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allan_s

775 karma · joined November 7, 2012

After 15 years as CTO and Tech Lead in startups, I switched sides. I've been the person you're trying to hire, the one who bridges developers and executives, turns chaos into shipping, and makes boring architectural choices that actually hold up at scale. I step in when :

* A startup needs hands-on technical leadership without a full-time CTO * A team ships too slowly and nobody knows exactly why * Tech debt has become the elephant in every product meeting

I'm a proponent of the boring stack: ingenuity should reflect in the simplicity of the solution, not in its complexity. Currently helping companies use AI without the BS.

contact: allan.simon.pro@outlook.com

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allan_s··on Cognitive Debt: When Velocity Exceeds Comprehension
It's not what I've written.

To clarify, by "dirty work on my pet project" , I meant ,spending times to fix some compilation issues that after 2 hours you told yourself "damnit, I forgot this!" , or when you want to adapt your old python project from python2 to python3.

And I didn't even talked about managment itself.

But , thinking about the big picture, telling claude code to not use this but that. To not overengineer etc. is engineering in my book, and what I've been been doing for the last 8 years at least with more junior engineers.

allan_s··on Google Workspace CLI
in a lot of sphere, MCP is still the hype. And it was the hype in even more sphere some month ago.

Because of FOMO a lot of higher up decided that "we must do a MCP to show that we're also part of the cool kids" and to give an answer to their even-higher-up about "What are you doing regarding IA ?"

The project has been approved, a lot of time has been sunk into the project, so nobody wants to admit that "hmmm actually now it's irrelevant our existing API + a skill.md is enough"

I've seen that in at least 4 companies my friends work in, so I would be surprised if it's not something like that here too.

On the contrary claude code, in my experience, has been perfectly able to use `stripe` `gh` and to construct on the fly a figma cli (once instructed to do it).

allan_s··on Cognitive Debt: When Velocity Exceeds Comprehension
exactly, as a manager and a sometimes a developer, "vibe-coding" has been looking more and more as my day job (in a good way, it's good to not have to do all the dirty work for your pet projects) and it's all about having the same discipline in term of:

* thinking about the big picture * knowing how you can verify that the code match the big picture.

In both case, somtimes you are happily surprised, sometimes you discover that the things you told 3 times the one writing code to do was still not done.

allan_s··on The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling
Thats too vague and drastic, every "show HN" is an ads, for notoriety at least. I would prefer we draw the line at "content pushed by a third party against payment must be displaid only with regard to where it is displaid and must not use information about to whom it is displaid" .

I.e displaying an ads about Sentry on a ads technica page, find . Displaying an ads about hiking equipment on ars techbica because i made a google search abd it is estimated I like that -> not fine. It would kill all the incentive to overtrack the ROI will no more justify the cost.

allan_s··on Show HN: Algorithmically finding the longest line of sight on Earth
I think the main insight is that the ocean horizon arrives quite fast.
allan_s··on Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
It's a slang for somebody fat. 子 does not carry a specific meaning it is more a character with grammatical function to nominative
allan_s··on Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones
Maybe he means that LLM will hit a ceiling glass or that the "right" approach will give equivalent with less training/less intensive compute requirements ?
allan_s··on France passes bill to ban social media use by under-15s
And the store does not use facial recognition and/or checking id to know if the potential buyer is a kid ? The only (huge) difference for me is the scale of the verification and how data are stored.
allan_s··on Show HN: Sparrow-1 – Audio-native model for human-level turn-taking without ASR
How does it compare with https://github.com/KoljaB/RealtimeVoiceChat , which is absent of the benchmark ?
allan_s··on The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup
See the agent as a coworker ssh-ing on your machine, how would you work efficiently ? By working on the same directory ? No

You give each agent a git worktree and if you want to check, you checkout their branch.

allan_s··on Resistance training load does not determine hypertrophy
I think I know where they're coming from as I used to have a similar wrong model. I thought strength = more muscle cells and endurance = just better heart/lungs to deliver oxygen and clear waste like CO2 and lactic acid.

Turns out muscle fibers mostly grow bigger rather than more numerous, and there are different fiber types (slow-twitch vs fast-twitch) that adapt based on how you train. So for the same muscle, an Ironman runner and a guy doing heavy low-rep squats will develop different fiber characteristics: you can't fully max out both.

I'm simplifying, but learning this changed a lot about how I understand exercise at the biological level.

allan_s··on Resistance training load does not determine hypertrophy
My understanding is that anabolic steroid are somehow close to what you're thinking about? It's just that as anything taking a simple shortcut , it comes with unwanted effects
allan_s··on I migrated to an almost all-EU stack and saved 500€ per year
Yes what would be better is a "libsyntching" that i can plug to a software so that it does not require additional brain power, i.e install Note app on device A and B, pair them once, fire and forget.
allan_s··on I migrated to an almost all-EU stack and saved 500€ per year
Yes sorry I meant firefox not for the way its sync , but in the way its a heavy client you install. As said for me most of my devices will be at some times during the week in the same nat so that no centralized server even short lived should be needed. And for personnal use, I only care if the device I have on me is the one with latest data especially as for most use case I'm the only one reading/ writing , so eventually consistency is not an issue
allan_s··on I migrated to an almost all-EU stack and saved 500€ per year
I also agree on "for personal things we don't need SaaS" and I would say do we even needs self hosted in the sense of a central server.

By that I mean, could we have like for firefox , heavy clients but with client to client sync. The goal is to not need to have a always online machine while still solving the "i prefer if my emails are copied both on my laptop and my phones" . Especially as nearly all my devices are often if not always on the same LAN

allan_s··on Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert
在腾讯新闻找到了,太谢谢你!我准备慢慢看,真有意思!
allan_s··on Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert
Thanks a lot, I really first thought "404" was just a geek reference and not the actual code name !

I have some very good friends which are Chinese but are not able to read English, do you mind if I do a AI translation, and if you can check it to see if it translate what you're trying to convey ? (I propose that as I think it would be too much to ask to ask to redo the text in Chinese)

Edit: haha I see you actually did the reverse ! Do you mind sharing also the original CHinese script ? That would also help me with my own mandarin learning !

allan_s··on Please just try HTMX
I would even say that even "just html" is enough for most website/app. We've been using "just html" at my company ( rosaly.com) for 5 years, we've raised 10 million, have hundreds of customer, and nobody ever complained. And the Android/Ios applications are 234 lines of React-Native which is just embedding a webview , a bit of error screen when there's no internet connection , and intercom library for notification.
allan_s··on PGlite – Embeddable Postgres
for CI you can already use postgresql with "eat-my-data" library ? I don't know if there's more official image , but in my company we're using https://github.com/allan-simon/postgres-eatmydata
allan_s··on I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
3 month I was annoyed by the "let me translate the page for you" and last week in vacation I was browsing some local website, and I was more than happy to have firefox being able to translate the website dynamically, the result was okay-ish , but okay enough that I was able to proceed. And I'm more than happy that it didn't left my mobile device.
allan_s··on Yt-dlp: External JavaScript runtime now required for full YouTube support
I was wondering how easy it is

I.e I know that hdmi stream can be encrypted so I guess for Netflix you can't juste have a "hdmi splitter"? Do you need to go as far as plugging yourself just before the lcd pixels ? And if so , is it the moment where its easier to have a high def camera pointed at your lcd screen with post processing?

allan_s··on Diphtheria, a once vanquished killer of children, is resurgent
Everything has risks, every time you go out of for a run you can injure yourself, fall badly on the head and die. Nearly all Life decision are about risk/benefits
allan_s··on XiangShan Vector Floating-Point Unit Design
In this specific case , it is a svg, so you can ask to translate the svg source.
allan_s··on SSL certificate requirements are becoming obnoxious
I know, it was to give example of why not every certificate can be "let's encrypt" and why some people still pay for certificate in 2025.
allan_s··on SSL certificate requirements are becoming obnoxious
For regulatory requirements: yes !

I currently for EIDAS certificates, I can only choose a vouched certificate provider, and it's mostly somes that requires me to in person with my ID card with someone verifying the guy who made the CSR is actually me.

The certificate is used for double SSL to authentify the server doing the request , i.e that the server doing an API call to the bank server is one I own. (I find it a pretty neat solution and much better than requiring to make a theater dance to get a token to renew every 3600 seconds )

allan_s··on SSL certificate requirements are becoming obnoxious
I think it's all about change management

a whole month put you in the "if you don't have the resource to automate it, it's still doable by a human, not enough to crush somebody, but still enough to make the option , let's automate fully something to consider"

hence why it's better than a week or a day (it's too much pressure for small companies) better than hours/minutes/secondes (it means you go from 1 year to 'now it must be fully automated right now ! )

a year or two years was not a good idea, because you loose knowledge, it creates pressure (oh my.... not the scary yearly certificate renewal, i remember last year we broke something, we i don't remember what...)

A month, you either start to fully document it, or at least to have it fresh in your mind. A month give you time to everytime think "ok, we have 30 certicates, can't we have a wild card, or a certificate with several domain in it?"

> Perhaps it's time to go with another method entirely.

I think that's the way forward, it's just that it will not happen in one step, and going to one month is a first step.

source: We have to manage a lot of certificate for a lot of different use cases (ssh, mutual ssl for authentification, classical HTTPS certificate etc. ) and we learned the hard way that no 2 years is not better than 1 , and I agree that one month would be better

also https://www.digicert.com/blog/tls-certificate-lifetimes-will...

allan_s··on Training language models to be warm and empathetic makes them less reliable
You know I can explain why a murderer has killed someone in her twisted system of value without myself adhering to said system

Also don't be so harsh on interpreting what I'm saying.

I'm saying that it's not the job of a company to "train" about moral value, while bring itself amoral by definition. Why are you interpreting that as me saying "nobody should teach moral value"

Also I don't see why as a French working in France, a French company should "train" me with a DEI focused on US history (US minorities are not French one) just because the main investors are US-based

allan_s··on Training language models to be warm and empathetic makes them less reliable
Yes hence why it's an example of

>its institutionalization has become pathological.

allan_s··on Training language models to be warm and empathetic makes them less reliable
it was not about what I could do, but explaining why people may resort to violence.

And to be very honest even the one using the socratic method may not be of pure intention.

In both cases I ve rarely (not never) met someone who admitted right away to be wrong as the conclusion of a argument.

allan_s··on Training language models to be warm and empathetic makes them less reliable
I'm very honestly wondering if they become violent, because using socratic method has closed the other road.

I mean if you've just proven that my words and logic are actually unsound and incoherent how can I use that very logic with you? If you add to this that most people want to win an argument (when facing opposite point of view) then what's left to win but violence ?

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