<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: alecbenzer</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=alecbenzer</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sun, 24 May 2026 23:52:21 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=alecbenzer" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alecbenzer in "If founders treated their investors the same way they treated their employees"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Been at 2 series A/B startups for the past ~3.5 years. It was a really fun 3-6 months followed by 3 very not fun years.<p>My N is low, they were both non-Bay (NYC) startups, maybe some startups are fun, maybe I'm really bad at picking startups, but I think a startup's culture is often as much or more of a crapshoot than the startup's business.<p>Was at Google before, and it was fun for only a bit as well, but definitely not as actively non-fun as my last 3 years has been.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 18 Aug 2020 21:08:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24204364</link><dc:creator>alecbenzer</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24204364</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24204364</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alecbenzer in "If founders treated their investors the same way they treated their employees"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>AFAIK the 90 day thing was more of a legal thing than something the companies themselves wanted to enforce?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 18 Aug 2020 14:55:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24199366</link><dc:creator>alecbenzer</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24199366</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24199366</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alecbenzer in "Kovarex's (creator of Factorio) struggle with burnout"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>What makes you say this is 80:20? The thing that got him out of the funk was fixing a minor UI issue:<p><i>> Once he asked me "Father, what is this thing in the list of things I can order?" ... "This is atomic bomb" .. "Oh, I want to order it" .. "No, we don't even have it researched" .. "But, why is it in the list then, it doesn't make sense" ... "Hmm, you are right, it doesn't, I might actually fix that." So I opened Factorio source code after a long time, and made the change, that the filter and logistic request selections didn't contain things yet to be researched (unless you force-unlock it in the settings). I made a change to Factorio, and it felt good, and I started to want more, this is how I got from the lowest point.</i><p>He didn't get back into it because the problem was particularly meaty or interesting to work on. It was a small piece of work that nonetheless allowed him to feel like he had impact. Because he was connecting with someone who was actually engaging with and getting joy from what he was building (and it might have helped that the person was his son).<p>I guess it's possible that what initially put him into the burnout was working on tedious things that felt like they had no substantial impact (though nothing in the post really indicates that IMO). But, that doesn't mean that this isn't burnout. Burnout is exactly caused by a felt loss of control and/or impact.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 18 Jul 2020 18:19:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23883502</link><dc:creator>alecbenzer</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23883502</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23883502</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Kovarex's (creator of Factorio) struggle with burnout]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-356">https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-356</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23881918">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23881918</a></p>
<p>Points: 4</p>
<p># Comments: 2</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 18 Jul 2020 15:13:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-356</link><dc:creator>alecbenzer</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23881918</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23881918</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alecbenzer in "MariaDB Temporal Data Tables"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Not only does that seem relatively simple<p>I haven't thought about this too deeply, but I think "simple" is overstating it. Being able to turn on versioning for any table by basically just pushing a button seems really powerful.<p>There's application-layer stuff like paper_trail for rails that can do this for you, but you're stuck if your language doesn't have a good one.<p>Building it into the db also means that any out-of-band direct edits to the DB also get tracked.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 12 Jul 2020 16:37:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23812572</link><dc:creator>alecbenzer</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23812572</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23812572</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alecbenzer in "MariaDB Temporal Data Tables"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Had no idea until recently that MariaDB supported this out of the box. Does anyone have experience using this? How does it compare to <a href="https://github.com/scalegenius/pg_bitemporal" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/scalegenius/pg_bitemporal</a> ?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 12 Jul 2020 03:06:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23808451</link><dc:creator>alecbenzer</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23808451</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23808451</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[MariaDB Temporal Data Tables]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://mariadb.com/kb/en/temporal-data-tables/">https://mariadb.com/kb/en/temporal-data-tables/</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23808444">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23808444</a></p>
<p>Points: 124</p>
<p># Comments: 43</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 12 Jul 2020 03:04:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://mariadb.com/kb/en/temporal-data-tables/</link><dc:creator>alecbenzer</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23808444</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23808444</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alecbenzer in "Unit Testing Is Overrated"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Can't tell if serious...</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Jul 2020 14:00:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23780309</link><dc:creator>alecbenzer</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23780309</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23780309</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alecbenzer in "Unit Testing Is Overrated"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>but BeSt PrAcTiCeS</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Jul 2020 13:53:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23780206</link><dc:creator>alecbenzer</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23780206</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23780206</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alecbenzer in "Unit Testing Is Overrated"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I meant expand on how those things make code easier to understand, not why unit testing causes you to adopt them.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Jul 2020 13:52:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23780187</link><dc:creator>alecbenzer</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23780187</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23780187</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alecbenzer in "Unit Testing Is Overrated"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes but discovering those hypothetical defects is usually less important than discovering the actual, currently present defects.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Jul 2020 11:46:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23779127</link><dc:creator>alecbenzer</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23779127</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23779127</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alecbenzer in "Unit Testing Is Overrated"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Compared to integration testing and end-to-end testing.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Jul 2020 11:42:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23779106</link><dc:creator>alecbenzer</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23779106</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23779106</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alecbenzer in "Unit Testing Is Overrated"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Loosely coupled code is also easier to reason about and easier to refactor.<p>Can you expand more on this? I think this is where the author would disagree.<p>E.g., how is the code easier to reason about or refactor having introduced a location service interface that has only one one implementation?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Jul 2020 11:38:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23779075</link><dc:creator>alecbenzer</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23779075</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23779075</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[My Time as a Black Woman Software Engineer at Capital One]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://medium.com/@soandsos/my-time-as-a-black-woman-software-engineer-at-capital-one-5c05fa8faed">https://medium.com/@soandsos/my-time-as-a-black-woman-software-engineer-at-capital-one-5c05fa8faed</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23755501">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23755501</a></p>
<p>Points: 8</p>
<p># Comments: 3</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 07 Jul 2020 03:43:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://medium.com/@soandsos/my-time-as-a-black-woman-software-engineer-at-capital-one-5c05fa8faed</link><dc:creator>alecbenzer</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23755501</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23755501</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alecbenzer in "Yann LeCun quits Twitter amid acrimonious exchanges on AI bias"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah, I think that's what's missing for me too. Like, what do they expect LeCun to be doing instead?<p>I guess it's possible to suggest that, given the lack of diversity in training sets, different training techniques should be adopted to account for it. Is that actually a viable approach that people are suggesting, and LeCun is ignoring/downplaying?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 01 Jul 2020 02:38:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23697155</link><dc:creator>alecbenzer</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23697155</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23697155</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alecbenzer in "Challenges and opportunities for better nutrition science"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>A theory I've heard is that <i>any</i> kind of diet is useful for losing weight, because it forces you to think more carefully about what you're eating.<p>But ditto, I've lost 50lbs twice in my life and both times were basically just via calorie counting.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 28 Jun 2020 14:48:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23669049</link><dc:creator>alecbenzer</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23669049</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23669049</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alecbenzer in "DHH: The HEY stack Vanilla Ruby on Rails, MySQL, redis, stimulus, elastic search"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Switching between pages is pretty hit or miss for me in Notion. If it's a page I've been to recently it's very fast, but it's noticeably slow on some page loads. hey seems consistently pretty-fast.<p>Moving around elements doesn't seem like a fair thing to compare to navigating around the app... that's more like looking at how smooth text editing feels in Hey.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 25 Jun 2020 21:17:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23645801</link><dc:creator>alecbenzer</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23645801</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23645801</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alecbenzer in "DHH: The HEY stack Vanilla Ruby on Rails, MySQL, redis, stimulus, elastic search"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Not measuring but just going off of my memory, hey feels subtly but distinctly snappier than discord.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 25 Jun 2020 21:15:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23645777</link><dc:creator>alecbenzer</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23645777</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23645777</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alecbenzer in "DHH: The HEY stack Vanilla Ruby on Rails, MySQL, redis, stimulus, elastic search"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah, maybe it's different the further you are from the US or something, but from my use of hey, I have no idea what these people are talking about. It feels about as snappy as most other apps I use. If anything it feels snappier than my average app (though I think that has more to do with backend/network than the UI).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 25 Jun 2020 21:14:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23645769</link><dc:creator>alecbenzer</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23645769</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23645769</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alecbenzer in "I Am Deleting the Blog"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The implication being that the NYT wants to use real names to drive clicks and appease advertisers?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 23 Jun 2020 14:00:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23614005</link><dc:creator>alecbenzer</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23614005</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23614005</guid></item></channel></rss>