tomhoward

I started out building websites as a hobby in about 1996 and somewhat professionally in about 2001. I’ve worked on many different web projects over the years, using various different platforms, frameworks and libraries. After 20-25 years in the game, it’s really only been in the past 3-4 years I’ve really felt like I’ve known what I’m doing. Even now stuff still throws me.

So, don’t be discouraged. Don’t think you’re stupid/incompetent for not knowing everything yet. It really can take a long time to understand how all the parts of the stack work together.

Aside from continuing to improve your craft, think about how you can improve your relationships with your colleagues so they become more supportive, or consider leaving and finding a workplace that is more nurturing to less experienced team members. Such places do exist and it’s worth making the effort to find a workplace where you feel supported and valued.

Good luck to you.

Cool to see you here on HN. I hadn't heard the name PairGain since I worked for a small corporate ISP in the early 2000s. We'd recommend PairGain modems for clients who needed seriously high-speed links of 2Mbps! This was just before ADSL and SHDSL were rolled out en masse, or at least well before they were reliable enough for corporate use. We had to organise a special installation of a direct copper line from their premises to ours. I guess they just patched them together at the exchange? It was a pretty small catchment area. Fun times!

In my experience, yes, in the sense that by acting as if it’s true and undertaking practices to address it, health and life gets much better.

It’s at least valid to consider a young person insufficiently experienced for the job, as long as the hiring decision is legitimately made according to experience not numerical age alone.

New travel tech company currently in stealth mode | Full Stack Developers | Remote (Anywhere), or onsite in Sydney or Melbourne Australia | Full Time

We're seeking developers who may be interested in joining a new travel tech company in the next 2-6 months.

We're building products to address some major challenges hotels and other accommodation providers are facing as travel volumes return to pre-pandemic levels. We have promising trials underway with pilot customers, a pipeline of new customers wanting to adopt the product very soon, and early investor interest (full disclosure, we are pre-funding and seeking people for post-funding positions).

Solid experience with any of the following will be most welcome: Rails, Python, Go, Elixir, Node, React/React Native, machine learning, NLP.

Please contact me via tom.howard+traveljobs at gmail.

They weren't more draconian than plenty of other countries, including parts of the U.S. They were just kept in place for longer, as they were effective at keeping case/fatality numbers low until vaccination levels were high.

But more to your point, the federal government that has just been voted out was centre-right/conservative, and was unsupportive of many of the pandemic management policies implemented by the states, most of which are governed by the centre-left Labor party. In certain Labor-governed states, e.g., Victoria and Western Australia, this election result can be seen as a repudiation of the unsupportive behaviour of the conservative federal government towards the pandemic response, and an affirmation of the states' policies, which saved many lives whilst also keeping their economies running quite well.

In fairness, the federal government played a positive role through income support, business support, and other stimulus measures, but their propensity to use pandemic measures to seek to achieve political advantage when citizens were struggling and fearful has played a significant role in this election loss.

It's not specifically about my father's proficiency/expertise. (There's a quirky brilliance to the way he builds this stuff, but it's unconventional. He's an electronics engineer, not a computer scientist; he taught himself assembly language when the 6800 micros came out in the 70s, and has never felt the need to learn newer techniques).

So yeah, it's more about the newer platforms having more hardware and software abstraction layers, so more things that can break and they have much higher power consumption.

In our applications, the weakest links are always the more "modern" communications modules, of which we've used Bluetooth and Cellular/IoT. In both cases, they are high-level SoC devices, with all kinds of capabilities and the ability to run BASIC or Python scripts on them. But they turn out to be much less reliable than our assembly code on the basic micros we use, and are the source of almost all device faults.

To illustrate the real-world advantage of the way we do it: our biggest competitor (a significant player that has shipped thousands of devices globally), uses a more modern/high-level platform (I don't know what exactly - it may be Arduino). One of our customers was given one to try out. Like most of our customers, they wanted data uploaded to the web app every 60 or even 30 minutes in order to have precise visibility of their soil moisture throughout the day. Ours can do that, running on just two 3.7V Li-ion cells that last for 1-2 years per charge. For the competitor product, to upload more than twice a day, it needs a solar panel, which needs to be mounted high up on a post above the crop. But that's a deal-breaker for this grower and many others, due to the use of pivot sprinklers and machinery.

Yep, that's exactly what we've been talking about.

That's what other players in the space do. I'd happily settle for C, in which case we wouldn't need to change the hardware much.

If we could find developers willing/able to do it, I'd happily stick with it. Such people are hard to find, but anyone reading this who is interested, feel free to get in touch (email address in profile).

Those airline reservation systems were built in the 70s and 80s, and had to be extremely efficient, so, evidently they felt assembly was a better option than any of the higher level languages available around that time.

My father still uses assembly language, on 8-bit Motorola (now NXP via Freescale) microprocessors. He's ben doing it since the early 80s, for data monitoring and control devices for various applications in agriculture, industry, academia and other sectors.

I've been working with him for the past few years to modernise his products and give them a future beyond his retirement, which is finally happening now (he's 74).

The device we've been working is an agricultural data monitor that reads from sensors in the soil and atmosphere (measuring impedance, voltage, pulse and digital signals), stores it in local flash memory then periodically uploads it via to my web app via a U-Blox cellular/IoT modem.

It's amazing what he's been able to make it do, and how simple/cheap the componentry is and how low the power consumption is. And whilst the coding and debugging is pretty slow and laborious, once it works, it's incredibly reliable and stable.

Now he's retiring, if the business is to continue we'll basically have to find someone who can migrate it to higher level platforms and languages. There aren't many (any?) people around willing/able to work with this kind of assembly code these days.

It feels like a shame. Other players doing this kind of work use higher-level platforms, which may be faster to develop for and debug but are more costly to manufacture, use more power and are less reliable.

I'm hoping we can find a balance between the easier/faster development cycle of newer platforms, whilst retaining at least some of the simplicity and elegance of my father's approach.

The original company rebranded when it pivoted to enterprise. I traded the Adioso brand/IP for my equity when I left, but have been working on other things, particularly since the pandemic arrived. A bit of LinkedIn sleuthing will lead you to the rebranded/active company, or you can email me if you want to know more.

No doubt several factors/motivations were/are at play, but I think what Parker is talking about is that for companies/orgs (particularly big corporates and government bodies) who already had a Microsoft operating environment and who weren't already using Slack, they would be much more comfortable adopting Teams, for reasons of cost, interoperability and (perceived) security, than adopting Slack, even if Slack was superior as a standalone group chat app.

Slack is a great product/company, but as Parker Conrad of Rippling explains in this podcast [1] (about 13 minutes in), Microsoft has been able to fend off Slack with an arguably inferior product, just by having an ecosystem that so many companies/orgs are already fully bought into.

[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/tt/podcast/20vc-ripplings-parker-...

This is mostly false, except perhaps for the suggestion of my co-founder being a stud.

The company survived by becoming commercially focused and profitable, which happened after we recruited a leader with experience/connections in the airline industry, not to investors. The products the company pivoted to were not more "VC-legible" than what we started out doing; they were just products that could generate enough short-term revenue to enable survival. The company hasn't raised funds from VCs; its funding has been from angels, airline/travel tech companies and family offices.

It has unquestionably taken a ton of resilience to get the company to where it was before the pandemic, then to survive the pandemic, and to find a way to thrive on the other side of it.

This is probably my biggest topic of contemplation and experimentation.

The startup I co-founded was funded by YC the month after this essay was published. It was the same batch as Airbnb. We didn't tick the VC boxes. PG commented later that we were "so nervous" in the interview; he had no idea how much.

It was said that all the startups in our batch were chosen because we seemed particularly resilient. It's amazing how being told that by someone like PG will make it come true.

Our startup didn't make it as a "home run" success, and we found it hard to raise VC funding, partly, I think due to not ticking VC boxes. But the company still exists in a different form. It employs over 10 people and is doing really important work to help airlines recover from the effects of the pandemic. It could yet be a huge success, thanks to the resilience and determination of the people still there (I left about 7 years ago).

Thanks in large part to the YC experience and vote of confidence, I've been undertaking a very profound journey of self-discovery and growth, and have worked on several important and successful projects. I'm now exploring multiple opportunities to start or join new startups, some related to the work we were doing in our YC-funded startup, and others completely different.

I think the last few years has been a tough time to be the kind of founder who doesn't tick VC boxes; the whole startup world has been dominated by glitz and hype.

It feels like that's changed in the past week. It seems the latest hype era is over, and we're re-entering a period where resilience, resourcefulness and determination will be in strong demand.

Please don't be discouraged. If you really want to build something important and valuable, you'll find a way to do it, and you'll get the support and funding you need when you're ready. It may take a long time, but important work always takes a long time.

I hope you find the purpose and motivation you need to have a go. It really can be the most amazing, life-changing experience. Feel free to contact me (email in bio) if you want to ask or discuss anything.

Best wishes.

I didn’t/don’t dispute that “many understand very well what blockchain is”.

My assertion is quite different: that people familiar with basic computing technologies have a natural intuition for web technologies, which brings with it comfort and trust, whereas this is not true of blockchain and cryptocurrency.

As I said I was excited by the potential of blockchain and crypto, and would welcome it being widely adopted, but I suspect this factor is a major barrier. I’d welcome evidence to the contrary, not sneering.

My 1996 self feels very seen.

I think a lot about the way the web was back in the mid 90s, compared to the bleeding-edge technologies of today, particularly blockchain and cryptocurrency.

And one major aspect I keep coming back to is that web technologies in the 90s, and even their descendent technologies now, are simple enough for most technology-literate people to understand, and that carried with it a lot of comfort and trust.

For anyone who had been using desktop computers and office software in the early 90s, which was basically everyone who was a student or an office worker, the web was just files on a computer, served over a network, which we already had plenty of experience using. And I think that's why my father, who was only a little older than I am now when I first showed him the web, grasped it straight away and was supportive of me building a website for his business.

These days I'm not spending much time writing HTML files in a text editor and uploading them via FTP; rather I'm writing programmatic code that talks to a database (A database! Just like MS Access or FileMaker Pro), does some processing, and displays the result on the screen with some elaborate JavaScript to make it look and function how I want (I’m happily a heavy user of React for building rich web apps), but it's still fundamentally the same concepts. Files on servers, accessed over a network and delivering useful information to my browser or app. The beautiful simplicity is still there, and it still doesn't feel like a big leap from the kind of computing we were doing 1993.

The world of blockchains and cryptocurrencies and "web3" feels vastly more opaque and esoteric by comparison and therefore untrustworthy to many of us, which I think is a significant answer to the question that was asked here in the past couple of days: "Why is Hacker News so anti-crypto?" [1].

I can't quite accept that it's just that I'm "old"; firstly because first heard about Bitcoin soon after it appeared and was excited by its potential, but also because I remember how people older than me reacted when the web arrived, and there was much more rapid acceptance and embrace than there I currently see for cryptocurrency, outside of those who are just chasing quick riches.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31302494

Oddpost was such an inspiration as to the kind of UX that was possible via the browser.

It was much the opposite for me.

I started building websites amaterishly from about 1995, and professionally from about 2001, and always hated how complicated and messy my code became any time I wanted to build rich functionality (i.e., a web-app rather than a website).

That first changed for me when I discovered ExtJS (now Sencha) in 2007, then later Angular and finally React in 2017.

These days I work almost daily on a React web-app I've built for displaying realtime weather/climate data for farmers, and it continues to be a very pleasing codebase to work with, more so than any I've worked on before.

> hoards of people will come to defend a rich dude who really doesn't need it

I don’t know if that’s a fair characterization generally, but it’s not the case with me and it’s actually a frustration/lament I have when discussing this topic.

I’m not particularly a fan of Musk or any of the current crop of billionaires or their companies. But I care about the principles and the practicalities.

There’s this tendency to say “There are terrible problems in the world. We need to fix them with money. Where can we get money from? Billionaires!”

But when you do the maths, i.e., total up all the wealth that billionaires have and divide it by all the people/causes in the world who “need more money”, you end up with basically nothing.

And that’s before you consider what the billionaires’ companies are doing - which in many cases involves things like making phones/goods/software/knowledge cheaper/free, which benefits everyone including poor people, making electric cars affordable and ubiquitous, which will benefit all humanity and the environment long into the future if it leads to climate change abatement, and creating millions of jobs including many for low-skilled people, and also that these companies do generate vast amounts of tax in the form of sales taxes, income/payroll taxes, and capital gains taxes when shareholders liquidate their shares, and you find that it’s not necessarily true that taking money away from these companies/owners would be net beneficial for society anyway; it could easily make the problems worse.

And now for the obligatory disclaimer - yes I know there are plenty of valid concerns about the merits and ethics of what companies do, and worker pay/conditions and externalities and other issues; but these are matters for regulators and consumers to consider and are separate from the principle of how billionaires should be taxed or how beneficial it would be for billionaires to be taxed more.

I’m also not in the U.S., and I see plenty of dysfunction in that country as well as many others - though we also see many people, including some of the world’s poorest people desperate to move there for a better life.

For what it’s worth I devote a large number of my brain cycles to contemplating how life could be better for the worst-off; I’ve spent much of my adult life dealing with health challenges that caused great difficulty in achieving steady employment and financial security, which I’ve now largely overcome, and do I think a lot about how the principles that helped me could be applied more broadly, including for people far worse off that I ever was. At this stage I find myself thinking there are certain things that could work, but a lot of it is just really really hard.

He has paid huge taxes ($11B worth, the highest tax payment ever) when he converted capital to income last year.

Nobody disputes that it’s a nice idea to make life easier for the poor. The mechanics of how you actually do it are the hard part.

Thanks for the detailed and thoughtful reply.

I understand the position, and please trust that I've wrestled with these issues daily since the pandemic measures began, and tried very hard to examine all perspectives, both philosophically and practically, as thoroughly and dispassionately as possible.

And please also trust that in my own family and community I've been in the (often lonely) position of questioning and critiquing the measures.

But where I'm pushing back here is on the proportionality of the condemnation and the aptness of the historical analogies. Given enough differences in the circumstances, such analogies cease to be appropriate or helpful, and certainly not persuasive to those with different (albeit thoughtful and legitimate) views.

The key points of my perspective in response to yours are:

- Re "... it is dependent on the people within a nation being willing to subvert their ordinary moral compass ..." – sure, but unlike the two analogies you give, which are all about attacking/imprisoning/killing people due to their racial/national/religious identities, the pandemic measures were about saving significant numbers of a society's own people from severe illness and death, which is _not_ a subversion of people's ordinary moral compass; a healthy, moral society protects its fellow citizens from illness and death as far as reasonably possible, regardless of how old or sick they are.

- Re. "Fear of the other, fear of loss, fear of sickness or death, fear of economic collapse, there are many ways to exploit the human mind using fear." and "it is entirely dependent on the lizard brain, emotions over reason, and a focus on single-metric management..." – (1) The fears, whilst sometimes exaggerated, were not imagined or hypothetical; the deaths really did happen, and are still happening (though thankfully in diminishing numbers), and happened not only to the elderly and frail, but to plenty of people with many years ahead of them in which to bring companionship and contribution to their families and societies. It's not a subversion of morality for people to care deeply about this, and it's neither excessively emotional nor excessively rational; it matters both from emotional and rational perspectives; (2) I pay a lot of attention to the decision-making that goes on in government about these things, and it was certainly not "single-metric management"; the fatality count was one factor, as was the load on hospitals/effect on hospital workers with regard both to covid patients and other patients, but also the flow-on effects to the rest of the economy/society. The effect on people's businesses/jobs was real (and for what it's worth, substantial moral and tangible support was offered to people whose jobs/businesses were affected), but given the complex nature of a pandemic, there were always going to be harms to people's jobs/businesses; this couldn't be avoided any more than illness/fatalities could, the issue was/is how to balance and minimise the harms overall; (3) To put it all down to "lizard brain" dominance; sure I see plenty of this, but I personally come to it having spent countless hours over many years doing emotional healing/development work to get out of lizard-brain thinking, and I have the most gratifying conversations on the topic with others who have been similarly dedicated to this kind of work. I equally see plenty of lizard brain dominance from those who cry "Nazi", "fascist", "globalists", etc in response to every/any government measure to manage the pandemic.

- I've done plenty of thinking and reading about how the pandemic response fits in with classical liberal philosophies, and have paid much attention to the likes of Taleb and Norman [1] from the Real World Risk Institute (who, incidentally, are now bitterly opposed to one another on the matter of vaccinations, but that is a healthy dynamic I think), and I'm persuaded by the idea that there is plenty of compatibility between Hayekian philosophy and the pandemic measures; this paper discusses it well [2].

I understand that much of the commentary about this is influenced by the significant differences in the way Americans vs Australians regard their governments, and real differences in the way the respective governments have operated, particularly in recent decades. Australians tend not to have such a hostile and adversarial relationship with their government, and I don't think this is altogether unhealthy; it's a much smaller country, with a much smaller role in the world, and plenty of mechanisms to limit/diffuse power, and so politicians here just don't have the scope to amass much power or wealth. It just doesn't hold that we're at significant risk of sliding down a slippery slope to despotic tyranny.

Maybe I'll be proven wrong, but I don't see any signs of it yet, and if I do I'll be sure to write many words about it :)

[1] https://necsi.edu/systemic-risk-of-pandemic-via-novel-pathog...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8444853/

I’ll preface my response by saying I’ve leaned libertarian/Laissez-faire for much of my (now lengthy) adult life, and I’ve liked plenty of what I’ve seen you write on HN before (I recognize your handle as we met personally at YC many years ago). I say that to point out that I don’t think we’re coming at this with strongly opposing ideological priors.

To your response:

- I myself was concerned by some of the measures and the risk of overreach and permanence of the measures - I said so in my original comment.

- Yes people protested, which was understandable and healthy, and allowed by governments/police.

- Yes sometimes police were heavy handed in enforcing the laws - where it went too far it was widely shared on social and mainstream media and condemned by pretty much everyone. But these cases were isolated.

- The measures taken in the NT to quarantine cases were done because that territory is home to some of the most vulnerable people on earth in terms of pre-existing health conditions, education/language and access to medical care and information; in short, it was done to protect the most vulnerable members of the indigenous population from severe illness and premature death. You couldn’t possibly think of anything more opposite to Nazism if you tried.

The thing about being an adult is that you learn that government policies/measures shouldn’t be measured against some idealistic, imagined alternate reality, but against the realistic next-worst scenario. That’s the whole reason I outgrew my belief in simplistic socialist policies in my late 20s, which most people do, of course.

To me one of the greatest revelations of the pandemic is that libertarians are just as liable to succumb to idealistic fantasies as socialists have historically been.

The standard refrain has been that governments should “protect the vulnerable” while letting everyone else live totally freely - but without suggesting a workable plan for how this actually could be achieved, particularly when it’s not obvious in advance, who is/isn’t vulnerable.

Let’s be clear: your phrase “societal-level adoption of coercive actions and narratives in the name of serving the greater good” is a high-minded way of saying that the virus should have just been allowed to spread, regardless of the cost in human lives, and that to do otherwise is essentially the same as Nazism.

If I’ve misrepresented you, please explain how.

If not, please be less euphemistic in how you’re conveying the kind of outcome you’d prefer to see of the pandemic in Australia, given that the ultimate actual outcome has been a remarkably low fatality rate by world standards (1/7 per-capita even of the much vaunted Sweden), and a social/political order now largely back to what it was beforehand.

The fiduciary obligation is to act in the company's (not shareholders') best interests, not to maximise (short term) shareholder value. If the board has grounds to believe they can increase the value of the company over the long term by more than Musk's present offer is doing, they're right to do this and are legally safe.

As an Australian who lived here throughout the pandemic, it's massively hyperbolic and bad-faith argumentation to relate Australia's pandemic response to Nazi Germany, or even to what is going on in China now.

Yes we had lockdowns - as did many other countries/states/provinces/cities, including in the U.S. And yes we've had vaccine mandates in order to work in many roles - as has been the case in the U.S. and many other places around the world that have always been regarded as highly liberal and democratic. And yes we had quarantine for people entering the country - which has been utilised widely throughout history.

It sucked to experience, and yes, sometimes there was cause for concern as to how far it was going and how permanent the restrictions would be.

But we can now see the outcome; the country is almost completely back to normal, and ended up with one of the lowest per-capita fatality rates in the world, hospitals were only briefly strained when omicron surged this past January but quickly returned to normal, and the country has fared well economically compared to most other countries.

And even if the outcome wasn't so positive, this distinction is crucial: Nazi Germany was defined by persecuting, imprisoning and murdering huge numbers of people; Australia's pandemic response was intended to prevent the premature deaths of huge numbers of people, and it succeeded at doing that whilst impinging on people's freedoms for only a limited period of time and to only a limited extent.

Screeching ideologues on Twitter and cable TV who were not here and know nothing about our societal values are not the people to be informed by on this topic.

Yes and no.

For the affirmative: Holmes was a Stanford student; the company was located in Palo Alto; she grew up idolizing Steve Jobs and thought she was emulating his approach; early investors were Tim Draper (personally or via DFJ? It’s not clear to me), Ellison and ATA.

For the negative: Draper’s investment was a super-early, “family and friends” investment when the company was just a “promising idea”, kinda like a YC investment, and he didn’t invest again; Ellison isn’t a VC and was also just excited by the concept and the founder; other than Draper, none of the main SV VCs invested - i.e., Sequoia, KP, Bessemer, Graylock, Benchmark, Accel, General Catalyst, Index, etc, or even any smaller ones with any pedigree (ATA was a new firm in 2004 and is now defunct, and never had any repute); most of the funding, even quite early, and especially later, came from sources outside SV, eg Murdoch, politics figures, and other non-SV investment firms - you just wouldn’t raise funds from those kinds of sources if you were making it as a conventional Silicon Valley startup.

I just don't know I'm sorry. I've also heard it's an issue, but I don't know how to go about finding produce that's particularly good or bad in that regard.

I'd guess a concentrated product that's developed specifically for detoxification, such as those linked below, may be free from toxicity. But this is a suggestion, not advice; I always recommend seeing a professional before taking these kinds of supplements.

https://iherb.com/pr/bioray-ndf-plus-gentle-heavy-metal-deto...

https://iherb.com/pr/planetary-herbals-cilantro-heavy-metal-...

> a set of curls doesn't honestly burn that many calories

No, I didn't say it did. But multiple sets of curls/presses at regular intervals throughout the day, along with limiting sugar/carb intake, is certainly beneficial.

Indeed, studies going back years have found resistance training to be effective at managing/preventing Type 2 diabetes:

https://diabetesjournals.org/care/article/29/8/1933/28728/Re...