest you can leave a candidate waiting. You have been warned

edit: I am in SFBA. Your reality may be different. People have spilled some 2 trillion dollars onto the area in the past 2 years. A lot of that is going to software engineers as everyone tries to shove AI down consumers' throats. Rents are up 60% in 12 months, which is not the sign of a cold employment market :)

> you project it to face to face situations it would be really rude behavior. Like in a chat room when you ask someone something with an explicit mention of their handle

The difference is that in person you as the asker are more polite about it also. You don't burst into an unrelated meeting just to ask someone a question. Or elbow your way through a group of friends having a conversation just to ask something unrelated.

But in chat rooms (and emails) you do. Easy for folks to get in a situation where dozens of people every day demand their attention and expect a response.

I remember building oauth logins back when “login with your twitter” was a brand new revolutionary idea, before there were libraries to handle the details.

Still have scars from building directly based off the blogposts Twitter and Facebook engineers wrote about how to integrate with this. Think it wasn’t even a standard yet.

I credit that painful experience with now feeling like OAuth is really quite simple. V2 cleaned it up a lot

>This has always bugged me. $7 million for a 30-second-long ad. What do they get out of it?

Super Bowl ads are about brand building. They're not conversion ads. Their direct impact is to reduce CPC (cost per conversion) on other advertising.

Say you have to pay $100 per instagram conversion. Users see your ads cold and need a lot of convicing. Most won't pay attention long enough for your ad to convert. You need them to see a lot of ads.

But after they've seen your brand plastered all over the Super Bowl (and other brand opportunities), those same instagram ads might start converting at $90 per conversion. Users see your ad and go "Oh yeah I remember that brand, lemme check this out"

The brand effect is so strong that displaying a Visa (or Mastercard or Amex) logo near checkout literally increases consumer spend. Study from 1986: https://academic.oup.com/jcr/article-abstract/13/3/348/18224...

Another study from 2015 showing that credit card logos increase estimates of item value: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Effect-of-Credit-Card-...

> At the end of the day, I like the mental model of programming, and I am somewhat uninterested in shaving every millimeter of friction off of every surface I touch on my computer. Does that make me a worse programmer? Maybe? I still delivered plenty of high quality code.

In every pursuit there are secretly 3 different communities. Those who love doing the thing, those who love tinkering with the gear, those who love talking about it.

HackerNews and the internet in general are dominated by people who like to nerd out about the gear of programming (IDEs, text editors, languages, agent setups, …) and the people who like to talk about programming. The people doing most of the work are off on the side too busy doing the thing to be noticed.

> Interest rates have fallen, not to near 0 as they were, but down from highs with no apparent effect.

Hey it turns out that going from decades of stability to 1 or 2 years of total fuckaroundery has economic impacts. Who knew?

This on top of the general trend that the post-ww2 USA gravy train has been ending for a couple decades now.

> Though I think lawyers will be reduced to being "official human stamping machines" before software engineers are reduced to mere Product Owners

GeLLMan Amnesia – AI can fully automate every profession except the ones I’m deeply familiar with.

I’m a software engineer who wears the product owner hat a lot these days, there’s no way AI will automate this any time soon. Too much peopling and accountability.

We have a similar scheme in Slovenia. Don't know the details but there's the concept of a "free artist".

At a minimum you need a registered business, regular exhibitions or performances in your field, you have to register with the ministry of culture, and can't have a job. Contract work is allowed and encouraged. Also you are expected to apply when the government issues a Call For Creatives.

I think you get paid minimum wage as long as you continue fulfilling criteria.

Best way I could find to share 2 links :)

The video version landed differently for me than the written testimony (it's the same person authoring both). I felt when speaking he emphasized the impact better than it came through in writing.

C-Span video if you prefer that over the written testimony: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd-_VDYit3U