Hacker News: fullsend

New comment by fullsend in "Valve Software handbook for new employees [pdf] (2012)"

fullsend — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 09:21:31 +0000

"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.

New comment by fullsend in "I'm Leaving Sentry"

fullsend — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 20:39:28 +0000

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.

New comment by fullsend in "When a Crystal Ball Isn't Enough to Make You Rich"

fullsend — Sun, 15 Dec 2024 18:04:59 +0000

“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.

New comment by fullsend in "Arch is a gateway drug to NixOS"

fullsend — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 23:41:06 +0000

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

New comment by fullsend in "The magic of small engineering teams"

fullsend — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 23:21:59 +0000

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.

New comment by fullsend in "Google Imagen 2"

fullsend — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 16:19:16 +0000

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.

New comment by fullsend in "Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?"

fullsend — Mon, 13 Nov 2023 20:29:05 +0000

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.

New comment by fullsend in "Elon Musk wants your entire financial life on X by 2024"

fullsend — Fri, 27 Oct 2023 18:29:03 +0000

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.

New comment by fullsend in "George R.R. Martin and other authors sue OpenAI for copyright infringement"

fullsend — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 17:44:01 +0000

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.

New comment by fullsend in "Managers say 4-6p.m. is now a work 'dead zone.'"

fullsend — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 21:33:48 +0000

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

New comment by fullsend in "Custom instructions for ChatGPT"

fullsend — Fri, 21 Jul 2023 15:24:19 +0000

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…”.

New comment by fullsend in "Google launches PaLM 2, its next-gen large language model"

fullsend — Wed, 10 May 2023 23:55:38 +0000

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.

New comment by fullsend in "Searches for VPN Soar in Utah Amidst Pornhub Blockage"

fullsend — Thu, 04 May 2023 03:05:36 +0000

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

New comment by fullsend in "Academic Ranks Explained or What on Earth Is an Adjunct?"

fullsend — Sat, 29 Apr 2023 10:30:14 +0000

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.

New comment by fullsend in "Academic Ranks Explained or What on Earth Is an Adjunct?"

fullsend — Sat, 29 Apr 2023 10:23:51 +0000

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.

New comment by fullsend in "Meta is about to start its next round of layoffs"

fullsend — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 22:51:10 +0000

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.

New comment by fullsend in "Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record"

fullsend — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 04:23:11 +0000

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.

New comment by fullsend in "GM’s decision to ditch Apple CarPlay, Android Auto sparks backlash"

fullsend — Fri, 14 Apr 2023 23:54:18 +0000

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.

New comment by fullsend in "Thinking hard makes the brain tired"

fullsend — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 20:35:23 +0000

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.

New comment by fullsend in "What Kind of Mind Does ChatGPT Have?"

fullsend — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 20:33:27 +0000

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