Viewing profile — jmduke

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 …

It's an interesting question! To me, an (or perhaps _the_) obvious threshold is once the emails become automated.

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".

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.…

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/…

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 fai…

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 eigh…

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 …

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 k…

Honestly, as long as you don't call it "Buttdown"... (this happens more than you'd think.)

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.)

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…

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 ( …

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…

(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…

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 bette…

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 s…

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 …

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 t…

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 i…

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 Hacke…

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 affi…

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 gr…

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 st…