jmduke

7 ms·

1.
by jmduke 4mo ago
With all due respect to Kevin Kelly (who has lived a life worthy of the aphorisms he writes!), I prefer the guidance of George Saunders (via Lincoln in the Bardo): > Please do not misunderstand. We had been mothers, fathers. Had been hus
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by jmduke 2y ago
It's an interesting question! To me, an (or perhaps _the_) obvious threshold is once the emails become automated.
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by jmduke 2y ago
I think the definition of spam necessitates some level of bulk sending, and I struggle to consider ~fifty emails over the course of two or three years "bulk".
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by jmduke 2y ago
The vast majority of commenters are being negative about this essay, and I agree with the negativity, because _automated cold emails_ are awful. (As are sequences, and mail merges.) However! _Bespoke cold emails_ are I think, a dying/l
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by jmduke 2y ago
This is pretty clearly an LLM-generated article. Kind of funny to see the commit that appears to have added a whole slew of them: https://github.com/ronynn/ronynn.github.io/commit/f1bc45de82...
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by jmduke 2y ago
This dovetails with my own experience more or less exactly: when I launched my company, it was easy to throw everything on Heroku, and to their credit and detriment it was also fairly easy to move pretty much everything _off_ of Heroku (RDS
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by jmduke 2y ago
I have no relation with the Astral team but have been an early and aggressive adopter of everything they've released and it's all been easy, fast, and ergonomic. Over the past eighteen months I've: 1. Replaced `flake8` with `
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by jmduke 2y ago
The only through-line for the author's definition of "bogus" (AI generated content; identity performance; rejection of canon) appears to me "cannot be situated in the culture of a few decades ago." To pick on one ex
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Show HN: A list of all 'public' company handbooks(handbook.directory)
1 points by jmduke 2y ago|1 comments
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by jmduke 2y ago
Yup, absolutely — you see a lot of the larger brokers do some genre of lease-to-own program (pay us the purchase price plus a near-usurious APY over 24mos and at the end, you can keep the domain.) My margins are solid and there aren't
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by jmduke 2y ago
Honestly, as long as you don't call it "Buttdown"... (this happens more than you'd think.)
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by jmduke 2y ago
And my old blog domain to boot! Exactly what I meant by "The hardest part of the process was the stuff you can't grep for..." (T/Y — fixed.)
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by jmduke 2y ago
Definitely not _necessary_ — I was more or less resigned to not having the domain, since the sticker price was $170K and my mental "is this _really_ worth it?" number was high five figures. As for why important: a melange of reaso
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by jmduke 2y ago
Nah, if you don't need list management you're definitely better off going with something a little bit closer to the metal. We actually keep a price guide for comparing MTAs here ( https://buttondown.com/comparison-g
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by jmduke 2y ago
Author here! Happy to answer any questions folks have. (I would also be remiss if I didn't say that I am grateful to HN for introducing me to what was called microISVs a decade ago, "indie hacking" five years ago, and now I s
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by jmduke 2y ago
(Disclaimer: I run Buttondown, which is an email-inflected product. I also have a comparison guide of various MTAs here — https://buttondown.email/comparison-guides/esps — and will add Plunk!) Nuances of self-hosting a
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by jmduke 2y ago
Shameless plug for folks looking for something similar, but on the web: I was fed up with Google's slow/janky dig webface, so built my own. (Still very WIP, but already works better as a daily driver than Google's!) https:&#
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by jmduke 2y ago
1. I quite like Evidence, and recommend folks check it out if they haven't already. My general sense is that there are 900 different "BI tooling" startups around right now and it strikes a really good balance between ergonomi
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by jmduke 2y ago
Responding to my own post: this comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40214695 ) I think is a very compelling answer. I love the design language of the splash page, but I think the copy could be improved by a little
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by jmduke 2y ago
OP: as someone who runs a Python business and is a happy user of Pydantic (via Django-ninja) — something I would want this splash page to convey, at least implicitly, is “why use this over Sentry?” As far as I can tell, the answer is: an Op
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by jmduke 2y ago
I think it's a good platonic ideal to have CI that _can_ be run on devboxes, but in my opinion most of the value in having runners like GitHub Actions is in _asynchronicity_, not in _performance_. Having to pull in changes and run the
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by jmduke 2y ago
To be clear, I reviewed applications _on behalf of Stripe Atlas customers applying to YC_, not on behalf of YC. (I have never chatted with anyone in YC, besides presumably on Hacker News.)
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by jmduke 2y ago
OP has a history of railing against YC, largely for engagement's sake: https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Advassallo%20YC&src=typed... (I have never applied to YC — my closest affiliation is that I reviewed YC appl
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by jmduke 2y ago
I'm talking about practical limitations, not academic ones. You're not incorrect (and libraries like FastAPI and Pydantic make me confident that the benefits of type-safety will grow throughout the ecosystem) but I am talking abou
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by jmduke 2y ago
Having migrated my application's Python and JS codebases to their typed siblings respectively last year, my 2c is that Python typing feels good and worthwhile when you're in the standard lib, but _awful_ (and net-negative) once yo
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OpenCTX, a spec for embedding context in various devtools(openctx.org)
3 points by jmduke 2y ago|0 comments
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by jmduke 3y ago
You're right, of course — there are parts of my codebase that flagrantly disregard these rules, and did so for good reasons that I don't regret. But I've found that while "everything is relative and should be situated in
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by jmduke 3y ago
Agreed with this essay, and I think it rhymes with two others that I've found pretty influential over the past five years: 1. Parse, don't validate ( https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2019/11/05&#x2F
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by jmduke 3y ago
Self-employed, running https://buttondown.email as a solo founder. (My day generally looks like — 30% engineering, 40% onboarding + support, 10% marketing, 20% operations.) It was a profitable nights-and-weekends project from 20
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by jmduke 3y ago
No offense taken, but that's odd to hear! There's nothing really fancy happening on the marketing pages: it's built in Next, but like you said it's all pretty much just divs with no scroll-jacking. Mind emailing me (just

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