markbao

Goody | Remote | $200–250K + equity and benefits | Full-time

Goody is hiring a full-stack Staff Software Engineer who likes to ship at a startup pace and has an eye for exceptional UI/UX.

I'm Mark, the technical co-founder and CTO at Goody. Despite being something everyone does, gifting is one of the areas of commerce yet to be disrupted. Our goal is to make people's days by making gifting easy, while building a sustainable business on that market opportunity.

We're looking for engineers who like to build at a startup pace, have a critical eye for detail and user experience, and thrive when given autonomy and ownership.

Our product is used by Google, Stripe, Anthropic, Meta, NBCUniversal, Notion, and others, and we also offer a developer API for commerce.

Check out our jobs minisite at https://jobs.ongoody.com/swe and feel free to email me at mark@ongoody.com.

This is very cool. Great that it’s built out of metal for longevity and repairability. Wonder if they could make the radius of the rotation smaller since that seems like the most likely ergonomic improvement I could see from the demo.

True, that’s a good example of the commenter’s “last 5% is the 95%”

I don’t like them either. The UX is annoying and it’s way too large. The benefit is that I get to see more options than can fit on the screens and they have photos, but still in person just seems better.

But I’ve read they’re effective, apparently, in consistently upselling compared to a human, so I’m guessing that’s their play.

McDonald’s is an interesting example because they’re increasingly replacing cashiers with kiosks. Robotics/LLMs seem to have diminishing returns compared to that in the order taking realm.

Just right-click any file in VSCode/Cursor to see how absolutely chaotic and tedious a long menu is without icons. Now imagine that Google Docs example without icons.

It’s much easier to recognize the funnel icon to make a filter, than to skim all that text.

AI-generated section “NVIDIA’s earnings” nerfed the credibility of this piece.

“Bad” seems extreme. The only way to pass the litmus test you’ve described is for a tool to be 100% perfect, so then the graph looks like 99.99% “bad tool” until it reaches 100% perfection.

It’s not that binary imo. It can still be extremely useful and save a ton of time if it does 90% of the work and you fix the last 10%. Hardly a bad tool.

It’s only a bad tool if you spent more time fixing the results than building it yourself, which sometimes used to be the case for LLMs but is happening less and less as they get more capable.

I think those machines are super fun and a snappy Linux experience is very satisfying. I use a lightweight WM myself on Linux and prefer it over the heavy ones. But this segment is 0.1% of technology users and we shouldn’t constrain applications to the limited hardware that this population chooses to use.

I disagree that we should be optimizing for low end machines and holding back on product improvements for the 80% mass market. Technology improves, it’s one of its best traits. We don’t need to be stuck in the past.

In a lot of ways, I agree with you. I think the key thing is that the complexity should be appropriate to what needs to get done.

Animations and etc. that distract from the actual content are superfluous. Agreed! I hate it when sites scrolljack.

But lots of HN posters want to impose the same austerity on every website, regardless of whether it’s appropriate. You can’t build Linear in 100KB of JS. Nor would you want to run it on 1 GB RAM. And that’s the case for a lot of economically useful applications.

Keeping things as simple as possible shouldn’t be the goal. It should be keeping it simple enough for the use case at hand.

To me it’s so obvious that it doesn’t require testing. The market shows it; there are nearly no production vehicles at volume with crank windows.

I do like the old JS Gmail UI. But the current JS Gmail UI doesn’t feel any slower. It is cluttered with more features, but some of them I find useful. (Displaying my calendar and being able to accept invites right in Gmail being a big one.)

I’m glad you want that! But, most people wouldn’t. Also, electric seat adjustments give you way more options than the manual adjustments could. And typically with more precision than the under seat bar with discrete positions.

Newspaper websites are a good example of bloat, true. I think if you’re in the business of primarily serving text content and not doing much interactive stuff, you don’t need a heavy site. A lot of them tend to cram their websites with trackers and ads and I guess that’s a business thing.

Tbh, it’s unpopular around HN, but I felt like AMP was a great experience for users. AMP pages were super fast and had no annoying banners - and none of my pet peeve: layout shift.

Most people have phones that can handle webpages with 1-5MB JS bundles. Why artificially limit what you can do on the web? Why limit ourselves to 1GB RAM when more resources means tech becomes more useful?

Returning to simple webpages is popular idea on HN but it’s like wanting a car with no backup camera and crank windows. If your goal is to have your car be as simple as possible, then sure, but that’s not the case for most people.

Most people want their cars to be safe and convenient, and their webpages useful and rich, more so than they want to return to some idealized simplicity.

A simple webpage or blog with minimal styling that runs as an ARM binary on a TV remote is cool and fun but it’s not economically useful. It’s the equivalent of a manual scooter. We can build better apps (in the same way that car manufacturers can build less crappy infotainment systems) but optimizing for scarcity isn’t the answer in a world where abundance tends to grow.

(Edit: your downvotes mean nothing to me, I’ve seen what gets upvoted!)

Goody | Remote | $200–250K + equity and benefits | Full-time

Goody is hiring a full-stack Staff Software Engineer who likes to ship at a startup pace and has an eye for exceptional UI/UX.

I'm Mark, the technical co-founder and CTO at Goody. Despite being something everyone does, gifting is one of the areas of commerce yet to be disrupted. Our goal is to make people's days by making gifting easy, while building a sustainable business on that market opportunity.

We're looking for engineers who like to build at a startup pace, have a critical eye for detail and user experience, and thrive when given autonomy and ownership.

Our product is used by Google, Stripe, Anthropic, Meta, NBCUniversal, Notion, and others, and we also offer a developer API for commerce.

Check out our jobs minisite at https://jobs.ongoody.com/swe and feel free to email me at mark@ongoody.com.

The Dropbox thing is exactly what I was thinking of when I was writing my original comment.

Here is the reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

The basic summary is that a HN commenter suggested Dropbox was redundant because you could do some convoluted setup that 0.1% of the world would understand and 0.001% would actually want to use (and yes, that’s still a few hundred thousand people) and overall that aged poorly.

Most of the loudest critics - and, I’ve found, many commenters on HN - are entirely out of touch with the majority of technology users. To think that nobody wants these features isn’t based on what we see in the real world, which shows a billion users using ChatGPT every month. That, plus the fact that AI browsers already exist and have users, indicates that the argument is more “I don’t like AI and everyone else should agree” rather than “the data shows that nobody likes AI”.

Those critics then straw-man by saying the AI will take up a ton of resources in your browser (it could be as simple as a text box) or collect your data secretively (what company wants to deal with that PR fallout?).

Goody | Remote | $200–250K + equity and benefits | Full-time

Goody is hiring a full-stack Staff Software Engineer who likes to ship at a startup pace and has an eye for exceptional UI/UX.

I'm Mark, the technical co-founder and CTO at Goody. Despite being something everyone does, gifting is one of the areas of commerce yet to be disrupted. Our goal is to make people's days by making gifting easy, while building a sustainable business on that market opportunity.

We're looking for engineers who like to build at a startup pace, have a critical eye for detail and user experience, and thrive when given autonomy and ownership.

Our product is used by Google, Stripe, Anthropic, Meta, NBCUniversal, Notion, and others, and we also offer a developer API for commerce.

Check out our jobs minisite at https://jobs.ongoody.com/swe and feel free to email me at mark@ongoody.com.

Just as the core idea of a book can be (lossily) summarized in a few sentences, the core crux of an argument can be quite simple and not require wading though the whole discussion (the AGI discussion is only 30 minutes anyhow).

Granted, a bunch of commenters are probably doing what you’re saying.

Goody | Remote | $200–250K + equity and benefits | Full-time

Goody is hiring a full-stack Staff Software Engineer who likes to ship at a startup pace and has an eye for exceptional UI/UX.

I'm Mark, the technical co-founder and CTO at Goody. Despite being something everyone does, gifting is one of the areas of commerce yet to be disrupted. Our goal is to make people's days by making gifting easy, while building a sustainable business on that market opportunity.

We're looking for engineers who like to build at a startup pace, have a critical eye for detail and user experience, and thrive when given autonomy and ownership.

Our product is used by Google, Stripe, Anthropic, Meta, NBCUniversal, Notion, and others, and we also offer a developer API for commerce.

Check out our jobs minisite at https://jobs.ongoody.com/swe and feel free to email me at mark@ongoody.com.

Goody | Remote | $200–250K + equity and benefits | Full-time

Goody is hiring a full-stack Staff Software Engineer who likes to ship at a startup pace and has an eye for exceptional UI/UX.

I'm Mark, the technical co-founder and CTO at Goody. Despite being something everyone does, gifting is one of the areas of commerce yet to be disrupted. Our goal is to make people's days by making gifting easy, while building a sustainable business on that market opportunity.

We're looking for engineers who like to build at a startup pace, have a critical eye for detail and user experience, and thrive when given autonomy and ownership.

Our product is used by Google, Stripe, Anthropic, Meta, NBCUniversal, Notion, and others, and we also offer a developer API for commerce.

Check out our jobs minisite at https://jobs.ongoody.com/swe and feel free to email me at mark@ongoody.com.

Most engineers spending their own money maybe, but the cost of Opus is not that much compared to the output when the company is paying for it.

Kei trucks are small but they look like a workhorse in a similar way to a classic Hilux giving them a respectability that I think this design lacks.

I agree there should be more approachable designs, just seems like this went way too far in the direction of toy-like

This is cool I guess but I don’t get why some of these electric car companies have to design cars that look like toys. Rivian and this. It looks like a golf cart with a flatbed. I think an electric kei truck would have a huge market in the US but the design needs some work to be taken seriously.

There’s something to be said for being distinctive, but you can do that while not looking silly (Lucid is a good example). And simply being a small electric truck is enough differentiation anyway

Goody | Remote | $200–250K + equity and benefits | Full-time

Goody is hiring a full-stack Staff Software Engineer who likes to ship at a startup pace and has an eye for exceptional UI/UX.

I'm Mark, the technical co-founder and CTO at Goody. Despite being something everyone does, gifting is one of the areas of commerce yet to be disrupted. Our goal is to make people's days by making gifting easy, while building a sustainable business on that market opportunity.

We're looking for engineers who like to build at a startup pace, have a critical eye for detail and user experience, and thrive when given autonomy and ownership.

Our product is used by Google, Stripe, Anthropic, Meta, NBCUniversal, Notion, and others, and we also offer a developer API for commerce.

Check out our jobs minisite at https://jobs.ongoody.com/swe and feel free to email me at mark@ongoody.com.

Don’t agree, but to each their own. The native app experience for every app noted in the article is better and smoother than the mobile web version, in my opinion. Lots of people hate Electron apps, which suggests to me that my preference for native apps isn’t unique.

Web apps can ask for your location or microphone the same way native apps can. Just reject it, there’s nothing that says you have to accept on either platform, so to say that’s a negative for native apps is odd.

The biggest downside of native apps is you can’t customize them with extensions or user styles like you can with websites.

The point of SPAs was never page transitions. I can’t name a single major SPA that does good page transitions, can you? They all just replace the content. And to take a popular SPA framework as an example, it’s almost impossible to do page transitions in Next.js because of the way routes are loaded. I know this because I added proper page transitions to Next.js and it has been an absolute nightmare.

There are two good reasons for SPAs that I can see:

1. Your app probably needs interactivity anyway; for most apps, it’s not just going to be HTML and CSS. Writing your app in some unholy combination of React and HTML is not fun especially when you need to do things like global state.

2. Loading the structure of pages up front so that subsequent data loads and requests are snappy. Getting a snappy loading screen is usually better than clicking and getting nothing for 500ms and then loading in; the opposite is true below I’d say 100ms. Not needing to replace the whole page results in better frontend performance, which can’t really be matched today with just the web platform.

Basecamp has probably invested the most in making a fairly complex webapp without going full SPA, but click around for like 30 seconds and you’ll see it can’t hold a candle in performance to SPAs, never mind native apps.

With that said, I agree that I’d want the web to work more like the web, instead of this weird layer on top. All the complexity that Next.js and SPAs have added over the years have resulted in more responsive but sometimes more tedious-to-build apps, and gigantic bundles. I just don’t think you can match the performance of SPAs yet with just HTML.

There was an article on HN a few days back on how it’s very hard to convey all the context in your head about a codebase to solve a problem, and that’s partly why it’s actually hard to use AI for non-trivial implementations. That’s not just limited to code.

I don’t use AI for most of my product work because it doesn’t know any of the nuances of our product, and just like doing code review for AI is boring and tedious, it’s also boring and tedious to exhaustively explain that stuff in a doc, if it can even be fully conveyed, because it’s a combination of strategy, hearsay from customers, long-standing convos with coworkers…

I’d rather just do the product work. Also, I’ve self-selected by survivorship bias to be someone who likes doing the product work too, which means I have even less desire to give it up.

Smarter LLMs could solve this maybe. But the difficulty of conveying information seems like a hard thing to solve.