Hacker News: danjl

New comment by danjl in "What is a product?"

danjl — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 15:11:14 +0000

A product is much more than the software and its reliability. The business side is just as big of a lift. You need to build a business, not just a product. A business includes understanding the value proposition, not just a potential solution in the form of a tool. It includes understanding how the software fits in to the target customer's workflow, and how it provides real value. You need to be able to communicate that value proposition to the customers, investors and your employees, amongst other stakeholders. Later, this transforms into understanding the sales cycle and how to use marketing to grow your users. The business side has always been the hard part. Software was always easy to build. The hard part is knowing what to build that really provides value.

New comment by danjl in "Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software"

danjl — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 16:23:30 +0000

Perhaps also a bit of ageism. Always hard to prove. Often implicit.

New comment by danjl in "The One-Person Company Fantasy"

danjl — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 20:38:49 +0000

Of course Solopreneurs were a thing long before AI. It just takes special people. I think the assumption of this article is that there may be a larger array of people capable of running their own business with the aid of AI. I'm similarly leery of this for the same reasons covered in the post. Solopreneurs were generally technical people who had been forced to learn the business side after playing a senior role, generally a CTO or CEO, of a previous startup. They are "full stack" founders, who have deep understanding of the entire business stack, both on the business and technical side. These special people will likely be supercharged by AI, which they can intelligently direct to offload much of the grunt work, both on the technical side, and on the business side, especially for marketing.

New comment by danjl in "New Claude app strings, Fable 5 coming back only with verification"

danjl — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 18:50:14 +0000

I mean, it is possible, that, after verification, credits are added to the Fable usage from your existing subscription plan. Maybe not. But maybe yes. No way to know. And, remember, when Fable was first released, they announced that it was only going to be on the existing subscription plans for a short period.

New comment by danjl in "Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown"

danjl — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 19:54:36 +0000

The Lance Armstrong defense

New comment by danjl in "The National Parks Were Reportedly Told to Stay Silent on Deaths"

danjl — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 23:24:02 +0000

The insecurity of this administration is screaming

New comment by danjl in "Elevated error rate across multiple models"

danjl — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 14:49:05 +0000

Perhaps they are adding security controls to bring Fable back online? One can hope.

New comment by danjl in "Astronauts told to return to ISS after sheltering over air leak repairs"

danjl — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:33:18 +0000

It seems as though the leaks are always in the Russian section? Perhaps this is why. Humans are the weak link. Damn breathers.

New comment by danjl in "The Ask"

danjl — Thu, 28 May 2026 03:16:31 +0000

I mostly agree. I'm curious to hear more details about why you think AI cannot replace middle management?

New comment by danjl in "The Ask"

danjl — Thu, 28 May 2026 03:07:52 +0000

I have 35+ years experience as a manager and engineer at large enterprise tech companies (what the kids now call FAANG, though some of the company names were different back then), and was a Founder, CEO and CTO at a $7M VC funded company and several other "differently-funded" startups.

New comment by danjl in "The Ask"

danjl — Thu, 28 May 2026 02:39:48 +0000

Harsh take: AI should replace most middle management. It is the easiest part of an organization to replace. The people making things should mostly communicate about company strategy, cross-team issues, and job requirements with an AI. There should be a handful of high-level strategy on top of the AI. The AI should have access to all the documents for the company. The middle management should be put in a spaceship along with HR and sent off to another planet so the people who build things can just get stuff done. This will never happen.

New comment by danjl in "Ask HN: Shouldn't Google need to give a public statement about Railway incident?"

danjl — Wed, 20 May 2026 18:17:53 +0000

Then you should be scared about every single online account you use, since they all have this same capability of suspension of your account. That's inherent in any service policy.

New comment by danjl in "Incident Report: May 19, 2026 – GCP Account Suspension"

danjl — Wed, 20 May 2026 18:14:16 +0000

I think the message here is that you can't trust any single cloud provider. You at least need two with full operational capability.

New comment by danjl in "Google changes its search box"

danjl — Wed, 20 May 2026 00:18:49 +0000

Feels a bit like New Coke

New comment by danjl in "I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support"

danjl — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 17:03:20 +0000

This sounds just like all my neighbors complaining about their internet provider.

New comment by danjl in "A $20/month user costs OpenAI $65 in compute. AI video is a money furnace"

danjl — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 23:38:36 +0000

The economics work if you generate the video locally, using your own compute and a pretrained model provided for a fee. The compute bit is the expensive part. Local users could trade time for money. They just don't have a business or security model that allows them to distribute the model for people to use locally. Sure, you might need to wait all night for 10 seconds of video generated on your 4090, but you could do it, and folks might even pay for the privilege of using the pretrained model. Licensing for local compute might even pay back the cost of training the model with enough time and users.

New comment by danjl in "Hostile Volume – A game about adjusting volume with intentionally bad UI"

danjl — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 20:31:15 +0000

...and, of course, there's really no need for a volume control in any app, since there's already a system volume...

New comment by danjl in "Grief and the AI split"

danjl — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 23:49:51 +0000

> I was afraid the puzzle-solving was over. But it wasn't—it just moved up a level.

The craft can move up a level too. You still can make decisions about the implementation, which algorithms to use, how to combine them, how and what to test -- essentially crafting the system at a higher level. In a similar sense, we lost the hand-crafting of assembly code as compilers took over, and now we're losing the crafting of classes and algorithms to some extent, but we still craft the system -- what and how it does its thing, and most importantly, why.

New comment by danjl in "Shall I implement it? No"

danjl — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 23:30:26 +0000

Just saying "no" is unclear. LLMs are still very sensitive to prompts. I would recommend being more precise and assuming less as a general rule. Of course you also don't want to be too precise, especially about "how" to do something, which tends to back the LLM into a corner causing bad behavior. Focus on communicating intent clearly in my experience.

New comment by danjl in "After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes"

danjl — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 21:45:51 +0000

Yes, more time on up front spec and plan building. Bite sized specifically to fit within the context window of a single implementation session. Each step should have a verification process that includes new tests.

Prior to each step, I prompt the AI to review the step and ask clarifying questions to fill any missing details. Then implement. Then prompt the AI after to review the changes for any fixes before moving on to the next step. Rinse, repeat.

The specs and plans are actually better for sharing context with the rest of the team than a traditional review process.

I find the code generated by this process to be better in general than the code I've generated over my previous 35+ years of coding. More robust, more complete, better tested. I used to "rush" through this process before, with less upfront planning, and more of a focus on getting a working scaffold up and running as fast as possible, with each step along the way implemented a bit quicker and less robustly, with the assumption I'd return to fix up the corner cases later.