Hacker News: farx

New comment by farx in "Mercedes‑Benz starts large‑scale production of electric axial flux motor"

farx — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 10:50:08 +0000

Visited Astrall Dynamics, a Chinese startup that builds quadrupeds with axial flux motors here in Shenzhen. Super cool to see the robots in actions, carrying 60kg of weight up over 20 flights of stairs quite rapidly. The high torque at the compact form factor was super impressive. As far as I understood they are more complex to manufacture, especially at scale.

New comment by farx in "Familiarity is the enemy: On why Enterprise systems have failed for 60 years"

farx — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 11:54:52 +0000

This whole article smells a bit of someone being salty they couldn't sell their software.

Having worked in corporate with vaguely software-buying related stuff, I am confused at why so many small companies think an enterprise would be excited to go with them.

Even if I love your product, how do I pitch to the powers that be that we replace something we are already paying for with this new thing? The company might make billions but I've always had to fight for my budgets.

And tell me again why we should bet our core operations on a two man outfit with six months runway? What happens when you pivot? What happens when our competitor acquires you? What happens when you go on a transatlantic flight and a key expires?

Selling to enterprise early on is a poisoned chalice as well. They have much larger teams, so you'll be dealing with a horde of product owners, compliance specialists, data privacy experts, who might never touch your product but come with excel sheets with 300 rows of gnarly questions. Not to mention just getting the bills paid can be a huge fight.

It will drag you into their orbit, especially if 80% of your revenue is from a single customer. Soon your other customers will start going to someone who actually have time to care about them. And by then there's been a political shift in-house and the new VP of X gets a quote for an outsourcing bundle from his squash buddy at one of the big system integrators. Your line item gets bundled into this to motivate the cost even though it's not even relevant. And that the end of your company.

If you do want to sell, treat the enterprise like an ecosystem of SMEs, find a department or team who are more innovative and sell to them behind the backs of enterprise IT. Once you've entrenched yourself and the users love you, then you can expand to other teams and eventually enterprise IT will be forced to negotiate with you for a license and do the compliance dance. But even so this will take years of effort and luck.

New comment by farx in "Business Retreats and Sanctions Are Crippling the Russian Economy"

farx — Fri, 29 Jul 2022 06:58:50 +0000

Interesting paper!

Business Retreats and Sanctions Are Crippling the Russian Economy

farx — Fri, 29 Jul 2022 06:58:49 +0000

Article URL: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4167193

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32273891

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by farx in "Music for Programming"

farx — Thu, 07 Jul 2022 11:12:05 +0000

I’ve been using https://brain.fm for years. Super nice to just be able to infinitely generate background noise for working, relaxing, meditating or whatever

New comment by farx in "Introducing nushell"

farx — Sat, 24 Aug 2019 08:08:03 +0000

What a missed opportunity not naming the post "nushell in a nutshell"

The Toolbox Toolbox

farx — Wed, 22 May 2019 04:24:28 +0000

Article URL: https://www.toolboxtoolbox.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19977752

Points: 2

# Comments: 0