Hacker News: laurent_du

New comment by laurent_du in "Five years as a startup CTO: How, why, and was it worth it? (2024)"

laurent_du — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 17:54:18 +0000

Good read, thank you. It feels nice to read something that was fully written by an actual human being.

New comment by laurent_du in "FyneDesk: A full desktop environment for Linux written in Go"

laurent_du — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 14:54:12 +0000

I have been a Linux user for 20 years and I have no idea what display server or windows manager I use. Every time this theme pops up on HN a lot of people argue very passionately about this and I feel I have no understanding at all of this. What are the stakes? Why does this matter? Why is there so much argument going on around Wayland, Xorg, X11 and whatever?

New comment by laurent_du in "There is a huge pool of exceptional junior engineers"

laurent_du — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 07:03:38 +0000

I have seen this happen countless times and it still baffles me.

New comment by laurent_du in "What is “good taste” in software engineering?"

laurent_du — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 07:51:24 +0000

Subjectivity is fine when it is backed by experience and knowledge. If anything, the narcissist perspective is the one where you claim expert opinion doesn't matter because it's all subjective and it hurts your feelings when people criticize your work (or your "taste").

New comment by laurent_du in "What is “good taste” in software engineering?"

laurent_du — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 07:48:12 +0000

There's nothing wrong with that. The problem is not that they were playing a childish game, it's that they were over-estimating their own abilities by a lot. It's ok to acknowledge you are good at something if you are, in fact, good at this thing.

New comment by laurent_du in "How to motivate yourself to do a thing you don't want to do"

laurent_du — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 19:06:07 +0000

I recently found a weird trick to motivate myself to do things I don't want to do. Instead of thinking of the outcome of this task (which I probably don't care much about since I don't want to do it in the first place), I think about the fact that doing things I don't want to do makes me better at doing things I don't want to do, which is a desirable outcome for me. Your mileage may vary.

New comment by laurent_du in "Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML"

laurent_du — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 11:52:29 +0000

He won't be giving any advice, they are buying his contact list.

New comment by laurent_du in "Development speed is not a bottleneck"

laurent_du — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 14:21:15 +0000

I think development speed is merely tagging the correct causal factor which is expertise. I have witnessed development teams requiring weeks to change a single flag in a configuration flag? Were they slow? Well, yes, but I'd argue they were mostly clueless.

New comment by laurent_du in "Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself"

laurent_du — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 15:28:19 +0000

No, it's a different etymological root. A better translation would be to say that you give a share of your attention (делить's meaning is to divide).

New comment by laurent_du in "Hledger 1.50"

laurent_du — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 14:42:24 +0000

I use 0.1% of hledger and that's enough for me. Thank you to the author for providing this powerful tool for free.

New comment by laurent_du in "Hledger 1.50"

laurent_du — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 14:41:07 +0000

I think the person you are answering to was asking for a book recommendation.

New comment by laurent_du in "Show HN: AfriTales – Discover the Magic of African Storytelling"

laurent_du — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 12:23:35 +0000

I am going to piggyback and drop an interesting bit of trivia: Enid Blyton's infamous Brer Rabbit is actually an African-American. Look it up.

New comment by laurent_du in "A visual introduction to big O notation"

laurent_du — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 19:34:02 +0000

I am not interested in arguing so I'll just repeat that your article is beautiful and even though it's not entirely correct I think it has value and I appreciate the time you spent working on this and putting it out to help others.

New comment by laurent_du in "A visual introduction to big O notation"

laurent_du — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 18:29:13 +0000

Beautiful article but that's not what big O means. The author seems to be describing something that is usually called (upper case) Theta. Big O is an upper bound.

New comment by laurent_du in "[dead]"

laurent_du — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 15:43:06 +0000

Can you really oppose "genocide" when your publication's name is literally "Jacobin"?

New comment by laurent_du in "Code formatting comes to uv experimentally"

laurent_du — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 05:51:49 +0000

Yeah the reaction is weird. It's 100% optional. People just love to complain.

New comment by laurent_du in "AWS in 2025: Stuff you think you know that's now wrong"

laurent_du — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 19:19:41 +0000

He's not talking about the prefix, just the beginning of the object key.

New comment by laurent_du in "US state department stops issuing visas for Gaza’s children to get medical care"

laurent_du — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 17:54:46 +0000

I guess the Guardian journalists believe that ethnically cleansing is an inherently right-wing endeavor, even though left-wing regimes have practiced this a lot and often with the blessings of communist intellectuals.

New comment by laurent_du in "US state department stops issuing visas for Gaza’s children to get medical care"

laurent_du — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 16:08:57 +0000

I didn't expect the article to conclude with a pg quote from twitter. Why did they think pg was a notable authority on the matter of human rights? I am not asking in snark, just curious.

New comment by laurent_du in ""None of These Books Are Obscene": Judge Strikes Down Much of FL's Book Ban Bill"

laurent_du — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 14:37:00 +0000

Using taxpayers money to corrupt minors is not "free speech".