So you might need some NAD+ precursor like NMN and this compound for it to work in humans because by the time you’re old it’s much harder for your body to make. Was the experiment done in older mice or younger ones that have NAD+ but artificial Alzheimer’s ?
NMN and NR are both good but NMN might not be available anymore as some company decided to repurpose it as a drug instead of supplement. Best combo nowadays looks to be liposomal NR with pterostilbene, a sirtuin activator. NR boosts NAD+ (the main electron transporter in mitochondria), pterostilbene activates sirtuin SIRT1 that regulates aging. B2/Riboflavin might be a good idea as well as it is a FADH donor, secondary electron transport carrier especially in nerves/brain. B1 to the mix as every single metabolic reaction needs it and it's depleted by consuming lots of carbs or drinking alcohol, a common western diet. Niacin is less effective in raising NAD+ but the flush can open up veins and flood hard to reach extremities of the body with blood so it's probably good from time to time. Slow B3 seems to be even worse for raising NAD+.
- you took niacin too often (best to do it once a few days as body adapts quickly)
- you have a gene mutation that prevents you from absorbing enough B3 (common in some schizophrenia cases that can be managed by huge doses of daily B3, like 4-10g)
Happy Christmas everyone, I’m at 29000 feet on a flight to Hong Kong after a mini version of planes, trains and automobiles and including cancelled planes and taxis to different airports. I’m struck by honestly what a miracle it is that we can travel thousands of miles at hundreds of MPH and have okay internet access and communicate. I don’t think people quite realise how delicate all of the technology is now and how easily it could fail if we don’t all look after each other. I hope you all have a brilliant Christmas and new year!
For a six foot tall person the horizon at sea level is only 3 miles away. You could get that experience on a big lake if it's more than six miles square.
If you think that’s the same experience I’m guessing you haven’t done it. Unfortunately my ocean voyage (from Okinawa to California) was when I was too young to remember much.
This is about the astonishing lack of ability in the political class in the UK. The security services are honestly wagging the dog and they think they can force some kind of key escrow eventually, but instead they’ll just destroy software development in the UK and possibly financial services.
It’s the same with the multi billion ID cards and digital ID which is almost impossible for a government as incompetent as this one to implement.
And whatever is foisted on the public will be so insecure you’ll have to deal with your identity constantly being stolen, and it being your problem to fix it.
I’d love to know more about what running a site like HN involves, would be great to get a write up of what it’s like running something like this at this scale (and what kind of traffic you guys get)!
I can’t put my finger on anything within the last decade, but I seem to recall it running in something close to its current form on a single core on a single server for a long time:
I took it as a good reminder that the hard part is the human part: that high-overhead features and UI fripperies are nice but not necessary (or sufficient) to keep a community healthy and vibrant over the decades.
(And on the subject of the human side, if you didn’t catch Anna Wiener’s 2019 profile, it’s here:
The most interesting number is the 1300 submissions because that hasn't grown since 2011 - it just fluctuates. Everything else has been growing more or less linearly for a long time, which is how we like it.
I find that surprising, as 2011-2022 covers an exponential rise in SEO spam and "growth hackers" attempting to drive traffic and links.
Or was 1,300 the number of non-flagged submissions?
He did work in Britain for decades, if I was him I’d just completely own it and say something like “if this is the weak stuff they are trying to get me on I must be doing a great job with things that actually matter. Everyone, especially the people whinging about this, also make mistakes!”
Since it fell from power, the UK does everything the US wants.
However, historically it set up a lot of bad things that happened in the Middle East, China, Africa, etc. The UK cannot untangle itself from it, "it's all in the past", because history is terribly influenced by things in the past, by definition.
So do you think citizens of the UK should be held accountable somehow? I honestly don’t think the UK has done much to harm other countries since the Iraq War which obviously made everything worse.
Authorities and government? Yes. Even if the current ones weren't born when history was made, it's their duty to understand the history of the country they are governing, and of how past decisions shaped the world as it currently is.
> I honestly don’t think the UK has done much to harm other countries since the Iraq War which obviously made everything worse.
The history of Hong Kong itself is deeply influenced by Great Britain's actions (as well as other world powers, of course), and it doesn't start with mainland China's takeover.
Another example of UK's actions deeply influencing the current world, unrelated to China, is Iran (and well, the Middle East in general). So the UK cannot simply point fingers at others and forget about how they helped shape the situation.
I don't think that's really true and I live here. People are convicted for saying 'rude' things online all the time, even if some of those stories are also hyped up in the news. Attempting to backdoor/otherwise break e2e encryption... also literally the case. I'm not sure where you think the nuance is.
You can say pretty much anything so long as you don’t insight violence or religious hatred. Nobody is allowed to shout fire in crowded theatre. Nobody has been convicted for saying something rude.
With relation to the article + Grand parent, the government first of all does not write on behalf of the BBC and in fact both Labour and Conservatives especially have had massive problems with its editorial decisions.
The ideal the you cannot criticise the government in the UK and that our laws here are similar to the ones in HK is honestly not a fair parallel at all.
I think the government are extremely naive and the security services try to push them into extremely stupid decisions on encryption.
> You can say pretty much anything so long as you don’t insight violence or religious hatred.
I don't think that's a fair characterisation. Recently we've convicted:
- an ex-footballer (i.e. someone with the means to mount a proper defence) for calling someone a 'diversity hire'; and
- someone burning a religious text in the street, as a protest.
Are these really meeting your bar for inciting violence and/or hatred? At a level might warrant imprisonment? For me, these things are not even borderline; they are well into legitimate free speech territory and the government shouldn't be trying its best to stifle them.
And those are just successful convictions, not initiated prosecutions, or the wider chilling effects of it all.
Even if what you said were true, those two things are largely legal in the US, so I wouldn't really say it's their tabloids over-hyping it as much as they legitimately find the actual standards here questionable.
Haha - you aren't even allowed to say what you think about the US government on social media and then travel to the US despite what the constitution says. Donald Trump has also made flag burning a crime. So it's not as if the US is a champion of free speech anymore.
I looked up the case against Joey Barton and it looks like he was deliberately trying to antagonise and abuse people upset which yes is illegal here. He could have easily made any points he wanted without abusing people. Note that he was given a suspended sentence in the hope that he would stop abusing people and has served no jail time as yet. Seems like a sensible decision.
The Quran burning outside the Turkish Consulate was even more weak stuff from you. The guy was fined £240 and told not to do it again.
Neither of these are about freedom of speech are they, they are about abuse online and deliberately trying to provoke muslims.
> you aren't even allowed to say what you think about the US government on social media and then travel to the US despite what the constitution says.
Does this matter? The question is whether the UK has a moral authority to tell China off over free speech. Nobody has said that different countries don't have varying types of restrictions on speech.
Even if I agreed with your characterisation of the US, you're talking about visitors, not residents or citizens. The UK also regularly denies visas for speech.
You're defending against whataboutism from China to the UK by invoking whataboutism from the UK to the US here.
> I looked up the case against Joey Barton and it looks like he was harassing people online which yes is illegal here.
No, harassment is a specific and different offence. He was convicted specifically for sending 'grossly offensive' messages, not harassing people. The definition of that crime is based on the content of the messages, not the pattern of their transmission.
> The Quran burning outside the Turkish Consulate was even more weak stuff from you. The guy was fined £240 and told not to do it again.
I don't really get how this refutes anything I've said. It's illegal to protest in this manner in the UK.
What is your argument here, that OK it's illegal but the punishment is not very severe so no problem? You understand that the specifics of _what_ is illegal is the criticism.
> Neither of these are about freedom of speech are they, they are about harassment online and deliberately trying to provoke muslims.
Neither of these is about harassment. Or they would have been convicted of harassment.
None of these laws limit your freedom of speech do they - you can perfectly well say you think that a TV presenter is incompetent without being arrested - it's the abuse that is the problem here. If your style of communication involves burning religious texts you must have very big mental health issues so I'm sorry for that.
> None of these laws limit your freedom of speech do they
Of course they do? Think we've descended into absurdity here if that's the claim.
Suffice to say, the Chinese response to Jimmy Lai would be along the lines of "well of course he has free speech, if only he did it in a completely different way that was acceptable to my sensibilities".
I'd like the right to burn any religious text I please, and to call someone a 'diversity hire', if those were my feelings. I thought that was clear from me using them as examples.
Crticisim of religion, through symbolic speech, is pretty classically part and parcel of the tenets of free speech. It's hardly some fringe belief.
Even if you think calling someone a 'diversity hire' is often untrue, or often racist, or some such thing, there are surely some cases where it is true or a legitimate criticism of hiring policy. Should we not be able to claim as much? On peril of imprisonment?
I don't think your views on this are particularly uncommon. It's just that British people don't have a history of wrestling with free speech, or its importance. Tone policing is a thought-terminating cliche in the UK.
On sentencing, Judge Menary KC told Barton: "Robust debate, satire, mockery and even crude language may fall within permissible free speech.
"But when posts deliberately target individuals with vilifying comparisons to serial killers or false insinuations of paedophilia, designed to humiliate and distress, they forfeit their protection.
"As the jury concluded, your offences exemplify behaviour that is beyond this limit – amounting to a sustained campaign of online abuse that was not mere commentary but targeted, extreme and deliberately harmful."
Seems like you're just lying with the 'diversity hire' content of Barton's posts aren't you?
Well feel free to roll all those in to what I'd like the right to say. I'm going with the most outlandish thing (to me) that he was convicted on, because by definition even without the other things you've now quoted, the 'diversity hire' comment in and of itself was found to be illegal. Thus it's illegal to say for anyone, even if they don't also call someone a 'bike nonce' or photoshop them onto unsavoury images.
None of this meets the bar for me, and ironically would not be illegal in China or the US, to address the original point.
I'm not making any claims at all, I was just adding context from my recollection of the article that appeared to be missing from the conversation.
Edit: What the article said:
> The kinds of web applications I’m thinking of with this post are monolithic web apps, with Postgres as their primary OLTP database.
So you are correct that this does not disqualify distributed databases.
I’m currently working on an in house ERP and inventory system for a specific kind of business. With very few people you can now instead of paying loads of money for some off the shelf solution to your software needs get something completely bespoke to your business. I think AI enables the age of boutique software that works fantastically for businesses, agencies will need to dramatically reduce their price to compete with in house teams.
I’m pretty certain AI quadruples my output at least and facilitates fixing, improving and upgrading poor quality inherited software much better than in the past. Why pay for SaaS when you can build something “good enough” in a week or two? You also get exactly what you want rather than some £300k per year CRM that will double or treble in price and never quite be what you wanted.
> Why pay for SaaS when you can build something “good enough” in a week or two?
About a decade ago we worked with a partner company who was building their own in-house software for everything. They used it as one of their selling points and as a differentiator over competitors.
They could move fast and add little features quickly. It seemed cool at first.
The problems showed up later. Everything was a little bit fragile in subtle ways. New projects always worked well on the happy path, but then they’d change one thing and it would trigger a cascade of little unintended consequences that broke something else. No problem, they’d just have their in-house team work on it and push out a new deploy. That also seemed cool at first, until they accumulated a backlog of hard to diagnose issues. Then we were spending a lot of time trying to write up bug reports to describe the problem in enough detail for them to replicate, along with constant battles over tickets being closed with “works in the dev environment” or “cannot reproduce”.
> You also get exactly what you want rather than some £300k per year CRM
What’s the fully loaded (including taxes and benefits) cost of hiring enough extra developers and ops people to run and maintain the in house software, complete with someone to manage the project and enough people to handle ops coverage with room for rotations and allowing holidays off? It turns out the cost of running in-house software at scale is always a lot higher than 300K, unless the company can tolerate low ops coverage and gaps when people go on vacation.
In my experience, SaaS is also fragile. It's real software, with real bugs. Most complex solutions offer an extensible API/scripting support with tons of switchable/pluggable modules to integrate with your company's infra. This complexity most often means that your particulary combination of features is almost wholly unique, and chances are your SaaS has much less open mindshare/open source support than any free solution.
We often ended up discarding large chunks of these poorly tested features, instead of trying to get them to work, and wrote our own. This got to a point where only the core platform was used, and replacing that seemed to be totally feasible.
SaaS often doesn't solve issues but replaces them - you substitute general engineering knowledge and open-source knowhow with proprietary one, and end up with experts in configuring commercial software - a skill that has very little value on the market where said software is not used, and chains you to a given vendor.
SaaS software, by it's very nature, tends to gets tested tons more than your inhouse software. It also has more devs working on the software. It is almost certainly more stable and can handle more edge cases than anything developed inhouse. It's always a question of scale.
But what you're describing is the narrow but deep vs wide but shallow problem. Most SaaS software is narrow but deep. Their solution is always going to be better than yours. But some SaaS software is wide but shallow, it's meant to fit a wide range of business processes. Its USP is that it does 95% of what you want.
It sounds like you were using a "wide-shallow" SaaS in a "narrow-deep" way, only using a specific part of the functionality. And that's where you hit the problems you saw.
I am speaking from experience. We have a SaaS tool for example to to CI/CD. It's super expensive, has a number of questionable design choices.
It's full of features, half of which either do not work, or do not work as expected, or need some arcane domain knowledge to get them working. These features provide 'user-friendly' abstractions over raw stuff, like authing with various repos, downloading and publishing packages of different formats.
Underlying these tools are probably the same shell scripts and logic that we as devs are already familiar with. So often the exercise when forced to use these things is to get the underlying code to do what we want through this opaque intermediate layer.
Some people have resorted to fragile hacks, while others completely bypassed these proprietary mechanisms, and our build scripts are 'Run build.sh', with the logic being a shell or python script, which does all the requisite stuff.
And just like I mentioned in my prev post, SaaS software in this case might get tested more in general, but due to the sheer complexity it needs to support on the client side, testing every configuration at every client is not feasible.
At least the bugs we make, we can fix.
And while I'm sure some of this narrow-deep kinds of SaaS works well (I've had the pleasure to use Datadog, Tailscale, and some big cloud provider stuff tends to be great as well), that's not all there is that's out there and doesn't cover everything we need.
That's my point, "It's full of features". You said it yourself.
You have bought a shallow but wide SaaS product, one with tons of features that don't get much development or testing individually.
You're then trying to use it like a deep but narrow product and complaining that your complex use case doesn't fit their OK-ish feature.
MS do this in a lot of their products, which is why Slack is much better than Teams, but lots of companies feel Teams is "good enough" and then won't buy Slack.
I'm arguing this is an entirely flawed product category (which might have elements of fraud as well) - things that are easy to get started with, but as your skill level or the requirements complexity increases, you start to see the limitations, and get entangled in the 'ecosystem', so given a sufficiently knowledgeable workforce, you are at a net negative by year 2 or 3 compared to experts having built something bespoke, or going the open-source route.
I'm sure you have encountered the pattern where you write A that calls B that uses C as the underlying platform. You need something in A, and know C can do it, but you have to figure out how you can achieve it through B. For a highly skilled individual(or one armed with AI) , B might have a very different value proposition than one who has to learn stuff from scratch.
Js packages are perfect illustration of these issues - there are tons of browser APIs that are wrapped by easy-to-use 'wrapper' packages, that have unforeseen consequences down the road.
This is true when SaaS is a simple widget for everyone. The problem is that when SaaS becomes a hydra designed to do a million things for a million people, the extra eyeballs aren't helping you, they're creating more error surface.
On top of that, SaaS takes your power away. A bug could be quite small, but if a vendor doesn't bother to fix it, it can still ruin your life for a long time. I've seen small bugs get sandbagged by vendors for months. If you have the source code you can fix problems like these in a day or two, rather than waiting for some nebulous backlog to work down.
My experience with SaaS is that products start out fine, when the people building them are hungry and responsive and the products are slim and well priced. Then they get bloated trying to grow market share, they lose focus and the builders become unresponsive, while increasing prices.
At this point you wish you had just used open source, but now it's even harder to switch because you have to jump through a byzantine data exfiltration process.
> Everything was a little bit fragile in subtle ways.
Maybe write some tests and have great software development practices and most importantly people who care about getting the details right. Honestly there’s no reason for software to be like this is there? I don’t know how much off the shelf ERP software you have used but I wouldn’t exactly describe that as flawless and bug free either!
This is only true if you assume that you are producing the same amount of code as today. Though, AI ultimately will produce more code which will require higher maintenance. Your internal team will need to scale up due to the the amount of code they need to maintain. Your security team will have more work to do as well because they will need to review more code which will require scaling that team as well. Your infrastructure costs will start adding up and if you have any DevOps they will need scaling too.
Soon or later the CTO will be dictating which projects can be vibe coded which ones make sense to buy.
SaaS benefits from network effects - your internal tools don't. So overall SaaS is cheaper.
The reality is that software license costs is a tiny fraction of total business costs. Most of it is salaries. The situation you are describing the kind of dead spiral many companies will get into and that will be their downfall not salvation.
> The reality is that software license costs is a tiny fraction of total business costs
Yes and no. If someone is controlling the SaaS selection, then this is true.
But I've seen startup phase companies with multiple slightly overlapping SaaS subscriptions (Linear + Trello + Asana for example), just because one PM prefers one over the other.
Then people have bought full-ass SaaS costing 50-100€/month for a single task it does.
I'd describe the "Use AI to make bespoke software" as the solution you use to round out the sharp edges in software (and licensing).
The survey SaaS wants extra money to connect to service Y, but their API is free? Fire up Claude and write the connector ourselves. We don't want to build and support a full survey tool, but API glue is fine.
Or someone is doing manual work because vendor A wants their data in format X and vendor B only accepts format Y. Out comes Claude and we create a tool that provides both outputs at the same time. (This was actually written by a copywriter on their spare time, just because they got annoyed with extra busywork. Now it's used by a half-dozen people)
There is no yes and no. This is a fact. Even a small startup of 3-5 people will pay more in terms of salaries than the total license costs they consume. A larger enterprise will will spend 50 to 100 times more on salaries then software license fees.
The reason software licenses are easier to cut by the finance team when things are not going well is because software does not have feelings although we all know that this not making a dent. Ultimately software scales much better than people and if the software is "thinking" it will scale infinitely better.
Building it all in house will only happen for 2 reasons:
1. The problem is so specific that this is the only variable option and the quickest (fear enough).
2. Developers and management do not have real understanding of software costs.
Developers not understanding the real costs should be forgiven because most of them are never in position to make these type of decisions - i.e they are not trained. However a manager / executive not understanding this is sign of lack of experience. You really need to try to build a few medium-sized none essential software systems in-house to get an idea how bad this can get and what a waste of time and money it really is - resources you could have spent elsewhere to effect the bottom the real bottomline.
Also the lines of code that are written do not scale linearly with team sizes. The more code you produce the bigger the problem - even with AI.
Ultimately a company wants to write as few line of code as possible that extract as much value as feasibly possible.
To me AI might have tilted the economic on doing in house a bit but it has been at least a decade or more that I find most enterprise SaaS, in the way they are used 80% of the time, could be recreated with a few developers in house. Instead of 10-20 developers maybe you only need 2-5 with AI, so for most big companies that doesn’t change much. A company that wants to build in house still has to hire a team. And in most non tech industries even if more expensive usually a service is preferred. SaaS was never (only) about costs, developers were already wondering why people would pay for an expensive CRM 10 years ago when it was only basic CRUD.
I work with both enterprise software and in house teams. Each path has its pro and cons. As you put it costly CRM might not be fulfilling its purpose. And the two biggest points in favour of in house are cost and bespoke nature of solution.
Building is only one part. Maintaining and using/running is another.
Onboarding for both technical and functional teams takes longer as the ERP is different from other company.
Feature creep is an issue. After all who can say no to more bespoke features. Maybe roll CRM, Reporting and Analytics into one. Maintenance costs and priorities now become more important.
We have also explored AI agents in this area. People specific tasks are great use cases. Create mock up and wireframes? AI can do well and you still have human in the loop. Enterprise level tasks like say book closing for late company ERP? AI makes lot of mistakes.
I agree about boutique software, but see the development still being external -
To attempt to summarize the debate, there seems to be three prevailing schools of thought:
1. Status Quo + AI. SaaS companies will adopt AI and not lose share. Everyone keeps paying for the same SaaS plus a few bells and whistles. This seems unlikely given AI makes it dramatically cheaper to build and maintain SaaS. Incumbents will save on COGS, but have to cut their pricing (which is a hard sell to investors in the short term).
2. SaaS gets eaten by internal development (per OP). Unlikely in short/medium term (as most commenters highlight). See: complete cloud adoption will take 30+ years (shows that even obviously positive ROI development often does not happen). This view reminds me a bit of the (in)famous DropBox HN comment(1) - the average HN commenter is 100x more minded to hack and maintain their own tool than the market.
benzible (commenter) elsewhere said this well -
"The bottleneck is still knowing what to build, not building. A lot of the value in our product is in decisions users don't even know we made for them. Domain expertise + tight feedback loop with users can't be replicated by an internal developer in an afternoon."
This same logic explains why external boutique beats internal builds --
3. AI helps boutique-software flourish because it changes vendor economics (not buyer economics). Whereas previously an ERP for a specific niche industry (e.g. wealth managers who only work with Canadian / US cross-border clients) would have had to make do with a non-specific ERP, there will now be a custom solution for them. Before AI, the $20MM TAM for this product would have made it a non-starter for VC backed startups. But now, a two person team can build and maintain a product that previously took ten devs. Distribution becomes the bottleneck.
This trend has been ongoing for a while -- Toast, Procore, Veeva -- AI just accelerates it.
If I had to guess, I expect some combination of all three - some incumbents will adapt well, cut pricing, and expand their offering. Some customers will move development in house (e.g. I have already seen several large private equity firms creating their own internal AI tooling teams rather than pay for expensive external vendors). And there will be a major flourishing of boutique tools.
Author here, really good comment and I agree with you.
What _has_ surprised me though is just how many companies are (or are considering) building 'internal' tooling to replace SaaS they are not happy with. These are not the classic HN types whatsoever. I think when non technical people get to play with AI software dev they go 'wow so why can't we do everything like this'.
I think your point 3 is really interesting too.
But yes the point of my article (hopefully) wasn't that SaaS is overnight dead, but some thin/lower "quality" products are potentially in real trouble.
People will still buy and use expertly designed products that are really nice to use. But a lot of b2b SaaS is not that, its a slow clunky mess that wants to make you scream!
I agree - it is surprising how many are looking at doing in house.
I think what they miss (and I say this as someone who spent the early part of his career outside of tech) is an understanding of what goes into maintaining software products - and this ignorance will be short lived. I was honestly shocked how complex it was to build and maintain my first web app. So business types (like I was) who are used to 'maintaining' an excel spreadsheet and powerpoint deck they update every quarter may think of SaaS like a software license they can build once and use forever. They have no appreciation of the depth of challenges that come with maintaining anything in production.
My working model is that of no-code - many non-tech types experimented with bubble etc, but quickly realize that tech products are far deeper than the (heavily curated) surface level experience that the user has. It is not like an excel model where the UI is codebase. I expect vibe-coders will find the same thing.
I have on several occasions built my own versions of tools, only to cave and buy a $99 a year off the shelf version because the maintenance time isn't worth it. Non-tech folks have no idea of the depth of pain of maintaining any system.
They will learn. Will be interesting to see how it plays out.
I like this thoughtful and nuanced response, I think you could be right. Makes me wonder if choosing an extremely boring niche and just making several million dollars could be a good move right now.
Quite honestly, this is exactly what I am currently doing - identified a market with probably $50mm global TAM. Bootstrapping with first design partners currently.
One thing I didn't mention is that there are often a few sleepy legacy SaaS players (often public) in these niche markets who don't have the chops to add AI to their product and may be a good takeout / exit down the line. Won't be for billions, but if you bootstrap, that doesn't really matter.
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