HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

etse

158 karma · joined August 31, 2014

Co-founder at Nen
submissionscomments
etse··on Uber is laying off 10% of staff
That's how I read it, too.

They pinpointed the problem of over-coordination to the messenger (coordinator) instead of the teams demanding final approval over launches (coordination).

Won't merging different teams under a single owner only push the problem further down the org chart?

etse··on Xiaomi: New CPU matches Apple cores single threaded, much faster multithreaded
By Chinese company, do you mean Taiwan is Chinese in the same way China is Chinese?
etse··on A Server Lost Power at 00:32. We Found Out at 08:18
In my mind, postmortems with a human touch to be subtle defensiveness, passive aggressive blame, and unempathetic factual digs at others. I read the lack of empathy in the article as simply following best practices.
etse··on Generic Methods in Go 1.27
What was the reason for interfaces having to work at runtime?
etse··on Launch HN: Freestyle – Sandboxes for Coding Agents
Ah, got it. Still impressive.
etse··on Launch HN: Freestyle – Sandboxes for Coding Agents
The memory forking is really interesting. I wonder if copy-on-write at the VM level, O(1) with respect to machine size, won't scale cost with how many forks to take, but 320ms median seems good for the branch-and-explore pattern without reprovisioning every time.

One gap I'm noticing in these comments and in the current sandbox landscape is Windows. Every platform mentioned in these comments like E2B, Daytona, Fly Sprites, Sandflare appears Linux-native. Makes sense for coding agents targeting Debian environments, but a real category exists to automate Windows-specific workflows: enterprise software, ERP systems, anything that runs only on Windows.

If anyone wants to run agents in Mac or Linux and need to access Windows for computer use, Dexbox could be helpful. [github.com/getdexbox/dexbox]

I launched an open source developer tool called Dexbox to run agent workloads that quickly provision and run Windows desktops. It's a CLI and MCP experience that's different from Freestyle, but slightly closer to our Windows-specific production infra, Nen. I like Freestyle's cool UI that shows off the unique technical approach and developer friendliness. Nen's a bit closer to that experience.

etse··on Are you team MCP or team CLI?
So, neither?
etse··on Gemini 3 Pro vs. 2.5 Pro in Pokemon Crystal
Isn’t frontend more complex? If my task starts with a Figma UI design, how well does a code agent do at generating working code that looks right, and iterate on it (presuming some browser MCP)? Some automated tests seem enough for an genetic loop on backend.
etse··on Kaiju – General purpose 3D/2D game engine in Go and Vulkan with built in editor
What’s the challenge with getting it working in macOS? Vulkan?
etse··on Thoughts on Go vs. Rust vs. Zig
That seems unusual. I would assume trivial means the default approach works for most cases. Perhaps mutable global variables are not a common use case. Unsafe might make it easier, but it’s not obvious and probably undesired. I don’t know Rust, but I’ve heard pockets of unsafe code in a code base can make it hard to trust in Rust’s guarantees. The compromise feels like the language didn’t actually solve anything.
etse··on Five years as a startup CTO: How, why, and was it worth it? (2024)
I have hardly come across aspiring-CEOs who do not have much ego and listen to other founders, let alone founders or serial-founders. After some founder dating last year, I am a bit jaded, though.
etse··on How Palantir is mapping the nation’s data
Morality is not about intelligence, but some folks believe living by morals is submitting oneself to the lack of intelligence (or stupidity even). The real [evil] geniuses prune their decision tree by not considering morality so they maintain optimum efficiency.
etse··on Do the simplest thing that could possibly work
There is a lot of sentiment in these comments about needing to scale still. I wonder how many need to do this in a pre-PMF stage vs growth stage? The trade off is faster growth if your PMF bet wins and loss of time if your bet goes south.
etse··on QueryLeaf: SQL for Mongo
Maybe not capabilities, but I'm wondering if Postgres has gotten any easier to scale horizontally. The administrative overhead of scaling and maintenance with MongoDB seemed lower to Postgres to me.

Would love to hear from others with more Postgres than I.

etse··on Mistaking Mary Magdalene
Interesting idea, but questionable scholarship.
etse··on Googler... ex-Googler
Hmm. Maybe you should test the site on a different phone. Not seeing an issue with responsiveness here.
etse··on Can American Drivers Learn to Love Roundabouts?
Not when the roundabouts are placed within the bounds of a 4 way stop. Not sure if those are called roundabouts, but I don’t like them.
etse··on Morris Chang and the Origins of TSMC
We don’t need to overstate racism, but “bigwig at TI” is a down leveling for Morris. Doesn’t seem right to limit greatness if it’s about race and not based on track record or other meritocratic signals.
etse··on Morris Chang and the Origins of TSMC
How? Morris didn’t get the job because he was born in the wrong country?
etse··on Family of OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji demand FBI investigate death
Very wealthy people have access to very exclusive and potentially unethical and/or illegal capabilities. Many do not think they are bound to the same rules as the rest of society. Some are probably not.

OpenAI the company may not be responsible, but there are elites in the OpenAI sphere who might be.

etse··on Borgo Programming Language
I’m curious which are the well known projects or products that have ported or converted away from Go. Anyone have a shortlist?
etse··on Structured Editing and Incremental Parsing
> why structured editors haven’t taken over the world: most programmers find them so annoying to use in some situations that they don’t view the pros as outweighing the cons.

Seems like "annoying" refers to a user interface annoyance.

I'm guessing the following since I couldn't tell what structured editing is like from the article:

Keyboard entry is immediate, but prone to breaking the program structure. Structured editing through specific commands is an abstraction on top of key entry (or mouse), both of which add a layer of resistance. Another layer might come from having to recall the commands, or if recognizing them, having to peruse a list of them, at least while learning it.

What does the developer's experience with incremental parsing feel like?

etse··on In Defense of LeetCode Interviews
This article was kind of lazy. It’s a lot of conjecture, a couple anecdotal observations, and some rhetoric for good measure. Basically, the content was a let down from the title. On the other hand, I didn’t know Data Scientist candidates would also be tested with LeetCode questions.
etse··on No more trip hazards: safe in-pavement electric car charging system pilot
“Yak” shaving of a sort!
etse··on Go 1.23 Released
Are you opposed to the process by which discussion can initiate a transition from negative state to positive state?

Seems healthy to me.

etse··on Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail
The opposite seems true (regarding Go being over-fitted to Google problems).

It was designed for Google, but Google has not adopted it widely. Google is still heavily C++ and Java after all these years. The outside world loves it way more. Kubernetes isn't used internally at Google (except Cloud, which is not any different from any other cloud provider) though it's sponsored by Google. Bazel is probably in a similar boat.

Being designed to solve Google problems doesn't mean that it actually solves Google problems well, or that Google thinks it does.

I became introduced to Go through my startup and my experience was it a delight to work with in very small teams.

etse··on Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay
Palo Alto is in Santa Clara County whereas Menlo Park and East Palo Alto are in San Mateo. That might be how.
etse··on JavaScript Promises from the Ground Up
Agreed. This is very well written.

I discovered the joy of Go from dealing with JavaScript promises while writing an API service in Node. So many painful runtime errors uncaught or unlogged because promises don’t (or didn’t) require the catch callback.

I think inverting the programming perspective to default to sync instead of async is more productive for web services development, than perhaps for UI.

etse··on The Stratocaster Turns 70
The belly cut for comfort.
etse··on Why we no longer use LangChain for building our AI agents
My reading of the article is that because LangChain is abstracted poorly, frameworks should not be used, but that seems a bit far.

my experience is that Python has a frustrating developer experience for production services. So I would prefer a framework with better abstractions and a solid production language (performance and safety), over no framework and Python (if those were options)

Page 1 of 5Next →