Hacker News: pfarrell

New comment by pfarrell in "Lessons from my first exit"

pfarrell — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 13:20:40 +0000

Don’t forget your investors and your board.

New comment by pfarrell in "Legalizing sports gambling was a mistake"

pfarrell — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 13:16:39 +0000

It was already tried in the US. The agreed upon results were that humans want alcohol and the downstream effects made society worse e.g. increase in alcohol consumption, empowering organized crime and corrupting the police.

New comment by pfarrell in "What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of Mad Magazine"

pfarrell — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 12:52:49 +0000

“New Kids on the Blech” is spot on.

New comment by pfarrell in "Show HN: Create diagrams of complex data flows in software systems"

pfarrell — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 08:36:08 +0000

Thanks for sharing your work. I too have the problems you’re attempting to address. Makes me think of LabView (which I would recommend checking out for inspiration if you’re unaware of it).

New comment by pfarrell in "The Alternative Implementation Problem"

pfarrell — Mon, 13 May 2024 00:07:03 +0000

Yeah, that original iPhone launch keynote is something I like to watch every so often. It really emphasized we’re only doing this because we see what’s wrong with smartphones and this is our vision. They didn’t go “we made the best stylus you can have”.

New comment by pfarrell in "The Alternative Implementation Problem"

pfarrell — Mon, 13 May 2024 00:05:01 +0000

That’s what I was trying to express. We implemented the features that were unique and interesting too late. We should have led with them and build some compelling demos

New comment by pfarrell in "The Alternative Implementation Problem"

pfarrell — Mon, 13 May 2024 00:03:15 +0000

Yeah that’s pretty much what happened. What I was thinking was we over estimated what the table stakes were. We were building a collaborative SQL editor aka notebooks. We spent way too much time getting it working with different dbs instead of focusing on a couple and building the things that actually made us stand out. A single customer wouldn’t really care about all the dbs we could talk to that were the one she was using.

New comment by pfarrell in "The Alternative Implementation Problem"

pfarrell — Sun, 12 May 2024 20:22:53 +0000

I learned something similar founding a startup. If I could do it again, I would have aggressively avoided pursuing the table stakes feature in our space. Instead we should have done the minimal amount to be comfortable that our architecture could support the enterprisey things. We should have then concentrated everything on something that would set us apart, something we could demo and get a “wow… I see where this could go” instead of something like “oh this is just a clone of x”.

New comment by pfarrell in "Show HN: Exploring HN by mapping and analyzing 40M posts and comments for fun"

pfarrell — Thu, 09 May 2024 15:26:27 +0000

I’ve had this same thought but was unsure what the licensing for the data would be.

New comment by pfarrell in "Show HN: Exploring HN by mapping and analyzing 40M posts and comments for fun"

pfarrell — Thu, 09 May 2024 15:19:50 +0000

I have a daily updated dataset that has the HN data split out by months. I've published it on my web page, but it’s served from my home server so I don’t want to link to it directly. Each month is about 30mb of compressed csv. I’ve wanted to torrent it, but don’t know how to get enough seeders since each month will produce a new torrent file (unless I’m mistaken). If you’re interested, send me a message. My email is mrpatfarrell. Use gmail for the domain.

New comment by pfarrell in "Perlis's Programming Epigrams"

pfarrell — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 11:56:47 +0000

A few are dated but number 74 is one I think about a lot when programming.

  Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to see it as a soap bubble?

Important to remember this was written in the early ‘80’s at the end of Perlis’s long career. For most of these to stay relevant and humorous 50 years later is pretty impressive.

New comment by pfarrell in "A proof-of-concept Python executable built on Cosmopolitan Libc (2021)"

pfarrell — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 12:32:14 +0000

If you are distributing software to an audience who want to use your thing without having to build it, then something like this is much more appealing than virtualenv.

New comment by pfarrell in "Show HN: A static site generator that prettifies the output HTML"

pfarrell — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 14:14:29 +0000

And not every optimization is worth the effort.

New comment by pfarrell in "Cowsay"

pfarrell — Sat, 02 Mar 2024 12:49:02 +0000

Let’s not forget sl

New comment by pfarrell in "Over 100k Infected Repos Found on GitHub"

pfarrell — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 16:06:49 +0000

Makes me think about Dijkstra being horrified to learn that the US was sending astronauts into space using unproven computer code [0]. Eventually, we'll have programmers trusting the AI generated code as much as we trust compiler generated code. Sometimes I think this will be the evolution of programming (like binary to assembler to compiled to interpreted to generated)... Other times I think about how we've grown used to buggier and buggier code and yet we press on.

0: https://pncnmnp.github.io/blogs/translating-dijakstra.html

New comment by pfarrell in "The Last Linotype Newspaper (2022)"

pfarrell — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 14:59:05 +0000

There’s a neat documentary from the late 1970’s, “Farewell etaoin shrdlu”. It’s about the final day the New York Times was printed using their linotype machines.

https://youtu.be/1MGjFKs9bnU

New comment by pfarrell in "Ask HN: How are you dealing with the job market anxiety?"

pfarrell — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 14:21:55 +0000

I went through it at the beginning of the year. In the end, a cold inbound from a recruiter for a leadership position that I wasn’t right for led to her referring me to another recruiter with something that was perfect. The point? Work every angle and treat looking for a job as your full time job.

You only have to find one gig, so don’t get sucked into self-pity endlessly focusing on everyone who’s having trouble, when it happens, have something constructive to divert you.

If you’re going for remote work, expect that the whole process will take longer and the same rules won’t apply. The candidate pool is vast and you need to stand out. You need to apply early, when the position is posted.

Realize your resume is likely being parsed by software before it’s even screened by HR. If you can get your resume directly to a hiring manager, do that. Otherwise consider feeding your resume through various parsers to see how it looks to algorithms. Cover letters that are written to the exact specs of the job as posted can’t hurt.

New comment by pfarrell in "How Gödel's proof works (2020)"

pfarrell — Thu, 23 Nov 2023 17:57:12 +0000

I look at videos like these as gateways to get someone excited about a subject, not as scholarly works. What you say is good to keep in mind on any video. You can’t get the full depth of anything complicated in 30 minutes, but it can make you want to learn more.

New comment by pfarrell in "How Gödel's proof works (2020)"

pfarrell — Thu, 23 Nov 2023 14:16:01 +0000

Veritasium has an excellent video explaining the proof and the historical context.

https://youtu.be/HeQX2HjkcNo

New comment by pfarrell in "GitHub Renamed Me (2014)"

pfarrell — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 17:03:12 +0000

Without any context or followup, this seems like old news that doesn't need to be rehashed on the front page today. This event pre-dates the Microsoft purchase of Github.