stack_framer

Our first year on Vercel, the bill was $40,000. When our management went back to negotiate the second year, Vercel wanted $120,000! Vercel wasn't offering 3x the features, mind you, they just knew we were locked in. Our management got it down to $60,000 (still a 50% cost increase, year over year).

Our app is small beans, too. We don't even have that many users. To borrow a favorite term from DHH, Vercel are "merchants of complexity."

But they're only half the problem. Our management is the other half. They can't be bothered to grow a spine and move away from Vercel. So we'll just keep paying, and eventually some people will "be affected" by a "reduction in force."

Now do OpenAI...

I once had an external monitor with a maximum refresh rate of 30 Hz, and mouse movements were noticeably sluggish. It was part of a multi-monitor setup, so it was very obvious as I moved the mouse between monitors.

I'm not sure if this LG display will have the same issue, but I won't be an early adopter.

My wife and I canceled Netflix a while ago and went back to DVDs. An FYE store in our area recently had a store closing sale, so we bought three DVD players and snapped up all our favorite DVDs for a few bucks each.

No subscription, no mid-movie ads, and no worrying about this or that service losing the streaming rights to whatever.

I never actually type semicolons in my JavaScript / TypeScript. In work projects, my IDE adds them for me thanks to the linter. In personal projects, I just leave them out (I don't use a linter, so my IDE does not add them), and I've never had a problem. Not even once.

Semicolon FUD is for the birds.

Under Secretary of War Emil Michael posted that there is no active negotiation with Anthropic:

https://x.com/USWREMichael/status/2029754965778907493

The AOL version missed an opportunity: After connecting it should have said, "You've got mail!"

AI also makes you bored.

I'm seeing a 404 page. I assume this is unintentional, but it's making a funny point: How could AGI possibly be imminent and we still have 404 pages?

Regardless, I agree with this article whose body eludes me: AGI is not imminent, it's hype in the extreme. It's the next fusion. It's perpetually on the horizon (pun intended), and we've wasted trillions on machines that will never reach it.

We went from having new JavaScript frameworks every week to having new AI frameworks every week. I'm thinking I should build a HN clone that filters out all posts about AI topics...

Wow, this is a new low I did not expect to see. "Just get high and you'll be able to code with an LLM." Preceded by, "I know it's terrible."

I'm wholly unwilling to relinquish my health and my morals to "AI" so I can "ship faster." What a pathetic existence that would be.

I find it such a strange cycle to tell AI to write some code, then tell it to fix the bugs in that code. Why didn't the AI just not include those bugs the first time it wrote the code?!

Truer words were never spoken. You have imparted wisdom upon me today. :)

Older than whom?

> your world view has fixed into a certain way the world works

Yeah, it's weird. I'm fixated on not having bugs in my code. :)

> But it is coming and you will either have to adapt or become irrelevant.

I heard it will be here in six months. I guess I don't have much time to adapt! :)

> wait six months.

I mourn having to repeatedly hear this never-quite-true promise that an amazing future of perfect code from agentic whatevers will come to fruition, and it's still just six months away. "Oh yes, we know we said it was coming six, twelve, and eighteen months ago, but this time we pinky swear it's just six months away!"

I remember when I first got access to the internet. It was revolutionary. I wanted to be online all the time, playing games, chatting with friends, and discovering new things. It shaped my desire to study computer science and learn to develop software! I could see and experience the value of the internet immediately. It's utility was never "six months away," and I didn't have to be compelled to use it—I was eager to use it of my own volition as often as possible.

LLM coding doesn't feel revolutionary or exciting like this. It's a mandate from the top. It's my know-nothing boss telling me to "find ways to use AI so we can move faster." It's my boss's know-nothing boss conducting Culture Amp surveys about AI usage, but ignoring the feedback that 95% of Copilot's PR comments are useless noise: "The name of this unit test could be improved." It's waiting for code to be slopped onto my screen, so I can go over it with a fine-toothed comb and find all the bugs—and there are always bugs.

Here's what I hope is six months away: The death of AI hype.

I wish there was a way to straighten myself out after I drag with the mouse or use the A/D keys to move left or right. I was expecting to be able to turn left or right, and weave through the servers (or whatever they are), as opposed to drifting left/right and eventually getting stuck.

What a great idea; good luck! Also, it's nice to read a hardware story on HN (we need more breaks from AI this and AI that).

How can I listen to your music?

Comments about Elon on HN have become exhaustingly cringe; dripping with devout derision, reeking of righteous reproach, and smacking of sanctimonious seething.

Apparently we must all gnash our teeth at the mere mention of "that man" or anything associated with him. It's as plebeian as it is predictable.

I'm sure this will now be downvoted into oblivion and I'll be accused of "defending an avowed racist" or some other such nonsense.

I want AI that I can command with the least possible effort, in the simplest terms, and it flawlessly does exactly what I said.

I want AI that responds instantaneously, and in a manner perfectly suited to my particular learning style.

I want AI so elegant in its form and function that I completely take it for granted.

What I'm getting instead is something clunky, slow, and flawed. So excuse me while I remain firmly in the anti-AI crowd.

Funny that he mentions people not pivoting away from COBOL. My neighbors work for a bank, programming in COBOL every day. When I moved in and met them 14 years ago, I wondered how much longer they would be able to keep that up.

They're still doing it.

I really like this idea, but I get distracted when the vertical bars don't line up!

  +--------+
  |        |
  | ASCII! |
   |       |
  +--------+

The very first step says...

"Click Rub with Silk to strip the fluid from the rod."

...but the button text is GENERATE FRICTION, not Rub with Silk.

Probably off topic, but what's the best way to get started with embedded development? I've been a web developer for over a decade, but I'd really love to try something much lower level, and I'm currently making my way through the Rust book. I've got a Raspberry Pi on the way, but I assume that's not truly embedded development.

I also use light mode in my terminal. Mock me at your leisure. :)

> Inspired by Andrej Karpathy's tweet[0] on Dec 26, 2024

The tweet was in 2025, not 2024.

[0] https://x.com/karpathy/status/2004607146781278521

It doesn't fit my definition of "clean" at all, but that's a subjective word anyway. I do have some feedback (unrelated to being clean):

- The search field is arguably the most important element on the site. It might benefit from a magnifying glass icon and/or some visual distinctions that make it actually look like a text input for searching. It's thick border and shadow make it look like all the other boxes on the page that have thick borders and shadows!

- Speaking of the search field, it would be really nice if it supported fuzzy search. For example, I searched for "greater than" and got no results. I had to search for "greater-than" (with a dash) to find the math symbols (like ≥).

- The small font size of the symbols makes them really hard to see for old people like me who are pretending not to be old.

- Ditch the analytics and cookie consent nonsense. These are anti-developer!

This post is woefully one-sided. There's no mention of the negative aspects of system design interviews, or the shortcomings of those conducting them, so I'll provide the missing balance:

### Not enough use of AI

I once had an interviewer tell me I wouldn't be advancing to the next round because I didn't use enough AI. My approach was to consult AI about every 10 minutes during a 45-minute interview. To this day I wonder just how many more prompts would have been "right" and how many would have been too many. Either way, it was ridiculous.

### Zero research about the candidate prior to the interview

Interviewers almost invariably ask questions that are literally answered on my resume—so they clearly haven't read it. I also like to keep a few subtle differences between my resume and my LinkedIn page to see if the interviewer is astute enough to discover something about me. They never do—they can't be bothered to spend 60 seconds perusing my LinkedIn page.

### Not starting with the customer

System design interviews often start with little more than API requirements and a drawing app. There's no mention of any customer. It's a fake scenario, lacking any real depth, usually conducted in a way that stigmatizes candidate mistakes.

### Hypocritical expectations on spend

Many companies spend 10x more on AWS than they should, and simultaneously have no appetite for refactoring or technical debt. Your company is probably no different, so please spare me the lecture about making money.

### Inflexibly following the corporate interview prompt

System design interviewers often have a reference diagram of the completed problem, and a set of answers to common questions. If your diagram doesn't match theirs enough, or you don't ask some arbitrary percentage of their questions, you don't advance. Ironically, if you ask a question not in their list, they don't know how to answer but you don't get any bonus points for stumping them.