I once had a conversation with a potential co-founder who literally told me he was pasting my responses into AI to try to catch up.
Then a few months later, another nontechnical CEO did the same thing, after moving our conversation from SMS into email where it was very clear he was using AI.
Small business owners work 997 and you don't see them incessantly posting about it. That's the catch, though. They own the business. Founders can subject themselves to 996 all they want but it's a failure of management to expect that from employees for less than 1% equity.
I took a break from tech to open my own bookstore and I definitely work more hours than when I worked at a pre-IPO $7B startup. I'm way less stressed. At least my bookstore doesn't wake me up at 3am 3 nights in a row, and expect me to come to work the next day.
I interviewed with an early stage pre-seed startup with a very young team, like 25-27. I was interviewed by someone way more junior than me. According to the recruiter, in 3 months, I've made it the furthest and he told me this startup was churning through top tier candidates left and right.
After my interview, I immediately knew why. The team was so junior they didn't know how to evaluate senior talent. They didn't know what they wanted. I've arguably interviewed more candidates than the person interviewing me.
Last I checked, they still haven't filled that role.
The strong hires I've given all came from underrated candidates who didn't come from trendy backgrounds. Still think Dan Luu's advice holds up even more at early stage startups. https://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/
This is so interesting to hear. From what I've seen, probably half of recent yc startups have founders below 30. I wonder how senior talent views being interviewed by people who are essentially junior/mid developers.
I'm in my 20s with good credentials and have quite a few friends in the startup world. I would never feel comfortable interviewing someone with 10+ years of industry experience.
> I would never feel comfortable interviewing someone with 10+ years of industry experience.
I would say that's probably overcompensating. I've got about 20 years of startup experience at this point, and one of the things that frustrates me the most is a kind of zero-sum mindset, where you "pass" an interview or not.
In the best cases, interviewing is a conversation, a path to better understanding for both parties. The idea that you're "not qualified" is just as silly, in my opinion, as the idea that an hour-long interview lets someone pass judgement. We can both gain, and maybe I'm exactly what you're looking for, in terms of someone who brings skills or perspective you don't have. Maybe it's obvious that I'd be an awful fit. But either way, I believe everyone has something valuable to bring to the conversation.
Some of the best times I've been involved in interviewing, we've had even an intern talk to someone. If they're helpful, clear, and kind, that can be a huge signal. It's kind of a cliche, back in the day, that you ask the office manager how the candidate treated them, but it's absolutely true that if you treat people "below you" in the hierarchy poorly, that's a red flag, to me.
As a senior (in age and experience), it is sometimes not pleasant.
The junior interviewer might be really smart and extremely motivated, but ready to argue about something very specific while missing the forest for the tree.
Years ago, I was interviewed by two young guys at meta. They asked me to solve on a white board a problem to which the obvious and expected solution was a binary search. Which I did.
I wrote a generic binary search function, and then used it in another function. I stepped through the code of each functions line by line as attempt to prove correctness.
They wouldn't have it. They argued I could only prove it was working by stepping through both functions together. While I argued the literal point of using (pure) functions was to simplify by composing and abstraction.
Things got quite heated up. Especially with one of dude. I just left right there and then.
I have been exclusively doing this in the past year, selling my services as “hardening vibe-coded prototypes for production” or “helping early stage startups scale”.
In the best cases, they were able to reach funding or paying users. Architecture debt is one of the worst kinds of tech debt, so if you set it up right, it’s really hard to mess up.
In the worst case, after my contract ended, the CEO fired the whole US engineering team and replaced them with offshore resources. This was an example of messing up despite the architectural and procedural safeguards we built.
To be a nit picky well acktually…one of your articles opens with, “ In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was import this, spoken by Guido van Rossum…”
I believe ‘import this’ was actually penned by Tim Peters.
> This is working well NOW, it will probably not work in 2 weeks, or it will work twice as well. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This all feels like spinning the roulette wheel. I sometimes wonder if AI proponents are just gamblers who had the unfortunate luck of winning the first few prompts.
A comparison I've seen isn't to roulette but to a slot machine. Anthropic itself encourages its employees to treat its use for refactors as a slot machine. [1]
It seems like an idea worth exploring formally but I haven't see that done anywhere. Is this a case of "perception of winning" while one is actually losing? Or it it that the winning is in aggregate and people who like LLM-based coding are just more tolerant of the volatility to get there?
The only study I've seen testing the actual observable impact on velocity showed a modest decrease in output for experienced engineers who were using LLMs for coding.
That really resonates. I've found myself questioning whether I'm wasting my time writing a piece of code: what if the LLM could do this more quickly? So I try it, almost every time, and sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. Am I really saving myself any work in the long run? Honestly I don't know. I feel like it's just causing me to work more because it feels like a game and that is, ultimately, where the results are coming from.
I've noticed a lot of people are converging on this idea of using AI to analyze your own data, the same way the companies do it to your data and serve you super targeted content.
Recently, I was inspired to do this on my entire browsing history, after reading https://labs.rs/en/browsing-histories/
I also did the same from ChatGPT/Claude conversation history. The most terrifying thing I did was having an LLM look at my Reddit comment history.
The challenges are primarily with having a context window large enough and tracking context from various data sources. One approach I am exploring is using a knowledge graph to keep track of a user's profile. You're able to compress behavioral patterns into queryable structures, though the graph construction itself becomes a computational challenge. Recently most of the AI startups I've worked with have just boiled down to "give an LLM access to a vector DB and knowledge graph constructed from a bunch of text documents". The text docs could be invoices, legal docs, tax docs, daily reports, meeting transcripts, code.
I'm hoping we see an AI personal content recommendation or profiling system pop up. The economic incentives are inverted from big tech's model. Instead of optimizing for engagement and ad revenue, these systems are optimized for user utility. During the RSS reader era, I was exposed to a lot of curated tech and design content and it helped me really develop taste and knowledge in these areas. It also helped me connect with cool, interesting people.
There's an app I like https://www.dimensional.me/ but the MBTI and personality testing approach could be more rigorous. Instead of personality testing, imagine if you could feed a system everything you consume, write, and do on digital devices, and construct a knowledge graph about yourself, constantly updating.
>During the RSS reader era, I was exposed to a lot of curated tech and design content and it helped me really develop taste and knowledge in these areas.
Man, you helped me realize how much the RSS era helped me out. I followed so many different sources of articles and had them roughly prioritized by my interest in them. It was really helpful reading thousands of articles and developing better and better mental models of how technology works while I was in high school. A lot has changed, but many of the mental models are still pretty accurate and handy for branching off and diving in deeper where I'm interested.
> Instead of optimizing for engagement and ad revenue, these systems are optimized for user utility.
Are they, or instead they will help keeping you in your comfort cage?
Comfort cage is better than engagement cage ofc, but maybe we should step out of it once in a while.
> During the RSS reader era, I was exposed to a lot of curated tech and design content and it helped me really develop taste and knowledge in these areas.
Curated by humans with which you didn't always agree, right?
> Are they, or instead they will help keeping you in your comfort cage?
I’ve been paying close attention to what YouTube shorts/tiktok do. They don’t just show you the same genre or topic or even set of topics. They are constantly in an explore-exploit pattern. Constantly trying to figure out the next thing that’ll keep your attention, show you a bunch of that content, then on to the next thing. Each interest cluster builds towards a peak then tapers off.
So it’s not like if you see baking videos it’ll keep you in that comfort zone forever.
But you're describing the engagement cage, while I'm just pointing that you need to be careful not to escape from it just to get trapped inside the comfort cage.
Huh? "Explore" means to show the user new content. "Exploit" is to show more of the same content. You can say the HN algorithm does both as well: the front page shows a variety of topics allowing you to explore but the upvotes "exploit" shared interest by bumping it higher in page rankings.
YT Music is a good algorithm for exploring music. You click a song and the playlist after that song is a mix of similar music and music you like to hear. There's also a button which lets you decide if you want to discover different music or something fresher based on your taste.
Twitter is an example of being entirely in the comfort cage - it links you with people who you agree with, even going out of the way to create these bubbles.
Meta seems to end up with a rage cage. If you criticize say, videos on how to become a billionaire, it would show more billionaire videos.
HN used to be the default. A forum where everyone is in the same cage. People criticize HN culture and thoughts, but sometimes it's just people being shown a side of the world they're not used to.
That's the core challenge in designing a system like this. Echo chambers and comfort cages emerge from recommendation algorithms, and before that, from lazy curation.
If you have control over the recommendation system, you could deliberately feed it contrarian and diverse sources. Or you could choose to be very constrained. Back in RSS days, if you were lazy about it, your taste/knowledge was dependent on other people's curation and biases.
Progress happens through trends anyway. Like in 2010s, there was just a lot of Rails content. Same with flat design. It wasn't really group think, it just seemed to happen out of collective focus and necessity. Everyone else was talking/doing this so if you wanted to be a participant, you have to speak the language.
My original principle when I was using Google Reader was I didn't really know enough to have strong opinions on tech or design, so I'll follow people who seem to have strong opinions. Over time I started to understand what was good design, even if it wasn't something I liked. The rate of taste development was also faster for visual design because you could just quickly scan through an image, vs with code/writing you'd have to read it.
I did something interesting with my Last.fm data once. I've been tracking my music since 2009. Instead of getting recommendations based on my preferences, I could generate a list of artists that had no or little overlap with my current library. It was pure exploration vs exploitation music recommendation. The problem was once your tastes get diverse enough, it's hard to avoid overlaps.
We’re building an AI-powered home manager: a proactive, chat-first system that helps homeowners stay ahead of bills, maintenance, documents, and expenses.
We're backed by founders of Freshly ($1.5B), Kustomer ($1B), and more.
What we're building:
- Structured parsing of home docs (insurance, warranties, bills)
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- Natural language interface
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You’ll:
- Lead development of user-facing features with React, TypeScript, CSS
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Requirements:
- 3+ years experience in frontend development
- Strong with React, TypeScript, modern CSS
- UX focus with portfolio of polished, intuitive interfaces
- Experience with design systems and collaborating closely with product/design
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- Experience with LLMs or AI interfaces
- Background in productivity tools or intelligent assistants
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Mention you found us on HN! We’re also hiring for product manager, full-stack, and ML roles.
This was a big confidence booster for me as when I first started learning English, people would complement me on how well I spoke English, but I took that as my accent was still detectable. It's only been in the past 5 years that people assumed I was American and made no comment on my English at all, until I disclosed that English was my second language. It's usually certain words that give me trouble, like "cupboard" or "chef". The AI detected my accent as a mixture of German and English. When I tried to exaggerate my accent, it correctly detected Thai.
If you learned English after 16. You probably still have an accent. Native speakers are really, really, really good at detecting it. They probably know as soon as you say "Hi".
If you tune up your detector that high it’s very likely you’ll get false positives. I’ve met Americans with fairly strong “accents” that aren’t necessarily a dialect either, just a different way of speaking. It could also be a mix with parents who are non-native. American English is vast, and very heterogeneous.
If we’re talking about specific parts like a regional dialect then I would agree, those are tricky to acquire later, at least to those undetectable levels. They can be extremely specific.
Yep big difference in accents of my cousins who moved here when they were 9 and another when they were 18. Now they are in their mid forties and you can still tell who moved when based on their accent. Its impossible to change your accent after late teens.
there are people who are better than other people at blending in their accents, even in more difficult languages than English (for accent coding), perhaps they are just very good at that.
those words are your Shibboleths, words that give your origin away.
When I was in Germany, friendly people used to compliment me on my language skill saying "your German is good!". To which I would reciprocate: "thanks, yours too!"
My ex-wife whose native language is Spanish worked hard to eliminate her accent because she got tired of people calling her accent “cute.” Her shibboleths were anything with a schwa. The whole concept of schwas offends her sense of vocalic purity.
I got burnt out as a SWE at a startup from stress and health issues. Bought a cafe and turned it into a bookstore cafe. Annual revenue is around 600k. Seller's discretionary earnings is around 220k. In hindsight, I should have done this earlier. Not having to deal with office politics, insane on-call rotations, stress. On top of that, it helped me qualify for E-2 investor visa, which is far less of a headache than OPT/H-1B. It was a major help having an experienced business broker/commercial real estate agent.
I'm a vegan and I've thought about opening a cafe that serves exclusively plant based drinks and food without explicitly/overtly advertising itself as "Vegan" (I find that even in progressive places like Bay Area, it brings out the worst in some people).
Branding it as a chill fun place to hang out and work, collaborate, etc.
I'm not hurting for money, so even if it can cover costs (hopefully returns some profit, but really just need to cover costs) that's fine with me.
Anyone down to try it out if they're on the same page as me? I'm down to commit at least $100k with 3-4 others, low key really serious.
Would be even more dope if we can get a building with a few studio apartments above it that we can turn into a 24/7 hacker cafe.
i’m vegan as well and would be interested in that, but i don’t have the money. would love to follow the process though if you have ever make a social media page for the cafe or something!
220k earnings on 600k revenue? Does that mean your profit margin is 36% or am I missing something? I was under the impression that a successful coffeeshop runs like a ~3%-7% margin.
650k avg revenue for past few years, COGS around 350k, Gross Profit 300k, 80k expenses, SDE 220k, EBITDA 170k. Catering is also a major source of revenue.
If they have some decent money already from their previous life as a SWE it’s possible they don’t have to hit the same sort of numbers others in the cafe business are trying to hit. I’m guessing the stress comes from having to perform at a certain level sales wise.
Can you share more about how you went about this? How did you learn what’s needed to go through with this? Beyond knowing things like time value of money and the goal of making more revenue than costs.
WOW, this is beautiful. Have you written publicly about this?
One of the things I am upset about is grocery prices and the fact that people buy unhealthy food to offset rising prices... I ask myself what an "open source grocery store" would look like.
Have you thought of "open sourcing" your business model so others can do something similar? Or learn from it? Either way, I'd love to hear more if you have anything public.
I can’t really talk much about this yet because legally, until my E2 visa is approved, I can only be in the owner role, not operator. Right now, I pay my friend to be the manager.
Once I am in the clear, I’d be happy to open source the process of acquiring a SMB and running it. I basically become a business broker myself for this one deal, thanks to the broker I worked with.
Like other commenter said would love to know about how to do this. I've had a similar idea for opening up a boardgame store but it's hard to find any public numbers about expected operating costs/expenses to know how to plan or budget for things and how much of a loan I'd need to take to make it happen.
a board game store might be challenging if you are doing it as bricks & mortar retail and competing against online sellers. i think it can work but you would want to be somewhere with a lot of retail foot traffic. you are going to need to set your prices higher than online sellers to pay for rent. i don't have any numbers/insight.
as someone who enjoys playing boardgames, what i would caution against is trying to run some kind of boardgame cafe. the problem with that is you end up with customers like me playing a long game occupying a table for 3-4 hours. maybe everyone buys a drink and half the players buy a meal. the revenue per table per hour will be low compared to a normal cafe or restaurant where you could cycle multiple groups through the table in the same time, and where the expected revenue per customer would be higher.
the places where board game events thrive are where the fixed costs (rent, wages to staff a bar/kitchen, etc) are subsidised by something that isn't board games. i.e. where the venue is open anyway and has spare capacity to fill a few tables with board game players who stay for hours and do not spend money quickly. in australia this is often at a pub/club which has an old spacious venue with lots of tables, where the business is kept afloat by income from a room full of people losing money playing the pokies (slot machines).
Funny enough I am also planning to convert this cafe into a bookstore/board game shop. The best way to find these numbers is to work in a similar shop or be friends with the owner. Naturally, during business brokerage, you will also get these numbers after signing an NDA.
Yes, this is really only viable in a major city. I wouldn’t consider doing this without at least 200k population in a major metro area. The area I’m in is 600k people with a heavy Laptop & Lattes ESRI tapestry segment. Basically it’s filled with software engineers.
jackdawed has shared a gem of actionable advice here for anyone reading the thread and thinking "i will also quit my terrible SWE job and pursue my dream of being a bookstore cafe owner/operator"
"profitable bookstore cafe" is not the input, it is an output of a process of understanding the market and considering different business ideas.
don't anchor on a single kind of business idea, e.g. blindly executing a dream idea of "bookstore cafe owner/operator" without understanding the market and if there's enough demand to support a new bookstore cafe business in the area.
do market research and understand the market segments in areas you are considering opening a business in. understand the market segments and what they each demand and what the existing competition is. consider a bunch of different business ideas and focus on one that serves a particular market segment and meets some underserved demand that isn't being met by existing competitors.
Then a few months later, another nontechnical CEO did the same thing, after moving our conversation from SMS into email where it was very clear he was using AI.
These are CEOs who have raised $1M+ pre-seed.