Hacker News: ngm7

New comment by ngm7 in "[dead]"

ngm7 — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 14:50:36 +0000

Being a founder is like being an elite sportsperson. That much is true.

On one hand it is true that just like an elite sportsman trying to work out of bad form, founders do work through our own fears and self-analysis to deliver what's required.

On the other hand I also think continuous improvement is a real thing. Especially for first time founders.

New comment by ngm7 in "Half-Baked Product"

ngm7 — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 14:01:34 +0000

Being able to say no, across the company! Having an engineering team which is allowed to say No the founder. Having a sales team which is allowed to say No to the customer. Having founders who are allowed to say No to themselves, sit patiently and figure the root-causes.

New comment by ngm7 in "Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)"

ngm7 — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 22:59:41 +0000

I echo this. The kind of entropy that real users bring has been refreshing to face as a founder.

Being a founder has a lot of SRE like activities. Fortunately I used to actually like troubleshooting and hence love being a founder but I know a lot of people quit this path because of the "suprising amount of details" in reality!

New comment by ngm7 in "Chip Off The Old Block"

ngm7 — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:04:30 +0000

Among the many non-business related exploratory conversations me and my cofounder have was one around having He had always imagined a big part of getting older would be having a kid. It was always an established part of his imagination. Wheras I have never thought of them that way. Although I am absolutely delighted to be around my friends' kids, I am invested in my own nephew's future, somehow that has not been a part of my equation.

I relate so hard with Scott although I do not have a child. Something so small, something so dependent can exist and hold you arrested for breath has been a revelation of the kind watching fable 5 build cannot bring.

Either how, I guess I understand this only theoretically. Emotionally feeling something in the moment might be different.

(The related story of my cofounder becoming a father one month after joining me is enormously heart wrenching; for another time)

New comment by ngm7 in "Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing"

ngm7 — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 19:59:48 +0000

> Orgs aren't remotely sensible at measuring anything that isn't counted in dollars.

A sensible organization machinery will move to optimize the metrics that make money. Often times figuring out said machinery takes iterations. Some of them are idiotic (ref: tokenmaxxing) but they are generally directionally correct.

New comment by ngm7 in "Mermaid: Generation of diagrams like flowcharts or sequence diagrams from text"

ngm7 — Sat, 24 May 2025 03:17:04 +0000

I'm slightly surprised excalidraw (https://excalidraw.com/) is not in the comments. I use it regularly to convey ideas to my devs and designers. Plus, it exports to json! Someone wrote a library to convert mermaid to excalidraw as well.

We're now experimenting with creating design questions to ask in interviews with excalidraw/mermaid

Electricity Supply Monitoring Initiative

ngm7 — Thu, 28 May 2015 06:50:57 +0000

Article URL: http://www.watchyourpower.org/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9616434

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by ngm7 in "Show HN: Sports betting between friends"

ngm7 — Tue, 10 Jun 2014 16:44:51 +0000

Brilliant! Loved the minimal interface. Awaiting graphs.

Would it be possible to provide a search bar to search for leagues on the homepage ?

"Keeping URLs safe" seems to be too geeky. I personally don't mind but my friends who join my league won't be so tech oriented.

EDIT: Also, you ask for the league name while creating it. might as well make it convenient for users to use that name. Separately, the URLs for the leagues could be simplified to contain the name instead of numbers.