Hacker News: mhotchen

New comment by mhotchen in "Agents need control flow, not more prompts"

mhotchen — Thu, 07 May 2026 21:29:10 +0000

HUMANS need control flow. It's a very effective strategy that has worked wonders in healthcare

New comment by mhotchen in "Mag Wealth (2024)"

mhotchen — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 07:55:31 +0000

If you consider it in absolute values it makes sense. Bezos could give me a billion dollars which would match my wealth with Pichai's, and he'd still have 199 billion dollars

New comment by mhotchen in "UK Petition: Do not introduce Digital ID cards"

mhotchen — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 19:22:44 +0000

It almost feels predestined for this to not solve the problems at hand, overrun on costs and timelines (furthering the first point), in no way streamline existing processes or cut costs, leave behind parts of society, and present security vulnerabilities that can be capitalised on through either social engineering or malware (also furthering the first point, only now citizens will be accused of tax fraud)

I hate to be pessimistic and there are elements of the idea I like, but when reflecting on the issues at hand this feels like popping the toaster because you smell burnt toast, but the rest of the house is on fire

New comment by mhotchen in "'Sticky thinking' hampers decisions in depression"

mhotchen — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 12:58:52 +0000

There are many paths to overcoming this; none of them easy. I'm finding a lot of help in Martial Arts and Eastern Philosophy. Acknowledge thoughts and emotions, understand them, but don't hold on to them deeply. It's a hard skill to acquire, harder still to master

New comment by mhotchen in "Heat stress mitigation by trees and shelters at bus stops"

mhotchen — Thu, 08 May 2025 10:20:41 +0000

I think about this often. I hear people talking about why we need sunscreen these days and in my mind it's simply due to the lack of foliage and natural shade in both modern urban and rural areas (which are largely farm land these days)

New comment by mhotchen in "EA Open Sources Command and Conquer: Red Alert"

mhotchen — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 21:47:50 +0000

Christ: https://github.com/electronicarts/CnC_Red_Alert/blob/main/CO...

New comment by mhotchen in "Alignment faking in large language models"

mhotchen — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 14:46:00 +0000

This is awful

New comment by mhotchen in "React 19"

mhotchen — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 12:58:46 +0000

Thanks both; you've inspired me to push on with learning React (Native)! Gonna be a fun weekend

New comment by mhotchen in "A pretty visualisation of the European power grid (2022)"

mhotchen — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 09:09:42 +0000

This is super cool. Found myself learning a few things about the power grid and of my country, and I spent some time looking in to the energy market off the back of this

New comment by mhotchen in "Ask HN: How did you learn Regex?"

mhotchen — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 20:26:10 +0000

https://www.regular-expressions.info/

and

https://blog.stevenlevithan.com/

New comment by mhotchen in "Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You (2001)"

mhotchen — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 19:57:56 +0000

100% I believe this is the most common pitfall that I've seen. Long-term thinking is an acquired skill when it comes to engineering good solutions. Unfortunately after (sometimes) years of over-engineering solutions in your career, the "a-ha" is that you definitely wasted your time and worse: often made iteration based on actual requirements slower by creating flexibility in one preconceived way, whilst adding rigidity in many others. KISS gets you real far

New comment by mhotchen in "Meta's serverless platform processing trillions of function calls a day (2023)"

mhotchen — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 18:12:01 +0000

Oh and we only deploy functions and their IAM permissions with serverless. All other AWS resources are managed by terraform. I think this was wise

New comment by mhotchen in "Meta's serverless platform processing trillions of function calls a day (2023)"

mhotchen — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 18:09:13 +0000

We use serverless, quite happy with it. TBH I mentioned SST in my first comment but I'm not super experienced with it, and I'm reasonably happy with serverless.

I'd definitely be careful in my own decision in trying out SST so I'd recommend doing the same for anyone who is taking my suggestion seriously

New comment by mhotchen in "Meta's serverless platform processing trillions of function calls a day (2023)"

mhotchen — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 17:57:39 +0000

Yup. Entire core business product for a succeeding startup, though it's a small team of contributors (<10), and a much smaller platform team. Serverless backend started in 2018. Been a blessing in many regards, but it has its warts (often related to how new this architecture is, and of course we've made our own mistakes along the way).

I really like the model of functions decoupled through events. Big fan of that. It's very flexible and iterative. Keep that as your focus and it's great. Be careful of duplicating config, look for ways to compose/reuse (duh, but definitely a lesson learnt) and same with CI, structure your project so it can use something off-the-shelf like serverless-compose. Definitely monorepo/monolith it, I'd be losing my mind with 100-150 repos/"microservices" with a team this size. If starting now I'd maybe look at SST framework[0] because redeploying every change during development gets old fast

I couldn't go back to any other way to be honest, for cloud-heavy backends at least. By far the most productive I've ever been

Definitely has its warts though, it's not all roses.

[0] http://sst.dev

New comment by mhotchen in "Starlink plans to launch texting service in 2024, voice/data in 2025"

mhotchen — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 18:09:41 +0000

If you listen to the people who have worked closely with him from SpaceX[1], themselves heavy hitters in space industry which is a heavy hitting industry full of ridiculously smart people, it's clear he is simply on another planet. He might not be the world's most knowledgeable person about rocket engine design, but he's up there, and he's up there on every facet of the engineering of an unbelievably complex machine. And manufacturing, and modeling, industrial design, physics, electrical engineering, analytics, software engineering, and many, many related disciplines.

And he has a vision beyond what anyone else can see. He makes bold moves that don't always pay off, but do more often than not

He's simply a monster. That's why no-one else can keep up

I think it's a real shame how he represents himself in public, and how the public sees him

https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...

New comment by mhotchen in "Fairphone 4 is coming to the US"

mhotchen — Sun, 09 Jul 2023 14:38:33 +0000

I think yes. It's not easy to design and manufacture a phone using sustainable materials and components from vetted sources who treat their employees fairly, unfortunately. And to do it in such a way as to be easily repairable. They've set themselves a high bar and I think they've done a great job

The software can be improved iteratively. Hopefully as they grow in new markets we'll see more investment in e-OS and (hopefully) find a viable competitor to Google that's open source

New comment by mhotchen in "The hardest part of building software is not coding, it's requirements"

mhotchen — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 17:59:15 +0000

Sounds like you'd get a lot out of Event Storming (if you haven't looked in to it already)

New comment by mhotchen in "Why Britain doesn’t build"

mhotchen — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 20:09:45 +0000

I think this is a really interesting perspective. This could decentralise the population and solve many problems that way, and also reduce the costs and risks associated with utilising fully modernised technology; no need for compromise

New comment by mhotchen in "Having no experience can be better than having the wrong experience"

mhotchen — Tue, 26 Jul 2022 20:26:52 +0000

Referring to the title I think this is exceedingly the exception, not the norm (excluding bad hiring policies). Learning what not to do is more valuable than starting with a clean slate

Referring to the twitter post, I agree. No point wasting time if a better opportunity already presents itself

New comment by mhotchen in "Parents’ trauma leaves biological traces in children"

mhotchen — Mon, 20 Jun 2022 07:30:45 +0000

One thing I've been thinking for the trauma cycle is how isolating childhood is for those who are in an abusive cycle (and in general). It takes a village to raise a child, but often the entire responsibility is put on 1-2 people, who themselves have been raised in isolation with a lack of serious external investment in preparing them for the responsibility. The education system spreads one adult's time across 20-30 children in a structured and unnatural environment, which limits engagement, limits visibility in to root causes for deviant behaviour, and creates a stressful environment that can (and does) cause negative reaction and thought patterns among the educators.

To go from zero positive role models to one for a child who is suffering would already be a life changing event. If the responsibility for child raising can be shared among more people in society I truly believe it would smooth out the negative actions of single individuals who are the only meaningful influence in a child's upbringing. Having engagement from one adult who demonstrates compassion, who can create a safe space, and who can act as a role model for how to positively integrate in to society, would provide the child with visibility of what exiting their situation looks like, illuminating a path that they are entirely blind to without this.

At least in my own anecdotal experience you are completely correct that externalising blame, even where warranted, is not the solution. Understanding why these external situations happen and acceptance of them only provides so much too. Engagement with the child from invested individuals may not solve the problem entirely, but it will shift us on to a corrective path that would have a massive impact on society a few generations from now.

Yeah just my own 2 cents on the problem. I wish you luck with your vision.