Hacker News: astatine

New comment by astatine in "Ask HN: What breaks first when your team grows from 10 to 50 people?"

astatine — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 11:57:25 +0000

Entirely my opinion, but I believe that there are breakpoints at multiples of 1,2,5. So, changes in org structure are needed to adapt at 10,20,50 (and further at 100,200,500) counts. More formality, more processes, more tools, more variety of roles.

If someone is doing a task which takes 4 hours a week, in a team of 10, on scaling to 50 it likely becomes a half FTE level work. Not everything scales that way, obviously, but it's a good way to model new roles needed.

New comment by astatine in "Ask HN: Is Claude down again?"

astatine — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 15:39:49 +0000

Same issue. Getting an "internal server error" message

New comment by astatine in "Ask HN: How many of you hold an amateur radio license in your country?"

astatine — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 11:37:52 +0000

VU3BNZ restricted class license

New comment by astatine in "Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal"

astatine — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 02:09:10 +0000

dBase was the gold standard for this back in the 80s, early 90s. Great tool. Both the "dev" part and how it could be made available to non developers. The freedom of spreadsheets when developing and the constraints of a TUI (or just UI in those days) for users.

New comment by astatine in "There is no comfortable reading position"

astatine — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 04:37:16 +0000

I find that, when I lie down, my glasses slip back closer to my eyes just enough to make things go out of focus at reading distance. The weight of the prisms could make it worse. Have you figured out some solution for this? If you have, it could be a game changer for me!

New comment by astatine in "IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)"

astatine — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 14:05:01 +0000

Nostalgic! Turbo C was my preferred IDE over many years in the late 80s to mid 90s. What an amazing tool! Those key bindings, used in so many other IDEs since, are burned into muscle memory. Even after decades of not using them, they bring a smile back. CodeWarrior, the debugger, helped me understand what happens when you run a program more than literally anything else I read or was taught.

New comment by astatine in "Show HN: Bolt – A super-fast, statically-typed scripting language written in C"

astatine — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 23:35:40 +0000

We have a server which uses Lua based script plugins. They are usually a few hundred to a few thousand lines and get invoked via APIs. I was trying to figure out how Bolt will behave in such a context and whether we could replace the Lua based plugin engine with this.

New comment by astatine in "Show HN: Bolt – A super-fast, statically-typed scripting language written in C"

astatine — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 22:30:14 +0000

This looks awesome. Would you have any data on the performance of large number of invocations of small scripts? I am wondering at startup overhead for every script run. which the 500kloc/s may not capture well.

New comment by astatine in "US Court nullifies FTC requirement for click-to-cancel"

astatine — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 06:27:23 +0000

You can absolutely do this in India. Every card based subscription requires an explicit authorization to set up. And every such authorized subscription can be seen in the bank app/site. You can choose to cancel those subscriptions at the bank end and the subscribed services will fail their next renewal. This is not just a service specific thing and is required by regulation for all recurring payments, incl utility bills, insurance premia, entertainment service, cloud services.

New comment by astatine in "Dunbar's Number Is Quadratic (2020)"

astatine — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 17:18:41 +0000

Anecdotal, I have been using 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, 500,... as the 'break points' where organizational structures need a rethink. So far, it has worked for me. These also match the lines on a log graph.

New comment by astatine in "AI headphones let wearer listen to a single person in a crowd by looking at them"

astatine — Wed, 29 May 2024 04:58:59 +0000

I used to think of building something related to let a mic pick up a single person to handle questions from the audience, during presentations. Will save the hassle of passing around mics.

This looks like it could do just that with the headphones feeding directly into the mixer and behaving like a focused mic.

Ask HN: Recommendations for a self hosted, open source, startup simulator

astatine — Sun, 03 Mar 2024 13:21:12 +0000

I am planning a startup workshop for a group of undergraduate students. I was looking for a startup simulation tool that could be used to engage them through participation. Ideally, something which provides a competitive environment for multiple startup teams.

Examples are like these: https://www.bacu.me/business_simulator/index.html https://mitsloan.mit.edu/teaching-resources-library/management-simulations http://thefounder.biz/play/

It would need to be self hosted to allow access within a local college lab and open source to allow local flavors to be introduced.

Thanks!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39580669

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by astatine in "Uber slashes fees in Bangladesh as drivers keep taking rides offline"

astatine — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 17:47:59 +0000

Take a look at ONDC. They do exactly this in India. Early days, but seemingly successful with very low fees.

https://ondc.org/

New comment by astatine in "OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman"

astatine — Sat, 18 Nov 2023 02:18:23 +0000

It would be so much fun if it's revealed that chatgpt is just a front for mechanical turk

New comment by astatine in "WordPress Playground: A WordPress that runs entirely in the browser"

astatine — Sat, 15 Jul 2023 05:08:12 +0000

I use WP all the time for a variety of nearly static sites that I can let someone else non-technical continue to add content. It works great for this purpose. There is nothing close to WP for this purpose.

It does need careful curating of plugins that one uses, set up suitable cloudflare frontends and preventing users from doing something seemingly simple but dangerous.

I get the feeling that a good chunk of the hate comes from people who tried it many years ago; or had needs which don't get met by WP; or received it as a legacy.

New comment by astatine in "Ulaa: A Privacy First Browser"

astatine — Fri, 05 May 2023 14:10:29 +0000

Indeed.

Ulaa: A Privacy First Browser

astatine — Fri, 05 May 2023 10:29:18 +0000

Article URL: https://ulaa.com/privacy.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35827412

Points: 3

# Comments: 2

New comment by astatine in "Software firms across US facing tax bills that threaten survival"

astatine — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 15:28:56 +0000

There will be a significant drop in reported research spending. This will seem like China is doing more research than the US. There will be a hueb and cry. Congess will incentivise research spending. Back to where we were.

New comment by astatine in "Software firms across US facing tax bills that threaten survival"

astatine — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 15:11:50 +0000

I have seen several situations where this would be desirable - notably bleeding startups with vc money. There is plenty of window dressing to capitalise expenses and show a better EBITDA.

What this will do is immediately reclassify large chunks of people out of "R&D" into operational resources. Just enough to balance between nice looking EBITDA and low real profit (= low tax)

New comment by astatine in "Offline is just online with extreme latency"

astatine — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 10:41:27 +0000

I would argue that it really is the other way around - online is just offline with instant synchronisation