Goody is hiring a full-stack Staff Software Engineer who likes to ship at a startup pace and has an eye for exceptional UI/UX.
I'm Mark, the technical co-founder and CTO at Goody. Despite being something everyone does, gifting is one of the areas of commerce yet to be disrupted. Our goal is to make people's days by making gifting easy, while building a sustainable business on that market opportunity.
We're looking for engineers who like to build at a startup pace, have a critical eye for detail and user experience, and thrive when given autonomy and ownership.
Our product is used by Google, Stripe, Anthropic, Meta, NBCUniversal, Notion, and others, and we also offer a developer API for commerce.
Goody is hiring a full-stack Staff Software Engineer who likes to ship at a startup pace and has an eye for exceptional UI/UX.
I'm Mark, the technical co-founder and CTO at Goody. Despite being something everyone does, gifting is one of the areas of commerce yet to be disrupted. Our goal is to make people's days by making gifting easy, while building a sustainable business on that market opportunity.
We're looking for engineers who like to build at a startup pace, have a critical eye for detail and user experience, and thrive when given autonomy and ownership.
Our product is used by Google, Stripe, Anthropic, Meta, NBCUniversal, Notion, and others, and we also offer a developer API for commerce.
This is cool I guess but I don’t get why some of these electric car companies have to design cars that look like toys. Rivian and this. It looks like a golf cart with a flatbed. I think an electric kei truck would have a huge market in the US but the design needs some work to be taken seriously.
There’s something to be said for being distinctive, but you can do that while not looking silly (Lucid is a good example). And simply being a small electric truck is enough differentiation anyway
They had a ton of design constraints, and looking like a toy wasn't one of them. This is what their solution to those constraints (such as more range via a low coefficient of drag) looks like. Very few people are capable of evaluating a vehicle without their biases influencing them, such as what a masculine truck needs to look like.
Not trying to offend anyone as this is a matter of taste, but I can't help finding the American "masculine truck" ugly and cringeworthy.
Maybe it is me being the from European Alps and having close contact with people who actually have to drive vehicles in challenging terain (for forest work and hunting). And those cars are typically the polar opposite of the pseudo-masculine big truck: You want them small, because where you go there are trees and rocks that won't move out of the way just because your car looks masculine. You want them light because you are moving across badly maintained forest roads, etc. You want them ugly because you will be scraping more things than you like. And unless you have need for moving bulk loads like water containers for alpine cows regularly a closed back is much more practical, at least in this climate (if you need to move such a thing, get a trailer).
Over here these trucks are relatively rare, and likely smaller than their American variants, and mostly driven by a certain type of man as what appears to be a fashion choice.
Maybe it is a cultural or generational thing, but to me a car is a tool and I don't connect a lot of my identity to it. That doesn't mean I don't like a specific car or don't like to be able to mainrain one myself etc. It is just that I like functional efficient machines and a big tank weighing many tons that you drive in mostly alone is the opposite of that.
That said, mountainous forest work is obviously a more prominent use case in the alps than it is in the US.
US trucks that are owned by individuals are not primarily seen as tools. 70% of US truck owners have only one vehicle, so their primary purpose is to be used as a luxury barge and family hauler. Not much different than the huge cars that Americans preferred to drive in the 1950s and 1970s. There has always been a thread of huge cruiser style vehicles in American auto culture and this continues today.
When it comes to work, towing capacity and generic American suburbia workloads tend to dominate (large houses with big projects, longer drives, etc).
Not saying that these tanks are a "practical choice", but they are perhaps better viewed through the lens of luxury barges.
Hunting is a good point, but from what I've gleaned it's a subculture that sort of stands alone and has a huge "gear" component. I think that it's somewhat common to have small specialized vehicles for that use case, like ATV style vehicles of various sorts. Ex: last time I was in North Carolina I saw someone with this dune buggy thing suited for that... and it was being hauled around behind a massive truck, naturally. Off-roading and hunting culture also overlaps a bit, and there is a legitimate off-road culture that is quite separate from the Big Truck culture. These people will often have two vehicles, so the Big Truck would be used for the aforementioned luxury cruising and status, while as you said, a more suitable vehicle is used for the actual rough terrain.
They do have a fairly unique status power in much of the US. If a small business owner drives up in a sports car, they may get jokes, but for some reason driving up in a new GMC 2500HD is sort of seen as a mark of a "working man's success" instead of being flashy and showing off. It's something you can drive up and meet clients without about how you are going to look. That said, I'm speaking from experience in southern and midwest culture, but that's where the majority of the US population lives. When I was in New York you would see these monster trucks much less often, and as you said the driver was often much more ostentatious I'm trying to flagrantly stand out rather than subtly rise above without getting called out as one does in the midwest.
Thanks for shining a light on this for me, helps me follow the line of thought, especially your part about how it is seen as a sign of success to own a specific new car etc.
Most urbanite Gen Z students I teach don't have (need) driving license and don't plan to get one. Owning a car is somewhat a useless luxury in most European bigger cities, since you're much faster and more comfortable with bicycles and public transport anyways. The occasional family trip or bigger transport can be done with a rental or car sharing, if public transport doesn't cut it. This results in the car being seen much less as a status symbol, except for certain migrantic or economically strained subcultures. But you won't be able to impress your say average Berlin Techno-girl with a flashy car, in fact it would likely achieve the opposite effect.
Where I live hunting isn't really that much of a sport, more a mix between a regular job, a hobby and tradition. So while there is expensive gear (hand-engraved traditional guns that sell for the price of a luxury car), most people just use whatever. From what I have seen in the US hunting (like literally everytbing else) is much more gear-focused over there.
To 99% of consumers in the US, kei trucks look like toys, so I'm not sure that's the best example.
Honestly, if you look at the truck market, it's dominated by masculine designs like the F-150. Arguably this has created a gap in the market for designs that are more compact and approachable. It may never be the majority, but TELO looks perfectly suited to address that niche.
I find it amusing that people are discussing the masculine design language and how men driving trucks are overcompensating (OK, not so much in this particular thread), but for as long as I can remember, it's been women that have always told me that they prefer bigger vehicles.
Personally I find the increasingly large bulbous noses tacked on to the front of US trucks ridiculous. The fact that these "codpieces" are empty on EVs is such a wild metaphor that it seems like an intentional parody.
I'll grant that the Telo may have gone a little too far in the other direction given that they have issues with the aerodynamic drag of the front wheelwells, but it still looks slightly more sensible than a normal truck.
This looks like a kei truck, who by definition looks like a toy.
Seriously though, it has the same shape and look of any kei I've seen. Like others, I wish for a 90s era Ford Ranger or Tacoma, but between safety requirements and capability demand from people that's probably not practical.
Goody is hiring a full-stack Staff Software Engineer who likes to ship at a startup pace and has an eye for exceptional UI/UX.
I'm Mark, the technical co-founder and CTO at Goody. Despite being something everyone does, gifting is one of the areas of commerce yet to be disrupted. Our goal is to make people's days by making gifting easy, while building a sustainable business on that market opportunity.
We're looking for engineers who like to build at a startup pace, have a critical eye for detail and user experience, and thrive when given autonomy and ownership.
Our product is used by Google, Stripe, Anthropic, Meta, NBCUniversal, Notion, and others, and we also offer a developer API for commerce.
Don’t agree, but to each their own. The native app experience for every app noted in the article is better and smoother than the mobile web version, in my opinion. Lots of people hate Electron apps, which suggests to me that my preference for native apps isn’t unique.
Web apps can ask for your location or microphone the same way native apps can. Just reject it, there’s nothing that says you have to accept on either platform, so to say that’s a negative for native apps is odd.
The biggest downside of native apps is you can’t customize them with extensions or user styles like you can with websites.
The author is not contesting that the app experience is better. Yeah, the web experience is worse -- because the product people are treating the entire web presence as a _marketing surface_ for the app. So, the web version is basically an ad for the app. This is true of Reddit, Yelp, and others. How could it not be worse?
It's too bad because it's not like the web is incapable of providing a beautiful ux for those products. But then so why do you think these companies employ massive teams of devs, for Android, and then again for iOS, reimplementing their functionality on every platform? All that to provide you with that sweet extra smooth native "feel", 2% nicer than the web could do? No, it's not for you...
This is key. Companies pushing apps is not for your benefit. It's so they can further monetize you right under your nose and with your full permission by accepting their EULA. This is just a furtherance of the if you don't pay for the product you are the product.
Isn’t that precisely the point with this thread? It’s all from the company’s perspective. They’ve just gaslit the users into thinking it is from the user’s perspective.
Companies still have to provide value for them to attract users. It's cynical to only look at the value the company gets and ignoring the value users and advertisers get.
I argue that this decade shows you do not have to provide value. You capture the market yester-decade and then you can hold the users hostage as you do any and everything to appeal to shareholders and advertisers.
This is indeed a short term strategy, but tech companies right now are thinking very short term.
Nostalgia, network effects, and boiling thr frog. Then you build on that with business incentives; you may not like Facebook, but you need to advertise there because that's where everyone is.
Basically, you rely on goodwill from yester-year and slowly ad in intrusive stuff that users adjust to. Thars enshittification in its raw essence. Admittedly, this mostly works because the general user is not "active" and will not take the time to migrate unless something absolutely scandalous happens. For them, it's easier putting up with ads than trying to log into an ad free substitute.
Nostalgia changes how people perceive value. Network effects is about how exponential value can be gained from linear user growth. Boiling the frog us about slowly doing things to avoid changing how people perceive value. None of these are a sign a product has no value.
No one would advertise with Facebook if there was no value from purchasing ad space. The billions of dollars people spend is evidence there is value there for advertisers.
>will not take the time to migrate
Sure, people don't actively seek to maximize the value they receive, but that doesn't mean what they are currently getting value from doesn't have value.
> None of these are a sign a product has no value.
You described the majority of those as being about the perception of value rather than value.
>No one would advertise with Facebook if there was no value from purchasing ad space. The billions of dollars people spend is evidence there is value there for advertisers
No one is disputing that the advertisers are getting value. The pursuit of advertiser value at the expense of users is the complaint.
I see perceived values as more of a multiplier. If an app had 0 value, 0 times anything is still 0. You can't take hostages over something with no value. If people didn't value their life it wouldn't work, similarly if people saw 0 value in an app they wouldn't use it.
My argument was about how value is decreasing. No one is arguing that these websites have zero value to begin with.
A more interesting thought experiment is where that threshold is before the lack of value invigorates the energy needed to migrate. That's part of why I put the boiling frog metaphor there. Rate of change definitely has impact on perceived value.
> Network effects is about how exponential value can be gained from linear user growth
network effects is the momentum that keeps everyone from stopping the use of the service/product. it takes too much energy to stop, so people just keep using. it also helps there's nothing to replace. any fledgling service that might offer an alternative just gets bought up by the service.
It is both mysterious and comical how we manage to enshitify every corner of our existence. I can't think of anything unrubbed with the magic poop wand.
The scope of the problem is much larger. If there is no "let's not use the app" movement and if there was it wouldn't be big enough to pick up on the radar.
We have bigger things to worry about as the shit is oozing out of everything.
They are localized, and not enough to overcome the migration Apathy. Reddit in 2023 was a great example of a high profile boycott that ultimately failed (in terms of impacting revenue. You can definitely argue brain drain).
>We have bigger things to worry about as the shit is oozing out of everything.
Yes, but "Tech bad/greedy" is about as far as we can push on HN before it becomes "too political" and and people/bots try to hide the story. At least I have other sources to discuss those matters.
In the early days a comment came with a footer with links to the authors little homepage, FOSS project or startup business. Killing this also killed organic linking. This idea that all self promotion is evil was the greatest mistake. That Google went along with it and even promoted nofollow puzzled me greatly.
I haven't put any effort in writing long well-researched comments since that time. I wouldn't dare put more than 2 references in a comment here. 4 would be pushing it.
As if nothing interesting was written before about anything?
Like the other posters you are giving reasons why people will not switch to alternatives, but you are failing to argue why people are stuck using an app that provides no value.
for one, it's a nice little icon on the desktop of their device. you click it, and it launches the very thing you are looking to do. a browser means you have to click to open the browser. then you have to type the specific URL which is already something way more demanding than clicking the single icon even if they do remember the URL.
for another, devs are definitely making the web experience subpar which has been mentioned elsewhere in this thread. most websites are just adverts for their apps if they function at all any more. loading a website on mobile is even worse than desktop as they pester you with "it's better in the app" pop ups.
people find browsing an app store much easier than browsing the web. in fact, do people browse the web at all any more. search is shit now, so discovery by search is not what it used to be. click through from search is also plummeting as "search assistant" type responses means no reason to click through to sites.
One. Because I don't believe one exists. The reasons you gave of it looking nice and accomplishing something the user wants to do provide value to the user.
Take Reddit, which is one of the few sites mentioned here that I use. At least initially, the value provided is getting rid of the constant prompts to load the site in the Reddit app. Even though I use old.reddit.com, which doesn't have those prompts, there are times when it redirects me to the new website automatically. Does it offer value beyond getting rid of those messages? Perhaps, but I doubt that it is the type of value that I would be looking for.
How about the value of being able to talk to people who share the same hobby you do. Or the value of being able to see a community made wiki about some topic you are trying to learn about. Even being able to see cat pictures is valuable to people.
I tend to use Reddit on mobile as a read-only medium, but I don't see why one couldn't contribute to conversations/wikis with a mobile browser. One can certainly do so through their website with a desktop browser. If there is a barrier, it would be artificial.
It's also worth noting that I have nothing against apps. I use them to read RSS feeds, download podcasts, etc.. Yet those are independent of any particular service and there is enough choice between apps that I can use one that respects my privacy. I am not being limited in any way. If anything, it is more empowering since the developers of a dedicated RSS feed reader is more likely to design an app that is directed towards the needs of its users. In contrast, the Reddit app is directed towards the needs of Reddit.
Nothing existed before a user was born. It is impossible for someone that has always had something to imagine in a real manner what not having it would be like. Hell, if there's an AWS outage for a couple of hours, those that have always had it freak out like the world is ending.
if the website already provides the value, there is no need for the app. instead, they cripple the website to push people to the app. why? it is more profitable for the company because of the data they can get from the app. doesn't matter if the UX is worse for the user. they only need to make it just usable enough
> It's too bad because it's not like the web is incapable of providing a beautiful ux for those products.
I’ve never seen a web app I was happy with being a web app. I understand that a lot of people prefer web-based tools but a lot of us cannot stand them and try to get our work out of the browser as much as possible because we dislike the UX of the browser platform.
The web is definitely incapable of hacking the speed of light, though. And if you want truly instantaneous search - I mean deterministic, keystroke by keystroke - you have to put your data as close to the customer as possible, ideally right on the same device, ideally right in the same process.
Is this necessary for most commercial projects? Of course not. But many of the programs I consider the nicest to work with today are that way precisely because someone fought back against the call of the network.
Mobile apps are so limited compared to an actual web browser's interface. The reddit mobile app only lets you view one topic/conversation at a time. Same with the IMDB app; it's impossible to do any research, like comparing actors or movies, using the IMDB mobile app because the flows are all captive and there's very limited ways to navigate between the resources. With a browser, I can open up multiple sets of content at once. So many mobile apps are just fixed views and offer no compelling interface for anything but the extremely limited way they want (force) you to use their app. The fact that a browser allows multiple tabs and can do bookmarking makes up for (works around) the relatively lack luster interfaces both website and mobile apps have.
Mobile IMDB is not the best example -- simply navigating backwards causes a page reload, or at least a long stall and jitter as the page scrolls you around. I'd prefer an app experience (however I just use the Letterboxd app instead.)
Tabs are a big win for mobile web, I agree. I just don't think it outweighs the annoyance of navigating the app in more traditional ways.
The reason I believe the web experience is inferior is because companies put more resources into apps at the expense of the web.
Apps break often. They need a lot of support. Everything must be constantly updated. You never know when Samsung or Apple will push an update that breaks things because of some esoteric policy shift or setting change.
But the web? If you do it right, maintenence is much easier. If things do break: users can try different browsers or devices to get around instead of being bricked.
I can't be the only one who _never _ updates software on my phone until I absolutely have to. Everything is so brittle. I'm sick of being gaslit that apps make that better. Despite it's own horrible implementations, the web is far more stable.
> The reason I believe the web experience is inferior is because companies put more resources into apps at the expense of the web.
The main reason is just a single company - Apple. They have been hell bent on nerfing Safari so that they can continue their rent seeking behavior on App Store.
If Spotify has a functional mobile website, they cant take 30% cut from their app. The way Apple does is 2 fold. 1) deliberating not investing $$ into Safari 2) claiming that you'll get malware from internet.
Spotify was an example, but since you were harping on it. Why is it that on desktop everyone uses spotify.com to listen to music, purchase subscription but when it comes to iPhone, we have to install an app from the App Store.
> Why is it that on desktop everyone uses spotify.com to listen to music
But … I don’t?
I download and install Spotify.app on my computer (at least my gf does on hers, I use Apple Music). Maybe I am the weird one? No I am not, I skimmed the Spotify subreddit and most use the app on PC/Mac: It has keyboard shortcuts, people find it nicer being its own program instead some browser tab, it is more lightweight, it provides offline play and crossfading and has (freemium and paid) higher bitrate than web. It is you who are missing out.
Music was played by the iTunes process on mobile until 2016, and only a single audio stream at a time. How dare you wanted a fade in/out with less than 3 seconds latency!
And even then Apple was reluctant to implement a correct Promise based Audio API in WebKit, which in turn was incompatible with all other Web Browsers (up until today, btw) and also had very different audio formats supported that were only compatible with iOS due to proprietary patents.
Saying WebKit played music in 2007 is literally a worse experience than a Flash web player doing that.
It is very true, you think the only way thst music came from your phone before 2016 was iTunes? It was a hack that streaming services - mostly radio streaming services- used before iOS 4 when apps could play music in the background used because Safari was the only thing that could run in the background.
The question was why did Spotify have to use an app instead of using the web.
But then again, are you really saying that Android users don’t use the app?
As a mobile dev who’s done a little web work, my experience has been the opposite. If you’re writing your apps with native OS SDKs and mostly stock widgets (don’t go reinventing wheels for the sake of branding), maintenance generally isn’t too bad.
Web app projects on the other hand always feel some degree of held together by bubblegum and duct tape. Do so much as breathe wrong and they fall apart (which is part of why the industry has become docker-centric). None of the old web projects I have laying around are trivial to get into good enough shape to develop on again, whereas I can pick up and old iOS app that hasn’t been touched in a decade and getting it running in an afternoon.
I will say however that there’s a class of poorly built cross platform mobile app that I’ve come to abhor, because as you say they’re brittle and break easily on top of generally being unpleasant to use.
I feel like many web developers want this to be true, but it is categorically false.
When you target a higher level abstraction, be it web, or flutter or whatever, you are explicitly choosing not to follow the platform native UX.
It’s more convenient to developers not to have to worry about that.
That’s it.
Web is easy. It’s free.
That doesn’t mean it’s better, or that it’s even possible for it to be as good as a native experience.
You can make a web app that is good; but it is the unavoidable and undeniable reality that web applications have a glass ceiling.
It is. Not. Possible. to write a web app that is as good as the equivalent native application can be. Certainly not a cross browser one.
There are reasons, you can blame Apple and safari or whatever you want, but that’s where it’s at, today.
> The reason I believe the web experience is inferior is because companies put more resources into apps at the expense of the web.
It’s not a falsifiable argument.
“That is not as good because I believe less effort was put into it”.
Ok.
I believe that for the equivalent effort you could create a better web app than a native app. I think you could measure that, and it would be pretty clear.
However, I believe many large native applications could not be implemented using the web platform. I think react native and the disaster that is is a reasonably solid proof that this is true.
They’re worse because web is worse, not because they didn’t bother to put effort in; because it wasn’t possible to do it using the web platform.
Native is always better if you out the effort in. It has capabilities that web doesn’t.
>But the web? If you do it right, maintenence is much easier
Eh, I'll argue this isn't as true as you think. Browsers are constantly updated these days and have their own fun things that break or mess with experiences.
But that's not the biggest issue with browsers, at least on the PC, it's that the average user seems completely incapable of keeping mal/adware off their device. For those users the app world is an escape from the hell they were in.
For me as a power user apps suck. But they became popular quickly for a reason.
With exception to Reddit, I generally prefer apps to sites because mobile process management is considerably nicer than browser tab management.
App processes are sorted in order of most recent use, keeping the most relevant ones at hand, and those that aren’t used for a while just silently go away without much fuss.
In comparison browser tabs aren’t organized unless the user does that themselves, and so with each web app tab management overhead increases. Some browsers have an idle tab auto-close feature, but that closes the wrong tab (usually a page with info pertinent to something I’m working on) quite often. “Installing” PWAs can be an ok-ish workaround, but the problem there is that a lot of sites don’t have the little bit of manifest magic that makes saving to home screen “install” a PWA instead of just opening a browser tab.
>The native app experience for every app noted in the article is better and smoother than the mobile web version, in my opinion. Lots of people hate Electron apps, which suggests to me that my preference for native apps isn’t unique.
I want native programs on my PC, and fewer apps on my phone.
I get all my apps from F-Droid. If I need to use Steam chat or view the menu at Taco Bell, mobile website it is. I am not gonna put their proprietary software on my phone. This also brings up another interesting difference. There is no desktop program for Taco Bell, that would be super weird. I think other comments already addressed that, but a lot of mobile apps are basically just the website.
A game like Luanti or some sort of Tetris is something I'd want native in both places (desktop and mobile). Games in browsers are a mess.
> The native app experience for every app noted in the article is better and smoother than the mobile web version
I've found it to be the opposite. Perhaps if you're heavily involved on Reddit, LinkedIn, etc., then it's more convenient. But I only go to those sites via a search link. Why would I want to spend time and effort installing the app, just to see the same content I just landed on?
It's a huge red flag when websites push their app so intrusively. It means the app has little value and will be just as bad or worse when you use it.
That's partially by design. Apple makes it a pain to make proper PWA's, and companies with websites make extremely intrusive elements to ruin the mobile website in order drive to the app. Which is easier to monetize and harder to adblock, I imagine. Some places outright disable the mobile view for the app.
More simply, I don't need an app for every website I visit. a bookmark is much more lightweight than downloading yet another app to clutter my drawer.
I work on PWABuilder, Microsoft's open source dev tool that packages PWAs for app stores.
I can say with certainty Apple has been hostile to PWAs.
Unlike Google Play and Microsoft Store, iOS App Store doesn't allow publishing PWAs. (You instead have to build a native web view app to load your PWA.) And many of the PWA features just don't work on mobile Safari.
That sounds like a potential attack vector. Similar to copy/pasting commands from web pages. I'm surprised it's allowed, but I suppose it's also very tricky to fix.
People who know what Electron is and profess hatred for it are usually mostly annoyed by the fact that it bundles all of Chrome, giving the app an absurd memory and storage footprint relative to its functionality. People don't complain the same way when apps are made with Tauri.
If this was actually done, let's say as a government-imposed requirement, we may actually see some innovation in browser usage and the release of new UI frameworks.
But I think a lot of the frustration comes from how aggressively companies push the app, even when the web version is perfectly serviceable for casual use
it doesn't seem like you even read the relatively short post since:
"The native app experience for every app noted in the article" doesn't make any sense, the article lists none.
"Lots of people hate Electron apps, which suggests to me that my preference for native apps isn’t unique."
again......what does this have to do with the article at all? Aren't you merely reinforcing the articles point?
" Just reject it, there’s nothing that says you have to accept on either platform, so to say that’s a negative for native apps is odd."
Except that most app's would stop working if anyone confined them to the minimum amount of data required, case in point any scooter app that won't let you rent unless you have google location services turned on vs just regular GPS.
OPs point is that app are a walled garden of functionality that lock users in because of expedience for living life.
The point of SPAs was never page transitions. I can’t name a single major SPA that does good page transitions, can you? They all just replace the content. And to take a popular SPA framework as an example, it’s almost impossible to do page transitions in Next.js because of the way routes are loaded. I know this because I added proper page transitions to Next.js and it has been an absolute nightmare.
There are two good reasons for SPAs that I can see:
1. Your app probably needs interactivity anyway; for most apps, it’s not just going to be HTML and CSS. Writing your app in some unholy combination of React and HTML is not fun especially when you need to do things like global state.
2. Loading the structure of pages up front so that subsequent data loads and requests are snappy. Getting a snappy loading screen is usually better than clicking and getting nothing for 500ms and then loading in; the opposite is true below I’d say 100ms. Not needing to replace the whole page results in better frontend performance, which can’t really be matched today with just the web platform.
Basecamp has probably invested the most in making a fairly complex webapp without going full SPA, but click around for like 30 seconds and you’ll see it can’t hold a candle in performance to SPAs, never mind native apps.
With that said, I agree that I’d want the web to work more like the web, instead of this weird layer on top. All the complexity that Next.js and SPAs have added over the years have resulted in more responsive but sometimes more tedious-to-build apps, and gigantic bundles. I just don’t think you can match the performance of SPAs yet with just HTML.
3. APIs. If you already have a client facing API for your iOS and Android apps, and maybe one for developers, a SPA is just another app to plug into that backend.
> Basecamp has probably invested the most in making a fairly complex webapp without going full SPA, but click around for like 30 seconds and you’ll see it can’t hold a candle in performance to SPAs
Really? I just started using it, and it feels fast. Most SPA's are slow and/or buggy (in the "fails to mimic real browser behaviour" kind of way)
There was an article on HN a few days back on how it’s very hard to convey all the context in your head about a codebase to solve a problem, and that’s partly why it’s actually hard to use AI for non-trivial implementations. That’s not just limited to code.
I don’t use AI for most of my product work because it doesn’t know any of the nuances of our product, and just like doing code review for AI is boring and tedious, it’s also boring and tedious to exhaustively explain that stuff in a doc, if it can even be fully conveyed, because it’s a combination of strategy, hearsay from customers, long-standing convos with coworkers…
I’d rather just do the product work. Also, I’ve self-selected by survivorship bias to be someone who likes doing the product work too, which means I have even less desire to give it up.
Smarter LLMs could solve this maybe. But the difficulty of conveying information seems like a hard thing to solve.
It’s likely that the models don’t need to get much smarter, but rather the ux for providing needed context needs to improve drastically. This is a problem that we’ve worked on for decades with humans, but only single digit years for AI. It will get better and that tediousness will lessen (but isn’t “alignment” always tedious?)
Yes, drastically. This means I'll have to wear Zuck's glasses I think, because the AI currently doesn't know what was discussed at the coffee machine or what management is planning to do with new features. It's like a speed typing goblin living in an isolated basement, always out of the loop.
I think architecture needs to evolve as well. Up until now the primary audiences were human comprehension and build tools. We may need to have more context embedded into software architecture and make systematic segmentation easier for an LLM to sus out as part of the concerns involved in our designs.
LLM's won't make it on their own because there isn't enough data with their concerns in mind for them to learn from, just a few happy accidents where an LLM can excel in that specific code base.
LLMs need something like Waterfall development. They require a very complete, detailed specification of the behavior. And probably building the whole system twice, as recommended by Royce's 1970 paper that created the Waterfall process!
Agile processes only work when the developers can be self-guiding, which LLMs aren't.
I’ve experienced this too and it’s not just no-names. I have a wireless gaming keyboard from SteelSeries, certainly a very legit brand. I lost the original USB-C cord. Tried every USB-C cord I could find, and they power the keyboard and charge it to exactly 1%, but no more.
Found plenty of people online with the same issue but no resolution.
Finally just paid the $25 to get the OEM SteelSeries replacement cable and it charges fully again. wtf… I guess the replacement cable was USB-A to C and I’ve only tried USB-C to C cables?
Actually, in most situations with this problem it is possible to solder 2 additional resistors inside the offending USB-C device. I have done that on a flashlight and can confirm that it fixed the problem.
Adding SteelSeries to my never buy list, along with Unicomp (Unicomp's literally died on me weeks after the 1 year warranty ended. Got told to buy another at full price, went to Ellipse instead at modelfkeyboards dot com for 4x the price and never been happier).
o.O i never knew usb could even do that... honestly some good tip here.. how did u find that out ? i would of never guessed for newer usb this was a thing
"Acquiring" is often synonymous with "merger". Technically the surviving company acquires the other, but effectively it's a merger. Not always, but it's not uncommon to see two weaker companies merge in a competitive landscape to survive. It also counts as a liquidity event allowing employees some financial levers.
They probably got what got left of it in a cashless deal. Basically, the shareholders got to exchange X shares in a fatally wounded company into Y shares in a still-alive startup. The economic sense depends on the ratio between X and Y, but if the board was close to panicking due to recent events, Cognition probably got a good deal.
I think google is buying windsurf, they are leaving 100% of assets and some employees, and windsurf is buying that 100m in assets + taking the leftover employee liability.
Microsoft poached the talent, devin Co. Picks up the scraps
Goody is hiring a full-stack Staff Software Engineer who likes to ship at a startup pace and has an eye for exceptional UI/UX.
I'm Mark, the technical co-founder and CTO at Goody. Despite being something everyone does, gifting is one of the areas of commerce yet to be disrupted. Our goal is to make people's days by making gifting easy, while building a sustainable business on that market opportunity.
We're looking for engineers who like to build at a startup pace, have a critical eye for detail and user experience, and thrive when given autonomy and ownership.
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Check out our jobs minisite at https://jobs.ongoody.com/swe and feel free to email me at mark@ongoody.com.