I work for Hinge, the dating app. We use them for our "prompt feedback" feature, where the LLM gives constructive feedback on how to improve your prompts if it judges them as low-effort or clichéd.
It's optional and doesn't generate responses for you, instead just nudging you in better directions. So it's certainly not generating a bunch of indistinguishable profiles. Quite the opposite, it gives people a second chance to expand on their own views or experiences.
I asked an ex-Bloomberg coder this question once after he told me he used floating points to represent currency all the time, and his response was along the lines of “unless you have blindingly-obvious problems like doing operations on near-zero numbers against very large numbers, these calculations are off by small amounts on their least-significant digits. Why would you waste the time or the electricity dealing with a discrepancy that’s not even worth the money to fix?”
I am writing a newsletter, https://www.clientserver.dev. It started with the writing prompt “what if someone tried to make Money Stuff for software engineering?” My time is constrained since I have a kid, and I’m still iterating on the format a bit. But I recently crossed 250 subscribers and have made the Hacker News front page twice in the 6 months I have been running the newsletter, so I feel like I’m on the right track.
In the past few months, I've learned that (a) writing a bulleted outline is a cheat code for producing decent work quickly, (b) every newsletter is a reminder that people could unsubscribe, so skip publishing issues that you're not proud of, (c) people really like stories, and (d) it's okay to have a mix of formats.
If one gets any traction (like 10 upvotes or more), I wait a month or so. I know the site values pacing out content from the same source. If something was on the front page in the past week, I don’t post it. This eliminates probably 80-90% of my posts; “news + reaction as a staff software engineer” is my primary format. Beyond that, it’s mostly feel.
And what is your strategy regarding commenting?
I don't spam (like commenting "good post") but my logical arguments get downvoted sometimes, don't understand the culture of HN properly.
I have a light touch. I think it comes from the foundation of having confidence in what I write. My three goals are to be entertaining, to be educational, and to stand by everything that I write. I don't have any emotional stake in being right or wrong; I'll make a correction if I'm wrong or have a typo, but I rarely have to do that. I don't really care if people disagree with me, because again, I stand by everything that I write. If I notice a trend in negative feedback I'll respond to it once and then check the thread again 2 or 3 days later to see how it shook out.
"Don't argue about the definitions of words online" is my "Never get involved in a land war in Asia." If people know what you mean but ignore it in favor of picking a fight, they're arguing for sport and I don't want to get involved with it.
It was a little sad to watch him get radicalized in real time. I really enjoyed reading his blog before this started to happen. But then a few publications started quoting blog posts of his out of context as rage bait -- I remember he was particularly butthurt about some Jezebel posts that took things he said out of context.
At this point, he basically started leaning into controversy for pageviews. He'd start linking to the controversial section of each post right at the top of the post. After a few months or so I had to unsubscribe, after years of reading his blog and Dilbert cartoons/books.
He's become such a gremlin that I won't be 100% sure he's serious about this until he actually dies.
Yeah I remember binging his blog while between classes in university - he wrote well and had interesting thoughts on marketability, mastery, business, etc., all things that I was interested in as someone learning to be an adult and find his place in the world. Then Trump ran for president, and honestly the blog was still good - Adams had some genuinely good insights about why Trump appealed, and suggested that he might be using the Republicans to get into power but he really doesn't share their values and will shake things up for the better. But then somehow Adams' identity got wrapped up in the idea of Trump not being as bad as people think and he just supported Trump more and more even when it became clear that Trump did not have a master plan to liberalize the Republican party.
I liked his blog at first and thought it really declined with video and short form content. It’s like his written editing slowed him down and made him less clickbaity than when he could post a video with no editing in just minutes.
I did hem and haw over whether it was appropriate, but I eventually went with it because it felt in line with the first 2 sentences of the Wikipedia page defining the phrase as "Malicious compliance (also known as malicious obedience) is the behavior of strictly following the orders of a superior despite knowing that compliance with the orders will have an unintended or negative result. It usually implies following an order in such a way that ignores or otherwise undermines the order's intent, but follows it to the letter."
It might have been malicious compliance. It might also have been your coworkers having a reasonable (if incorrect) expectation that their coworkers at a leading tech company understood how to schedule meeting time using the calendar their company produces. Or maybe both.
Malicious compliance is one of the great tips from the Simple Sabotage Field Guide. And it is one of the few effective ways to escalate pain in an organization. If you don't get shit done because of rules, and a boss asks you to simply break the rules for efficiency's sake, you can return the favor and just ask to simply abolish the rules for efficiency's sake. It may surprise you how fast stupid rules can be abolished, even in large orgs.
I don't see how it undermines the intent here, or has an unintended result. It's actually reinforcing the order by forcing other teams to comply with it.
For my newsletter[0], I just reached 231 subscribers in 5 months. Getting to this point has involved posting to as many channels as possible (without wearing out my welcome in any of them)
My first 40 subscribers came from direct friends and my LinkedIn network.
The remainder have come from regular posting on BlueSky, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Substack notes, and starting to get search traffic from Google.
I've gotten no traction from Reddit (wow, the programming subreddits are so much angrier than every other subreddit where I contribute!) Twitter (seems like it's pay to play, which I won't do) or IndieHackers (I post milestones just for fun, but it hasn't amounted to anything).
I've found that I need to post twice a week to grow. I had a period where I was sick and was putting less effort into posts, and another period where I was dealing with a mortgage and had to post only once a week, and my subscriber growth treaded water instead of gradually growing. Even casual visitors to the site can tell the difference between moderate and minor effort.
Reddit is a self-perpetuating AI-engagement machine.
Seems like 90% of the content there is now either reposts from Reddits first decade (2008-2018), engagement rage-bait, or really low-effort posts from newly registered users (who might be real, but they are normies so they ask really mundane boring questions that could be googled in seconds).
I truly believe it now exists only to serve as training data for the highest bidder to pay out the initial investors, everything else be damned.
It's kinda always been this way (I just turned to dust thinking about this, but I've been posting to it for like 18 years), but it's worse now.
r/programming is the only subreddit I regularly visit where there are a bunch of posts with 0 upvotes in the top 30. There are 16 right now on the Hot view.
The thing about twitter is once you do pay for a checkmark, you get a ton of traction and boost. And there is a certain amount of logic to it; if you're willing to pay $8 how badly do you really want to grow your reach.
It is frustrating though, because it makes it slightly harder to find communities of people who just want to have fun but it's better for people trying to grow a service.
Bazel runs into the problem that it expects to have the complete well-defined understanding of the inputs and outputs for your project. This might have made sense when Blaze was first designed and projects were done in languages with compilers that had rigid inputs and outputs. But now we're in a world where more and more systems are becoming layers of compilers, where each compiler layer wants to just have a bunch of dependencies thrown at it. In a frontend project, it wouldn't be weird for Tailwind CSS to be compiled and embedded in SCSS, where it's pulled into a JSX module via some import that magically provides type checking with the CSS under the hood. And so you either need to handwave over it and lose some of the benefits of incremental builds, or spend time getting it to work and making it continue to work as you add new layers.
So in my mind, Bazel is no longer worth it unless the savings are so great that you can afford to staff a build team to figure these things out. Most teams would benefit out of using simple command runners instead of fully-fledged build systems.
I am writing a newsletter, https://www.clientserver.dev, which started with the writing prompt “what if someone tried to make Money Stuff for software engineering?” I’m still iterating on the format a bit, but I just crossed 100 subscribers and made the Hacker News front page, so I feel like I’m on the right track.
I had a daughter almost 2 years ago, and for a while I didn’t have any free time. But once I started getting a few hours in the evening, I wanted to start up side projects again. I found it frustrating to work on coding projects in 1-2 hour windows. But writing is a little easier; I feel like progress is a little more linear with writing, and having the Monday/Thursday deadline has helped me just ship.
Hi, author here! At my job before Google I had to debug these kinds of bugs for our mobile robotics / computer vision stack, but I found them fun so they didn't feel "hard" per se. The most time-consuming one took a month on basically a camera-mounted computer vision system, where after an hour of use the system would start stuttering unusably. But the journey took us through heat throttling on 2009-era gaming laptops, esoteric windows APIs, hardware design, and ultimately distributed queuing. But fixing it was a blast! I learned a ton. I hated that project but fixing that bug was the highlight of it.
