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drx

2,107 karma · joined May 1, 2010

working on supernova.ai

ask me about analytics - luke@supernova.ai

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drx··on A new ceiling for Λ: the de Bruijn–Newman constant
Personally I found it pleasant to read. Why does it matter if/how much AI was used to write it if the end result is great?
drx··on Series C and scale
I thought it was a pretty interesting choice to post the funding announcement as the team and not as the CEO, more companies should probably do that.
drx··on We fell out of love with Next.js and back in love with Ruby on Rails
Rails has ActiveRecord, which has an extremely elegant REPL. It's a delight to use.
drx··on Show HN: Repaint – a WebGL based website builder
Congrats on launching. WebGL is really hard, I built a similar engine and it's tougher than it seems.

Your budget is only 8.33ms if you target 120hz too btw :) And realistically less because you don't get all of it.

drx··on CEOs are running companies from afar even as workers return to office
The circle of life :)
drx··on CEOs are running companies from afar even as workers return to office
Another advantage startups have over big companies.
drx··on Apple unveils 'Passwords' manager app at WWDC 2024
I didn't want to editorialize the article title, but yeah, it's tacky.
drx··on The Rust project has a burnout problem
FWIW, not to me. Variety is the spice of life. It’s their blog, they should use whatever style they feel like using.

Besides, is lowercase poetry a fuck you to the reader as well?

drx··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2023)
Canvas | Sales Engineer | San Francisco in-person | Full-time | $200k + 1%

Canvas [0] is building the easiest way for founders to grok their startup through analytics.

Come solve this with us and save founders from drowning in Google Sheets.

Why should you join?

- We make money from building for customers that love us

- We actually really need you. You’ll have a huge impact on our trajectory

- We love shipping and we hate bureaucracy

- We’re here to win

- We’re backed by Sequoia, SV Angel, founders of Fivetran, Segment, Datadog, Webflow, Lattice, Flexport, Instacart, Front, Okta, DoorDash, Loom, Shogun, Postmates, and more.

Also hiring killer AEs atm, ping me for a job description.

Interested? Email me at luke@canvasapp.com (technical CEO)

[0] https://canvasapp.com

[1] https://canvasapp.com/careers

[2] https://canvasapp.com/blog

drx··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2023)
Canvas | Startup Engineer | San Francisco in-person | Full-time | $200k + 1%

Canvas [0] is building the easiest way for founders to grok their startup through analytics.

Come solve this with us and save founders from drowning in Google Sheets.

Why should you join?

- We make money from building for customers that love us

- We actually really need you. You’ll have a huge impact on our trajectory. This isn’t a ZIRP scale up

- We love shipping and we hate bureaucracy

- We’re here to win

- We’re backed by Sequoia, SV Angel, founders of Fivetran, Segment, Datadog, Webflow, Lattice, Flexport, Instacart, Front, Okta, DoorDash, Loom, Shogun, Postmates, and more.

Interested? Email me at luke@canvasapp.com (technical CEO)

[0] https://canvasapp.com

[1] https://canvasapp.com/careers

[2] https://canvasapp.com/blog

drx··on When MFA isn't MFA, or how we got phished
What would be your recommendation for replacing TOTP today?
drx··on When MFA isn't MFA, or how we got phished
Excellent write-up, thank you.
drx··on How long it took different companies to find product-market fit
This is such a great post for so many reasons, but I'm glad Lenny made that chart in particular. The overnight success fantasy is toxic and I've seen it infect (and sometimes ruin) many startups.
drx··on Keisan Casio is shutting down
It looks like only the English version is shutting down. The Japanese version seems to be going strong: https://keisan.casio.jp/
drx··on Ask HN: Co-founder equity split methods?
My two cents:

- The equity split is about incentivizing/rewarding you both for the work ahead, which is going to be much harder than anything thus far

- I would treat the 2 years as a sunk cost

- If you are true cofounders, 50/50 or 51/49 is the fair way to go

- Vesting diffuses the edge cases (either of you leave early, either of you turn out to be flakes), and is a necessity if you want to ever raise VC money

- It sounds like there is a question of him working only part time. In this case he should not get founder equity. Read the clerky docs as there can be severe drawbacks of granting significant amounts of equity post-founding

drx··on Maker's schedule, Manager's schedule (2009)
Likewise, and have had many people refer to it as well (including managers!)
drx··on What I Learned Reading 1k Investor Reports
Pretty good overview from the investor side. I find it's a helpful forcing function to be disciplined about retrospecting regularly – it's as much for the benefit of the investors, as you the CEO.
drx··on Startup Decoupling and Reckoning
I hope startup founders read this and internalize it. Those who raised at 100x multiples and think "this will not happen to me" might be for a rude awakening a year from now.
drx··on Show HN: Inquery (YC W23) – Real-time events for Postgres
Pretty cool! Any plans for a cloud version? If so, what would be the pricing model?
drx··on Show HN: Adventures in embedding Postgres schemas in GPT
Our experience so far is that it's pretty tricky and feels a little early to use in production. Curious to hear how others have solved similar issues.

That said, we're looking forward to seeing how the API evolves and seeing what GPT4 has in store.

(I work at Canvas)

drx··on Reflections on My Decade at Sumo Logic
Thank you for sharing! Fun to read a story of someone sticking around for so long and not jumping ship frequently. Curious, as an early engineer, what were some things that Sumo Logic did really well that made you want to stay there beyond four years?
drx··on Ask HN: How do you test SQL?
If you're using dbt, dbt tests are a good start: https://docs.getdbt.com/docs/build/tests

You can hook up dbt tests to your CI and Git(hub|lab) for data PRs.

Depending on your needs, you can also look into data observability tools such as Datafold (paid) or re_data (free)

drx··on CTEs as lookup tables
Common table expressions: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/queries-with.html
drx··on CTEs as lookup tables
CTEs are low-key one of the best features of SQL. Great for debugging big queries, such as:

  with source as (
    select * from wherever
  ),
  transformed as (
    ...
  ),
  joined as (
    ...
  ),
  final as (
    ...
  )
  select * from final
You can switch `final` to `transformed` to see what the query is doing internally. Almost like having good control flow. Almost.
drx··on Nintendo GBA and DS ROM hacking guide (2016)
Savestate hacking used to be easier because everything in a savestate is uncompressed and raw. Tile graphics, level layouts, palettes, sprite mappings, etc.

To hack a ROM you need to know how to decompress the data, and then recompress your changes. A given game might use multiple compression formats.

drx··on Ask HN: Good resource on writing web app with plain JavaScript/HTML/CSS?
You said app, which means you'll likely need some sort of backend. Express is pretty simple to get started with. These examples work out of the box and give you a simple starting point: https://expressjs.com/en/guide/routing.html

Then you can layer on HTML, frontend JS, and CSS. With modern typescript you can definitely write pure JS and be "fine".

That said, after a while once you grok how it all works, I would try React.

> Do I really need Node?

As an alternative, you could look at using a vercel template with some sort of out-of-the-box cloud database. These are super simple to get started, although they go against your goal of not using frameworks for the most part. https://vercel.com/templates

drx··on Interactive Docs with Markdoc
Really cool of @koomen to donate the domain, from the github repo (https://github.com/markdoc/markdoc):

  Special shout out to:
 
  @marcioAlmada for providing us with the @markdoc GitHub org.
  @koomen for gifting us https://markdoc.dev.
drx··on Show HN: Heat Pumps, Hooray – A heat pump calculator for your home
This is awesome! Must have been a lot of work.
drx··on Ask HN: Shut down a startup despite strong traction?
Apply to YC - it’s perfect for startups with some early traction and no VC network. Even just doing the application is a great exercise.

An alternative to VC money is monetize your users and live cheaply while you grow revenue.

I shut down a company with really great product-market fit, but a small TAM. I don’t regret it, but I wish I didn’t have to. Real traction is gold.

drx··on My co-founders asked for a €150k salary (Seed). What is your take on this?
Hard to answer without more info, so I’m going to make some assumptions, YMMV. Depending on the area and situation, $150k could be reasonable, or ludicrous.

If it’s significantly above their personal expenses and you are uncomfortable with it, I would ask myself if they are cofounders or employees.

You should have a candid conversation about what the seed money is for. It could be the case that they never considered your perspective, and this is a good opportunity to get aligned on the topic.

Side note, salary disparities between cofounders are a potential future source of resentment.

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