This email was 100% AI generated. I just edited a similar sentence from a claude code doc I'm writing - "we're not just X, we're fundamentally Y" is an obvious tell. I guess he's putting his money where his mouth is
I ship a very visible product which, when it breaks, generates a lot of social media angst (it's in the gaming adjacent space). So we try not to break things to the best of our ability. We have very few QA people and have whittled down that team over the past few years (DevOps was eliminated during the first round of layoffs ~2023).
This was painful at first but I do think it's the way to go. We found that too much manual QA incentivizes devs writing features to throw it over the fence - why should they test more if someone else is paid to do it? Devs need to feel the pain of writing tests if their code is hard to test, and they need to be held accountable when their code blows up in production. This feedback loop is valuable in the long run.
Same thing for test automation. Previously we shipped this over to our in-team DevOps people and they built complicated CI/CD setups. Losing them meant we needed to simplify our stack. Took a while and it slowed down feature development, but it was worth it. Of course you need leadership who understands this and dedicates time to building this out.
In defense of DevOps, I think the landscape for automation was poor a few years back. Jenkins and Teamcity are way too complex. Github Actions (for all its warts, and there are many) is much simpler. Our pipelines are also in their own CI/CD (CDK, CodeBuild) - infrastructure as code is the key to scaling.
We still have manual QA people to test things we can't automate. Usually this is for weird surfaces such as smart TVs, or for perceptual tests. I don't see this going away any time soon, but high levels of automation elsewhere drive down the need for "catch-all" manual testing.
> But for some reason, democratic socialists refuse to engage with the book earnestly.
You're not as informed as you think you are, probably because you're not an NYC resident and have no actual stake in this election. We successfully passed 3 ballot proposals that reduce regulation and review time for building certain housing units. Mamdani voted for all 3 also. More deregulation is needed and expected under Mamdani - not to the tune of enriching developers, but for building actual affordable units.
Side rant: A lot of people on HN talk about building more supply. And we do - if you've lived in NYC for an appreciable amount of time, you'll know how different LIC, Greenpoint/Williamsburg, Downtown BK, and Gowanus (among others) look like after 10 years of intense development. Despite receiving tax breaks (421a), most units are not affordable. They're also incredibly cheaply built and generally unpleasant places to live, chock full of excessive amenities that drive up the rent. There's a balance here between freeing developers and allowing them to run buckwild with "affordable" 5k/mo studios. It's easy to quote Paul Krugman on HN about supply side housing and rent regulation but there's more to the story here than just "build more".
I work for another large streaming site where people like to use adblockers. These adblockers also cause similar performance issues that are entirely caused by awful code in these blockers. I've studied the code for all of these blockers and they do stuff like:
- Constantly hammering the playlist endpoint to try and get something without an ad stitched in
- Constantly tearing down and remaking the player
- During an ad, requesting the playlist for every other quality to see if those do not have any stitched ads
- Proxying all traffic to servers the adblocker people own in countries where ads are not typically served (eg Russia)
- Intercepting playlist requests and simply deleting segments that they believe are ads (oh no why is my stream broken!!! stupid streaming website!!)
Youtube _could_ be doing something here, but there is also a very real chance your adblocker code is simply bad.
This comparison has never made sense to me. If I get a free beer, I can do whatever I want with it. Drink it, dump it, whatever. Same thing with pretzels. Am I missing something?
Yeah I wonder what people do, and have done, around the world in walkable communities predating the car. Perhaps people in these communities are on average more mobile into old age because they frequently walked?
Bell Labs in Holmdel (ala Severance HQ) is now "Bell Works", a combination of offices, restaurants, stores, and community space, including the public library. It's free to get in and you don't need to spend money to use the amenities. Walking around is pretty pleasant, the architecture is stunning and they did a good job of keeping the soul of the space. It's a bit of a rarity in suburban NJ.
According to AAA, the average cost of owning a new car is $12k per year [0], and that's just for one car. So New Yorkers can put that extra $1000 per month towards housing. As a New Yorker, $4000 is pretty high. You'd typically see that in hot areas for 1br's with in-unit w/d. Most people, including myself, do not pay that much.
Also, interesting phrasing to make it seem like a "small nyc apartment" is a bad thing. I don't pay for expensive repairs, yard maintenance, or big ticket appliances. Most renters don't pay for heat either (at least not directly). Not to mention interest on a mortgage or property taxes. All costs totaled, living in NYC isn't strictly more expensive than living in a suburb.
Seriously? Just google it, there's plenty of articles. And unless the OP is lying (they're not), they're literally providing you with info from a firsthand source.
Whats with HN and sealioning in every freaking comment lately?
Any topic on HN which is tangentially related to the Culture Wars (progressive cities/DAs among them) typically has several comments bashing the "woke".