glenngillen

The lawyer I ended up using for a lot of my structuring happily admitted as much when I was shopping around for someone to do what I needed. I said something along the lines of "all the other quotes I've got are obviously more expensive, I have to think that's because they've put a lot more work into them to cover/mitigate any precedent I need to be concerned with and/or are better equipped defend these documents if we end up in court". His reply was: "Oh sweet summer child! You think any of us are showing up in court to defend these contracts!? No. If someone has issues with any of these, you'll send them to me and I'll charge you my rate to deal with them. If we need use a clause in these contracts to protect ourselves or get what we're owed then I'll send a bunch of stern emails about it, and I'll charge you my rate. But if anything ever ends up in court... hah... that's not us man. Now you're having to find a lawyer that specialises in litigation. Nobody that you're speaking to about these documents right now is going to show up in court to defend these documents. That's not how it works".

When I pushed the others it turns out he was right (except for one especially large firm who basically did everything, but it may as well have been a collection of a dozen different companies). Really appreciated his honesty but was all the more baffled by how the whole industry hadn't already been disrupted.

I'm not sure I follow the correlation or causation logic here. By the evidence presented the conclusion I would draw is it's very difficult to have repeated success. All your stated failures predated any unionisation.

If anything to unionization seems correlated simply to how long a company has been around.

Is this unique to AI? I feel like something changed with social media becoming kinda ubiquitous. Like everyone suddenly felt the need to have an opinion on every thing. And on lots of divisive topics the fact you might not have an opinion could have you face criticism for not caring and/or being on the "other" side to whatever position your accuser/interrogator is.

I don't actually know what it is or when the phenomenon changed, but it definitely feels like people don't say "I don't know" or "I don't know enough to have an opinion on that" very much any more.

In hindsight it was quite early in my career, but a bit over 20 years ago I felt burnt out in tech and wanted to try something new. I was share trading quite a bit so thought maybe I'd become a stock broker (online trading was only just starting to become a thing, so being a broker was still a real job at the time!). I finished the degree and got qualified, and while I loved the learning I discovered I hated the industry and that it wasn't for me.

But all of that discovery work, the financial planning, what their actual objectives were, having to dig into why someone wanted to buy a house, etc. proved to be some of the most invaluable and transferable skills I've learned (that, and SQL ;). A lot of that part of the course was learning how to ask questions, and learning how to follow-up to get past the superficial and often incorrect initial answers.

To your point I feel like there's these kind of meta skills that are transferable to many domains, but are sadly lacking these days from a lot of education that is hyper-focused on very role-specific qualifications. The ones that immediately come to mind:

- Learning how to learn (i.e., how to understand yourself, and improve)

- How to ask good questions (similar to above, but about others)

- And something I need a better label for because I just clumsily call it "sales", but in the Daniel Pink "To Sell is Human" style. Something like being able to structure a coherent and compelling narrative to other people. Clearly I fall short on this one.

Totally agree with unique at own domain isn't actually privacy. It wouldn't take much of a paper trail to work out the details.

I continue to use it everywhere for a few reasons:

- if someone emails me acting all friendly like we've had some previous relationship but it's sent to linked@mydomain or github@mydomain I know they've just scraped my contact details and it's spam

- similarly, if a vendor leaks or sells my data and I start receiving marketing from somewhere I don't expect it's easier to trace the source of the leak (and in some cases just blackhole that entire email address)

- I already use a password manager and have different passwords on every site, but having a different email address too raises the barrier further for someone trying to script an automated attack based off some other pwned data set.

yes, but how else would you know that "flare" was the load bearing part of that statement? /s

I've not lived in London for more than a decade. I always thought the black snot was from the Tube. Is it not?

Last time I was in the US the lowest dose melatonin gummies I could find in a CVS were 1mg — kids gummies.

That's more than 3x the actual recommended dose for an average adult based on the research others have shared in this thread. So no, they're not starting from a sensible starting point.

I remember thinking the same about a bunch of friends I know who were working at early GitHub. What are you all doing build a replacement Campfire? Omg, now there's a team building an IDE because they don't like Textmate? And dozens of similar ones I've forgotten over the years. But both of those lead to Electron, and Atom, and ultimately VSCode. Which given they ultimately ended up at MSFT probably didn't hurt when the acquisition conversations started.

He became CTO in 2014. I was familiar with him at Joyent some years before that though.

edit/update: and the Samsung acquisition was in 2016. So I'd hope the CTO would have _some_ involvement in that decision.

The apparent fear of universal healthcare many Americans seen to have is incredible.

And to call it out in a thread where someone has literally shared that they're forced to attend a pointless appointment at an exorbitant cost like that isn't itself some form of wasteful bureaucracy. But if the time and money is going to a corporation instead of the government it's better :/

also subscribing to this!

Agreed. From a quick skim (especially of the CLI interface) it looks to be a device to impersonate an NFC card, so you can then put it on a reader (eg. A hotel room door) and try to reverse engineer the handshake.

Back in the early days of Heroku (when I worked there), we were all fairly deep into the Ruby community. Ruby has never had a great reputation for performance, but... it seemed like almost a running joke that any time you went down a rabbit-hole trying to understand some weird performance issue you'd eventually discover that @tmm1 had already identified the same issue months earlier, patched it in core, and given an hour long talk about it somewhere. Despite his ability and willingness talk publicly about quite deep technical topics Aman always came across as an incredibly quiet and humble in person. Every Ruby developer has benefited from his attention to finding and fixing performance issues. I'm sure the same can probably said for every GitHub user (where he worked for years).

Congrats to the entire Cursor team! I don't know all of their stories, but I do like to smile and celebrate a little when I see people who are often hidden in the shadows quietly making things x% better for all of millions of us every day for many years getting reward for that effort.

And Edinburgh in Scotland

I was just wondering the same thing!

I do suspect it was built with some form of AI though because the handful of links I've tried to dig into have all linked to the wrong place/are invalid :/

It's been a lot of trial & error. A quick aside: running these tests/evals/call them what you will at scale has been fascinating to me. Going back and trawling through the logs has been like speed-running through hundreds of usability tests with people, full of the same types of "aha! Of course you'd try and do that, why didn't I think of that already?" moments of insight and inspiration.

Which is also how we've gone about working out how to improve the CLI. It's usually one or more of:

* rethinking the subcommands and hierarchy to something more obvious and aligned to the task

* providing clear documentation upfront (i.e, in the skills file)

* keeping help text concise, but not too concise. You can't assume the reader is already a power user and it's simply looking for a reminder/reference. So include usage examples for common use cases

* where possible on errors, suggest the likely commands the person meant.

* In general offer affordances on what likely next steps will be. This goes for help output, success, and errors.

> cli help text is usually massive

That doesn't have to be true.

> could eat a lot of the savings on retries

This doesn't have to be true either. You don't need to give the same full help output on every single error, once they've got it once they've got it. Also the size of the entire help output for most CLIs is generally insignificant compared to even just a couple of source files in most repos.

I did exactly that and it's all covered in the blog post. There's no hidden eval harness, it's in the same codebase as the CLI so others can reproduce and/or extend as they see fit. It also includes code editing tasks and measures them too. The only asterisk on the code editing is I didn't automate the reporting of accuracy because the test only uses Claude and having it judge it's own work seemed dubious, and having our existing parsers + policy checks verify Claude's output in a benchmark test like this might look like we were cooking the books in our favor (i.e., we're testing and verifying using our own system which obviously we will always get 100% on). Writing up a whole new independent Terraform parser or test harness to verify the results was beyond the scope of what I was willing to do for this just right now. So I opted for a "just assume Claude always gets it right", and we reported on just the token differences to get there.

I'm not sure I follow, which profile do you mean? My profile on HN?

I don't know if we'll keep dissecting every incremental improvement we make as (so far) the general approach is the same as documented in the existing blog post: document common use cases -> benchmark them -> identify bottlenecks/expensive hot spots -> fix them -> repeat

The main thing changing right now is observing new more frequent use cases (either because we're adding new capabilities, or users are doing things we didn't entirely predict) and adding them to the test cases.

Exactly! The estimates + cost diffs are expandable in the PR so you can see the working.

We've a lot of experience doing this! Also while this feeds into and supports LLMs and non-deterministic systems, our recommendations are entirely deterministic. So it's pretty rare to have a "wrong" recommendation given they've essentially been implemented + reviewed by actual people.

What can definitely happen though is you get one that is inappropriate in a given context. An example here might be a recommendation from an m5.2xlarge to an m6g.2xlarge instance. Same vCPUs and memory, lower cost, but... also a switch from Intel -> ARM architectures. For a lot of companies their build pipelines make it easy enough to make that change. For others there may be some specific dependency on Intel for that workload which means changing the architecture isn't viable. In that case you can simply dismiss the recommendation and we'll stop suggesting it.

We do cache the results locally so that we're not repeatedly hitting our pricing API. The LLM doesn't access that cache directly though as it'd suffer the token tax you mention. Instead we optimised our CLI to return agent optimised results. We're constantly iterating and improving on it, but it already reduces the tokens usage very significantly. I wrote about it here: https://www.infracost.io/resources/blog/we-cut-claude-s-toke...

We've found even more improvements since that post so those will be shipping soon too.

I guess another way to interpret what he was trying to say could also be:

"the kind of movies that I loved and the kind of movies that were my bread and butter (are no longer affordable if I was to do a cinema release)"

So maybe Behind the Candelabra was direct to HBO precisely because of the economics he was pointing out?

What do you mean by "Terraform cross compatibility"? Pulumi was (initially) built upon the same underlying providers so had the same capabilities.

I'd posit the main difference between the two was Terraform's declarative approach provided more consistency and predictability in how infrastructure was defined and provisioned. The constraints it imposed were the benefit vs a sprawling estate with a hundred different bespoke ways to provision a given service in your preferred language.

Yikes. If you showed me this car and asked me to guess the brand I'd probably say Renault. Which isn't meant to be shade on Renault, and I don't exactly hate the design and might even take a look at it if I was in the market given the expectations I have around the price point of a new Renault.

This is absolutely not a car that screams "Ferrari" though.

Yeah, while the "average" person might be able to gracefully handle these situations there's still a lot of people who do things that to me seem obviously silly and avoidable.

Locally there's a bridge that is regularly hit by human drivers. A bridge! Not a rare weather pattern, not some temporary and surprising change in conditions. A physical structure that has literally been there for over 100 years. The approach has numerous warnings, flashing lights, and swinging poles that will hit your vehicle and alert you that you're too high to clear the underpass if you continue. And yet... it's so common that there's websites and instagram tags and all manner of things to track and laugh at the people that continue to do it anyway.

FYI, 59 days since the last incident apparently: https://howmanydayssincemontaguestreetbridgehasbeenhit.com

not OP, but apparently all it takes is 2 kids that are independently into multiple sports + both parents being actively involved in the clubs/work schedules that allow us to regularly make every training session and game means we're regularly playing taxi for multiple families and having to split ourselves across locations when fixtures clash. Also all their kit just takes up a heap of space too. I wanted a sedan when we upgraded one of our cars late last year but it just wasn't going to work given all of the above.

I remember meeting a founder who had a moderately successful adtech business who was venting about the difficulty getting very large brands with huge spend on board. This is probably almost 2 decades ago now before what many of us take for granted in terms of analytics, so direct attribution between spend and return wasn't particularly common.

He was having great success with small and mid-tier companies, then he'd run a pilot with a massive global brand and the results would be even more stark than what he'd see with his existing users. But basically could not close a deal.

Because of exactly what you've shared here: "they measured on how much the spend, not on how much they bring in. Because they've never been able to do that. Their job is so much easier if nobody can ever see that latter figure they just go year to year asking for more budget and the more they spend the more everyone thinks they're doing a great job". I was naive enough at the time to think he was wrong and that couldn't possibly be true. But I've seen enough in the years since to realise he was right.

I mostly agree with what you said (the diff being we've still done the "pretty" output and progress bars for the human-centric outputs). And I found it a fun exercise as trawling through the log output of the LLM tests to see why things were slow at times felt like watching a bunch of usability tests. Various approaches to solve problems that seem obvious in hindsight but not at all paths we'd optimised for. If you've ever done usability testing on something you've built you probably have a sense for what I'm talking about.

And yes, one of the outcomes of this was also ditching the human output for something more dense and LLM friendly.

Most big companies still have travel agencies/companies manage their corporate travel. I can’t remember who we used when I was at Amazon, but I made a similar complaint to my manager once given I could fly cheaper in a higher class on a different airline (also one I had heaps of points with so I would have preferred it because I’d be able to upgrade further and/or use the lounge).

Turns out the price I saw in the booking portal isn’t actually what Amazon paid. It’s kinda more like a rack rate listing. But then there’s all kinds of discounting/cash back that happens on the backend based on the amount of travel booked each month.