Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47416495

Points: 9

# Comments: 4

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47380231

Points: 116

# Comments: 83

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47374037

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

It’s an interesting question if the decline would have happened regardless of LLMs, just slower?

[1] An annotated visualization of the same data I did: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/are-llms-making-stackover...

Interestingly, this was my exact experience when working with a publisher (Manning, in my case), and it was the main reason I decided to part ways when writing my book (The Software Engineer’s Guidebook). While I did appreciate publisher’s desire to please a broader crowd by pushing a style they thought would broaden the appeal: but doing so makes technical books less attractive, in my view. And even less motivation to write!

In my case, self publishing worked out well enough with ~40,000 copies sold in two years [1], proving the publisher’s feedback wrong, and that you don’t need to dumb down technical books, like this specific publisher would have preferred to do so.

Even if it wouldn’t have worked out: what’s the point writing a book where there’s little of the author (you!) left in it. Congrats to OP for deciding to stick to your gut and write the book you want to write!

[1] https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-software-engi...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46004999

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45106863

Points: 30

# Comments: 2

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44260789

Points: 10

# Comments: 0

From the legislation:

“ Section 174(c)(2) provides that the required § 174 method does not apply to any expenditure paid or incurred for the purpose of ascertaining the existence, location, extent, or quality of any deposit of ore or other mineral (including oil and gas).”

Is there an explanation how software developers creating software for oil and gas companies are different than for any other industry?

Or can we assume that the oil and gas industry managed to (yet again!) have its lobbyists where it mattered?

I did what seemingly no other publication reporting on it did: signed up for Klarna, bought one item and used this bot.

I was... not impressed?

Klarna's "AI bot" felt like the "L1 support flow" that every other company already has in-place: without AI! Think like when you have a problem with your UberEats order and 80% of cases are resolved without a human interaction (e.g. when an item is missing for your item.)

I walked through the bot's capabilities [1] and my conclusion was that pretty much every other company did this before (automating the obvious support cases.) The real question should have been: why did Klarna not do it before? And when it did, why did it build a wonky AI bot, instead of more intuitive workflows than other companies did?

My sense is that Klarna really wants to be seen as an "AI-first tech company" when it goes public, and not a "buy now pay later loan company" because AI companies have higher valuations even with the same revenue. But at its core, Klarna is a finance or ecommerce-related company: an not much to do with AI (even if it uses AI tools to make its business more efficient - regardless of whether it could use non-AI tools to get the same thing done)

[1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/klarnas-ai-chatbot/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43721423

Points: 5

# Comments: 8

This is a full-remote startup and they have now added a mandatory in-person interview to their recruitment loop.

Amusingly, in their case, using local job boards did not help: they got candidates pretending to from Poland or Serbia, yet not speaking the language.

A little sad to see how each episode like this casts more doubt and uncertainty into full-remote interviewing.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43340994

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43560940

Points: 12

# Comments: 0

While most companies can operate for some time without JIRA: losing your paging service means you're flying in the dark. And yet, Atlassian did not prioritize restoring OpsGenie.

I covered the details at the time [1]. To this date, this incident is a real head-scratcher and makes me wonder if Atlassian has internalized how much more critical an incident alerting software is, compared to a ticketing software (JIRA) or wiki (Confluent).

[1] https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/i/52148641/what-atl...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43177532

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

I originally didn’t mention this because S174 impacts the US and US-HQ’d companies. In this data other countries like Germany, UK, France all see a similar drop. Also, S174 impact likely really started from early 2024, when companies impacted had to pay high taxes and realized the change is here to stay with no end in sight. Doesn’t explain the drop since 2022.

Updated the article to make this clear though. It was not in the original version - thanks for the note!

[1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/section-174/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42380514

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Pricing for these services is not cheap, given it can be very helpful for professional traders.

(I’m no professional trader, and not even a trader. I just sometimes want to search for interesting things in transcripts, when I research a topic. I would pay for a decent service offering full text search for transcript search, to use it a few times per month (or perhaps even less frequently). Still not found a product that does it at a sensible price point for my use case - likely because my use case is not worth building a business on.)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41949251

Points: 10

# Comments: 5

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41419364

Points: 3

# Comments: 0