It is absolutely not easy to start a business that generates any revenue at all, much less a median salary.
But, to be fair, the OP was for joint a startup, not a generic programming gig.
Starting your own business is a massive amount of work. For next to no money for years. And chances are (>90%) that you will lose all the time, effort, and list income that you put into it.
If you do the work right (ie all the non-programming stuff) and you survive, then the long-term rewards are very satisfying. 90% will fail. 10% will succeed. And we all believe we are in the 20% right?
Interviewing at a YC backed startups? Here is everything you must know.The post has complete details on what you must demonstrate vs what they expect and how you must answer all in full details.
For anyone new to Charlie Stross' fiction, here are a few links for your perusal:
Stross' 2005 novel Accelerando [1] set around the technological singularity, is made freely available by the author
In addition to various standalone science fiction novels, Stross also has a couple of long series, the Laundry Files and Merchant Princes / Empire Games.
The setting of the Laundry Files is a mix of magic as a branch of applied math, UK secret service bureaucracy and lovecraftian horror. Stross' laundry files novella "Down on the Farm" is available to read here [2].
Stross' early novelette A Colder War, published in 2000, can be read here [3].
The Merchant Princes series is also a great yarn. The setup is that parallel universes with alternate history Earths exist, and tech journalist Miriam discovers she belongs to a bloodline who can "jaunt" into a parallel medieval Earth. One thing Stross does well is applying the science fictional / economic lens of "OK, so if that were true, then what happens?", so instead of simple fantasy tale we get an exploration of stuff like the transdimensional narco-courier-for-guns trade, or what would Rumsfeld do if transdimensional narcoterrorists made a severe error of judgement and picked a fight with the US? The series gets pretty dark...
He’s not just talking about agents good enough to replace workers. He’s talking about whether agents are currently useful at all.
>Overall, the models are not there. I feel like the industry is making too big of a jump and is trying to pretend like this is amazing, and it’s not. It’s slop. They’re not coming to terms with it, and maybe they’re trying to fundraise or something like that. I’m not sure what’s going on, but we’re at this intermediate stage. The models are amazing. They still need a lot of work. For now, autocomplete is my sweet spot. But sometimes, for some types of code, I will go to an LLM agent.
>They kept trying to mess up the style. They’re way too over-defensive. They make all these try-catch statements. They keep trying to make a production code base, and I have a bunch of assumptions in my code, and it’s okay. I don’t need all this extra stuff in there. So I feel like they’re bloating the code base, bloating the complexity, they keep misunderstanding, they’re using deprecated APIs a bunch of times. It’s a total mess. It’s just not net useful. I can go in, I can clean it up, but it’s not net useful.
It looks like Andrej's definition of "agent" here is an entity that can replace a human employee entirely - from the first few minutes of the conversation:
When you’re talking about an agent, or what the labs have in mind and maybe what I have in mind as well, you should think of it almost like an employee or an intern that you would hire to work with you. For example, you work with some employees here. When would you prefer to have an agent like Claude or Codex do that work?
Currently, of course they can’t. What would it take for them to be able to do that? Why don’t you do it today? The reason you don’t do it today is because they just don’t work. They don’t have enough intelligence, they’re not multimodal enough, they can’t do computer use and all this stuff.
They don’t do a lot of the things you’ve alluded to earlier. They don’t have continual learning. You can’t just tell them something and they’ll remember it. They’re cognitively lacking and it’s just not working. It will take about a decade to work through all of those issues.
Here's how I've been explaining this to non-tech people recently, including the CEO where I work: Language is all about compressing concepts and sharing them, and it's lossy.
You can use a thousand words to describe the taste of chocolate, but it will never transmit the actual taste.
You can write a book about how to drive a car, but it will only at best prepare that person for what to practice when they start driving, it won't make them proficient at driving a car without experiencing it themselves, physically.
They're blue because computer scientist Ben Schneiderman made them blue using research from 1985:
" In 1985, a group of students at the University of Maryland, mentored by computer science professor Ben Shneiderman , conducted a series of experiments to study the impact of different hyperlink colors on user experience. They were eager to determine which color would be the most effective in terms of visibility and readability.
The experiments revealed interesting findings. While red highlighting made the links more noticeable, it negatively affected users' ability to read and comprehend the surrounding text. On the other hand, blue emerged as the clear winner. It was dark enough to be visible against a white background and light enough to stand out on a black background. Most importantly, it did not interfere with users' retention of the text's context."
Mozille should really do better research before posting histories like this. It's easy to overlook the impact of academic research in tech.
You also need to consider the impact of offshoring. Accenture's layoffs of 11,000 workers is listed in the chart, but a few days earlier they announced they were opening a new campus in India and hiring 12,000.
For all the praise I give to Claude, I still use it as a fast version of what I would do myself:
- Looking at compiler errors and fixing them. Looking at program output and fixing errors.
- Looking for documentation on the internet. This used to be a skill in itself: Do I need the reference work (language spec), a stackoverflow, or an article?
- Typing out changes quickly. This goes a little bit deeper than just typing or using traditional "change all instances of this name"-tools, but its essence is that to edit a program, you often have to make a bunch of changes to different documents that preserver referential integrity.
All these things can be amazingly faster due to the agent being able to mix the three legs.
However, it doesn't save you from knowing what needs to be done. If you couldn't in principle type out the whole thing yourself, AI will not help you much. It's very good at confidently suggesting the wrong path and taking you there. It also makes bad choices that you can spot as it is writing out changes, and it's useful to just tell it "hey why'd you do that?" as it writes things. If you don't keep it in line, it veers off.
The benefit for me is the level of thinking it allows me. If I'm working on a high-level change, and I write a low-level bug, I will have to use my attention on figuring this out before coming back to my original context. The window of time during the day where I can attempt a series of low-level edits that satisfy a high-level objective is narrow. With AI, I can steer the AI when I'm doing other things. I can do it late at night, or when I'm on a call. I'm also not stuck "between save points" since I can always make AI finish off whatever it was doing.
I’m not sure where they’re getting their data about companies not hiring juniors.
In 2021, 104,874 CS students graduated—the highest number ever [0] (1.5x more than the 4 years prior). But the job postings 2022-2025 have certainly not maintained that trajectory.
If the number of graduates keeps climbing while the total number of jobs shrinks, then naturally more new grads will struggle to find work.
Playing devil’s advocate: some “senior” folks may now be competing with juniors, since they’re willing to take lower titles or pay just to stay employed. I’m not sure how much that actually shifts the market, considering companies famously don't hire overqualified people and tech workers face age-ism risk.
Notes from the Google bug tracker linked by the GitHub issue: applying this command to each Chrome/Chromium app impacting your system will workaround the underlying macOS resource leak (EDIT: which only occurs when Electron mucks with private APIs to fake having native UI):
That command’s equivalent is being patched into Chrome and will have to ripple downward into Electron apps; directing complaints to each electron app impacted with a link to the relevant Google issue workaround will give them sufficient data to mitigate it, if they bother to.
pps. Manually applying this workaround without scheduling its future removal has a slight but non-zero risk of someday breaking OS-linked autofill in your electron apps in weird or unexpected ways.
ppps. I don’t work for anyone, school for another three years minimum.
Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward?
First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God's delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctness and newness of each leaf and each snowflake.
Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people. Deep within, we want others to use our work and to find it helpful. In this respect the programming system is not essentially different from the child's first clay pencil holder "for Daddy's office."
Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning. The programmed computer has all the fascination of the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate.
Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the task. In one way or another the problem is ever new, and its solver learns something: sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both.
Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by the exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures....
Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.
Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men.
> Each of these 'phases' of LLM growth is unlocking a lot more developer productivity, for teams and developers that know how to harness it.
I still find myself incredibly skeptical LLM use is increasing productivity. Because AI reduces cognitive engagement with tasks, it feels to me like AI increases perceptive productivity but actually decreases it in many cases (and this probably compounds as AI-generated code piles up in a codebase, as there isn't an author who can attach context as to why decisions were made).
I realize the author qualified his or her statement with "know how to harness it," which feels like a cop-out I'm seeing an awful lot in recent explorations of AI's relationship with productivity. In my mind, like TikTok or online dating, AI is just another product motion toward comfort maximizing over all things, as cognitive engagement is difficult and not always pleasant. In a nutshell, it is another instant gratification product from tech.
That's not to say that I don't use AI, but I use it primarily as search to see what is out there. If I use it for coding at all, I tend to primarily use it for code review. Even when AI does a good job at implementation of a feature, unless I put in the cognitive engagement I typically put in during code review, its code feels alien to me and I feel uncomfortable merging it (and I employ similar levels of cognitive engagement during code reviews as I do while writing software).
Read through your comment history and it sounds gnarly. I hope you find something soon. I was unemployed for 6 months in 2022-2023 and it was horrible. I guess I learned something from it, but I hated it. That said, I became employed after applying to a role by emailing the CTO after they posted on the monthly Who's Hiring thread. I've had 2 jobs from HN since.
HN has been huge for my career personally, so I made this site to help make it easier to find stuff that's good for you: https://hnresumetojobs.com/
I recently had to deal with Entra ID for the first time to setup Microsoft OAuth for our site and my god why is it so badly designed.
Just creating a tenant is a PITA and you get a default tenant you can't change without paying for Microsoft 365? Then you have subscriptions, Microsoft partners, Enteprise vs individual accounts, etc. All mixed with legacy AD naming and renaming, documentation with outdated screenshots, Microsoft Partners bullshit.
It’s a pain in the ass to source a copy of this book without giving Jeff Bezos all the money. If anyone reading this thread knows John, could you bring this to his attention?
I even tried calling the bookstore on his campus and they said try back at the beginning of a semester, they didn’t have any copies.
My local book store could not source me a copy, and neither IIRC could Powell’s.
Your best moat against low effort copycats? Stamina. Keep your app in the store, update it regularly, add support for new devices, add new features if appropriate, keep marketing and selling it, and keep polishing it. The copycats don't want any part of that. They want to make a quick buck with as little work as possible, hence the copying and plagiarizing. In a matter of weeks or months, unless they're making bank from it, their app will start to rot. If your app has staying power, then you will eventually rise above them all. And when you have another good idea down the road, cross promote between your own apps (but don't be obnoxious about it), and you'll begin to grow a user base who trust you. That's as good a moat against copycats as you could ever get.
> thread 'main' (17953) panicked at ck-cli/src/main.rs:305:41: byte index 100 is not a char boundary
I seem to have gotten 'lucky' and it split an emoji just right.
---
For anyone curious: this is great for large, disjointed, and/or poorly documented code bases. If you kept yours tight and files smaller than ~600 lines, it is almost always better to nudge llm's into reading whole files.
for no telemetry and half the bloatware you can always use the enterprise version. it's also (n)x the price. there also the iot version which is more stripped down and get only security updates, no features updates or other craps.
I don't think we will ever see a new version the way you described it, the amount of information Microsoft get from spying and telemetry is so much more profitable they even gave 10/11 for free.
thats what i use it for, comes with no new feature updates (which is sometimes annoying as some software depends on some Windows feature updates) and you have to buy 5x licences- and its more expensive. but it works.
LTSC Enterprise IoT. Using this for workstation for years.
Creating bootable install disc via Rufus gives you an options to set up offline account, skip secure boot requirements, skip privacy options, etc., Installation is then a matter of few clicks.
> answered complaints about Windows being bad for development by embedding an OS that is good for development and calling that an innovation
Well, they actually did it twice in recent history: WSL 1 was relatively innovative, integrating Linux application compatibility into the Windows operating system itself. But that turned out to still be bad for development because it meant Linux software was now subjected to the performance problems of the Windows IO stack. So they responded with WSL 2, an ordinary Linux VM. And separately they also introduced the "Dev Drive" feature to let you create a filesystem that bypassed the worst parts of the Windows IO stack.
I had a similar issue 2 years ago[0], tracked it down to a device metrics hostname and then blacklisted the DNS for it. That stopped the huge data use and seemed to have zero affect on the device functioning. It's still working just fine today with that host blocked.
This is one of the reasons I am working on an enclosure-compatible open-source version of the 2nd gen Nest thermostat. It reuses the enclosure, encoder ring, display, and mounts of the Nest but replaces the "thinking" part with an open-source PCB that can interact with Home Assistant.
Nest has been pretty-badly supported in Home Assistant for over a year anyway, missing important connected features.
I've got the faceplate PCB done and working; the rotary encoder and ring working; and the display working but with terrible code with a low refresh rate.
I need to ship at the end of October to beat the retirement date. Plans to get some regular development report-outs and pre-orders are coming quite soon.
It's open source, and uses ESP32-C6 so it can be Wifi, BLE, or Zigbee, whatever software you intend to load onto it.
I replaced all my thermostats for both of my homes with Sinopé products. Smart, allows integration with locally hosted home automation, and compatible with ZigBee networks. Purchased my first batch in late 2021 and haven't had any issues. Physical temperature controls if the LAN goes offline. Highly recommend.
Here's the hardware installed for on-prem home automation using the open-source Home Assistant software:
* Raspberry Pi[1] CPU, heatsink, A/C adapter, and case
* ConBee II Zigbee USB gateway[2]
* USB ADATA Micro SD card reader and USB cable
* Micro SD card (for operating system and Home Assistant)
But, to be fair, the OP was for joint a startup, not a generic programming gig.
Starting your own business is a massive amount of work. For next to no money for years. And chances are (>90%) that you will lose all the time, effort, and list income that you put into it.
If you do the work right (ie all the non-programming stuff) and you survive, then the long-term rewards are very satisfying. 90% will fail. 10% will succeed. And we all believe we are in the 20% right?