mattbrewsbytes

3,735 karmajoined 16년 전

software dev, eng mgr, started professionally during the browser wars

comments

6일 전discuss

Politics is about framing, posturing and perception. Engineers tend to focus on data, science and part of our job is testing a hypothesis, reviewing results and shifting a solution.

A lot of software engineers make a lot of money in the US from very right/center leaning companies. Its hard to have an honest opinion on political topics like AI data centers, government funding towards AI/tech companies, etc. when some element of those are tied to your career. Even indirectly - funding up across the industry helps everyone out in the industry (same can be said for layoffs, it impacts the industry too).

A corollary might be commercial airline pilots. It might be hard for them to be environmentalists because of the pollution jets create, but they might love aviation so much that they are blinded to the detrimental things their career may contribute to the environment. Engineers loving programming and computing so much that they turn a blind eye towards massive build outs of data centers.

Its called cognitive dissonance.

11일 전discuss

> I need to have the system running day and night

Buy a server or rent a VPS. Take the cost of either of the Apple options and divide by 36 months and get the biggest server you can for that monthly price.

17일 전discuss

Usually when talking about bubbles bursting its about a stock market bubble. P/E ratios now are approaching/passing the P/E ratios during the dot com boom/bust. Another reference point with high P/E ratios was around 1929-1930 (there are others too).

The dot com boom can be thought of as ecommerce which enabled investing in a lot of silly ideas at the time. A key technology that underpinned it all and won out was search. Every ecommerce site felt like they needed search, there were search engine companies, lots of competition across google, yahoo, etc.

An interesting lens to put on AI and the current stock market is that the software will be commoditized, its an eventuality. Its trending towards being able to run LLMs locally and get decent output. Decent is subjective but output similar to Q4 of 2025 models is when we started seeing more consistently usable output.

I believe that will a potential the inflection point for a bubble bursting the stock market: local or DIY LLMs producing "good enough" output and companies publicly backing away from enterprise contracts, lowering their AI spend if they can find cheaper ways to do it.

26일 전discuss

AI support agents, chatbots, etc. on web sites these days are the equivalent to search engines during the dot com boom. Everyone felt that having a search engine on their dot com was the killer feature that was going to win. There were a lot of companies building search engine technologies and selling them too. Now its ubiquitous that most ecommerce sites have a search bar but nobody cares about the underlying technology much, its consolidated and commoditized.

Good on Intercom for getting acquired.

If we're seeing larger consolidation/acquisitions happen, does that mean the hype train has hit a key station?

지난달discuss

You do a great job not curating content. If people are complaining about the plethora of JS frameworks years ago or "everything is AI" these days, its a reflection of what people are discussing online.

Now I'm waiting for these ideas to collide and once the hoopla about AI hits a lull, everyone's going to go re-invent parsing the DOM, again and we'll see lots of new AI generated JS frameworks.

지난달discuss

> is kinda fake and unauthentic

I think Apple can't find their voice since Steve Jobs passed/stopped doing the presentations. Thats why it feels inauthentic. I imagine its also hard to really feel "best (iphone|ipad|macos|etc) yet" when they are debuting features that existed elsewhere for a while. Its just a massive disconnect from anyone but fans. The same could be said for innovative features, whats left to innovate on smart phones?

In some ways both things are like having to be the person coming on after an amazing presentation or comic or musical act. How do you follow it?

지난달discuss

Your job as an experienced developer is to ship working code, the fact that AI tools are here doesn't change that. I would strive to create as minimal a set of artifacts for AI as possible. Observing where we are today with 6 months or 12 months ago means the state of the art is constantly shifting. Spending a lot of effort implementing some concept you've read about or watched others talk about online might not be useful in 6 months. Its hard to discern valuable content vs. stuff people are finding gets lots of clicks these days.

If what you're creating isn't shippable to a customer/user then really scrutinize it. Things like AI skills, AI task loops, etc. those are all throw-away artifacts, the equivalent of Jira tickets. If you can get AI to help delivery without them, do that. The AI lab companies want you to use tokens but if you can automate something without AI in the mix, since you're experienced I assume you know shell scripting, automation concepts, etc., then automate it to work without token use. This is especially if you are doing something solo - your process and workflow can change on a whim so the least amount of overhead is going to keep you lean and focused on shipping software.

지난달discuss

Letting new stocks marinate in the market and get 4 quarters of SEC filings along with following all the GAAP accounting practices will definitely help evaluate them before inclusion. The last large boom/bust cycle had a couple of companies, at least, that were doing illegal things. I'm not stating that these three are, just that nobody knows and the process should play out.

I do wonder if any of these three companies are using AI to do their accounting and bookkeeping. What happens when there are AI hallucinations affecting those outcomes?

지난달discuss

It might be a good idea to move to entire market index funds (VTI for example) for a few months around these IPOs to minimize the blast radius to your portfolio which still includes them in case of massive upside. If there is a downturn in the markets, its also a great time to be buying in, so keep up those contributions.

A major reason for the waiting period before being added to indices is to see 4 quarters of results, accounting practices, and all the fine print on those SEC filings. All sorts of other ETFs and mutual funds index off the indexes so the market will not have the waiting time to ascertain if these companies balance sheets and accounting practices are filled with bullshit.

Is it possible that one of these IPO's would be like a Global Crossing or Enron having an IPO during the dot com timeframe and would being auto-included into indexes be a good idea? Certainly not. I'm not claiming any of these companies are cooking their books or committing fraud, etc. only pointing out that there was a reason for the waiting period and part of that reason is seeing results held up to accounting standards.

2개월 전discuss

Or possibly an elevated number of AI Slop Cannons aiming their LLM generated hallucinations at github hosted repos?

2개월 전discuss

I'm just an internet commenter who knows nothing about running a retail store and has thought about a bookstore as well. With that out of the way, finding high margin items to sell to offset low margin items would make sense. I think this is why you see coffee paired with bookstores, coffee should be high margin but might also require food licensing/inspections.

Ideas for a local bookstore: seasonal and local items for sale, think gift giving timeframes - mothers day, fathers day, end of year holidays. Items like unique greeting cards, calendars, custom gift wrapping, having a kids section with higher margin items kids like - toys, trading cards, etc. Also you could throw some checkout friendly things like book lights, book marks, candies, etc.

If you find local craftspeople, offer some shelf/floor space for free if you can agree on a split of the margin. Hand-crafted things would pair well during holiday seasons and advertised properly might get repeat visits and word of mouth spreading.

2개월 전discuss

You could say the same about software. In both cases someone is looking at a screen typing things. One is used for communicating with other humans, the other is used for communicating with computers. For sure there are software engineers working on projects where its not apparent how it generates value and it may not actually generate value.

2개월 전discuss

In the dot com boom there were companies spending like $100+ on ads per $1 of revenue. The cost of customer acquisition was insanely high because of the hype of ecommerce and it was being subsidized by VC and IPO's.

This AI boom feels similar, a lot of hype and the AI usage costs are being subsidized by private equity/VC so far. IPO's are supposed to happen this fall for OpenAI and Anthropic. They're going to have to face the music of corporate governance, accounting rules, reporting revenue, earnings, etc. Subsidizing users seems unsustainable, they need to either jack up rates or downgrade usage per plans. Then there is the circular investments between all of them and Google, Microsoft, etc. Seems like a house of cards.

2개월 전discuss

The race to invent variants of Gas Towns, Ralph loops, pump out videos, blogs, etc. showing off greenfield development with cleverly named agents running in parallel is another case of engineering people diving head first into Resume Driven Development.

Sure there are industry changing things going on. What if you're working on an app thats a decade old and has had different teams of people, styles, frameworks (thanks to the JS-framework-a-week Resume Driven Development)? Some markdown docs and a loop of agents isn't going to help when humans have trouble understanding what the app does.

2개월 전discuss

I think there's merit in a privacy first, no ads, no global/viral content app/service like this; there have been a lot of threads here on HN with related sentiment. I think the challenge is more a business problem - how do you pull users in when people may be scattered across various platforms? Are you finding that a single user purchasing a $2/mo plan pulls in additional users?

2개월 전discuss

Back then your typical management, who frequently followed "you can't go wrong with picking IBM" in their decision making, would question open source software and take actions to stop it from being used (like blocking sites in a corp firewall). Open source software was a counter culture then, now its common and mainstream.

Another difference is large companies using user's data in various ways, some creepy and maybe nefarious. This wasn't done 25 years ago, UI heat maps didn't come about until 20ish years ago, much less collecting data specific to one person.

These days, there's no push back on OSS and companies and individuals might prefer to not have all their usage and data sent to a giant corporation. There could be a turning point for OSS LLM's that can add value and run on personal devices (laptops, phones). Maybe there will be a resurgence of apps (desktop/phone) that have AI features but don't collect your data. Maybe that's the next digital counter culture movement - keeping data private.

2개월 전discuss

Its 10x code generation with .5x quality at best and all other parts of the SDLC are at 1.x or worse.

AI is not delivering 10x shareholder value, anywhere. Software developers have quite the level of hubris about how important they are to companies. Yes our work is very complex and takes a certain mindset to do it well. It takes a lot of other roles to have a successful business, many of those roles will use AI to help draft slide decks, emails, etc. and that's the limit for them.

Look at recent companies doing layoffs claiming its because of AI, like CloudFlare and Coinbase, do their reported financials paint the picture that they are crushing it with AI? No, its net losses into the $100's of millions.

2개월 전discuss

If you want to look at facts (these come from yahoo finance): 36% of their stock is held by institutions, another ~9% by insiders. Ebay is 95% held by institutions (that sounds insane but I don't follow markets, maybe its normal) and it went up 11% yesterday. That sounds like institutional traders think this is real, right? Ebay is at or near an all time high so why would anyone want to buy at an all time high? Maybe this is a pump and dump on ebay by Wall St? Get retail traders hyped, your stock bumps 10% or more, then dump shares.

I don't understand how a smaller publicly traded company can buy a larger publicly traded company. Don't they need to have a majority of shares or enough to demand a board seat? A deal like that probably needs to have outside investors and/or some leverage of some kind.

3개월 전discuss

Its always been like this, I think some of it is perspective. When you reach your early twenties you are likely exiting a childhood and schooling bubble where your focus has been friends, family and school. Once you emerge from that and start interacting with the workforce you become more attuned to things going on locally/globally where before it wasn't really a concern. Probably more so for your generation because of the internet and social media the speed of information sharing is much faster and more readily available.

My opinion on how things could progress in 5-10 years is it depends on how much the average people push back. It could be pushing back on AI data centers, loss of freedoms, CEO pay ratios, etc. The intensity of the push back could impact events.

3개월 전discuss

That HN is turning into reddit with posts that don't contribute to the startups, tech, engineering, entrepreneurship, or science topics that its contributors used to focus on.