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I only noticed a few times when she brought up age, and all of them were natural and appropriate in the context. Eg she was asked how old she was when she opened the dry-cleaning business.

Also, there’s this weird thing in culture (is it US only?) that whenever an interviewer brings up (even implicitly) the guest’s age, the guest has to make some quip about it as if they’re offended or sensitive to it. So I wouldn’t interpret even a slightly defensive comment about age as an “obsession.”

Every manager and employer should skim through that subreddit. When I stumbled onto it I felt like Bruce Willis at the end of The Sixth Sense, where the truth was revealed and every flashback moment suddenly made sense and lined up. Until then, things just felt “off” but it was hard to put a finger on what was actually going on.

It’s also possible to “freeze” your employment history report just like you can freeze your credit report. Which prevents even companies with the wherewithal to do an employment history check from getting that information.

People who practice overemployment delude themselves that multiple jobs doesn’t affect their performance and therefore there’s nothing wrong with working multiple jobs. Their subreddit is a dumbfounding echo chamber.

I had an “over-employed” person on my team (who lied about it) and I can confirm what all others are saying about this guy: they start going AWOL, miss important discussions, miss deadlines, blame their colleagues (creating toxic culture), start doing shoddy work because they’re not thinking deeply through problems and also to keep expectations low, create busywork for others to take the pressure off themselves, use company resources and accounts for other projects (creating security issues, among others)… just to name a few reasons.

It’s not about possessiveness. Many co’s are glad to hire contractors, who don’t “belong” to them.

I don’t think so. Or at most it talks about “reasonable effort” or something vague like that.

/someone who discovered an over-employed person on his team and wondered the same thing

Yes, with a little help: https://youtu.be/hmh30wuXg08?si=3M6XG1yF9l_jQEkG

…yes? Feels like there’s some bit of tribal knowledge required to understand your point, but fewer people know it than you think.

In at least the case for coding agents the emerging pattern is to have the agents use containers for isolating work and git for reviewing and merging that work neatly.

See for example the container use MCP which combines both: https://github.com/dagger/container-use

That’s for parallelizing coding work… I’m not sure about other kinds of work. I still see people using workflow builder tools like n8n, Zapier, and maybe CrewAI.

I see a new alternative (or attempt at one) come out every few days, so it shouldn't be long before we have "the one" alternative.

https://www.app.build/ was just launched by the Neon -- err, Databricks -- team and looks promising.

Nice to see container use mentioned (https://github.com/dagger/container-use). I work with the team that made it (a lot of ex-Docker folks including the creator of Docker.)

Running agents in parallel will be a big deal as soon as we learn (or the agents learn) how to reliably work with just one.

Even before then, if you're trying to get work done while the agent is doing its own thing or you find yourself watching over the agent's "shoulder" out of fear it'll change something you didn't ask it to change, then it's useful to run it in a containerized dev environment.

Container use is definitely early but moving quickly, and probably improved even since this post was published. We're currently focused on stability, reducing git confusion, better human<>agent interaction, and environment control.

> Overall, we are convinced that containers can be useful and warranted for programming.

Last week Solomon Hykes (creator of Docker) open-sourced[1] Container Use[2] exactly for this reason, to let agents run in parallel safely. Sharing it here because while Sketch seems to have isolated + local dev environments built in (cool!), no other coding agent does (afaik).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/live/U-fMsbY-kHY?si=AAswZKdyatM9QKCb... - fun to watch regardless

[2] https://github.com/dagger/container-use

Low-latency and cheap retrieval for RAG.

And if you love the look but don’t want to build it and have a spare $18k laying around, just buy one: https://www.1stdibs.com/furniture/tables/dining-room-tables/...

Structured data = relational data

This has more applications than you might first think.

92% reduction is amazing. I often write product marketing materials for devtool companies and load llms.txt into whatever AI I’m using to get accurate details and even example code snippets. But that instantly adds 60k+ tokens which, at least in Google AI Studio, annoyingly slows things down. I’ll be trying this.

Edit: After a longer look, this needs more polish. In addition to key question raised by someone else about quality, there are signs of rushed work here. For example the critical llm_min_guideline.md file, which tells the LLM how to interpret the compressed version, was lazily copy-pasted from an LLM response without even removing the LLM's commentary:

"You are absolutely right! My apologies. I was focused on refining the detail of each section and overlooked that key change in your pipeline: the Glossary (G) section is no longer part of the final file..."

Doesn't exactly instill confidence.

Really nice idea. I hope you keep going with this as it would be a very useful utility.

Fantastic list. Brings back many memories.

Regarding the “recharge” vs “engage” trips: If you’re restless like me then you’ll probably feel most recharged after a trip that fully engaged you. Because you can’t think about work when you’re busy navigating your way through a rural and foreign land, speaking with strangers, and straining to learn just enough of a new language to get around.

The “laser-back” tip is 100% on point. I came to know this intuitively but I’ve never seen it put into words. One caveat I’d add there is: if it takes >20 hours to get to your first destination, give yourself time and permission to just chill on the first full day there.

Also I want to strongly endorse the “carry-on only” tip. More than that, I suggest backpack only. Your options and opportunities for spontaneity increase significantly when you can just swing a backpack ever your shoulder and go. It also forces you to live with less, at least for a time, which in turn teaches you that actually you don’t need all that much to get by. Then you return home and question why you need a closet full of clothes.

See https://www.fixify.com/, although they are too modest about mentioning the AI they're using under the hood.

Congrats Paras. VWO has been my go-to A/B testing platform ever since everyone else either pivoted upmarket into six-figure “experience management platforms” or shut down (Google Experiments). I hope this won’t change!

Author here... I edited "around the base" to "at the base." It was indeed a day hike. I originally said "around" as in "putzing around," not "circling around."

Vercel has revenue of over $100M. So yes at least a few companies use them beyond the free tier.

People want whatever they searched for. If the ads provide that, then sure. That's why Google and Meta are the size that they are...

It may not be a model quality issue. It may be that GitHub wants to sell a lot more of Copilot, including to companies who refuse to use anything from OpenAI. Now GitHub can say "Oh that's fine, we have these two other lovely providers to choose from."

Also, after Anthropic and Google sold massive amounts of pre-paid usage credits to companies, those companies want to draw down that usage and get their money's worth. GitHub might allow them to do that through Copilot, and therefore get their business.

Ouch.

This is even more painful for small-to-midsize projects whose star counts help distinguish them.

People want to save face. Some more than others. I also read the TC article and thought they were trying a bit too hard to make this seem like a good outcome.

Nothing against the founder. It's just how the game is played. And there's little to gain from deviating from the norms.

Edit: It benefits not just the founder’s ego but also the future career prospects of the employees. Big difference in your engineers being able to say “I worked at X all the way until they got acquired!!” and “I worked at X but the product was so unsuccessful we had to have a fire sale.”

You almost don't have to snoop for details to have a good guess at what happened. If the acquisition announcement is the first time in a year or more that you're hearing from this company and they omit the sales price, you can bet this isn't the exit most parties wished for. Although by this stage the founder(s) is probably happy to find a buyer who will retain their team.

For the lazy:

“The main idea is to tell people to ‘F—— off for 15 minutes’ before they get to interrupt you.”

The announcement post says they have a product that early customers are testing. https://www.poolside.ai/checkpoint/announcing-our-500-millio...

It's not a good look to piggyback off competitors' launches like this. Let them have their moment.

(I'm not from Inkeep but I've seen and used their product.)

I'm not sure how they do it but the answer quality and the UI is meaningfully better than all the other "chat with your docs"-type products I've tried.

In other words the promised outcome isn't very original but they've nailed the execution.

Highly recommended. Congrats on the HN launch.

Inkeep works great at Pinecone and meaningfully reduced the number of support tickets with common questions/issues.

[1] https://support.pinecone.io/