Hacker News: mstibbard

New comment by mstibbard in "Ask HN: Struggling founders, pls share your startup struggle"

mstibbard — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 00:57:20 +0000

Is the long-term pricing model seat/usage based? Value based?

Consider how much you want/need to be charging customers in 3-5 years time and work backwards from there. Be open with early customers on these prices. Offer discounts (sometimes even permanent) against these target prices for early customers/design partners.

New comment by mstibbard in "Phoenix.new – Remote AI Runtime for Phoenix"

mstibbard — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 00:21:10 +0000

This thread on Elixir Forum is a good read if you are considering building agents with Elixir. Jido's author weighs in also.

https://elixirforum.com/t/is-anyone-working-on-ai-agents-in-...

New comment by mstibbard in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2023)"

mstibbard — Sun, 03 Dec 2023 08:05:04 +0000

This appears to be true remote (I.e., globally remote) as long as you are willing/able to have 4 hours overlap with US working hours per day

New comment by mstibbard in "Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?"

mstibbard — Sun, 03 Dec 2023 05:13:08 +0000

I’d really like to hear more about this

New comment by mstibbard in "Generative AI for Beginners"

mstibbard — Fri, 24 Nov 2023 21:00:20 +0000

https://course.fast.ai

https://karpathy.ai/zero-to-hero.html

Both fantastic.

New comment by mstibbard in "Show HN: Instant API – Build type-safe web APIs with JavaScript"

mstibbard — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 05:33:34 +0000

According to Wikipedia[1] it looks like the rebranding effort from Swagger -> OpenAPI was in November 2015, but the OpenAPI Specification was only officially renamed on 1st January 2016. OpenAI was founded on 10th December 2015. So it depends how pedantic we are being -- technically on branding, OpenAI predates OpenAPI by 21 days. In terms of the spec itself (as in, the thing they adopted), Swagger v1 was released August 2011.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAPI_Specification

New comment by mstibbard in "Show HN: Instant API – Build type-safe web APIs with JavaScript"

mstibbard — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 05:26:11 +0000

OpenAPI predates OpenAI by quite some time. OpenAI has adopted usage of OpenAPI.

I do find myself accidentally saying one and meaning the other, in both directions too!

New comment by mstibbard in "Ask HN: Holy grails of free, online courses?"

mstibbard — Sun, 24 Sep 2023 00:29:51 +0000

+1 for https://course.fast.ai/

New comment by mstibbard in "FedNow Is Live"

mstibbard — Fri, 21 Jul 2023 01:22:19 +0000

I think that was their point - the rest of the world solved this long ago, it is just the USA that lagged

New comment by mstibbard in "Google layoffs Jan 20, 2023 – California WARN public records"

mstibbard — Thu, 02 Feb 2023 02:28:43 +0000

I would estimate a senior staff engineer to be an L5 or L6 at Google

New comment by mstibbard in "Ask HN: What's the best tech stack for indie hacking?"

mstibbard — Sat, 28 Jan 2023 03:01:09 +0000

If you don't already know a tech stack, I'd recommend Elixir & Phoenix (incl. LiveView).

If you DO already know a tech stack then use that one!

New comment by mstibbard in "Modules, not microservices"

mstibbard — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 21:58:29 +0000

Forcing consistent language, runtime, tooling etc is generally a good thing as it reduces ongoing operational burden as well as some retention & hiring dilemmas.

New comment by mstibbard in "Ask HN: How do you host cheap relational databases?"

mstibbard — Mon, 12 Sep 2022 12:21:29 +0000

Have you tried supabase?

New comment by mstibbard in "Column – a chartered bank for developers"

mstibbard — Thu, 21 Apr 2022 20:48:57 +0000

It looks fantastic, as does the whole product. I’ve been hoping for someone to make a good bank-in-a-box for a long time. Good luck!

New comment by mstibbard in "Column – a chartered bank for developers"

mstibbard — Thu, 21 Apr 2022 20:32:36 +0000

Does anyone know what they used to produce their API documentation?

New comment by mstibbard in "Ask HN: How do you use email aliases?"

mstibbard — Sun, 13 Feb 2022 02:02:22 +0000

Fastmail brought out a Masked Email feature last year which does this for you! I'm a big fan.

"Keep your real email address private. We’ll create a new address you can use when subscribing to services online, that sends to your inbox. If you start receiving spam, you can block that address.

New Masked Email addresses will be created @fastmail.com. Want to use your custom domain? You can change this in Settings → Domains."

New comment by mstibbard in "70% of startups offer remote work options as hiring heats up, YC data shows"

mstibbard — Fri, 21 Jan 2022 03:40:29 +0000

Thanks Ryan, I'd definitely be keen to see what insights you glean from that data, and I am also interested to hear which other YC startups hire global-remotely as I'll add them to my site :)

New comment by mstibbard in "70% of startups offer remote work options as hiring heats up, YC data shows"

mstibbard — Fri, 21 Jan 2022 00:33:55 +0000

I think most "remotes" are within time zone-proximity.

The employment regulation burden is also massive for going truly global-remote.

Australia and NZ for example have strong employment laws AND do not overlap time zone-wise with most of the rest of the world. We have some great talent here but it's often too hard to make it work.

Disclaimer: I made https://rafo.com.au to collate remote jobs that work for Aussies & Kiwis.

New comment by mstibbard in "Ask HN: Why do so many large Tech companies buyback their stock?"

mstibbard — Wed, 16 Jun 2021 02:11:31 +0000

Stock buybacks are (generally) done by companies when they think their stock is undervalued.

Stock buybacks destroy the quantity of shares that are bought by the company. E.g., if a company had 1,000 shares outstanding and bought back 100 of them, there's now only 900 shares outstanding. This benefits shareholders (assuming they didn't sell into the buyback) because each share is now a larger holding of the company (1/900 > 1/1000).

This decrease in shares outstanding normally corresponds to a share price increase.

I'd speculate that tech companies do buybacks as a way to keep employee remuneration high (via stock) without necessarily needing to pay them a lot of cash.

New comment by mstibbard in "Ask HN: Does anyone else find the AWS Lambda developer experience frustrating?"

mstibbard — Mon, 19 Apr 2021 04:41:46 +0000

Would you please share more details about your mental model for working with Lambda?