Hacker News: maxgiraldo

New comment by maxgiraldo in "OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21)"

maxgiraldo — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 18:53:13 +0000

My understanding is that collusion among competitors is illegal (although I’m not a lawyer). I was referring instead to the prisoner’s dilemma that Bruce Greenwald discusses in Competition Demystified. In theory, competitors, like prisoners who are pitted against one another to rat on one another, are usually better off cooperating rather than turning against each other.

New comment by maxgiraldo in "OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21)"

maxgiraldo — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 17:02:02 +0000

OpenAI could still have a significant moat. ChatGPT occupies most consumers’ minds when they think about AI and has become a household name. Google won because search became a habit-forming product people grew accustomed to using. Bing was once effectively indistinguishable from Google Search, yet still failed to achieve mass adoption because users had already become accustomed to “Googling” things. The same could be said for people "ChatGPT-ing" things. If OpenAI and Anthropic are smart, they will maintain similar pricing rather than aggressively undercutting each other, allowing the market to resemble Home Depot and Lowe’s, or cloud computing, where AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure coexist as highly profitable competitors. Unfortunately, I doubt OpenAI or Anthropic will pursue this strategy, as both companies appear to be acting as though the race to AGI is winner-take-all even if the market may ultimately support several highly profitable competitors.

Show HN: Sidequests

maxgiraldo — Sat, 07 Sep 2024 13:15:21 +0000

A web app to encourage people to explore their city. I built this to give myself a little incentive to go out and explore.

- XP is calculated based on your current location at the time the quest was added. The further it is, the more XP you get. - There's level progression. - You can only complete the quest when you are within radius of the quest location. - Everything is stored on the client in localStorage. There are no API calls, third-party tracking, etc. - For now, quests are loaded manually or loaded through "quest packs" which are just CSV files of quest names + coordinates.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41473774

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by maxgiraldo in "Ask HN: I suck at math, where to start?"

maxgiraldo — Wed, 12 Jan 2022 20:30:53 +0000

If anyone is looking to brush up on their Algebra fundamentals, I built an app for that and it's free to use: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pensend/id1571322730. I had a similar problem where I didn't understand where my fundamental knowledge gaps were so I ended up starting from the beginning (pre-algebra). I hope this is helpful for people!

(sorry for the shameless plug)

Warby Parker Launches Contacts

maxgiraldo — Tue, 19 Nov 2019 14:35:48 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-11-19/warby-parker-launches-scout-daily-contact-lenses-at-440-a-year

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21573154

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by maxgiraldo in "What to Know Before Debating Type Systems (2008)"

maxgiraldo — Fri, 03 May 2019 21:27:05 +0000

IMHO Javascript is "unusable" because you can mutate state (among other things). Rich Hickey has a few other arguments against static typing and OO such as names dominating semantics and "types are an anti-pattern for program maintenance and extensibility because they introduce coupling. They’re also parochial." I think he said that in his talk called "Effective Programs":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V1FtfBDsLU

New comment by maxgiraldo in "People Who Claim to Work 75-Hour Weeks Usually Only Work About 50 Hours"

maxgiraldo — Thu, 25 Apr 2019 22:14:24 +0000

Hours spent at the office do not equate to hours worked.

New comment by maxgiraldo in "Spent 50 hours on a take-home assignment only to be ghosted"

maxgiraldo — Wed, 24 Apr 2019 16:45:07 +0000

Regarding take-home assignments, if you do decide to incorporate this into your hiring process, I think pulling a page out of Aaron Swartz's "How I Hire Programmers" [1] is a good place to start. Important points being to keep the task small and non-proprietary. If it is legally and financially possible, then also pay the programmer for her/his/they time.

[1] http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hiring

New comment by maxgiraldo in "How the Kleiner Perkins Empire Fell"

maxgiraldo — Wed, 24 Apr 2019 01:01:07 +0000

I'm still under the impression that if you gave the same set of companies to every VC in the world and had each of them bet on the winners, that you wouldn't see that much of a difference in portfolio performance from the very worst to the very best VCs. There's no magic formula for choosing companies that firms like KP have--a lot of it is based on their reputation. Plus, the next Facebook is not going to look like Facebook or whatever that maxim was. The better companies tend to go to the VCs with the better reputation and the cycle continues.

New comment by maxgiraldo in "Why did Clojure gain so much popularity?"

maxgiraldo — Tue, 23 Apr 2019 15:14:29 +0000

I can't speak about lein or maven, but it is in no way a requirement to use emacs as your editor. In fact, there is really interesting work going on in other editors like Atom with proto-repl[1]. For the web, you can spin up a Gorilla REPL[2] which basically gives you a Jupyter notebook but for Clojure.

[1] https://atom.io/packages/proto-repl [2] http://gorilla-repl.org/

New comment by maxgiraldo in "Why did Clojure gain so much popularity?"

maxgiraldo — Tue, 23 Apr 2019 15:03:51 +0000

> To be perfectly honest, Clojure's biggest mistake, from my point of view, was to be so heavily JVM-dependent.

With Clojure being a hosted language, there's nothing stopping it from adopting a new platform or expanding to other platforms or languages. It has actually already done this with Clojurescript (run in the browser or Node.js)[1] and Clojure CLR (run on Microsoft's .NET)[2].

[1] https://clojurescript.org/ [2] https://clojure.org/about/clojureclr

New comment by maxgiraldo in "Why did Clojure gain so much popularity?"

maxgiraldo — Tue, 23 Apr 2019 14:56:33 +0000

Could you speak more on the use of macros and bottom-up programming as well as REPL-driven development at Walmart Labs (if applicable)? Would be interested to know if those lisp-like attributes play as important a role as functional programming and the JVM in general.

New comment by maxgiraldo in "Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product"

maxgiraldo — Mon, 22 Apr 2019 18:26:47 +0000

The docs for the API, especially for a company whose primary users are software developers, is a core part of the product offering. Just look at the investments that AWS, Twilio, and Stripe make in their docs. This stuff matters.

Esports Company Cloud9 Raises $50M in Series B Funding

maxgiraldo — Wed, 17 Oct 2018 01:33:27 +0000

Article URL: https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattperez/2018/10/15/esports-company-cloud9-raises-50-million-in-series-b-funding/#590691a83dd3

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18234918

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

China to block more than 120 offshore cryptocurrency exchanges

maxgiraldo — Tue, 28 Aug 2018 19:19:00 +0000

Article URL: https://www.scmp.com/tech/enterprises/article/2161014/china-block-more-120-offshore-cryptocurrency-exchanges-crackdown

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17861981

Points: 8

# Comments: 0

Why Bitcoin

maxgiraldo — Tue, 24 Jul 2018 15:29:20 +0000

Article URL: https://www.slideshare.net/MaxGiraldo/why-bitcoin-107308172

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17601892

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by maxgiraldo in "China Is Building a Rain-Making System Three Times as Big as Spain"

maxgiraldo — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 15:00:43 +0000

Why not plant trees? https://forestsnews.cifor.org/10316/make-it-rain-planting-fo...

New comment by maxgiraldo in "Technical debt and microservices presentation by chief architect of Warby Parker [pdf]"

maxgiraldo — Thu, 01 Mar 2018 16:59:59 +0000

Chief Architect of Warby Parker Robert Lefkowitz's presentation on technical debt and his proposition for a microservice architecture called the von Neumann.

Some interesting ideas include:

1. Remove dependencies. 2. Store data in the code (inside AWS lambdas). 3. Technical debt is "borrowed" code.

Technical debt and microservices presentation by chief architect of Warby Parker [pdf]

maxgiraldo — Thu, 01 Mar 2018 16:59:45 +0000

Article URL: https://cdn.oreillystatic.com/en/assets/1/event/281/Technical%20debt_%20A%20master%20class%20Presentation.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16493730

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

Google ends first click free policy

maxgiraldo — Tue, 03 Oct 2017 14:25:37 +0000

Article URL: https://digiday.com/media/please-subscription-hungry-publishers-google-ends-first-click-free-policy/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15392599

Points: 1

# Comments: 2