Anyone taking some time to do cool stuff?
Paul mentions that we work best when we work in a group of 8-20 people in a flat structure like our hunter gatherer ancestors use to do. Each member have their own roles and responsibilities and each individual contributes the well being and future security of the group. Such a group is optimal communication wise and it also offers greater incentive for it's members to work harder as you are directly participating in your own growth unlike our current structure where people are helping other people get rich.
This is very extreme take but imagine if companies are capped at 20-50 employees. Will it work? I think it might. What do you guys think?
0: You were not meant to have boss - http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html
Edit: rewording.
I don't think.
I cannot imagine companies doing GPU, CPUs, Windows, etc. with just 20-50ppl.
Sure valve isn't making GPUs or CPUs, but they did make the steam deck, in addition to the largest online game store, and several high quality AAA games, and the valve index. They apparently have around 250 people according to a quick Google search, but that still goes against the mindset that you need 10s of thousands of employees to make a successful large scale tech product (whether that's software or hardware).
For me, it feels like corruption would be more the risk from a cap.
This theory conflicts with Bullshit Jobs' theory (or more likely the truth) where power in an organization is derived from amount of reports someone has therefore companies must endlessly grow, only being limited by the amount of cash they can give their employees compared to the money coming in.
In the PG blog he says:
A group of 10 people within a large organization is a kind of fake tribe. The number of people you interact with is about right. But something is missing: individual initiative.
Citation needed. Even wolf packs have alphas, as I understand "hunter gatherer" societies were even less flat, if you disobeyed the leader you had your head chopped off.
He adjusts to government policy. More bosses.
He’s just trying to sound like he lives on his own world, like the entitled child he is.
After years of lurking here, watching on the sidelines, working for larger companies, having kids, buying a house, I'm finally going to take the dive. I'm excited, nervous, lost, all at the same time. But I have enough savings and an accommodating spouse, so I don't have to work for a while.
I'm a long-time academic, turned ML-practitioner. I have no major online presence. I don't have a brand. But if anyone is interested in talking, DM me, I have lots of time and am still in the divergent phase of entrepreneurship.
Edit: Added email address to profile. Excuse the confusion, I have been a lurker too long.
Related note, I came across this newsletter which goes into more detail about our “work” identity and how your employer doesn’t (to your point!) “care about you”
(https://wokescientist.substack.com/p/work-life-balance-is-a-...)
Romantic partners usually wish for more time to spend together, deepening the relationship or just hanging out.
This isn't productive per se, but it's natural that your life partner would like to actually live a life with you and not see you checking off tasks at home.
Is his true calling house renovations and childcare? If not, then it’s probably a choice that is being made for him. Personally, I love my babies and I consider it worth my time for basic care and teaching them things, but only as much as it benefits them. For the house renovations and all other labor that goes into partner-driven life, I would be much happier living in a mud hut with a candle and a math book, but I’ll never whisper a word about it. Its easy to become someone’s unlimited source of free labor, and they’ll always think they’re doing you a favor.
It's pretty poor behaviour to make massive assumptions about and be judgmental of someone else's marriage
1. I immediately went to Spain to do the Camino de Santiago. Was learning building web apps (Meteor) and launchd a full landing page / swing dance registration site while on the Camino.
2. Learned React and a few other tools after that, tried to be a consultant for a year. Then tried to launch a bunch of projects ("startups" if you wanted to be generous with that term)
3. Met my partner (and now cofounder) at a swing dance, who showed me microbiology and "the potential of phage therapy" because doctors weren't getting access to it
4. I created a random side project connecting docs with phage labs with her (now six years ago). We started connecting docs and labs, and have since taken on 40+ cases, and successfully treated two. Last year we moved to Sydney to essentially run a translational microbiology lab / phage therapy clinical trial — she's the microbiologist and I'm the research software engineer. We're just treating our 4th patient now. I'm building data collection tools for our bioinformaticians, doctors/nurses and microbiology lab, and trying to scale this project up using automation tools and robots. We're creating reports for the TGA to make sure our preps are safe. There's lots of work in areas I've never deal with (data science, stats, building full stack web apps, dealing with OpenTrons, REDCap, and a billion other tools).
It doesn't pay nearly as much as tech, but it's the most absurd thing I could ever do as a "UX designer"
How did you feel about balancing studying skills with socializing & enjoying the journey of the Camino?
People asking why the Camino, I haven't done it but I have done a number of treks / meditation retreats etc. It sounds fantastic but I think there are many physical journeys like this that could represent a lot of "inner travel".
In my case, I stayed six years in my first job out of college - as did most of my coworkers (the company was pretty stable up until the very end, when I left). I made a lateral shift within the company, and also made it to senior, under their wing.
The illusion started to come apart after a layoff (35% company-wide, 45% in my department, 60% of my team). I started looking for another employer at that point, because it was pretty obvious I'd only been retained to keep the lights on. When I gave my resignation, I wasn't met with any attempt at retention like higher pay. I _was_ told that it'd be personally detrimental for me to leave, because the company was my family (they knew I'd had some unrelated domestic issues that year), and without them, I'd be lost.
And of course, I agreed with them - for one week, after which I shook my head, said "what on earth am I thinking?", and resigned again. It took some time to realize that it was mostly a manipulative attempt on their part.
Then again, there’re people that manipulate their family members. So I get why it’s confusing for some.
I'm working on a Rust library for SAT solving and other things informed by John Harrison's text on Automated Theorem Proving.
https://github.com/aetilley/harrison-rust
This is largely for me to to learn Rust, but I think it may have the potential to turn into something cool. Next on the todo list is optimizations to DPLL as the existing implementation is currently in its most basic form (I skipped optimizations there for the time being in order to move on to predicate calculus).
I've since found a new perspective that's helped me transform my identity and self-esteem through therapy and journaling about my experience/thoughts. I still have negative thoughts, but I see them as independent things to observe and not part of my core self.
This is your story to write and other people's opinions are just that their opinions which is "none of your business". The layoff is not a reflection of you. You are worth it and things will get better.
I'm about to run out of money so I'm planning to move to the Amazon rainforest where money will last longer...
You can tell I haven’t done a lot of web dev since 2014 or so. :)
It's quite different from Rails. There are no models, no views, no controllers. There are components and there is a directory called app/pages where all components named page.haml will get their own route (kinda like the path based routing in Next.js).
Ruby+Haml removes a lot of unnecessary syntax so components become much shorter than their JS equivalents. It feels really nice to use actually.
Since the server knows which components are in use on a page, it will only include CSS for those components, which makes loading pretty fast. Then whenever a user clicks on a link they will receive the styles for the components that appear there.
There is no need to write JavaScript, nor is it possible. It would be interesting to support custom elements (web components) but I haven't found a use case yet. I suppose it will come up some day, for things that need to be aware of browser state like scroll position in very long lists.
It's really easy to make interactive components, just like React. I'm running the website on Fly.io and I barely notice the latency (I got about 60-120ms and my nearest edge node is in a different continent).
I feel like I'm up to something good, though I'm gonna need to attract some users and contributors to make it usable. There are a few bugs and lots of improvements to be made... But it works!
I got divorced about a year and a half ago. I’m 32 - for what it’s worth. In June, I left my job and SF. Put all my stuff in storage and went to the east coast for a month then went to Europe for 3 months. After all that, I committed to getting a six month lease on an apartment in Manhattan. Been here since November.
I haven’t worked at all. Maybe done a total of 20 leetcode problems but I spend way more time reading about layoffs and hiring freezes than interview prep. Mostly have spent my time at the gym, Broadway shows, meeting new people, and watching a lot of content online. I go out social dancing 5x/week and to the gym about the same amount. I’m trying to get better at yoga and getting a v-taper at the weights. I’d go out more but it’s hard to find the dances on some nights. (Sunday’s and Monday’s are particularly slow in nyc)
The absurd part is that I’ve done all of this in hopes of meeting a fantastic woman and seducing her to come to SFBA where I can start a family, build a house in the Santa Cruz mountains, and enjoy the region.
It is quite absurd - mainly cause it has no chance in hell of working but it wasn’t going to work in SF either. We’ll see where I end up moving next - too ugly and too much melanin for Manhattan.
It doesn’t help that I’m the Dalit of the professional world. (Working in tech) Here, finance reigns king. Doctors and law are fine. Tech though? (Even if rich) May as well be a janitor.
Status obsessed in this region. They don’t even think about the money.
Tbh - the real issue though is that I’m just an ugly fuck with a hard to place racial makeup. I’m going to get some more cosmetic surgery in May/June because I need to do something to improve my odds if this isn’t working.
I know not everyone can afford to "just take time off" but among those laid off from a tech company and browsing HN, surely some fraction of you could afford to do the same. You will still have a career to come back to if you spend a year turning your attention and energy to the climate crisis. BUT if you're under 40 or so (I'm 37), you may find that there is not a recognizable planet to come back to if you continue to focus on your career until the retirement age we were brought up to expect.
We don't really need much to have a good life.
Just wonder whether we'll be able to escape our current destructive economic and value system and move towards a more circular economic system[0] on time to keep global warming increase under 2C.
But for that our value system needs to change first... getting away from the 'more more more' value system and focusing more on what you wrote about. Would be great for example if we had a richer reuse and repair economy.
[0] Waste equals food https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/waste-food/
Thanks! I picked the simplest thing that I know that could work.
That's really great insight, actually. I definitely thought about adding the affiliate links, however I am somewhat unsure about the legality of promoting sportsbooks within the US. I think there are certain licensing requirements. I may look into it in more detail in the future, if the site picks up in traffic and search rankings.
> See https://www.bestfightodds.com/ if you want a site that does this for MMA rather nicely
This is super on-point. BFO was my inspiration for doing this and I know Catena and other affiliates typically have an interest in successful sports sites, so that thought, as a potential eventual exit strategy, crossed my mind.
> If you eventually add historical data people will scrape your site and try to clone it so that may be a problem.
I do have historical data in the backend, but I haven't done anything with it yet. Great point about the scrapers. I don't have a solution for that yet, although I am aware CloudFlare offers certain tools.
Player pages are a great idea, although I need to think what data will be useful and, preferably, won't require a lot of manual upkeep.
Just the admin of setting up and running the day-to-day has taught me a lot.
But the biggest lesson I learned is that I have the capacity to research and implement technologies new to me in relatively short amounts of time to make meaningful impact.
In addition, my confidence has improved and I am more likely to accept challenging work within my domain than ever before.
What I am doing running a small business is not cool in the context of the OP and the discussion, but it's cool to me in the sense that I did something I once feared and stuck with it.
Thanks for sharing, everyone. Really cool projects. Take care.
Temporarily!
I'm creating a web-first colony simulation game. I'm inspired by SimAnt, RimWorld, idleRPG, and Tamagotchi. My goal is to establish a strong, daily, mental health hygiene routine which promotes box breathing, gratitude journaling, and improved awareness of my health, fatigue, and motivation.
The game unfolds on an alien world covered in a thick sea of fog and asteroid impact craters. Huge fog waves roam the planet, splash against the crater walls, and continually intrude with frigid moisture. A damaged terraforming satellite orbits the planet and directs its limited energy towards one crater which keeps that crater habitable. There are three entities in the story: an AI powering the terraforming satellite, the consciousness of a biologist uploaded into the satellite's computer, and a fledgling ant colony within the barely habitable crater. The player fills the role of the protagonist, the biologist, and the hostile weather plays the role of the antagonist. The goal is to terraform the planet without throwing it out of balance.
The ant colony simulation runs on ~autopilot similar to idleRPG but with slowly unfolding visuals like 1x speed RimWorld. It's a real-time simulation which "runs" even when the tab is closed, but is only able to be controlled when the satellite orbits overhead and has line-of-sight with the crater. The queen hatches workers, workers expand the nest, navigate the fog, and search for food. The ants lay pheromone trails to food, but every night the fog rolls in and wipes clean the pheromones. Each day the ants begin searching for food once more. The colony grows optimally given available information, but is not omniscient or even opinionated. The colony will never push itself out of the local maximum of a single crater and struggles with attention due to the fog. Surprisingly, during initial nest expansion, the ants discover a rectifying crystal which allows them to sense electromagnetic waves emitted by the satellite. They develop a ritual around attempting to interpret these electrical impulses which provides a very rough form of of one-way communication from the satellite to the ants. The biologist leverages this communicational channel to assist the colony by providing high-level environmental awareness and opinionated responses.
Each day, the player is asked to show up and check-in at a consistent time. The player wants to be able to nurture their colony, but they need to unlock the ability to do so. They begin by engaging with a guided, box-breathing routine while "awakening" the consciousness of the biologist. It's effortful for the biologist to take autonomy from the terraforming AI in the same way waking up is effortful and so the player is guided through that process. Then, the player is greeted with a technophilic UI which provides in-depth stats and charts of their colony and the planet. Based on current and projected resources, the user makes a decision to encourage the colony to push harder or to ease up. This influences whether the colony will push out of a local maximum, but comes at the cost of damaging the health of the ants. The player needs to balance pushing the colony to expand into additional land with tapering their exertion to avoid long-term negative effects. Finally, the player is given an opportunity to self-reflect and journal on the goals and progress of the ants. Gratitude journaling provides a means of keeping attention on high-value food resources such that the ants don't lose track entirely due to the fog. Non-gratitude journaling (i.e. venting, daily reflections) provide a source of entropy for the weather system of the world.
Outside of check-in time, the player is only able to watch their high-level decisions slowly play out over the course of the day. The interface is calming and provides an opportunity for brief respite similar to taking a moment to observe an aquarium.
Overall, I am building software to help me be more consistent and diligent in my personal growth and mental health hygiene. Sometimes when I get depressed I stop caring for myself, but I'm always good about showing up for others. I want to leverage that to promote self-care. Conversely, when I'm firing on all-cylinders, I tend to think my motivation and determination are limitless. I take on significant personal growth goals only to eventually reach a mental breaking point because I never identify a good time to push less hard until forced. So, I would benefit from a visual indication of where I am at on a motivation/determination boom/bust cycle so that I don't find myself surprised by burnout.
I've never really responded well to software that implies I have problems which need fixing. Instead, I do much better when someone tells me a story, I contrast that story to my own, and I succeed in identifying personal growth areas through the reflection. Instead of creating "yet another mental health / journaling app" I am interested in telling a compelling, sci-fi story where the protagonist struggles to succeed in their goals due to a failure to acknowledge their humanity. I believe telling this story, while providing tools to participate and a pet to stay attached, is likely to instill long-term changes in those who engage.
> Sometimes when I get depressed I stop caring for myself, but I'm always good about showing up for others.
What stage of the project are you on? How can I track or contribute? I would love to see this come to fruition.
Seriously asking as someone who is grateful to have a wealth of resources at their disposal, but suffers from a complete lack of imagination in the idea department—that is any idea that would motivate me to the point of starting up a startup.
https://twitter.com/LeapJosh/status/1552977798452609024
I started the autumn after covid reached America.
I’ll also work on my own personal projects and see if any of them can gain enough momentum as a lifestyle business to avoid returning to soul-sucking BigTech.
For the cool stuff, I'm thinking of picking a project/skill each week and devoting a full week to that, to see if I enjoy it and can get any mental traction. Becoming more proficient with pure C has been a lot of fun, so I'll definitely push forward on that. I have a couple of Pico-8 projects to work on. There's any number of opaque or classical technologies that I'd like to understand more deeply. I'll enter a game-jam, just to keep myself on a proper schedule with a proper deadline. There are a lot of books I want to read.
At some point though I'll need to collect my thoughts and start looking for the next thing. I have recruiters already knocking on my door, and the company will pay for 6 months of job agency assistance. But to tell the truth, I just can't see myself jumping back into software engineering as a full-time career so I don't yet know how best to utilize these resources. Sorting myself out is a critical goal for the coming months.
"What do I want to be when I grow up?" is almost as difficult to answer at 51 as it was at 18.
Then I modified my quantum chemistry simulation platform (https://atomictessellator.com) so that it would use this Python/websocket interface to a running 3D engine to visualise the molecular simulations
Why? It’s fun and I wanted to see if it would work.
The grind and the firefighting is forever and endless, and the new services you have to learn, the dev and product demands that are poorly planned, make one want to quit, and consult on specific projects. CI CD pipelines, and general purpose SRE project consulting.
I'm thinking about quitting in a high cost of living place and living off of savings will I search for gigs and build a network.
Is that absurd?
(Running on Grav with Turbolinks; visuals made in Affinity Designer; audio made in Reason)
Recently I got into using mono.Cecil to rewrite c# assemblies (specifically assemblies created by IKVM). I haven’t had a personal project in years but this has definitely reignited a spark, so I’m going to try for a remote software engineering job first.
It can only be had through ownership. Ownership is harder and riskier.
Worker-owned co-ops are the way to go, not megacorps.
Startups are special kinds of fast growth businesses that are rare and rarely successful. They exist, but there aren't many. There is a lot of money thrown at startups because the upside is potentially very lucrative, e.g., IRR positive.
Also a couple of applications.
And finally learning to play an instrument.
Meanwhile I'm looking forward to my $440 a week in unemployment!
So now I'm also settling thoughts on my next lifestyle business kind of project, something I kept in mind, though with those AI improvements these days it might get a new flavor