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Author is Vice President of AI, 1X Technologies.
Readit NewsI've been an early employee (sub 10 and 20) in two unicorns and another (a presidential campaign) that didn't have a valuation but did the equivalent. People did not work 40 hours per week, and I feel comfortable saying that the companies could not have been as successful if people had.
The common threads were:
- incredible ICs
- founders who spiked in the most important areas for that market
- a mission that everyone truly believed in
- a culture of people who deeply cared about one another but were comfortable pushing back (as you said!)
It's incredibly rare to find all of these together. I agree that management is responsible for helping others thrive, but not necessarily that they should shape the environment to fit any engineer. Some people want things (projects, challenges, roles) that don't make sense in that company's context. It's okay, especially when it's hard, to agree that this isn't the place for someone.
Are you saying people worked less than 40 hours a week or more than 40 hours a week in those organizations? I’m assuming over, but it’s unclear to me from the tone of your post.
appellations commented on As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise npr.org/2025/12/28/nx-s1-... · Posted by u/geox
How do suppliers communicate these changes? Are they just like yep now it’s 3x higher? Im surprised you don’t have longer contracts
Longer contracts are riskier. The benefit of having cheaper RAM when prices spike is not strong enough to outweigh the downside of paying too much for RAM when prices drop or stay the same. If you’re paying a perpetual premium on the spot price to hedge, then your competitors will have pricing power over you and will slowly drive you out of the market. The payoff when the market turns in your favor just won’t be big enough and you might not survive as a business long enough to see it. There’s also counterparty risk, if you hit a big enough jackpot your upside is capped by what would make the supplier insolvent.
All your competitors are in the same boat, so consumers won’t have options. It’s much better to minimize the risk of blowing up by sticking as closely to spot at possible. That’s the whole idea of lean. Consumers and governments were mad about supply chains during the pandemic, but companies survived because they were lean.
In a sense this is the opposite risk profile of futures contracts in trading/portfolio management, even though they share some superficial similarities. Manufacturing businesses are fundamentally different from trading.
They certainly have contracts in place that cover goods already sold. They do a ton of preorders which is great since they get paid before they have to pay their suppliers. Just like airlines trade energy futures because they’ve sold the tickets long before they have to buy the jet fuel.
FreeBSD 15.0. Rather depressingly, almost everything I said two months ago is still true: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45419134
But I'm hoping to have it out by the first week of December.
Thanks for all your hard work!
appellations commented on AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1 health.aws.amazon.com/hea... · Posted by u/kondro
I became one of the founding engineers at a startup, which worked for a little while until the team grew beyond my purview, and no good engineering plan survives contact with sales directors who lie to customers about capabilities our platform has.
Founding engineer is the worst role in tech
appellations commented on Three ways formally verified code can go wrong in practice buttondown.com/hillelwayn... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
In some languages overflow is asserted as a can't happen and so the optimizer will remove your checks
Best I can tell is that overflow is undefined behavior for signed ints in C/C++ so -O3 with gcc might remove a check that could only be true if UB occurred.
The compound predicate in my example above coupled with the fact that the compiler doesn’t reason about the precondition in the prior assert (y is non-negative) means this specific example wouldn’t be optimized away, but bluGill does have a point.
An example of an assert that might be optimized away:
int addFive(int x) {
int y = x + 5;
assert(y >= x);
return y;
}appellations commented on Three ways formally verified code can go wrong in practice buttondown.com/hillelwayn... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
In some languages overflow is asserted as a can't happen and so the optimizer will remove your checks
Care to share a language where the compiler infers the semantic meaning of asserts and optimizes them away? I’ve never heard of this optimization.
appellations commented on Three ways formally verified code can go wrong in practice buttondown.com/hillelwayn... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
How would that look like if you accidentally assumed you have arbitrary large integers but in practice you have 64 bits?
Add(x,y):
Assert( x >= 0 && y>= 0 )
z = x + y
Assert( z >= x && z >= y )
return z
appellations commented on Formatting code should be unnecessary maxleiter.com/blog/format... · Posted by u/MaxLeiter
I generally agree, but max line length being so high you have to horizontally scroll while reading code is very detrimental to productivity.
I forget there are people who don’t configure softwrap in their text editor.
Some languages (java) really need the extra horizontal space if you can afford it and aren’t too hard to read when softwrapped.
I've frequently argued to my organization's leadership that the product could be open source on GitHub with a flashing neon sign above it and it wouldn't change anything about the business. A competitor stealing our codebase would probably be worse off than if they had done anything else. Conway's law and all that.