andrewljohnson

“send cold emails with enriched context”

What’s the difference between cold and spam?

You either need to quit or keep your head down, I can’t tell which.

This sounds like a constraint I model in my bin packing optimization routine.

Bin packing is theoretically NP Hard but practically solved all the time on real world datasets.

Pro-tip - the older it is, the more likely it is to be good.

This sounds like a broken culture to me. Teams shouldn't tolerate it... it is both harmful and contagious.

A lot of organizations right now are dealing with the "Claude says..." problem.

It's not that you should never include any AI generated text in a conversation with other engineers, but you mostly shouldn't.

AI is a tool to help you understand/debug/review yourself, but you shouldn't be conferring authority to your AI (because it doesn't understand anything and is often wrong in the text it spews), and you shouldn't be running an AI for other people, they should run it themselves.

You can just look at the diff when you do a pull request, no prayer needed, and if you want it to be “surgical” in that way, your prompt (and agents.md) can be specific.

You can also unit test the function to better assure behavior didn’t change.

I’m fine with bulk review, it just has to get reviewed before a merge. You don’t need to review the LLM output as you work except as it aids you to work.

LLM editing should be done to produce deterministic output.

That is, the LLM should produce a diff, and the user should accept the diff. It seems like a bad pattern to just tell the LLM to edit any long document without that sort of visibility. Same goes for prose as for code.

I am familiar with all the particulars, check my HN profile ;)

eBay already had warehousing ops, I assume larger than tcgplayer’s.

Last year, eBay shut down tcgplayer’s only fulfillment facility in Rochester, NY and switched to using eBay’s facility in Kentucky.

For my marketplace, I was friends with someone who could make it look like not a ghost town for the supply (an established game store with lots of trading cards in stock). Then, we struggled to get more sellers. Then, we found channels to get selllers, which were basically software systems we could build integrations with. The integrations de-risked the proposition for sellers enough to get more traction. Eventually, if you have growing volume, the supplyside just starts coming on its own mostly, and you focus on retaining sellers and growing buyers.

For your marketplace, you could bring the supply-side by Fedexing stuff when you don't have a carrier. You'll have to lose money on the initial shipment, until you can route the jobs to the supplyside. This assumes you think the typical use case for this isn't smuggling.

The amount of jobs may be low enough at first that you can be like "You said Cairo to London, that will be $N." Then, if you can fill the job manually by finding someone somehow, then you add them to the platform and they do the job. If not, you send a prepaid mailing package with a Fedex label to the recipient and they ship it easily, and you subsidize it so it seems like a great deal to them.

Limiting geography seems like a good approach too.

You could argue that compute was a decisive factor in World War II even (used in code breaking and designing nuclear weapons).

We use Mercury’s treasury account to get yields on cash, and what appeals to me is it is easy to manage. I don’t have to worry about setting up processes to move money around and it’s integrated with my bank account, and we wouldn’t want to switch even for a higher yield… the operational burden is more important to us than yield.

I think the yield is about 3.2% based on how we set it up to be as liquid as possible. We could have accepted less liquidity for more like 3.8%

Mana Pool | Senior/Principal Software Engineer | Full-Time | Remote (US) | 135k-200k USD

We make the market for Magic cards. If you play Magic, we'd love to see you apply.

https://manapool.com/jobs/software-engineer

This doesn’t read to me like it was personally written by one person. It’s not Dario we should read this as being written by, it’s Anthropic as an entity.

the shakespeare code tuned a little with different training data does a good job of generating Magic The Gathering commander decks

This is neat, I have a simple CSS effect that I apply to foil cards on my Magic card marketplace site, but I have wondered what it would take to replicate all the different foil effects that a Magic card can come in to be both more varied and more true to life, in a performant way that fits into my CRUD svelte UX.

This almost exact thing happened with me with a hiking app I used to make. We had a 7-day trial when you started the app, but we shipped a release that broke this and made all the paid features immediately paywalled. This led to a big increase in sales and we got rid of the trial forever.

It’s possible that our trial might have worked better if it were like modern iOS trials that start charging you after a certain period, but ours just let you use the paid features for 7 days and then lapsed, and it stifled sales. My theory was people urgently needed the paid features (mostly to download maps for a coming trip) so the trial got in the way of them paying right away.

The same could be said for books about writing, like Williams or Strunk and White. The trick is to not apply what you learn indiscriminately.

I find using AI very educational in some respects.

I am way more knowledgeable about SQL than I have ever been, because in the past I knew so little I would lean on team members to do SQL for me. But with AI, I learned all the basics by reading code it produced for me and now I can write SQL from scratch when needed.

Similarly for Tailwind… after having the AI write a lot of Tailwind for me from a cold start in my own Tailwind knowledge, now I know all the classes, and when it’s quicker, I just type them in myself.

In GIS world, a vector tile is a chunk of geographic data (the vectors) limited to a geographic region (the tile boundaries which fit into the projected checkerboard of your map).

You use a vector tile instead of a png or jpeg tile because you don’t want an image representation of the data, you want the raw “vector” data so you can style it, search it, and do other things with it on client devices.

Make sure not to apply this polite but curt tone to consumer apps.

Forget squarespace websites. AI is such a huge time saver for complex front ends. It doesn’t write the whole thing, but you can easily go from screenshot to code you are better off using as a starter than typing it all up yourself. And it’s way easier to make css or tailwind changes to modify components than thinking really hard.

Edward Teller wasn't sure the atomic bomb they were building wouldn't light the entire atmosphere on fire for a while there.

A marketplace that focuses 100% on Magic: The Gathering cards.

https://manapool.com

I wonder if MidJourney is still ripping. I’m actually curious if it’s superior to ChatGPT’s Dall-E images… I switched and cancelled my subscription when ChatGPT added images, but I think I was mostly focused on convenience.

It's because it's a great place to HODL for me, since they seem vastly more secure than all the sites that have gone down in thievery and flames over the years.

I think it'd be disingenuous to suggest that there is any safer place to hold crypto, given they are publicly traded, have excellent engineers, have insurance, etc. I even think it's more likely I'd fuck up personally custodying my crypto than letting Coinbase hold it. I've had friends lose so much money trying to keep their crypto in private wallets and on shady exchanges.

Did you have any savings?

At what point in your career were you?

Anywhere in the Bay Area, or in the neighborhoods you were willing to live in? What weee your constraints?