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chadash

6,817 karma · joined August 22, 2017

https://www.dtnewman.com/contact_me.html
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chadash··on The Future of AI Software Development
> Will LLMs be cheaper than humans once the subsidies for tokens go away? At this point we have little visibility to what the true cost of tokens is now, let alone what it will be in a few years time. It could be so cheap that we don’t care how many tokens we send to LLMs, or it could be high enough that we have to be very careful.

We do have some idea. Kimi K2 is a relatively high performing open source model. People have it running at 24 tokens/second on a pair of Mac Studios, which costs 20k. This setup requires less than a KW of power, so the $0.8-0.15 being spent there is negligible compared to a developer. This might be the cheapest setup to run locally, but it's almost certain that the cost per token is far cheaper with specialized hardware at scale.

In other words, a near-frontier model is running at a cost that a (somewhat wealthy) hobbyist can afford. And it's hard to imagine that the hardware costs don't come down quite a bit. I don't doubt that tokens are heavily subsidized but I think this might be overblown [1].

[1] training models is still extraordinarily expensive and that is certainly being subsidized, but you can amortize that cost over a lot of inference, especially once we reach a plateau for ideas and stop running training runs as frequently.

chadash··on OpenClaw is what Apple intelligence should have been
The problem is that OpenClaw is kind of like a self driving car that works 90% of the time. As we have seen, that last 10% (and billions of dollars) is the difference between Waymo today and prototypes 10 years ago.

Being Apple is just a structural disadvantage. Everyone knows that open claw is not secure, and it’s not like I blame the solo developer. He is just trying to get a new tool to market. But imagine that this got deployed by Apple and now all of your friends, parents and grandparents have it and implicitly trust it because Apple released it. Having it occasionally drain some bank accounts isn’t going to cut it.

This is not to say Apple isn’t behind. But OpenClaw is doing stuff that even the AI labs aren’t comfortable touching yet.

chadash··on Amazon confirms 14,000 job losses in corporate division
"job losses" is BBC editorializing. They do not use that term in their letter: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-workfor...
chadash··on J.P. Morgan's OpenAI loan is strange
The math is wrong:

> Cost: $1,000 Case 1 (90%): OpenAI goes bankrupt. Return: $0 Case 2 (9%): OpenAI becomes a big successful company and goes 10x. Return: $1,000 + 5% interest = $1,050 Case 3 (1%): OpenAI becomes the big new thing and goes 100x. Return: $1,000 + 5% interest = $1,050

The actual math is that if OpenAI succeeds, then there's a nod and a wink that JPM will land the lead role in the IPO or any mergers/acquisitions, which translates into huge fees.

chadash··on Gemma3 Function Calling
so if i'm reading this correctly, it's essentially prompt engineering here and there's no guarantee for the output. Why not enforce a guaranteed output structure by restricting the allowed logits at each step (e.g. what outlines library does)?
chadash··on Ask HN: What to do when you're out of money and can't find a job?
Why is there a 5 year gap on your resume? It sounds like you didn't sit around twiddling your thumbs... you built stuff during that time. On your resume, treat it like you were working a job and talk about what you built. Highlight your open source contributions and if possible, tie them to your resume. Sure, some people will treat an ex-founder as a negative, but many will see it positive. You only need one job.

There is definitely ageism in tech, but 39 isn't old. I'd be happy to take a look at your resume and provide advice if you give me a way to contact you. But it sounds like the issue isn't your resume... indeed you are getting lots of interviews, so maybe it's something you are doing in the interview process. Do you have a sense of where things go wrong? Are you often getting to the final stage before hearing no?

chadash··on A 10-Year Battery for AirTag
> Ten years is a very long time in tech.

Well, they certainly _might_ be functioning in ten years from now. Conservatively, you get 5 years of use out of this, which isn't bad for $15-20, depending on your use case.

chadash··on Five days a week in the office? Forget it
Obviously in practice, this isn't always true, but in general, each employee should output more than their pay, or they wouldn't be there. As an example, Exxon Mobile supposedly has profits of $899,000/employee [1]. Their average pay is probably significantly lower than that, but let's say it's $300k, so a 20% boost in productivity increases profit per employee by $180k. An increase of 50% in salary (and I don't think it takes that much to get people to work in an office) costs them $150k.

[1] https://www.lifehealth.com/top-25-us-companies-ranked-by-pro...

chadash··on Product management is hosting a party, not playing chess
I think that software engineering is about two things: building things the right way and building the right things.

The second one is more important than the first one. If you don't build the right product, it doesn't matter how well it scales or how it has amazing test coverage or wonderful documentation. To that end, I think that too many managers (and companies) do too much shielding of engineers from customers. If you are just given a figma mockup and told "build this", it's easy to get bogged down for a week with the details of building a search bar at the bottom of the page only to realize that the stakeholders would have been OK with a dropdown select. Better to understand the problem you are solving and the only way to really do this is to have some kind of interaction with customers. As an engineering manager, I try to encourage engineers to get on sales calls and see product demos. When you see it from a high level, you a) almost always notice things that need fixing or can be improved and b) see where the piece that you are working on fits into the larger picture.

That said, I find that many engineers don't want to get on customer calls, and usually there's room for those engineers in an organization as well. For example, "build a new video conferencing service for artists to collaborate" would be a very challenging problem (I think) that is not well defined and therefore requires deep customer understanding. "Make Google searches run with 10% fewer CPU milliseconds" is arguably a much harder problem to solve, but it's so well defined that it really doesn't need customer understanding (setting aside the initial decision about whether it makes sense to work on).

chadash··on Learning to Reason with LLMs
Only a small fraction of all future AI projects have even gotten started. So they aren't only fighting over what's out there now, they're fighting over what will emerge.
chadash··on Lesser known parts of Python standard library
> OrderedDict - dictionary that maintains order of key-value pairs (e.g. when HTTP header value matters for dealing with certain security mechanisms).

Word to the wise... as of Python 3.7, the regular dictionary data structure guarantees order. Declaring an OrderedDict can still be worthwhile for readability (to let code reviewers/maintainers know that order is important) but I don't know of any other reason to use it anymore.

chadash··on Elasticsearch is open source, again
The words of the license are "You may not provide the software to third parties as a hosted or managed service, where the service provides users with access to any substantial set of the features or functionality of the software.".

I don't think competing with ElasticSearch is mentioned anywhere within the license. If team 1 uses ElasticSearch and team 2 is developing RAG (without using ES), then that's not an issue (but only if using the most recent version of ES, since the license for the code that I fork today has no bearing on future code that ES hasn't written yet).

chadash··on Elasticsearch is open source, again
I love https://resend.com/ as an example of a website that does a GREAT job explaining what they do. Lots of companies tell you that integrating their product is quick, but with their website I can look at it for 30 seconds and understand what the next steps would be.
chadash··on Elasticsearch is open source, again
I'm pretty happy with this, since they are keeping the option to use the Elastic License. Now everyone can be happy. To me, it's weird that the AGPL is any more "open source" than the Elastic License. The AGPL requires you to publish all of your source code if you make any changes to the product; the Elastic License just says, "don't use our code to make a direct competitor to Elasticsearch". I find the former to be much more restrictive in most practical ways since the majority of companies don't want to open source their code, but very few of them plan to sell hosted search.

Personally, I do wish that there was more broad acceptance of the Elastic License. Who wants to put in years building a business and then have a competitor with better distribution take your code and compete directly with you? For me, the reasons to want open-source code are:

* If a vendor goes under, I can self-host

* If a vendor raises prices too much, I can self-host

* If there's a bug in the code that affects me too much, I can fix it

* If there's a feature I really need, I can add it

The Elastic License allows for all of the above. Seems fair to me.

chadash··on Ask HN: Imagine a world with 1Tb/s internet. What would change?
I went from 500mpbs download/upload in my old condo to 50/20mbps download/upload in my house. There are two noticeable effects: it takes slightly longer to download movies the night before I go on flights or long car trips and it takes significantly longer to push updates to large docker containers to the cloud. Everything else is more or less identical for me.

Now, maybe there'd be some novel use case that would come up if everyone (or let's say 80%+) had 2gbps internet, but it's hard to imagine that that's the big constraint for much. Maybe something like virtual/augmented reality could do more heavy processing in the cloud in that case (assuming low enough latency)?

chadash··on Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones
Chrome is not anyone's default browser, but it still has dominance. People will be bothered a little under some circumstances.
chadash··on 21 More AWS Services They Should Cancel
+1 on NAT Gateway. For those unaware, you need to setup a NAT gateway for your tools inside of a VPC to access the internet. I forget the pricing, but it's way more expensive than it should be and it's a huge pain to setup. This is a service that is annoyingly expensive for hobbyists/indie-devs/people just playing around, but a rounding error for AWS's "real" customers. Just build it into VPC (a checkbox that says "I would like to be able to access the internet from my code in the VPC") and make it free or at least have upfront pricing.
chadash··on Which country consumes the most coffee?
Come on. People in Luxembourg average 5.31 cups of coffee per day? Yes, my experience is anecdotal, but I'm not even sure that the self-described "coffee addicts" who I know are averaging that much, let alone an entire population.
chadash··on Costco starts to sell 'apocalypse bucket' with food that lasts 25 years
The vast majority of Jews made significant geographic moves in the 20th century, either from Europe/Russia or the arab world. Most of them went to North America or Israel.
chadash··on TinyPod – Apple Watch case with scroll wheel
I'm in the same boat. Want a small phone with premium features. My hope is that the next generation of iphone SE is at least on par with the 13 mini that I currently have. Otherwise, not sure what I'll do when my mini dies since the current SE is a pretty big step down from the 13 mini.
chadash··on Supreme Court rules ex-presidents have immunity for official acts
> Convictions are in the high 90%. Juries are very weak and at the mercy of powerful prosecutors.

This is a bit misleading. DAs have latitude about what to prosecute and if they don't think they can win, they dont have to bring it to court.

chadash··on Every product that you try to build is already built
If your idea solves any pain-point that some market has, then chances are someone else has thought of it. This is especially true in the consumer space, where you don't need deep industry knowledge to come up with an idea.

But very few people actually execute on ideas that they have. And even fewer successfully execute. This is why I like the advice from the book "The Lean Startup": if you think an idea is valuable, call up a product manager at the biggest player in the space and try to get them to steal your idea from you... the short answer is that they won't, because any successful company is flooded with good ideas and they have to be picky about which ones they pursue [1].

That said, people vastly underestimate the size of the market for many things and they assume that some competitor might keep them from taking off. Think of the tire market: how many people can give a good explanation of the difference between Michelin and Goodyear? Maybe 1% of people? Yet, but companies are huge. Now go to almost any other market (save for a few with network effects) and you'll find at least several competitors in the space. And if no one is competing in a space, sometimes that's a bad sign, not a good one if you are considering it.

[1] There are some ideas that are obvious, and they might already be pursuing, such as using LLMs to automate some aspect of customer service. That doesn't count as a stolen idea. Also, don't take this to the extreme. Obviously some ideas are valuable, but they tend to be things that require very deep expertise.

chadash··on Show HN: Skyvern – Browser automation using LLMs and computer vision
First of all, wonderful work. I'm gonna be using this for sure. I can think of many use cases. What would be nice though is a simple API. I send you what I need, you send me a jobId that I can use to check the status of my job and then let me download the results when I'm done.

I played with the Geico example, and it seems to do a good job on the happy path there. But I tried another one where it struggled... I want to get me car rental prices from https://www.costcotravel.com/. I gave it airport + time of pickup and dropoff, but it struggled to hit the "rental car" tab. It got caught up on hitting the Rental Car button at the top, which brings up a popup that it doesn't seem to read.

When I put in https://www.costcotravel.com/Rental-Cars, it entered JFK into the pickup location, but then failed to click the popup.

chadash··on Ask HN : Street Vehicle Speed Counter
> It seems to me that it could be selled to the public sector.

Selling to the public sector is a skill in itself. It isn't usually the best product that wins at this... it's the company that knows the most about selling to the public sector.

chadash··on More doctors are charging fees to respond to patient messages
Doctors very much charge for time. By definition, their work doesn't scale. But because of their immense training, they get to charge _a lot_ for that time.

The same is true in law. Just because you have 10,000 hours of training doesn't mean you aren't billing by the hour.

This is why there are many many doctor and attorney millionaires and very few doctor/attorney billionaires.

chadash··on More doctors are charging fees to respond to patient messages
I met with a new accountant yesterday. He told me that if I email him and ask if I can expense a lunch and it's a 1 minute answer, he's not gonna charge me. But if it's gonna take him a good amount of time to respond, then he will. And I think that this is completely fair.

I'd expect the same from a doctor. If I am asking a very occasional and non-urgent question with a quick answer (e.g., can I take my medicine and drink alcohol safely) then yeah, I'll be annoyed if I get a $25 fee. But typing out responses to question might take my doctor 30 minutes, so it's fair if they charge me, so long as I get a good answer in a reasonable timeframe.

Obviously there's exceptions. If it's a brain surgeon who just made $25,000 on a single procedure and I have a 15 minute followup question, it seems a little nervy to bill me $25 more, but not if I'm emailing my kid's pediatrician a picture of a rash.

chadash··on My co-founder wants to bring his wife as a late joining co-founder
There's a lot of weird stuff going on here. First of all, someone new joined your lab one month ago and in that month, your friend not only started a personal relationship but even plan to marry? That seems like a red flag to begin with (although to be fair, I know multiple people who got engaged after 2-3 dates and have had long and happy marriages... so not saying that it's a problem, just a red flag).

Second, your co-founder wants to grant co-founder status to his girlfriend. That seems like an odd request. I think I'd be uncomfortable with this even if it was my best friend and he'd been married to his wife for over a decade. There's plenty of things that can go wrong in a startup to begin with, no need to add the possibility of divorce and other relationship issues to the mix.

Finally, they "often reach consensus without involving me in the preliminary discussions"? That's very odd, assuming that you and your friend have roughly equal shares of equity. I personally would shy away from partnering with two romantically involved people, but at the very least, I'd want to feel like I'm not being crowded out and having decisions made behind my back.

chadash··on My co-founder wants to bring his wife as a late joining co-founder
Who says she isn't vesting? The standard is that even 50/50 cofounders have a vesting schedule.
chadash··on Ask HN: What skills are worth learning long-term against AI?
Building something the right way doesn’t matter if you don’t build the right thing. Requirements are never fully specified and it is your job to use good judgment on the ambiguous parts. Figure out what business problem you are being asked to solve and recommend solutions accordingly. “If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse” - Henry Ford

Also, you most likely think your job is what’s in the job description. That is not true. Unless you are in a field where output is super easy to measure (e.g., professional golf) your job is to make life easier for your boss and other people above you at your company.

chadash··on Claude 3 model family
There’s a market for that though. If I am running a startup to generate video meeting summaries, the price of the models might matter a lot, because I can only charge so much for this service. On the other hand, if I’m selling a tool to have AI look for discrepancies in mergers and acquisitions contracts, the difference between $1 and $5 is immaterial… I’d be happy to pay 5x more for software that is 10% better because the numbers are so low to begin with.

My point is that there’s plenty of room for high priced but only slightly better models.

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