A truly committed pessimist would accept this dark omen.
Anyway, this definition of optimism
> or the belief that the future will be favorable because one can control important outcomes
Isn't what one colloquially means by it.
Though it is eye catching that it will make a positive impact even if you don't, actually, control important outcomes, like by not smoking
> These relations were independent of socioeconomic status, health conditions, depression, social integration, and health behaviors (e.g., smoking, diet, and alcohol use). Overall, findings suggest optimism may be an important psychosocial resource for extending life span in older adults.
The 100m / 10k analogy is fantastic, but the reality is even worse.
Let’s say you expect a candidate to stay for average five years. That’s about 1200 working days. If you get to interview them for 1 day, then that day is 8.3m to the 10k. You get to watch them run for 8.3m and decide how well they can run the 10k.
You're not even watching them for the skills required on the job either. Most jobs aren't even about running at all.
Basic, boring, line-of-business web application shops are asking candidates to implement Boyer-Moore and k-d trees. When the applicant is going to be hired to mostly update JSX templates and figure out why the customer is frustrated. It's like every business needs Olympic athletes when they're running a hot-dog stand.
It's one thing if your business is writing a RTOS for a custom platform you develop. Asking a candidate to implement a slab allocator might be a fine exercise. It fits the work being done.
Businesses need to get off their high horse and look in the mirror. Most of them are doing mediocre things that need average, good-natured people who are willing to work.
Came here to say this!
So many ways to parse it. But the key issue was not knowing that “pregnancy-test frogs” was the central concept. Without that, the headline is so confusing… at some point I had to consider whether “frogs” was being used as a verb
Too much developers relying on bloatware, not enough “implement it yourself” because in reality every hash map doves a unique problem that a Palin hash map is not necessarily suited for. Embrace NIH
You need at least one or two somewhat disagreeable folks in a team. Because without this, groupthink emerges, teams have too much inertia, they follow the assumed norm instead of challenging it for something better, they don’t debate the options enough. That disagreeable energy, in the right dose, leads to better decisions. If you don’t have it naturally, you can encourage someone to “play devil’s advocate” in decision discussions (or do it yourself) and you’ll find sometimes the devil’s advocate is actually right.
Agree - but The Goal (Eliyahu Goldratt) is a rare exception to this. It’s written as a novel but actually contains valuable and counterintuitive lessons about optimizing for efficiency in a complex delivery process. Worth every page
Agree, it's not testing. The problem is here: "In a typical testing workflow, you write some basic tests to check the core functionality. When a bug inevitably shows up—usually after deployment—you go back and add more tests to cover it. This process is reactive, time-consuming, and frankly, a bit tedious."
This is exactly the problem that TDD solves. One of the most compelling reasons for test-first is because "Running the code in your head" does not actually work well in practice, leading to the above-cited issues. This is just another variant of "Running the code in your head" except an LLM is doing it. Strong TDD practices (don't write any code without a test to support it) will close those gaps. It may feel tedious at first but the safety it creates will leave you never wanting to go back.
Where this could be safe and useful: Find gaps in the test-set. Places where the code was never written because there wasn't a test to drive it out. This is one of the hardest parts of TDD, and where LLMs could really help.
I don’t think there’s zero demand recommendation apps, a lot of founders choose this because it’s a problem they want to solve for themselves, and there are a few success stories out there. It’s just that it’s a super-hard problem
I spent 2024 building an awesome TV series recommendation platform. It worked by matching you to professional critics who shared your tastes, by basically crawling Rotten Tomatoes and getting an LLM to grade the reviews out of ten. The recommendations were awesome, and having a personalized Rotten Tomatoes where you could read about and research the show using reviews by people who felt the same way as you did about stuff was freakin' cool.
However, getting people to actually sign up and use the app without a massive marketing budget was very, very difficult. The stickiness to get people to go back to it is difficult. Asking people to input their preferences in the first place is hard. People also simply didn't believe the recommendations, and wouldn't take chances on shows; the computer can recommend The Detectorists to as many people as it wants, but there's a high number of people who would love the show but will dismiss it looking at the cover image and having a quick read of the synopsis.
The recommendation part isn't super hard, the getting people to use a B2C app is super hard.
I think sign up for anything is a tall order. To use a recommendation site I would need it to just start asking me questions and immediatly also start the process of visually narrowing down content suitable for me. How many ratings from me would you need to do a good rec? Is there diminishing returns after certain amount of data from the user? There should be zero barriers of entry to this kind of thing. Like quirky website you click for few minutes. You can always provide ”save your answers” button and have the sign-in flow there, although I would appreciate unique link I can bookmark more.
Interesting. I wonder if this is the right way though. Firstly because the RT critic score was gamified a while ago, and secondly because there's often a big gap between what the critics think and what the audience thinks. (One of the things I like to do is find movies on RT where the difference between the two is the biggest)
Even if you ignore the fact that some reviews will be sponsored and not made entirely in good faith this is assuming that critics' judgment is a good signal in the first place.
Now, if you were Netflix (or Popcorn Time), you could just show them the series directly in the app and people would come to your app to watch the series, and also get the recommendations. They'd come back more often if you had good recommendations. People just don't want standalone recommendations.
There's also the fact that more data == better recommedations.
Even if people wanted your standalone app, they're not going to sit and enter the kind of rich data a decent recommendation engine needs. It really has to be a tool that gathers data about you as a side-effect of you using it.
Well, there's "enter your Netflix username and password here"
This has severely fallen out of fashion since the 2000s, but it used to be not uncommon that when one web app wanted to do actions on your behalf on another web app, it would just take your username and password and log in as you. According to Cory Doctorow (I wasn't there) Facebook did this to MySpace.
For Netflix in particular, logging in from your server would probably trigger anti-account-sharing, but you could avoid that by making the requests you need from the user's app on their device, not from your server.
I think the industry feels like it's illegal now, but I don't think it's actually illegal? since there's no criminal intent. I don't think it's the same, legally, as when a criminal steals your login details and logs in as you. But I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. But my evidence is that there are apps (e.g. POLi) that do this with bank accounts and still don't seem to be in any trouble. Even the banks don't seem to be locking it out as that would hurt the customer's relationship with the bank.
"It's a problem they want to solve for themselves", but note that they haven't tried all the alternative recommendation services and are only creating one as a last resort. They want to solve the problem, which is a different drive from wanting a recommendation app.
Now, if someone made a "Recommendation-Engine-in-a-Box", where someone who wanted to make a recommendation app for themselves would supply the content and could tweak the algorithm and the design, I could see that being successful in this market :)
Do you think we've made it to the point that a broker for streaming services would be viable? You pay a 10% premium and they connect you with the media you want to watch without you needing to maintain a monthly subscription to 15 different services.
Would probably be worth it even if just to have a consistent UI across services.
That would be nice, but I think it is just a licensing issue and the companies that hold the licenses don’t have any incentive to try and simplify things—they’d prefer we subscribe to every service and then watch, like, one show on each.
It would be interesting to see data on this. How many people subscribe to multiple streaming services, vs the opportunity to license the content to an aggregator and sell to those that miss a lot of content because, like me they don’t want multiple services. I refuse to subscribe to all the services that have the content I want to watch: Netflix, Apple, Prime, HBO Max, Discovery… the high seas become an inconvenient option at this point.
Exactly. And the whole reason all these other services popped up is the IP holders realized they could make a lot more money with their own service vs licensing to an aggregator. I think it worked out pretty well for Disney+, because they have a huge back catalog of very popular IP. Not sure if anyone else is really making money with this new model, but they still don’t want to go back to ceding all control to Netflix.
I agree (and would also like to see that sort of info if it existed). But, I’m pretty sure the same folks who were in charge of cable when it became insufferable are now in charge of streaming. So, less-annoying business models… I’m not hopeful.
Account pooling? Sign up to a pool that distributes your account to others when not being used, in return gives access to multiple streaming platforms on demand...
Amazon Prime Video is already this. You can subscribe to Max, Peacock, Crunchyroll, etc. from within the Prime Video app, and watch content normally exclusive to those services.
You can browse through to the video on YouTube then read the transcript (I think transcripts are available on all YouTube videos - perhaps unless the publisher disables it. But it’s definitely available on this one).
I think it would be great if YC turned discussions like this into well edited written articles. I know there’s talk about producing more text content to help startups.
Having worked in banking for many years (no longer), I can say with confidence, the big banks have a giant moat: regulation.
They want to be heavily regulated so that new upstart competitors will not come in and spoil their cozy space. And it’s easy to justify because terrorism, money laundering, insider trading, etc etc. And many of these regulations are largely ineffective and easily worked around, whilst costing billions to the banks to comply with. Hence the moat.
We won’t get banking disruption until there’s banking deregulation.
