Magmalgebra (u/Magmalgebra)

Magmalgebra commented on It’s been a very hard year bell.bz/its-been-a-very-h... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

senordevnyc · 17 days ago

It’s ironic that Andy calls himself “ruthlessly pragmatic”, but his business is failing because of a principled stand in turning down a high volume of inbound requests. After reading a few of his views on AI, it seems pretty clear to me that his objections are not based in a pragmatic view that AI is ineffective (though he claims this), but rather an ideological view that they should not be used.

Ironically, while ChatGPT isn’t a great writer, I was even more annoyed by the tone of this article and the incredible overuse of italics for emphasis.

Magmalgebra · 17 days ago

Yeah. For all the excesses of the current AI craze there's a lot of real meat to it that will obviously survive the hype cycle.

User education, for example, can be done in ways that don't even feel like gen AI in ways that can drastically improve activation e.g. recommendation to use feature X based on activity Y, tailored to their use case.

If you won't even lean into things like this you're just leaving yourself behind.

Magmalgebra commented on Why does Swiss cheese have holes? usdairy.com/news-articles... · Posted by u/QueensGambit

rootusrootus · 2 months ago

I don't know what to make of that statement. It is arrogant, at least. Are you trashing just the 340 million people in the US with this comment, or everybody not-Swiss?

Magmalgebra · 2 months ago

Standards come from a mixture of culture and attention. The reason SF pizza is so much worse than NY pizza is that SF does not have culture of high quality pizza (I say this as an SF native). Conversely we have higher standards for Sourdough. Seoul has higher standards for Kimchi, you get the idea.

Everywhere is like this to some extent - no people can be an expert in all things.

Magmalgebra commented on Today is when the Amazon brain drain sent AWS down the spout theregister.com/2025/10/2... · Posted by u/raw_anon_1111

pinkmuffinere · 2 months ago

> one really gets the sense that it took them 75 minutes to go from "things are breaking" to "we've narrowed it down to a single service endpoint, but are still researching," which is something of a bitter pill to swallow

Is 75 minutes really considered that long of a time? I don't do my day-job in webdev, so maybe I'm just naive. But being able to diagnose the single service endpoint in 75 minutes seems pretty good to me. When I worked on firmware we frequently spent _weeks_ trying to diagnose what part of the firmware was broken.

Magmalgebra · 2 months ago

Depends on what you're measuring.

Quite a few of AWS's more mature customers (including my company) were aware within 15 minutes of the incident that Dynamo was failing and hypothesized that it'd taken other services. Hopefully AWS engineers were at least fast.

75 minutes to make a decision about how to message that outage is not particularly slow though, and my guess is that this is where most of the latency actually came from.

Magmalgebra commented on Ask HN: How does one build large front end apps without a framework like React? · Posted by u/thepianodan

actinium226 · 2 months ago

> React is a lot more stable than I think you're giving it credit for.

Hooks are only 5 years old. The docs were revamped 2 years ago and there's lots of dead links to the old docs page which has a scary warning "These docs are old and won’t be updated." Create-react-app was deprecated in February of this year and in their blog post they tell you to use frameworks like Next.js.

And then there's the ecosystem. Next.js introduced app router 3 years ago and lots of docs for libraries still assume you're using pages router. Remix is now react router v7, and I have no idea what's going on with all this Tanstack stuff. There's a new typescript compiler called "Speedy Web Compiler" which just came out in April and as a result Vite now has 4 options for creating a new React project: react, react-ts, react-swc, react-swc-ts

Meanwhile moment.js has had 5 releases in the last 4 years. 3 of them in 2022 and 2 in 2023.

Magmalgebra · 2 months ago

Most of your complaints are about things that are not React. Those are optional. I can still standup a vanilla React stack in an afternoon just as easily as I did 5 years ago and immediately start writing the exact same code and have it "just work".

Magmalgebra commented on Semaglutide loses patent protection in '26 in India, Canada, Brazil and Turkey iqvia.com/locations/emea/... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross

asdff · 2 months ago

Weight loss is solved already. Diet and exercise. Done. No profit for pharma company doing that though.

Rare diseases are not solved, you die or have lifelong quality of life issues. Collectively, they aren't that rare.

Magmalgebra · 2 months ago

While I get what you're saying I don't think this is what most people think of as "solved".

The brass tacks are:

1. Estimates for the cost of obesity globally are somewhere around 2 trillion dollars.

2. Telling people to diet and exercise usually did not get them to lose weight

3. Giving people semaglutide does get them to lose weight

So many people in my life who were unhappy and struggling with their weight are now happy because semaglutide worked where advice about diet and exercise did not. I can't imagine most rare disease drugs will have that level of impact.

Magmalgebra commented on Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office businessinsider.com/micro... · Posted by u/alloyed

pm90 · 3 months ago

Richard Hamming. And the essay is here: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html.

As you point out, Its important to note that Hamming makes this observation specifically in the domain of research which requires a lot of collaboration between people, and is enhanced by interaction with other people doing research. Most standard software engineering jobs don’t require that kind of research activity (although it does require some; product development is a creative process).

Magmalgebra · 3 months ago

> Most standard software engineering jobs don’t require that kind of research activity (although it does require some; product development is a creative process)

This seems to describe what good engineers above the senior level do. Certainly everyone with a PhD I work with who rose through the ranks said that being very senior was a lot like being a good researcher - albeit with much more pressure on execution.

Magmalgebra commented on YouTube is a mysterious monopoly anderegg.ca/2025/09/08/yo... · Posted by u/geerlingguy

makeitdouble · 3 months ago

Aside from Music, these are all negative features that are valuable only because YouTube is so obnoxious.

I'm in vehement agreement with parent to be honest. "We'll stop spitting in your soup if you pay us extra" isn't a nice value proposition.

Magmalgebra · 3 months ago

It feels bad as a consumer, but the alternative is usually worse.

The "stop spitting in your soup if you pay us extra" is really efficient market segmentation. If you don't do that you need to find actual value props that separate the market in just the right way to generate the financials that allow the product to keep going as is. 9 times out of 10 the result is that failing PMs totally fuck up the product and everyone loses.

It's the SSO kerfuffle in a different package - terrible, but the right choice surprisingly often.

Magmalgebra commented on YouTube is a mysterious monopoly anderegg.ca/2025/09/08/yo... · Posted by u/geerlingguy

troupo · 3 months ago

I keep seeing people say this: "I pay for YouTube Premium. For my money, it’s the best bang-for-the-buck subscription service on the market" and I don't understand.

For me, Premium's only value proposition is removing ads. Recommendations are still the same (quite shitty). Search is unusable (4 relevant results then unrelated recommendations). Shorts are pushed aggressively no matter how many times you hide them. Search in history will often not find even something you just watched a few days ago.

It's the same Youtube.

Magmalgebra · 3 months ago

I imagine most people have the same value prop I do

1) I watch youtube more than any streaming service

2) I really really value not having ads in my life

So the price for ad-free youtube really seems phenomenal. None of the other features really matter to me - ad free dominates all value discussions.

Magmalgebra commented on Don't use Redis as a rate limiter medium.com/ratelimitly/wh... · Posted by u/5pl1n73r

Magmalgebra · 4 months ago

I wish the article talked more about why people use Redis as a rate limiter and why alternatives might be superior. Anecdotally I see the following play out repeatedly:

1) You probably already have Redis running

2) Adding a "good enough" rate limiter is easy

3) Faster solutions are usually more work to maintain given modern skillsets

If you are a b2b SaaS company odds are your company will exceed 10 billion in market cap looong before Redis rate limiting is a meaningful bottleneck.

Magmalgebra commented on We Don't Believe in Work-Life Balance entrepreneur.com/business... · Posted by u/g4k

sigseg1v · 4 months ago

Ever since the recent AI fad, more and more of these types of people have come out of the woodwork.

Every random unknown business now truly believes that they have built something novel and revolutionary. They have the audacity to see difficult things being invented by geniuses and think "wow, I can do it too". They think that they must succeed at all costs; their employees must work unlimited hours and they must use unlimited resources because nothing is more important.

It's kind of sad to watch, knowing that in a couple years nobody will care and their company will have produced nothing of value, while the negative consequences of their "progress at all costs" will still be felt by individuals and the world.

Magmalgebra · 4 months ago

This is so much better than a decade ago! No underhanded "we're a family" - the company says "you will work 60 hours a week and take a big risk" and employees can say yes or no.