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caffeine

2,755 karma · joined May 27, 2009

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caffeine··on Going full time on my SaaS after 13 years
I read this as tongue-in-cheek.

The author was amused at his younger self’s naïveté and entitlement in assuming such a raise was a given and planning it on a timeline app.

So I think you are actually in agreement.

caffeine··on Tools for Better Thinking
I found the book “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy” was pretty close to what you are talking about.

* Good definitions of what is or is not a strategy

* How to identify whether you have an actual strategy or just some empty words or a repetition of the objective

* A lot of examples of different strategies, bad strategies, and non-strategies

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11721966-good-strategy-b...

caffeine··on Update on Hiring Plans
> There are things in life more important than money.

Not only this, but I think even in purely self-interested financial terms your ethical approach is superior over the long term.

Over time, truth and honesty offer a compounding positive spiral.

You make better decisions because a) the inputs are free of lies and b) you make them carefully knowing you will own the consequences.

Reputationally you garner trust which makes possibilities available to you (collaboration, quid pro quo, and low-friction litigation-fee business relationships) that are not open to unethical people.

caffeine··on Ask HN: Advice for a Generalist Going Solo?
My advice is, watch your costs. When you leave paying work it’s easy to think the slug you’ve got in the bank will last a while.

But traction will take 2-3x longer than you think, and an unexpected stream of “one-offs” will eat your runway.

So be extremely conservative on costs from the very beginning.

caffeine··on What good cash-strapped hiring looks like
To be fair, all the other interview rounds were with more junior, low-EQ CS nerds like me, so he could still be pretty confident the candidate would get a good grilling.
caffeine··on Open Source Alternative To
I’m finding this more useful as a reverse search!

“Paid, supported, professional alternative to”

caffeine··on Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta
This is a random place to throw this at you, but you seem like you have a) the skills and b) and the motivation.

The internet needs an “allowlist” front end for kids, especially for video platforms.

I would pay $20/month for a family subscription to a front end app for Netflix and YouTube that lets me allowlist shows and channels, and never lets Netflix or Youtube AI choose what to show my kids next.

Netflix in particular is extremely subversive. I have seen it stop a show mid-episode to suggest a new show to my 6yo - which is clearly aimed at slightly more mature audiences, and is therefore more exciting/scary for my daughter.

The AI is constantly pushing her toward more mature content even if she doesn’t choose it. And there is NO WAY to stop it other than just get rid of Netflix entirely, but they also have by far the best content for kids.

Anyway, a browser with proper kids controls, good UX for the parents, and especially the ability to filter/block the closed video platforms, would be huge.

caffeine··on Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta
I would think that as you grow, economies of scale will kick in and the cost per search should go way, way down.
caffeine··on Sheryl Sandberg stepping down as Facebook COO
WhatsApp is probably their best property.
caffeine··on Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel
At my old job in the UK, we always got better results hiring engineers from Imperial College (which is the UK attempt at an MIT/Caltech-type of school) than from Oxbridge.

We eventually figured out that the Imperial students had written thousands and thousands of lines of code by the time they graduated, in several different types of languages (Prolog, Haskell, C, Verilog, Java, Python, Javascript) and at all levels of the stack (they were writing drivers, theorem provers, machine learning code, games, web apps, etc.). The students had been using Linux as their daily driver for 4 years, the command line experience of ssh/git/grep and the rest of it was native for them.

The Oxbridge students had done a lot of hardcore mathematics and a lot of proofs of theoretical computer science concepts. Brutally difficult.

But the Imperial students would roll in, sit down, and within a few weeks (after we taught them about tests) would be pounding out large swaths of working code.

The Oxbridge students would start to get stuck once their programs hit 1000 lines, and would spend days refactoring little functions and making things pretty rather than just getting stuff done. They simply had never dealt with large, real-world code before.

caffeine··on Turkish Magician Built a $600M Nasdaq-Listed Scam Based on Lies
It’s factual, but I think it’s there because it sounds exotic and makes the title more interesting.
caffeine··on Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired? (June 2022)
> know deep down this is bad for the long term

It’s bad for your sense of self-worth, even if it’s not objectively a bad thing.

One day you might ask yourself “Where would I be if I went all-in on something exciting rather than just putting 10% effort into my work for all those years?”

caffeine··on Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired? (June 2022)
Consider taking a longish holiday (like 3 weeks)? If at the end of it you don’t want to come back, quit. But that might be long enough to scratch the itch and feel refreshed.
caffeine··on What good cash-strapped hiring looks like
I was a younger, inexperienced tech lead sitting in on an interview led by an engineer about 10 years older than me.

I was shocked when he spent the whole hour asking soft questions like “So describe your previous team structure. How did ideas and plans arise? Who took responsibility? How was conflict resolved? What were your impressions?”

I always went hard on technical stuff when interviewing, was always worried that an incompetent would sneak through.

I asked the senior engineer his rationale. He told me “This guy went to X school and got Y degree and worked at Z company. So I know he’s smart enough. And I can teach him to write good software. But I can never teach him not to be a prick.”

caffeine··on What good cash-strapped hiring looks like
Have a look at this comment I saw on here previously, it’s a great example of the article’s idea in practice:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31451536

caffeine··on Embracing Modern C++ Safely, Book Review
Yeah I understand but I disagree.

If you race a skilled Rust team against an equally skilled C++ team to build some big complicated fast software, the Rust team would likely ship first, and with less bugs.

The C++ team will eventually ship too, but it will take much longer. The software will also be of high quality, and very slightly superior performance, but there will be a couple of memory leaks, maybe a couple of exploits, and possibly a tricky segfault, somewhere down the line. Maintaining the C++ team’s software without introducing further issues will require superhuman intelligence, so it won’t happen - there will increasing issues as the team turns over and the detailed understanding of the code is lost over time.

The Rust team will mostly suffer from frustration about how bad async is, go down the rabbit hole of using it, and then rip it out and replace it with hand-rolled state machines and epoll. Down the line at some point, future programmers will decide this is legacy garbage and replace it all with async again.

There will be no segfault or memory exploits, and a similar number of logic bugs to the c++ team.

I say this having worked on large C++ projects and large Rust projects, and with no particular religious love for Rust other than a grateful appreciation for the compiler.

caffeine··on Elon Musk Tesla email: Remote work is no longer acceptable
Those maximums in Europe are largely ignored in high-paying roles (like what Tesla engineers would certainly be).

As an example, in London when you get a high-paying finance job, on day 1 the HR person comes by your desk and has you sign a waiver to waive away any rights to overtime and to accept that you will work as and when needed regardless of national limits.

Edit: I would also like to point out that when I did that job, the builders working on the skyscraper next door were working substantially longer hours than my 50ish hours per week, and probably for substantially less pay.

caffeine··on Elon Musk Tesla email: Remote work is no longer acceptable
This isn’t an Elon tweet.

> Can't he just keep it focused on the cars and the share price?

I actually agree with your sentiment, but for a different reason - I think tweeting is a massive waste of his time which I would prefer be spent either working on any of his amazing companies, or for restorative rest - but obviously I don’t get a vote where he spends his time!

For the same reason, I really hope he doesn’t buy Twitter - not because I don’t like what he’ll do, but because Twitter is a dumpster fire and I don’t want his valuable attention squandered on something so worthless as fixing discourse Twitter.

> I hope this pushes folks at Tesla to unionize.

Elon corporate culture/values seems like it’s definitely unique, and not something for everyone.

It’s probably better for everybody if those who aren’t onboard go work somewhere that aligns better with their values.

Tesla China doesn’t have these problems.

caffeine··on Embracing Modern C++ Safely, Book Review
> survivorship bias, that countless projects never got the chance to be developed due to the too high of a burden of doing it properly

I would contend the cost of doing things “safely” is much higher in C++. since a human being has to mentally do all the work the compiler would do in a safe language.

caffeine··on Ask HN: How do you sync your computer’s development configurations/environment?
Ha I do exactly this. Windows with Linux in a VM is great.
caffeine··on Ask HN: What to do about ‘Good at programming Bad at Leetcode’
Not OP but here are a couple reasons:

* It doesn’t scale well to huge organisations.

* It’s not standardised “repeatable” in the sense that you cant generate datasets from this that let you correlate interviews with subsequent outcomes and improve hiring metrics company wide

* It requires expertise in pair programming, which most companies don’t have

Basically, OP’s hiring process is an excellent example of “doing things that don’t scale” to gain an asymmetric advantage as a small organisation.

They don’t need to derive metrics, they can invest the time, they have a team who are skilled at pair programming - so they can have this hiring process and other people can’t.

caffeine··on Town Seized Building, Offered to Return It If Owners Bought Two Cars for Police
I think parents should be allowed to hit their kids for being ungrateful little runts.
caffeine··on Tether Required Recapitalization in May 2022
The problem is this:

One day, people who think like you will come to power and decide that under their administration, [activity your livelihood is based on] constitutes “extracting value from the system” and is no longer permitted.

Maybe you are a golfer, or a restaurateur. But “what you’re doing is solely about enriching yourself.” Your fine cuisine is not feeding the poor. It is immoral to play golf while children go hungry. You have clearly become wealthy while doing nothing for the greater good.

They will come to you holding guns and demand that you cease your activity, and hand over your “wealth” - maybe your house, your savings, the food in your pantry, the clothes on your bank, maybe your wife or your daughter.

“We will take back for the People what is theirs” they will say. If you refuse, you will starve in prison, and they will take your life anyway. If you accept, you will starve in the street.

caffeine··on Computer work lying down comfortably with a home-made stand over the bed
Using a VR screen could make a lot of sense here. Along with a split keyboard so he can have his hands flat on either side of his body.

Would also make it easier to get up off the bed

(I’m guessing someone that wants this setup finds getting in and out of bed somewhat challenging as well.)

caffeine··on Computer work lying down comfortably with a home-made stand over the bed
Why not a 1st-class airplane seat?
caffeine··on $3B in Bitcoin was sold in a last-ditch attempt to save UST from collapse
> The fact that crypto is correlated with tech stock valuations should be raising eyebrows

Because fiat volatility in inflation/rate hikes respectively (ie the NPV of a USD) completely dominates the other factors.

The volatile leg here is the fiat dollar, and everything denominated in it is whipsawing around as its value changes.

caffeine··on Ask HN: Any other self taught devs terrified of interviewing these days?
We should hire plumbers this way. “Tell me about your favourite plumbing project” for 20 minutes.
caffeine··on The other kind of staff software engineer
I feel like nowadays that joke has evolved to devs that use JSON vs devs that use binary serialisation (like capnproto or whatever else)…
caffeine··on Cities with Nice Weather
I think his desire for “lower variability” than Toronto means he has gone from “sometimes bad” to “always bad” weather.
caffeine··on Lessons learned from the recent job hunt
The difference between the dead comment and the article is the self-deprecation and the positive vs negative connotation.

The flagged comment was saying something negative about a group.

The original article was self deprecation (they don’t ask for enough) and complementary about the group it stereotypes (sticking up for oneself).

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