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alecbenzeron If founders treated their investors the same way they treated their employees

Been at 2 series A/B startups for the past ~3.5 years. It was a really fun 3-6 months followed by 3 very not fun years.

My N is low, they were both non-Bay (NYC) startups, maybe some startups are fun, maybe I'm really bad at picking startups, but I think a startup's culture is often as much or more of a crapshoot than the startup's business.

Was at Google before, and it was fun for only a bit as well, but definitely not as actively non-fun as my last 3 years has been.

alecbenzeron If founders treated their investors the same way they treated their employees

AFAIK the 90 day thing was more of a legal thing than something the companies themselves wanted to enforce?

alecbenzeron Kovarex's (creator of Factorio) struggle with burnout

What makes you say this is 80:20? The thing that got him out of the funk was fixing a minor UI issue:

> Once he asked me "Father, what is this thing in the list of things I can order?" ... "This is atomic bomb" .. "Oh, I want to order it" .. "No, we don't even have it researched" .. "But, why is it in the list then, it doesn't make sense" ... "Hmm, you are right, it doesn't, I might actually fix that." So I opened Factorio source code after a long time, and made the change, that the filter and logistic request selections didn't contain things yet to be researched (unless you force-unlock it in the settings). I made a change to Factorio, and it felt good, and I started to want more, this is how I got from the lowest point.

He didn't get back into it because the problem was particularly meaty or interesting to work on. It was a small piece of work that nonetheless allowed him to feel like he had impact. Because he was connecting with someone who was actually engaging with and getting joy from what he was building (and it might have helped that the person was his son).

I guess it's possible that what initially put him into the burnout was working on tedious things that felt like they had no substantial impact (though nothing in the post really indicates that IMO). But, that doesn't mean that this isn't burnout. Burnout is exactly caused by a felt loss of control and/or impact.

alecbenzeron MariaDB Temporal Data Tables

> Not only does that seem relatively simple

I haven't thought about this too deeply, but I think "simple" is overstating it. Being able to turn on versioning for any table by basically just pushing a button seems really powerful.

There's application-layer stuff like paper_trail for rails that can do this for you, but you're stuck if your language doesn't have a good one.

Building it into the db also means that any out-of-band direct edits to the DB also get tracked.

alecbenzeron MariaDB Temporal Data Tables

Had no idea until recently that MariaDB supported this out of the box. Does anyone have experience using this? How does it compare to https://github.com/scalegenius/pg_bitemporal ?

alecbenzeron Unit Testing Is Overrated

Can't tell if serious...

alecbenzeron Unit Testing Is Overrated

but BeSt PrAcTiCeS

alecbenzeron Unit Testing Is Overrated

I meant expand on how those things make code easier to understand, not why unit testing causes you to adopt them.

alecbenzeron Unit Testing Is Overrated

Yes but discovering those hypothetical defects is usually less important than discovering the actual, currently present defects.

alecbenzeron Unit Testing Is Overrated

Compared to integration testing and end-to-end testing.

alecbenzeron Unit Testing Is Overrated

> Loosely coupled code is also easier to reason about and easier to refactor.

Can you expand more on this? I think this is where the author would disagree.

E.g., how is the code easier to reason about or refactor having introduced a location service interface that has only one one implementation?

alecbenzeron Yann LeCun quits Twitter amid acrimonious exchanges on AI bias

Yeah, I think that's what's missing for me too. Like, what do they expect LeCun to be doing instead?

I guess it's possible to suggest that, given the lack of diversity in training sets, different training techniques should be adopted to account for it. Is that actually a viable approach that people are suggesting, and LeCun is ignoring/downplaying?

alecbenzeron Challenges and opportunities for better nutrition science

A theory I've heard is that any kind of diet is useful for losing weight, because it forces you to think more carefully about what you're eating.

But ditto, I've lost 50lbs twice in my life and both times were basically just via calorie counting.

alecbenzeron DHH: The HEY stack Vanilla Ruby on Rails, MySQL, redis, stimulus, elastic search

Switching between pages is pretty hit or miss for me in Notion. If it's a page I've been to recently it's very fast, but it's noticeably slow on some page loads. hey seems consistently pretty-fast.

Moving around elements doesn't seem like a fair thing to compare to navigating around the app... that's more like looking at how smooth text editing feels in Hey.

alecbenzeron DHH: The HEY stack Vanilla Ruby on Rails, MySQL, redis, stimulus, elastic search

Not measuring but just going off of my memory, hey feels subtly but distinctly snappier than discord.

alecbenzeron DHH: The HEY stack Vanilla Ruby on Rails, MySQL, redis, stimulus, elastic search

Yeah, maybe it's different the further you are from the US or something, but from my use of hey, I have no idea what these people are talking about. It feels about as snappy as most other apps I use. If anything it feels snappier than my average app (though I think that has more to do with backend/network than the UI).

alecbenzeron I Am Deleting the Blog

The implication being that the NYT wants to use real names to drive clicks and appease advertisers?

alecbenzeron What adolescents think of mindfulness in schools

IME it does deliver. Not necessarily directly (like, you're not going to come up with an action plan white meditating), but, over time, it helps cultivate a state of mind where those things are easier to do.

I think it does take time, though, like between 1 week and 1 month of daily practice, to start noticing the effects.

alecbenzeron What adolescents think of mindfulness in schools

Maybe, but the article is kinda just saying that -- I don't see the quoted sentences from the instructors as evidence that they just want to suppress anger or think that anger is always irrational.

alecbenzeron What adolescents think of mindfulness in schools

>In many programmes, students learn that emotions such as anger, anxiety and fear stem from reactions in a brain region called the amygdala. They are taught that mindfulness helps them identify and manage these emotions by activating the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain associated with behavioural regulation. In doing so, students are taught that mindfulness creates space in which we can ‘choose our response’ as opposed to reacting or lashing out. In the words of one programme, mindfulness gives us ‘the freedom to choose’.

> These might sound like reasonable claims, but they imply a dichotomy between emotions and reason, and the superiority of ‘rational’ responses to distress. This idea derives not from traditional mindfulness but from liberal Western ideals. Historically, these ideals have served to undermine oppressed groups, as anger and resistance is perceived as irrational.

The article's commentary here seems out-of-touch with most mindfulness instruction I've experienced. It's usually emphasized to notice things in as non-judgmental a way as possible; you're definitely not encouraged to label anger or any other emotion as "irrational".

Mindfulness does give you the freedom to choose. It wouldn't be freedom to choose if the choice was always to ignore anger: sometimes anger is useful, other times it isn't; mindfulness helps you notice that and act accordingly.

alecbenzeron What adolescents think of mindfulness in schools

> I've seen it suggested in other articles here before that mindfulness programs for employees are often a way for employers to try and get their staff to be more accepting of crappy conditions, or unpleasant, meaningless or unethical work.

I'm not sure I buy this. I suppose it's true that being better able to tolerate unpleasant situations does mean you might put up with them for longer. And while meditating, yes, the goal is to not react to things you're feeling.

But for me, a big benefit of mindfulness is more clarity on where my emotions are coming from. I'd sometimes feel tense, or upset, or nervous, but couldn't even really notice I was feeling that way, let alone why I was feeling that way.

I think clarity there generally helps people change their conditions more than it urges them to just accept them.

alecbenzeron Show HN: Automatically Rename HEY's 'Imbox' to 'Inbox'

I think the metaphor starts to break down a bit here because variety is usually specifically desirable when it comes to food, but not really when it comes to email or any app's workflow.

alecbenzeron Show HN: Automatically Rename HEY's 'Imbox' to 'Inbox'

It sounds like it's invite-only just until July.

alecbenzeron Show HN: Automatically Rename HEY's 'Imbox' to 'Inbox'

I don't see how that meaningfully changes the metaphor? Imagine, idk, someone who likes to very carefully design their apartment vs. someone who hires an interior designer to do it for them. People that love to tinker with their cars vs. people that don't.

Some people like to very carefully craft an experience on their own and some people are happy to have someone else do that.

alecbenzeron Show HN: Automatically Rename HEY's 'Imbox' to 'Inbox'

Focusing on hey for a sec: I understand that some people might prefer a system where they can take various components and combine them how they like best, in the same way some people like to cook their own meals.

But what's weird is this sense of anger at products that aren't as flexible. It's like being upset that a new restaurant opened up because they have a set menu and don't let you make your own food. If you like cooking your own meals, great! Keep doing that. This restaurant is for people that want someone else to make a meal for them.

With slack I understand the frustration a little more, since it's something an entire company is going to be using and asking you to use.

alecbenzeron Show HN: Automatically Rename HEY's 'Imbox' to 'Inbox'

I think there's a subset of tech folks that don't really value UX (which is like 90% of hey's value-add). It's the same people that don't understand Slack's value because "it's just over-hyped IRC"

alecbenzeron Show HN: Automatically Rename HEY's 'Imbox' to 'Inbox'

I didn't mind most of the marketing, but FWIW I saw Jason Fried talk the first time in the hey walkthrough and I did find something insufferably smug about the way he spoke.

But I still think it's a cool product and luckily I won't have to hear Jason Fried talk while using it.

alecbenzeron Show HN: Automatically Rename HEY's 'Imbox' to 'Inbox'

It's bad, but it's such a minor flaw. If you won't use hey because of that, either you don't care at all about any of the actual features (in which case, sure, don't use it) or you're being dramatic.

alecbenzeron Show HN: interviewing.io is out of beta and open to engineers of all levels

> Not to burst your bubble, but you aren't. You are very good when you get it right. You aren't when you don't get it right. But then you are leaving out that part because nobody likes to focus on the negatives

I'm sorry, what? "No one is right 100% of the time so there's no such thing as being good at anything"?

alecbenzeron Show HN: interviewing.io is out of beta and open to engineers of all levels

Yeah but there's got to be some give in the name of getting signal. Resumes are incredibly noisy signal. I think references are pretty noisy too... a bad reference is very bad, a better than average reference is really good, but I think the average reference, which most people give, is very low signal.