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petralithic commented on Collaboration sucks   newsletter.posthog.com/p/... · Posted by u/Kinrany
hinkley · 3 months ago
It’s a perfectly fine analogy if you can get over your own ego enough to realize your customers don’t want to hear about how very clever you are, they just want to get shit done and move on to four other tasks.

They don’t care about us. They don’t. They just want to do what their boss asked them to do or kill the bad guy to get the treasure, and we are often enough as much in the way as we are facilitating that.

petralithic · 3 months ago
This sounds like a non sequitur to me, when did I ever say I disagreed with the fact that "they just want to get shit done?" I am not sure what your comment has to do with the part about misconstruing features for moving parts, for those are two independent things, and still more generally, like I said, people do pay for software that has more features than fewer.
petralithic commented on Collaboration sucks   newsletter.posthog.com/p/... · Posted by u/Kinrany
hinkley · 3 months ago
Every delivered feature is a liability not an asset.

If you don’t believe me, consider two products that make customers equally happy and one has half as many moving parts. Which one is more profitable to maintain? The one with less shit. Because the rest is just more liability.

So if I deliver a feature all by myself quickly and move on to something else, I’m digging a bigger hole and faster than the wisdom arrives to change directions.

But most importantly, none of the rest of you fuckers know what I built or why, except what you gleaned from standup or whatever docs I wrote in place of collaboration. And docs written without collaboration are usually hot garbage.

So what do you all do when I’m hiking in the woods and the cluster is on fire? Sure would be nice if I collaborated on that functionality wouldn’t it? Then you’d have two other people to ask.

petralithic · 3 months ago
> Every delivered feature is a liability not an asset.

> If you don’t believe me, consider two products that make customers equally happy and one has half as many moving parts. Which one is more profitable to maintain?

Wrong analogy, use the word feature in both emphasized terms. Consider two products and one has half as many features, which is more profitable to maintain? Well, it depends whether people are paying for the other half of the feature set or not, as oftentimes people will pay for more features than fewer.

petralithic commented on Collaboration sucks   newsletter.posthog.com/p/... · Posted by u/Kinrany
throwaway713 · 3 months ago
> Every time you see collaboration happening, speak up and destroy it. Say “there are too many people involved. X, you are the driver, you decide.” (This is a great way to make friends btw).

Corollary for managers: Do not say "it's your call", then once the decision has been made (and you skipped all the meetings pertaining to that decision), comment about how you would have done it differently and then retroactively request your report to go back and make changes. This is a great way to lose employees.

petralithic · 3 months ago
Exactly, these two sentences seem at first related,

> No deadlines, minimal coordination, and no managers telling you what to do.

> In return, we ask for extraordinarily high ownership and the ability to get a lot done by yourself.

but can be insidious if implemented incorrectly. High ownership to do what you want, but what happens if what you decide goes against the goals of the manager or the company itself? No company can succeed without at least some sort of overarching goal structure, from which employees will naturally avail and seek to benefit themselves.

petralithic commented on Ask HN: Why has typing on a phone not improved in ~20 years?    · Posted by u/mvkel
JohnFen · 3 months ago
Yes, but that requires carrying a separate device, which makes it too inconvenient to use casually. I want the keyboard to be built into the device itself, like you used to be able to get.
petralithic · 3 months ago
There are keyboard cases like https://www.clicks.tech/ which attach to your phone directly.
petralithic commented on The 'Toy Story' You Remember   animationobsessive.substa... · Posted by u/ani_obsessive
ilamont · 3 months ago
There’s an analog analogue: mixing and mastering audio recordings for the devices of the era.

I first heard about this when reading an article or book about Jimi Hendrix making choices based on what the output sounded like on AM radio. Contrast that with the contemporary recordings of The Beatles, in which George Martin was oriented toward what sounded best in the studio and home hi-fi (which was pretty amazing if you could afford decent German and Japanese components).

Even today, after digital transfers and remasters and high-end speakers and headphones, Hendrix’s late 60s studio recordings don’t hold a candle anything the Beatles did from Revolver on.

petralithic · 3 months ago
The same with movie sound mixing, where directors like Nolan are infamous for muffling dialogue in home setups because he wants the sound mixed for large, IMAX scale theater setups.
petralithic commented on Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line   kensegall.com/2025/11/07/... · Posted by u/zdw
loloquwowndueo · 3 months ago
Yeah shame it’s hidden behind 50 pop-under triggers and infectious scam ads. Literally unusable without an ad blocker. (Which you should use anyway but it means they’re not a great choice for Joe user on his unprotected windows pc)
petralithic · 3 months ago
One, people should be using uBlock Origin as you mentioned. Two, there are many search engines without such ads. Three, qBittorrent has a search right inside the client, there is no need to even access the websites to perform searches.
petralithic commented on Show HN: I scraped 3B Goodreads reviews to train a better recommendation model   book.sv... · Posted by u/costco
croes · 3 months ago
I visit your garden and take 1 apple from your tree

I visit your garden and take 1000 apples from your tree.

Not that different.

petralithic · 3 months ago
For every apple I take, you still have your apple on the tree, because my apple is only a copy of yours.
petralithic commented on Show HN: I scraped 3B Goodreads reviews to train a better recommendation model   book.sv... · Posted by u/costco
voidUpdate · 3 months ago
Does this break part 4 of the Goodreads TOS?

"[...] you agree not to sell, license, rent, modify, distribute, copy, reproduce, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, publish, adapt, edit or create derivative works from any materials or content accessible on the Service. Use of the Goodreads Content or materials on the Service for any purpose not expressly permitted by this Agreement is strictly prohibited."

Also did the reviewers give you permission to fed their content into an LLM?

petralithic · 3 months ago
Why ask questions you already know the answers to?

u/petralithic

KarmaCake day330August 7, 2025View Original