MCP for browser automation is interesting because Safari's WebKit engine is the one most AI agents can't easily drive (Playwright and Puppeteer are Chromium-first). Having an MCP server for it could fill a real gap in cross-browser testing for agent workflows.
Half-Baked Product
151–160 of 447 posts
Re: Half-Baked Product
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did at peerdb
Sai? What do you think was the difference?
Sai is https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=saisrirampur
Maybe we were saved by being acquired before hiring sales. Sai knew the problem & understood customers. He'd sometimes oversell a bit, but managed it: kept pulse of capacity for new development, would ask about how hard requested features were, would feel out customer intent & guide customer adapt to what was already there
When we had our pepepizza moment, there was an understanding that it wasn't going to work, took learnings of what would be involved there, but kept focus on improving what we already had
For kafka connector we had a design partner, I got to work with them directly. They wanted 30 microsecond message processing, so didn't want json. Original ask was flatbuffers. I decided to put message formatting into a scripting layer using gopher-lua. Spent a weekend getting flatbuffers working with lua (it was buggy, opened half a dozen PRs to flatbuffers repo which got ignored). It was clearly awful having to manage flatbuffer schema files & update scripts every time schema changed. But I had alternative already made: msgpack. Throughput needed work but addressed that by creating pool of lua interpreters
Overall I overworked myself (put my hands out of commission & spent months relearning how to type on split ergo colemak-dh), but I enjoyed the work. Team was very open with each other & when performance is your selling point there's an understanding that engineering quality needs to be maintained. Sure there were parts of the system I hated, & sometimes I'd try chip away at those
Hopefully that helps, hard to say the difference, but I really feel in my work that when customer has problem I'm part of conversation. Most recently there was talk of customer wanting cold data offloaded from postgres which is what inspired https://github.com/ClickHouse/pg_clickhouse/pull/298 where we get Postgres to do most the work
Raised problems trying to mix C++ into postgres extension, decided fix was to write clickhouse-c library to replace clickhouse-cpp, there was some doubt on team about value, but demonstrated value (https://github.com/ClickHouse/pg_clickhouse/pull/254) & I appreciate my colleagues not being afraid to change their mind
There's a level of trust where instead of being assigning tasks on a board I instead work on what I think is important based on information available. Nobody was asking for wal-rus, but I know my fleet
ClickHouse Cloud similarly took route of taking its time hiring sales. Better to have a small sales team that can work directly with engineering on quality leads than overwhelming everyone so that sales becomes the enemy. Guess the difference is agency. When engineering is involved in making commitments they're invested in delivering & there's push back so sales doesn't start hallucinating features
Re: Half-Baked Product
#153[dead]
Re: Half-Baked Product
#154Re: Half-Baked Product
#155MCP for browser automation is interesting because Safari's WebKit engine is the one most AI agents can't easily drive (Playwright and Puppeteer are Chromium-first). Having an MCP server for it could fill a real gap in cross-browser testing for agent workflows.
Wrong thread
Re: Half-Baked Product
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sounds like you're joking, but I've long dreamed of a different type of dishwasher. One that washes instantly. I don't need it to fit more than a single plate at one time. Just put something in from one end, and out comes clean and dry plate on the other end. Like a car wash. I am quite certain these exist already large kitchens and I seem to remember one from a school diner from maybe 35 years ago, but I've alway…
I've dreamed of a dishwasher for people who prioritize clean dishes quickly and quietly over the incremental savings from using asymptotically less water or energy. See also low flush toilets and clothes washing machines.
Too bad the government demands you prioritize the latter
Re: Half-Baked Product
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Where did the story go sideways? At what point what character could have prevented the disaster? for me the company should never have existed in the first place. and that lies with the founder. starts with them. falls on them. i'm biased i suppose because my part in the "10%" part of my story was finding out just how little research anyone actually did... they all just wanted to play the role of important businessm…
> just how little research anyone actually did More often I see the opposite. 100 page pdfs that fall apart in first contact with reality. I think it’s not about research, but it’s very hard to contribute in a field you haven’t actually had a career in.
yeah i'd agree with you there with lack of experience. and that was definitely a thing at my place. i think it plays a part in the research stuff too. cos if without relevant experience a lot of bad assumptions get made.
"FOSS is universally unreliable" was one of such assumptions i had to push back against 5 years later. they meant academica produced software. but they assumed all foss is the same as all academica produced software.
Re: Half-Baked Product
#158One important part of the story is in the very beginning: The founder’s motivation. To become wealthy. You see this in the startup world a lot. Founders with 5+ failed startups in different sectors, because said founder picked the fields mainly by doing some market analysis. Not domain expertise. There’s then a big mismatch between what the founder thinks is possible, and what the domain expert thinks is possible. Th…
> I’ve sat through some pitches like that, where it is very obvious that the founder/CEO has limited knowledge and expertise in what they’re pitching, where the product is limited, but their enthusiasm is off the charts.
And for all the talk of investing into people, what was your opinion?
Re: Half-Baked Product
#159We keep seeing this. If you had to point out the fundamental problem, what would it be?
I think it’s the disconnect. Each persona is an expert in their own field but is completely oblivious to other critical areas.
The founder knows how to raise money but doesn’t really understand the customers. The engineer knows the tech but doesn’t really understand what it takes to keep the business afloat. The salesperson knows what customers want but doesn’t really understand what’s possible to make. The investor knows the numbers but doesn’t really understand how poorly the business is run.
I suspect if you look at successful startups you’ll often see a very small (1-3) group of founders who are very close, each can do more than one thing really well, and their combined expertise means that together they have very few blindspots.
Re: Half-Baked Product
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've long dreamed of a dishwasher that can detect when you remove the (cleaned) dishes from it, and presents a display saying 'load dishes' or something like that. And after finishing a cycle, says 'unload dishes'. Should be pretty easy to achieve with some load cells in the feet, but haven't seen any like that.
Many modern ones have a door open sensor that allows for the dishwasher to display that dishes are clean after a cycle until the door is opened and fully closed again. That doesn't help, however, if users are lazy and don't unload the dishwasher after opening it to grab a clean plate or whatever. It's a nice feature that can be added with existing sensors and one line of logic in the uC. Another one I noticed recentl…
Some dishwashers add a simple timer-based heuristic so if you open it for just a few seconds while you lazily grab something the "clean" indicator stays lit.