Nevertheless, they said it was: too late to opt out, that it can't be canceled or postponed, and then kept emailing us endlessly and sending to collections to pay them another $10K platform fee for the next year (more than we had in the company bank account).

I understand this with large corporations, but I don't think they're a good fit for startups.

Let them use their preferred setup and AI to the full extent they want, and evaluate their output and their methodology. Ask questions of "why did you choose X over Y", especially if you're skeptical, and see their reasoning. Ask what they'd do next with more time.

It's clear when a candidate can build an entire working product, end-to-end, in <1 day vs. someone who struggles to create a bug-free MVP and would take a week for the product.

In addition to the technical interview, hiring them on a trial basis is the absolute best if possible.

Taste and technical understanding of goals and implementation to reach those goals is the biggest differentiator now. AI can handle all the code and syntax, but it's not great at architecture yet - it defaults to what's mid if not otherwise instructed.

The majority of engineers, in my hiring experience, failed very simple tests pre-AI. In a world where anyone can code, they're no better than previously non-technical people. The CS degree is no longer protection.

The gap between average and the best engineers now, though, is even higher. The best engineers can visualize the whole architecture in their head, and describe exactly what they want to an AI - their productivity is multiplied, and they rarely get slowed down.

While this could be done by junior or senior, I think junior usually has the slight advantage in being more AI-native and knowing how to effectively prompt and work with AI, though not always.

If this gives an extra 1% per se, I imagine that is more worth it to a company fresh off a large fundraise with a ton of cash in the bank.

Startups otherwise are lean and won't hold enough cash to get a meaningful return from the 1%.

But okay - I'm confused what sources you would accept? There are "Antifa" groups on social media that literally advocate for doing this, I've seen it first-hand.

I think we can and should all agree that child sexual abuse is a much larger and more serious problem than political leanings.

It's ironic as you're commenting about a social media platform, but I think it's frightening what social media has done to us with misinformation, vilification, and echo chambers, to think political leanings are worse than murder, rape, or child sexual abuse.

I do think it's counter-productive for America to make it harder for legal and talented immigrants, and we should fix that - but what's your evidence that America isn't still the world capital for the ambitious?

Statistically: The close competitors (e.g. Western Europe, Canada) are looking pretty dire economically compared to the US.

Anecdotally: I have friends from Estonia, Canada, the UK, and France that are all clamoring to be in America for the opportunity.

Historically: Post-WWII in the 1950s, 6.9% of the population was foreign-born. It's now 15.8%. So are we really more closed-off than we were then? Or is this just the response to the ever-increasing interest in immigrating because of the US being as compelling as it is?

90-99% of an engineer's work isn't entirely novel coding that has never existed before, so by succeeding at what "already exists", it can take us to 10x-100x productivity.

The automation of all that work is groundbreaking in and of itself.

I think that, for a while into the future at least, humans will be relegated to generating that groundbreaking work, and the AI will increasingly handle the rest.

HN today is equivalent to Reddit 5 years ago: not as great as it was when smaller 10 years ago, but still better than Reddit today.

2) I've never made this accusation on HN before and apologize if I'm wrong, but this is a new account with 3 comments, all on this post (one of the largest posts about Hong Kong I've seen in a while here), and it looks a lot like a paid actor for China. This makes me thankful for the green-name feature on HN, if the random string of numbers wasn't enough of a tell.

(2) I'd actually like the American government to pay better wages for its engineers, and optimize for hiring the best, rather than those desiring a stable, low-paying bureaucracy — I don't think that attracts the best people.

(3) On talent and recruiting: This is being done by the National Design Studio, it says at the bottom. That's led by a cofounder of Airbnb - I know one person who works at the National Design Studio and he's a phenomenal engineer. The administration also has the involvement of David Sacks, who founded Craft Ventures and is pretty well-known in SV. I think this is probably the most tech-competent the government will have been in a long time. I'm not crediting Trump at all for that, to be clear - just pointing out that tech talent in government seems to be getting better, not worse.

I would assume he's just telling the story as it happened.

I disagreed and said that they are both equally horrid.

Expressing equal hatred for people and systems that kill countless millions through starvation, gulags/concentration camps, and disappearing them, is not childish. I have a ton of solidarity with victims of other evil regimes.

OpenAI went closed (despite open literally being in the name) once they had the advantage. Meta also is going closed now that they've caught up.

Open-source makes sense to accelerate to catch up, but once ahead, closed will come back to retain advantage.

I think you may be confusing 'power' or 'impact' with wealth in this take.

Paul Graham wrote about this in a blog post [1].

In NYC, being rich is cool, even if you just inherited it all. Having lived 12 years in NYC, I agree wholeheartedly. It's what everyone aspires to have; the Tribeca loft and the Patek watch.

In SF, PG wrote that nobody cares that you inherited a bunch of wealth unless they're a real estate agent. I think this is true — flashy wealth isn't impressive in SV/SF. Impact and power and the scope of what you've built and created is what's impressive, for better or worse. (I just moved to SF for this reason).

[1] https://paulgraham.com/cities.html