Poomba

Does anyone here use Discord for their workplace comms?

We are outgrowing Zulip as our team chat tool and are anti-Microsoft, so Teams is definitely out. Slack is the “default” choice but their pricing leaves a lot to be desired, especially if you want SSO, longer history of saved conversations, etc

Which leaves me to Discord. I know it seems like an unconventional choice but does anyone here use it in their workplace? And how do you find it?

Now that Trump/the administration has designater Anthropic a supply chainrisk and threatened every company that uses them, how do u think most companies that use Anthropic/Claude would respond?

Anthropic only has ~100 customers in federally focused industries (ie defense) [1] but it seems Trump is not just targeting “pure” federal contractors/agencies but anyone doing business with the govt. so that obviously includes a huge chunk of tech companies like Crowdstrike, Asana, Salesforce, Hubspot etc [2] and even non-tech companies

And how is the govt going to enforce companies to not use Anthropic? Are they going to audit the internal tool usage of thousands of companies?

What if individual developers pay for Claude Code personally? What if a company uses Azure or AWS Bedrock which routes to Claude? How would they handle those “edge cases”?

[1] According to Bloomberry (https://bloomberry.com/data/anthropic-claude/) [2] many of these tech companies sell separate products to the government (https://www.hubspot.com/government and https://www.salesforce.com/government/)

I'm trying to decide whether to adopt Cursor for our company, but we're in a heavily regulated industry and our compliance team is flagging concerns about HIPAA/SOC2/audit trails.

The thing is, there are companies in regulated industries using it [1][2]. But Cursor has no HIPAA BAA, no FedRAMP certification, and is cloud-only with all requests routing through their AWS infrastructure. (This is probably true for Claude and other coding assistants, though I've only looked seriously at Cursor.)

So how are regulated companies actually making this work? Or do most just avoid Cursor and other AI coding tools altogether?

[1] 165 healthcare companies use Cursor according to Bloomberry: https://bloomberry.com/data/cursor/

[2] Cursor's customers include Sanofi, Johnson & Johnson, and Neuralink: https://cursor.com/customers

I built a GPT for the ChatGPT store to help turn docs and meeting notes into internal wikis. The ideal customer are large engineering-oriented companies. Ideally, companies that just started using ChatGPT and AI to do this type of task.

Is there a tool that can help me find companies that just started using ChatGPT? I tried Wappalyzer and Builtwith but those seem to just focus on frontend stuff like JS frameworks

I started using clay to enrich a list of companies I want to target (mostly agencies). Priblem is that its starting to become way way too expensive. I mostly want to enrich my list with email of decision makers and whether they use a particular tech stack and whether they hiring for a particular job right now. And every one of these require more credits :(

I saw some show hns for clay alternatives awhile ago so figured some of you might know of any inexpensive options. aAnything thats essy to use would be a bonus too!

Anyone have any open source recommendations? Or if not open source then something with a reasonably good free plan?

Are there any software jobs that actually have a high barrier of entry? Besides maybe an LLM Engineer?

I feel like no matter what type of engineer you become there is always gonna be a bunch of ppl who you’re competing with. Perhaps someone are slightly more competitive than others like a devops person, but overall, i feel like the entire SWE field has become a commodity

Are there actually any software jobs that require a ton of schooling, or a ton of self education? Like literally years and years like you need to become a pediatrician or a lawyer

Is there a cost-friendly Builtwith alternative that lets me find businesses that use a specific tech product? I find Builtwith a bit too expensive for my needs as it's $299 for 2 technologies, and I have 10+ I want find businesses for. And BuiltWith doesn't seem to have a lot of technologies I'm looking for either. I've tried Wappalyzer too, and though it's much less expensive, it also doesn't have data for a lot of niche technologies I'm targeting either.

For context, I own my own tech consulting business and want to find businesses that are trying to seriously start/expand an engineering team. I've already exhausted asking my network, existing clients, etc, and thinking of expanding now into more outbound stuff.

I was thinking of finding businesses that started using a particular Javascript framework or started using a "starter-level" devops product like BitBucket, as a way to find those businesses that are just beginning to scale their dev team

Are there any good alternatives out there? It feels like the type of tool that the HN crowd would be building...