My employer recently switched us all from Cursor to Claude Code. Aside from my personal preference for having a chat window inside VSCode, Claude Code is painfully slow compared to Cursor for my workloads. I think part of this is due to Claude's massive bump in popularity without a similarly rapid build-out of compute. So, the low-hanging fruit for Cursor is to have a massive speed advantage over Claude Code and regain popularity that way. (My current paid AI subscriptions are ChatGPT, Gemini and Cursor. I do not personally pay for Claude.)

And as far as the pivot goes, there seems to be speculation that Elon Musk wishes to roll up all his companies into one big company. So, it doesn't really matter if the AI company lives inside SpaceX or Tesla, since it'll all be one big thing in the future.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46724040

Points: 14

# Comments: 3

Anyhow, it appears it's DigitalOcean, not you. My droplet has been popping up and falling back down. Hopefully they'll get it all fixed soon!

I tried to get in touch with some higher-ups (co-founder and lead engineer) via LinkedIn, but no luck. I emailed support asking to get connected with some higher ups to report the bug, and they thought I was asking for a job. I called support, and the rep didn't seem to understand the nature or the gravity of the security bug, and said they were forward my report to the "accounts department".

Anyhow, what is the normal and proper procedure you would follow to report this to the organization?

I appreciate the insight!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38617313

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

First, my experience with the standing desk: 1) If standing still, my inclination is to lock one knee, cock my hip and lean in. This gets pretty uncomfortable and is probably not much better than sitting for short-term pain issues. 2) I also bought a treadmill to do the walking desk thing. Works well for some tasks, but if I'm deep in complex coding, I can't be walking at the same time. It just doesn't work for me. There's a bit of extra context switching that happens for me when I need to turn off or turn on the treadmill.

What did work for me was a bicycle desk. I bought Garmin Tacx smart trainer and hooked up a cheap bike that I got for free from a friend. I slid the front of the bike under the desk. I can then pedal while working. I found I can pedal even when in moderately deep thought, and if I need to stop pedaling for something complex, you simply stop, rather than having to turn off a device. There have been many days where I've gotten in 50 miles of pedaling while working. I usually output 80-100 watts while working, so very low power. However, after doing that for hours, it's a non-trivial amount of calorie burn. So, you do get a lot of muscular activity.

1. I have a relative who is an MD. He was recruited cross-country at great expense. (Average cost to recruit an MD can be about $250K). So, if his comp was $200K/year and it cost $250K to recruit, a neighboring practice could monitor for new incoming docs, and make an offer of $220K/year in salary to the newly hired doc. If that happened, it would be in the best interest of the doc to switch jobs, but the original practice would be out $250K in recruitment costs.

2. In the case of an acqui-hire, the team is often the special sauce. You embed a bit of non-compete in the form of stock options that vest on a particular schedule, but it may be tricky to structure the deal in an attractive way without a non-compete and non-poach agreement.

3. Trade secrets are often hard to cover in NDA's. Your trade secrets may become embedded in the employee's mind in a manner that they cannot extricate. So, if your employee receives training that includes your trade secrets, those trade secrets will be implicitly used at the next job.

So, I think the argument basically boils down to there being a vast upfront cost to the employer for getting a new employee. If the employee switches to another company, the value of that upfront cost transfers to the new company with no compensation to the old company. It seems a new, more pernicious workaround to non-competes is where employers are charging their employees for training if they leave early. That seems even more hostile than a non-compete.

(As a side note, I think non-competes can be quite damaging. In the case of the MD relative, he was fired, essentially without cause, and his non-compete forced him to be unemployed for a year before he was finally able to convince the former employer to waive the non-compete. So, there should be very hard parameters around non-competes. One thing I think should be mandatory is a written buyout amount for any non-compete that has some basis in reality. For example, if my MD relative was recruited at a cost of $250K with a 2-year non-compete, then he could buy himself out at $250K, minus about $20K for each month of service he completed. Obviously, I haven't fleshed this idea out all the way.)

Second, make sure you have your taxes straight. The S-corp thing is a reasonable idea, but only touch that if you have an accountant doing it for you. The IRS is less forgiving with bad S-corp filings than they are with normal schedule C filings. Also, if you've only been paying taxes on what you took home rather than the total profit of the business, get an accountant and a lawyer ASAP and fix the tax situation. (I doubt that's what happened, but one could infer from your original post that it's possible you mistakenly thought that leaving money in the business account means that it's not taxed that year. Even if you didn't think that, there are probably people who do think that and might be reading this thread.)

As far as your actual question, here are some notes: a) Remember that income from a business is fickle. Operate under the assumption that this income could disappear at a moment's notice. b) If you have a spouse, their opinion is as important as yours, and statistically, they relate to money differently than you. (One stereotype that I've seen played out many times in real life is that men tend to think of money as a scoreboard, and women as safety and security. If a husband and wife ignore those differences, it can lead to intense marital strife.) c) Your stage in life makes a difference. At an early stage in your career, it might be acceptable to swing for the fences, strike out, and start from 0. (That is, reinvest all the money in business growth, grow huge, and eventually implode, failing to gain any profit, but knowing that you at least tried to 100x the business.) In other stages of life, that's not an acceptable risk. d) Regardless of life goals, I think keeping huge amounts of money (more than 18 months of salary and expenses) as cash in your business account isn't wise. It's not doing anything there, and inflation is currently high and will likely stay that way, so it's probably better to have excess money in an asset that matches inflation. e) Don't over-fixate on taxes. Be sure to pay as little tax as you are obligated to pay doing what you want to do, but don't let your decisions be steered excessively be taxes. For example, a 401(k) is a fine way to reduce taxes if you aren't planning on using the money until traditional retirement age anyhow, but perhaps you want investments that can throw off current income, not for some time in the future when your bones hurt and all you want to do is sit around and drink martinis. You have enough income that you can take a mild tax penalty to actually do what you want.

So, as far as what I would do, I would probably buy real estate in a growing area with low to moderate real estate taxes and a good ratio of rent to house cost. (So, San Francisco and New York are out because rent is cheap compared to the value of the unit, and Illinois is out because property taxes are so high that vacancies will cause you to burn cash.) Some states that I've been looking at include the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Tennessee. You're throwing off enough cash, that in a few years you can buy enough housing stock with cash to replace your $14K/month salary with rental income (remember to include the cost of management, maintenance, taxes, and insurance when calculating potential rental income!). At that point, you've bought yourself full flexibility, and then you can swing for the fences as hard as you like, and if you strike out, you're already so far ahead that it'll be an annoyance rather than a catastrophe.

Anyhow, the above is what I would do (and am in the process of doing - my business isn't throwing off as much cash as yours is, but it is exceeding my income requirements). Alternatively, you can do the Silicon Valley approach - pour all your excess cash back into growing the business. Ask yourself: what would it take to 10x the business from here? Is it just that customers don't know about your business? Hire a marketing guy and get after it. Are people not converting from trial to paid accounts? Hire a sales person to hold the customers' hands. Is the market fairly well captured already? Think of adjacent markets to expand in (either similar markets in the US, or localize the product and sell abroad). Take the $23K/month that the business is throwing off each month, and spend it as hard and fast as you can. Or better yet, turn yourself into a Delaware C-Corp, write up a pitch deck, go out to investors, and raise $4 million at at $30 million valuation, and devise a plan to spend $200,000/month on growth. Triple, triple, triple, double, double, double! In 6 short years, your business will have $45,000333222=$9,720,000 in monthly revenue. Then go public! Or more likely, watch it crash and go to $0! Dust yourself off and do it again! (This part of the comment may sound snide, but it's not actually intended that way. The venture capital path is the path that was taken by most of the super-successful recent tech businesses. It works for many people and many businesses.)

Best of luck!

Also, DO seems to be the only major-ish cloud company that only does cloud services (at least that comes to mind immediately). For Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, IBM, and Alibaba, their Cloud products are just one product among many. (Of course, AWS is Amazon's big profit-center, and Microsoft is also betting big on Azure.) RackSpace is publicly traded again, but doesn't seem to really have an identity of its own anymore.

The big thing about DO that I like is that their products seem no-frills and developer-centric. They just make it really easy to be a customer. Everything just seems to work the way you expect, the pricing is what you expect, and their staff seem to understand their customers.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26714627

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Thanks everyone for providing real-time information. It's unnerving when an entire SQL server disappears from your control panel:-). I'd rather not have to restore everything from backups, if it's all the same!

In particular, I have a high availability instance (HA!), with a bonus read replica. The main server and the failover server seem to be malfunctioning. The read replica appears to be fine, and I can access that to pull data.

My first question is, will any revenue be available for companies that build on top of this platform? Normal banks make money on interchange on bank cards and interest spread (as well as less savory activities like crazy overdraft fees). Is there any revenue split with the partner? E.g., maybe Goldman pays 0.82%, I offer my customer 0.50%, and so I pocket 0.32% of the balance.

Second, what about customer service for the end customer? There's clearly a top-level layer that's managed by the partner, a mid-level layer managed by Stripe, and the deep backend banking layer managed by the partner bank. How is customer support split up among those 3?

Those were my two main questions. I heard a couple of people asking about use cases. My use case would be an idea I've been kicking around for a while. I've been working on a concept for a next-level-totally-awesome personal finance budget app. The fundamental purpose of a personal budgeting app is to assist you in knowing when to say yes, and when to say no to a purchase, and to do autopsies on past purchases that may have messed things up. I tried a basic version using Plaid to get a data feed from my bank, but the Plaid data feed is inconsistent from bank to bank (with how it handles authorizations that later settle or fail to settle). Being able to bundle a budget app directly with banking could be killer. You'd have real-time, 100% accurate data coming in. That would be a game changer that might make me finally finish my dusty app.

So, Tara, if you're not doing revenue sharing with partners yet, please consider it:-). Revenue sharing is a great way to make apps-on-top-of-platforms flourish.

Also, I love your job title. Did Stripe issue that title to you? Or did you get to make up the title? Either way, it gave me a chuckle.

Anyhow, Stripe's decision on this account has left me scrambling, because the client's web store was built and ready-to-go, just waiting for the client's API keys, and now it's dead in the water.

Anyhow, I'm 99.99% confident that their decision was made in error. The organization is a local franchise of a well-known nationwide non-profit organization, and is about as non-risky as they come. However, while Stripe has a lot in its favor, talking to humans doesn't seem to be a point in its favor. So, after that long introduction, here's the question:

Is there a secret path to get to a higher up at Stripe to get a real human to manually review a decision that was almost certainly made in error? I know lots of you have worked with Stripe, so perhaps some of you have found this path.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25193708

Points: 1

# Comments: 4