fullsend

"We are the priests who maintain the holy money printer called Steam for our lordship, first of his name Gabe Newell, so that he may purchase fleets of yachts. Don't rock the boat by hiring someone who doesn't get it." They could have said it like this with a lot less bullshit. And Silicon Valley could learn a lot from this company.

Sentry is atrocious. The thing runs Postgres, Redis, Clickhouse, Kafka, like a dozen huge components on their own as its backend. Their hosted vs self-hosted support is bad so deploying the thing yourself is a nightmare. The opposite of a zero config philosophy.

“Perhaps this overuse of leverage is explained by” it’s explained by it being a silly little toy game. This experiment goes way differently if you use the one page business section of The Economist. WSJ front page is going to be literal clickbait.

As always in Linux at home, “something exotic” here means using Bluetooth at all.

I started out firmly against large companies. My ideal team is 10-20 engineers, in person, hyper focused and all on the same page with mutual respect. Minimal or no product manager types.

But I’m also sick of hearing how these teams can “ship” so fast. Yeah you can ship, you have no customers. No users, no SLAs, no employees. Good work, you just did whatever you wanted and then typed “git push” to a repo you control, with standards you control, and a build process you control. Wow those stodgy big co’s could learn something from you!

This is a similar convo to “why use Kubernetes”. Do you have one binary and one database with one password? Go nuts with your single VPS and bash scripts and keep telling yourself that everyone is over complicating it. But are you scaling? You’ll probably need some orchestration. You’ll probably need some managers, a ticket system, on-call, standard build tools. Documentation.

Scaling to billions with a team of 20 is a fantasy achieved only by the select few. As always it is a fine line companies should tread lightly. Don’t rush to hire, but don’t be afraid of it either. Focus on scaling intentionally and carefully.

According to Fiona Cicconi, Google’s chief people officer, Google employed 30,000 managers before the recent layoffs. The hard truth is Google needs a Twitter style culling. Take all those billions you're burning and give it to people with a builder mentality, not career sheeple. Unfortunately the same executives who would oversee this are the ones who need to be culled first.

This is the sort of stuff I use it for all the time, great examples. Or summarizing new concepts, reformatting strings or tables quickly, asking what some strange code snippet might be doing.

The “everything app” doesn’t get built by brute force and dollars. It has to be emergent. Musk will fail at achieving that vision at least.

Pretty wild take. In what word does someone write some of the greatest fantasy novels of all time and then just hand the last two off to someone else? In the name of “productivity” of all things. This line of thinking sounds like a Hollywood producer trying to crank out hits.

Gasp! Next “Managers” will be saying that Friday is now a work “relaxed zone”.

Knowing GPT, this is probably as simple as priming it not to overly explain every time that it has considered the instructions. Otherwise every single time it would say “I have thought about how relevant this is to your preset instructions and…”.

They are still stuck in the mindset of “this is our proprietary secret and we can’t let others catch up.” That mindset is just one of the reasons their company is stagnating.

OnlyFans is probably just a slice of this. So is Twitch in some ways.

The highest rank in my mind is the tenured professor who builds businesses from the safety of the university. Those few who poach the brightest students for their lab, leverage that into a startup (or more than one), and exit for millions while collecting university checks. This brings me awe, respect, jealousy, and distaste in equal measure.

This reminds of how the politburo of China is often made up of engineers, chemists, and people with similar backgrounds. Whereas American politicians are all lawyers.

Layoffs may be needed. But there should be a healthy dose of executives included for making those hiring decisions. And they should do it all at once. Doing it in waves is absolutely brutal.

The consequences of failure in America are higher, that’s why we work so hard. You are a millionaire, or you are homeless. The in between is a hard and continuous struggle to get to the former and avoid becoming the latter.

My partner just got an Ioniq and it is pretty sweet. It’s a brand I never thought twice about that seems to be killing it recently.

Thanks for sharing. Perhaps it’s useful to share that if I had started earlier, I may have gotten more leeway without leaving. Asking the company for a break, literally saying “this is too much for me now.” When I started, it was too late. Good luck friend.

Hah yes, that could be part of a solution for sure.

The problem is that, like so many of the hard problems these days, we have no clue what makes our own minds let alone any other mind. What’s the real path? If you could have any resources, no moral qualms at all, unlimited time, what’s the step by step process to figure out exactly how the brain and body work?

We spend tons of time at work and it’s where we got a lot of our value in our lives. I recently went to a dinner party where there were lots of people like me who wanted to talk about work and it was refreshing after spending so long talking to people who hate their jobs. Grass is greener and all that.

Does anyone know how fleshed out Einstein’s ideas were up until his first papers? It strikes me that there are all these modern minds - Witten with his M theory, Wolfram, Penrose, so many others, who seem to just be putting things out there. “Could be this!” Impossible to prove, or mathematically beautiful but practically useless, etc. just a very strange stage of affairs.

Look at who these people we celebrate are in reality. The pathetic venture capitalists who funded this debacle trying to stroke their own egos. The sheltered, immature wunderkind of Jane Street and elite colleges who never struggled a day in their lives before being gifted a blank check. And the despicable politicians who beg like dogs and allow this behavior in a desperate attempt to get some scraps from the tables of their betters. The American aristocracy.

What crushing apathy is it that now keeps the peasants so docile? Where before the railroads and factories would burn when they learned of the decadence on the other side of the locked gates. Toiling day in and day out to earn in a lifetime what these people lose track of in a Slack channel before breakfast.

We have invented so many stories to justify this system. To avoid acknowledging how some deep, implacable greed has been unleashed among us. Money as the only moral good. Here we reap what we’ve sown. This behavior will get worse.

An okay thought but to be honest one thing I like about HN is that some of the experts are here occasionally.

I’ve seen a good number of things get addressed simply because an Issue crossed a threshold of votes/comments over time. Really can make voices heard on the anon internet. Big respect to anyone working for free who takes them seriously, that takes integrity.

Some people are having sophisticated debates about AI. Definitely not anyone at or near the Financial Times.

I appreciate that. I tried to leave some ammo for those who had been in the trenches with me, but also had to just let it burn so to speak. Hope you are in a better spot these days.

Recently got burned out for the first time. Context switching and constant hard thinking were a direct cause. I unofficially took on a chief architect’s role doing design and planning for a huge project, was doing some managerial work assigning tasks and mentoring younger team members through it, and was writing code as an individual contributor.

I just wanted it to succeed so badly, I took on an absolute ton without any systems in place in my own habits and daily life to protect me. I would be in a conference room tracking ten different threads of work day in and day out. Making decisions for every component, directing people, debugging…at first I felt like a god. Everyone was looking to me, we made more progress in six months than the last two years, meetings would get cancelled because I couldn’t be there to make a decision (should have been a massive red flag but it fed my ego).

But the way I work is to put my head down and get addicted to a problem in some sense. I can’t stop until it’s done. I think of these as loops in my brain, and I deeply need to close them. It is both a strength and tremendous weakness. As I climbed to principle engineer and above, this was a huge boon. A few weeks of nonstop coding, then crash for a couple weeks till the next tasks come along. But at a certain level, I stopped having clear cut tasks. The work had huge scope and was totally open ended. I was doing quarterly planning and this quarter’s work wasn’t done yet, etc.

I got lost pushing to be “done” and it never came. One day my brain started hurting all the time. I started crying when I had to think about work, out of nowhere…really scary for me who always thought I was rock solid even after months of long days doing nothing but thinking hard. I tried to push through, ask for more money to soothe my pain, the company offered me a sort of break. But I had to quit cold turkey.

Now I am taking a real break and the thought of that work makes my body tense up. I get tearful again. I am going to take a lot of time to build some workout habits, some set hours of the day where I will never “work”, and do some emotional digging into my loops.

Thanks for sharing! It is so nice to hear everyone’s stories.

Who are these people getting all this in their feed? Are you outing yourself or something? Why would the algorithm give you a bunch of nazi content? Never seen anything of the sort, and I follow some very edgy crypto twitter accounts among other sketchy ones. Your bar for what constitutes “nazi” content must be low.