This is such a timely article. It was a HUGE electric fence for me as a founder. I was hesitant asking for introductions, help and advise. It took a lot of internalization that I would always welcome asking for help and others would think the same. One fence I still struggle with is following-up. Usually people don't respond the first time and my fence natural thinks that they read and were not interested. But the reality is that most people are bad at following-up. Even me, many times think I will write back to them and I forget. So same thing happens to others. Reaching out multiple times - at least twice - usually works. It still takes a lot of energy to remind them the second time when they haven't responded.
Readit News30minAdayHN commented on The electric fence stopped working years ago soonly.com/electric-fence... · Posted by u/stroz
30minAdayHN commented on Do Things That Don't Scale (2013) paulgraham.com/ds.html... · Posted by u/bschne
I also think that the biggest value in doing things manually is that you actually learn.
One of my clients used to make a nice curated list of the important financial and stock market news of the week, it was a niche part of a niche product but people loved it.
At some point he thought about automating everything, it became less curated, more spammy, it lost any value and in the end so did the product. Sure there was more news, but it was less curated, edited and the signal to noise ratio got worse.
In fact what they did manually was more valuable even if the scope was smaller.
Many companies don't understand that and rush into premature optimization.
I'll have another example: one of my clients wanted a scraper to automate something his company needed to do manually: check competitors prices on their ecommerces.
I built it, way simpler than they wanted (they thought they wanted an app with a proper front end, turns out it was better for both to produce an excel spreadsheet with the data) and they were happy.
Then after some time they understood that they were missing part of the experience: navigating their competitors manually allowed them to see new approaches to show the catalogue, new trends and products, they were actually learning from the competition.
Eventually they realized and got back to doing it, and left my scraper just for price analysis.
But the overwhelming majority of my clients keep putting automation before the product and problem and misses important learning opportunities.
Similar thing happens in sales. A gen-AI driven sales tool might write perfect copy and reach 1000 people. But when you go by each person and write a hand-written email to them, the ancillary thing is that you learn about that person. You develop intuition about what sort of people would be right people and develop a perspective about why you can solve their problem or not. This completely gets lost when you automate and play numbers game. This is especially important in zero to one phase.
30minAdayHN commented on H-1B Visa Changes Approved by White House newsweek.com/h-1b-visas-c... · Posted by u/ivewonyoung
Do keep in mind.
H-1B is for when you cannot find an American to fill a role so somebody comes into the US on a visa to fill that slot.
O-1 [1] is a for when somebody non-American has a lot of skill and is allowed to immigrate into the US to perform it.
I still think H-1B visas should require some kind of additional fee proportional to training an American to fill that role. Afaik, most of the H-1B visas are just abuse where you hire somebody at a low wage than you'd need to for an otherwise legal resident so there needs to be some kind of higher opportunity cost to the company.
[1]: https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
I agree with your broader point about companies abusing H1-Bs. But I'm not sure if the abuse happens through hiring at lower wage. For example, if you look at FANG, they pay as much for an H1-B as they would pay any other employee. Where is this perspective that you can hire someone at lower wage because they come with H1-B? Would love understand the loophole.
30minAdayHN commented on Myanmar’s proliferating scam centers asia.nikkei.com/static/vd... · Posted by u/WaitWaitWha
I always thought that people willfully participate in scams to make more money. For example, I know there are quite a few telephone scam centers in India, that call US folks for SSN fraud etc. I thought these folks just work for salary.
It's scary to look at the scale of 'organized' crime / modern slavery. This is almost like Squid Games.
Did you make the contributions though? Or did the LLM?
This is not directed at you, but I am worried that contributors that use AI "exclusively" to contribute to OSS projects are extracting the value (street cred, being seen as part of the project community) without actually contributing anything (by being one more person that knows the codebase and can help steward it).
It's the same thing we've seen out of enshittification of everything. Value extraction without giving back.
Maybe I'm too much of a cynic. Maybe majority of OSS projects don't care. But I know I will be saddened if one of the OSS projects I care about get taken over by such "value extractors".
Did not take it personal. You brought up a good point.
I've slightly alternate perspective. Imo, using OSS without contributing is the value extraction without giving back.
If someone can fix a bunch of chores (that still take human time), with the use of AI (even though they don't become stewards), I still see it as giving back. Of course, there is a value chain - contributing with AI without understanding code is the bottom of value creation. Like you mentioned, also being a steward is the top of the value chain. Along the way, if the contributor builds some sorta reputation that would help with their career or other outcomes, so be it.
So in that sense, I don't see it as enshittification. AI might make a pathway to resolve a bunch of things which otherwise wouldn't be resolved. In fact, this was the line of thinking for the tool we built. Instead of people making these mindless PRs, can we build an agent that can take care of 'trivial' tasks. I manually created PRs to test that hypothesis.
There is also a natural self selection here. If someone was able to fix something without understanding any code, that is also indicative of how trivial the task is. There is a reverse effect to my argument though. These "AI contributors" can create a ton of PRs that would create a lot of work for maintainers to review them.
In my case, I was being upfront about how I'm raising PRs and requesting permissions if it is OK to work on certain issue. Maintainers are quite open and inviting.
This study focused on experienced OSS maintainers. Here is my personal experience, but a very different persona (or opposite to the one in the study). I always wanted to contribute to OSS but never had time to. Finally was able to do that, thanks to AI. Last month, I was able to contribute to 4 different repositories which I would never have dreamed of doing it. I was using an async coding agent I built[1], to generate PRs given a GitHub issue. Some PRs took a lot of back and forth. And some PRs were accepted as is. Without AI, there is no way I would have contributed to those repositories.
One thing that did work in my favor is that, I was clearly creating a failing repro test case, and adding before and after along with PR. That helped getting the PR landed.
There are also a few PRs that never got accepted because the repro is not as strong or clear.
Me and my friend are working on Workback[1], a tool that can fix a11y issues end-to-end.
First we built it as a tool to fix any bug. After talking to a few folks, we realized that it is too broad. From my own personal experience, we realized how messy it is within organizations to address accessibility issues. Everybody scrambles around last minute. No body loves the work - developers, PMs, TPMs etc. And often external contractors or auditors are involved.
Now with Workback, we are hoping to solve the issues using the agentic loop.
If you personally experienced this problem, would love to chat and learn from your experience.
30minAdayHN commented on Why Lotus Domino? (2024) moohar.com/blog/why_domin... · Posted by u/wonger_
Story time!
The year that IBM bought Lotus, they decided to create a mini-website about it for their annual shareholder's meeting. The plan was to host the site on Lotus Notes Domino as a way of showing the value of the acquisition.
Something about this was last minute, but I can't remember what it was: Either the whole thing was a rush job because the merger has just happened, or the decision to use Domino to host the site was. I'm not sure which.
IBM had hired a boutique firm in Atlanta to design and lay out the web pages with all the bells and whistles: Slick graphics, gif-animations, JavaScript interactivity, etc. (this was mid-1990s when flashing text was a big deal). But, of course, they had no Domino experience.
At the time, I was a 20-something wiz kid working at my first job after I dropped out of college for a Lotus Notes consulting firm in Atlanta, with contracts at Bell South, Coca-Cola, IBM and other big names. I had been the first one in the company to get into the web in general, and then combined that with my Lotus Notes experience to become the Domino expert.
When the design firm reached out to my company for help getting the website working on Domino, I was the (only) one to send over to help.
So I spent a few days at their hip downtown loft/office working on a Notes database that would host the site. This involved converting their ordinary web pages into something that would work in Domino, which had it's own way of storing templates and displaying pages based on the underlaying Notes database. I'd run into an issue and then get with the designers to work around some limitation or another. But by Friday we had it working and looking great. They sent the database and other files up to IBM where they would then get it up and running on their public web servers.
Around 5pm that Sunday, I get a call from my boss. The design firm had called in a panic: IBM couldn't get Domino working. They could see the site locally on the same machine, but they couldn't access it publicly. I needed to help their server team fix it. In New York. Tomorrow. (Me? Didn't IBM own Lotus?)
He tells me that IBM is sending a car to come around and pick me up in 30 minutes, to get me to the airport where I'll fly to New York. Another car will pick me up and drive me to Armonk, where I'll check into a hotel, and then Monday morning I was to go into IBM early and help them get the site working, as the shareholders meeting had started.
IBM wasn't messing around. They used black car service with driver, flew me First/Business class, booked me into a nice hotel, the whole deal.
So I arrive at like 6 am the next morning and am met with open arms by someone running their server farm who explains everything they've done so far. He then plops me down in a corner of a giant server room, in front of a machine running AIX, with a Unix version of Notes and a terminal open to the machine running the Apache proxy to their public servers.
I had never seen, let alone used, a Unix box in my life up to that point, and knew nothing about Apache. I wasn't even sure what a "proxy" server did. I remember just sitting there for a minute, wide-eyed - looking at the three-button mouse like it was an alien artifact, and boggled by the GUI (CDE? Motif?) which was also from Mars. I was the opposite of that girl in Jurassic Park. "It's a Unix system! I have no idea what to do!"
Thankfully the Notes interface was the same on all platforms, so I had an anchor point to start from. Besides the fact that it took me a minute to figure out how to scroll (middle mouse button), I was in my element there.
The problem, it turned out, was a simple configuration setting (thank all that is holy) which I recognized immediately. It took me longer to figure out the mouse button thing. So like the proverbial plumber story, I opened my toolbox, took out a small ball peen hammer, tapped the configuration options, and the site popped up online.
Hooray!
Smiles all around! Handshakes were given, backs were slapped, jobs were saved. I was out of there by 8 am and on a plane back to Atlanta a couple after that, the conquerering hero.
So there's my Domino story. 30 years later it's still amusing to me.
In my mind I'm visualizing the IBM office to be of scale in the Blade runner movie :-)
30minAdayHN commented on Show HN: I vibecoded a 35k LoC recipe app recipeninja.ai... · Posted by u/tomblomfield
Vibe coders will be so busy solving the problem of making something work that they wont invest time into understanding the business problem at hand
Imo, this is not just a vibe coders problem. It's been a classic builders mindset issue, where many start with building and look to find problem to the solution.
I'd argue this is true for social networks like Facebook actually. There was a magical period in Facebook between 2005 to 2010 or so where it was mostly college friends, high school friends, some work friends, and we all actually shared what we thought on our posts, shared links to interesting stuff, etc.
When all the relatives started being added to your network the vibe became decidedly different, and then acquaintances, people who aren't close, etc. and everyone has that one experience where one time they post something and someone who isn't close get offended, whether it's political or not, and they gradually share less and less.
At this point, my network is bunch of 'aunts' and 'uncles'. I take secret pleasure by posting stuff that irks them :)