Hacker News: mhotchen

New comment by mhotchen in "Larry Ellison: "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re recording""

mhotchen — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 18:55:14 +0000

Oh wow I went and looked that up after reading your comment. Launched less than a month ago! Incredible that you're seeing such impact already

New comment by mhotchen in "Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?"

mhotchen — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 10:26:16 +0000

This conversation makes me wonder if age verification at the system level could be considered an externality for its cost to society as a whole, and the solution be to collect tax from any commercial sale of a desktop OS that doesn't implement a defined open standard. If there is any money raised it could be used for eg. education pieces on harm and harm reduction

Maybe it doesn't work in this case, but I think you both make great points. Just feel like there must be a way of bridging this gap

New comment by mhotchen in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2026)"

mhotchen — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 23:29:02 +0000

  Location: London, UK
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Permanent: No
  Technologies: TypeScript, Python, PHP, SQL, Terraform, Linux, AWS, AWS Lambda
  Email: m@mhn.me

My name's Matthew Hotchen. I was founding engineer of a successful YC-backed substance use management platform (Pelago Health) delivering rapidly on dozens of features, creating a well-structured backend, data pipeline, and multi-region HITRUST certified platform. I then learned the A-method of hiring and worked hard to build a great team of long-tenured engineers, entrusting them to do their work, scaling CI/CD and test infrastructure, implementing strategic refactors to improve system consistency, implementing reliable security and infosec practices, effective checklist-driven development workflows that helped us release several times a day (with a small team). I was voted most committed to the mission and played a key role in defining the company culture. I was there for seven years and only left when Pelago had really found its footing and was going from success to success (and it continues to do so)

Prior to that I built and led the API team for World First, one of the largest FX brokerages in the UK where I played a leading role in their technology success, becoming and expert in FX markets and bringing innovative solutions to the space, helping the company expand globally over my time there. They sold to Ant Finance for $700m not long after my departure

I've also been a contractor, worked at an agency, and a bespoke suit company with an online tailoring system (and also tried to build my own business in this space)

I'm good at software design, thinking about and modeling data, efficient access patterns. I've worked with a wide selection of tools over the years (17 years professionally). I've been using Linux for 20 years now. I still write the best SQL queries I've ever seen (but I would say that). I've designed and worked with distributed systems and event-driven systems a fair bit and modeled some complex workflows. I've used AWS Lambda extensively

As well as the technologies above, I'm an expert in rapid delivery, team building/hiring, CI/CD, pipelines and workflows, and distributed systems

Although I'm a backend engineer I've also worked extensively on frontends, both mobile (react native) and web (going all the way back to Flash which I worked with professionally early in my career)

I've been taking a break from work to recuperate and put some focus on my hobbies but I have been getting back in to programming (now with LLMs). I'm currently working on an opensource alternative to Github Copilot

I'd like some money coming in though, it's always a good feeling

I'd make a good candidate for any founders who haven't landed on a CTO yet or looking for a stopgap, but want someone they can depend on to deliver what they need rapidly whilst receiving good insights from someone who played a key role in taking an early stage startup to unimagined succcess. I'm not looking for a permanent role. Anything from days to months

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)