Hacker News: andrewljohnson

New comment by andrewljohnson in "GameStop makes $55.5B takeover offer for eBay"

andrewljohnson — Mon, 04 May 2026 20:09:26 +0000

I am familiar with all the particulars, check my HN profile ;)

New comment by andrewljohnson in "GameStop makes $55.5B takeover offer for eBay"

andrewljohnson — Mon, 04 May 2026 15:12:41 +0000

eBay already had warehousing ops, I assume larger than tcgplayer’s.

Last year, eBay shut down tcgplayer’s only fulfillment facility in Rochester, NY and switched to using eBay’s facility in Kentucky.

New comment by andrewljohnson in "Ask HN: How to solve the cold start problem for a two-sided marketplace?"

andrewljohnson — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 20:00:58 +0000

For my marketplace, I was friends with someone who could make it look like not a ghost town for the supply (an established game store with lots of trading cards in stock). Then, we struggled to get more sellers. Then, we found channels to get selllers, which were basically software systems we could build integrations with. The integrations de-risked the proposition for sellers enough to get more traction. Eventually, if you have growing volume, the supplyside just starts coming on its own mostly, and you focus on retaining sellers and growing buyers.

For your marketplace, you could bring the supply-side by Fedexing stuff when you don't have a carrier. You'll have to lose money on the initial shipment, until you can route the jobs to the supplyside. This assumes you think the typical use case for this isn't smuggling.

The amount of jobs may be low enough at first that you can be like "You said Cairo to London, that will be $N." Then, if you can fill the job manually by finding someone somehow, then you add them to the platform and they do the job. If not, you send a prepaid mailing package with a Fedex label to the recipient and they ship it easily, and you subsidize it so it seems like a great deal to them.

Limiting geography seems like a good approach too.

New comment by andrewljohnson in "Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects"

andrewljohnson — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 05:18:40 +0000

You could argue that compute was a decisive factor in World War II even (used in code breaking and designing nuclear weapons).

New comment by andrewljohnson in "Launch HN: Palus Finance (YC W26): Better yields on idle cash for startups, SMBs"

andrewljohnson — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 18:55:12 +0000

We use Mercury’s treasury account to get yields on cash, and what appeals to me is it is easy to manage. I don’t have to worry about setting up processes to move money around and it’s integrated with my bank account, and we wouldn’t want to switch even for a higher yield… the operational burden is more important to us than yield.

I think the yield is about 3.2% based on how we set it up to be as liquid as possible. We could have accepted less liquidity for more like 3.8%

New comment by andrewljohnson in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2026)"

andrewljohnson — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 21:29:55 +0000

Mana Pool | Senior/Principal Software Engineer | Full-Time | Remote (US) | 135k-200k USD

We make the market for Magic cards. If you play Magic, we'd love to see you apply.

https://manapool.com/jobs/software-engineer

New comment by andrewljohnson in "Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War"

andrewljohnson — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 03:04:38 +0000

This doesn’t read to me like it was personally written by one person. It’s not Dario we should read this as being written by, it’s Anthropic as an entity.

New comment by andrewljohnson in "NanoChat – The best ChatGPT that $100 can buy"

andrewljohnson — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 18:24:44 +0000

the shakespeare code tuned a little with different training data does a good job of generating Magic The Gathering commander decks

New comment by andrewljohnson in "Implementing a Foil Sticker Effect"

andrewljohnson — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 20:52:43 +0000

This is neat, I have a simple CSS effect that I apply to foil cards on my Magic card marketplace site, but I have wondered what it would take to replicate all the different foil effects that a Magic card can come in to be both more varied and more true to life, in a performant way that fits into my CRUD svelte UX.

New comment by andrewljohnson in "A bug saved the company"

andrewljohnson — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 15:11:21 +0000

This almost exact thing happened with me with a hiking app I used to make. We had a 7-day trial when you started the app, but we shipped a release that broke this and made all the paid features immediately paywalled. This led to a big increase in sales and we got rid of the trial forever.

It’s possible that our trial might have worked better if it were like modern iOS trials that start charging you after a certain period, but ours just let you use the paid features for 7 days and then lapsed, and it stifled sales. My theory was people urgently needed the paid features (mostly to download maps for a coming trip) so the trial got in the way of them paying right away.

New comment by andrewljohnson in "Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists"

andrewljohnson — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 19:12:21 +0000

The same could be said for books about writing, like Williams or Strunk and White. The trick is to not apply what you learn indiscriminately.

New comment by andrewljohnson in "Avoiding Skill Atrophy in the Age of AI"

andrewljohnson — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 14:03:31 +0000

I find using AI very educational in some respects.

I am way more knowledgeable about SQL than I have ever been, because in the past I knew so little I would lean on team members to do SQL for me. But with AI, I learned all the basics by reading code it produced for me and now I can write SQL from scratch when needed.

Similarly for Tailwind… after having the AI write a lot of Tailwind for me from a cold start in my own Tailwind knowledge, now I know all the classes, and when it’s quicker, I just type them in myself.

New comment by andrewljohnson in "Serving Vector Tiles, Fast"

andrewljohnson — Sun, 06 Apr 2025 15:35:13 +0000

In GIS world, a vector tile is a chunk of geographic data (the vectors) limited to a geographic region (the tile boundaries which fit into the projected checkerboard of your map).

You use a vector tile instead of a png or jpeg tile because you don’t want an image representation of the data, you want the raw “vector” data so you can style it, search it, and do other things with it on client devices.

The Shuffler Is Broken: Finding the Best Method for Shuffling Cubes

andrewljohnson — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 23:08:01 +0000

Article URL: https://luckypaper.co/articles/the-shuffler-really-is-broken-finding-the-best-method-for-shuffling-cubes/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42718498

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by andrewljohnson in "I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it"

andrewljohnson — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 16:02:46 +0000

Make sure not to apply this polite but curt tone to consumer apps.

New comment by andrewljohnson in "Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far"

andrewljohnson — Wed, 22 May 2024 03:01:49 +0000

Forget squarespace websites. AI is such a huge time saver for complex front ends. It doesn’t write the whole thing, but you can easily go from screenshot to code you are better off using as a starter than typing it all up yourself. And it’s way easier to make css or tailwind changes to modify components than thinking really hard.

New comment by andrewljohnson in "Could humans alter the moon's orbit significantly with current technology? (2016)"

andrewljohnson — Sun, 28 Apr 2024 05:53:01 +0000

Edward Teller wasn't sure the atomic bomb they were building wouldn't light the entire atmosphere on fire for a while there.

New comment by andrewljohnson in "Ask HN: What non-AI products are you working on?"

andrewljohnson — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 22:46:42 +0000

A marketplace that focuses 100% on Magic: The Gathering cards.

https://manapool.com

New comment by andrewljohnson in "Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI"

andrewljohnson — Sat, 23 Mar 2024 04:58:20 +0000

I wonder if MidJourney is still ripping. I’m actually curious if it’s superior to ChatGPT’s Dall-E images… I switched and cancelled my subscription when ChatGPT added images, but I think I was mostly focused on convenience.

Building Phomo, Part 1: The Calendar

andrewljohnson — Sat, 09 Mar 2024 19:50:28 +0000

Article URL: https://yungchomsky.substack.com/p/building-phomo-part-1-the-calendar

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39654228

Points: 2

# Comments: 0