MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Startup Head of Engineering
by heroicmailman | 2025-11-11 16:13:09+00:00
I'm going through a bit of a career crossroads at the moment and figured I'd ask the HN zeitgeist for its opinion.

A bit about me: I've got about 10 years of experience in engineering. I've worked at publicly-traded companies as both an IC and a manager, and also had two shorter stints at startups. Both of those startup experiences ended poorly, and suddenly, with no warning prior to being laid off or let go.

I'm currently a frontline manager at a larger, public tech company. While more comfortable, I do disagree with a lot of the ways that my company has chosen to scale (particularly post-COVID) and the way it handles process in the day-to-day. I don't feel a lot of agency or ownership over anything. There's also a bit of paranoia about job security.

Add in a bit of burnout and mistrust in any leadership team, given my personal experiences, and the state of the tech industry writ large, and I'm starting to seek other avenues.

I'm beginning to look for my next role and have actually been offered a role as a head of engineering at an early-stage startup.

What I'm looking for more than anything is opinions on making the jump from a frontline EM role into a Head of Engineering role at a startup. The engineering team at the startup is about the size of my team today at my current company, so I'm wondering more about the ancillary stuff that comes into play when you're representing the entire engineering function at a company rather than managing a single team.

Am I setting myself up for another bad startup experience, or will being in a Head role be different enough? Has anyone here had a similar experience?
by vdupras | 2025-11-11 16:13:26+00:00
There are options, yes, but the path to options that could be said to compete with, let's say, C, is narrow.

If you use Indirect or Direct (ITC, DTC) threaded code, there's no way out: you're going to call every word. You can use Subroutine Threaded Code and inline some code (that's what I do in Dusk OS), but you still have to choose the words you're going to inline. Typically, you're going to end up with words that "calls" more than your typical C code.

And then, you might very well realize that being fast as C everywhere isn't all that important and that all the inlining you've been placing everywhere isn't worth the tradeoff, so you'll scale back on it and keep speed optimizations for bottlenecks.

So, again, yes it's possible, but the path to it is narrow. I don't know of a Forth that can say that it compiles code expressed as Forth (as in ": foo bar baz ;") that compiles native code that can compete with C, speed wise. Do you?
by kemayo | 2025-11-11 16:13:31+00:00
> You can't see all of the detail the artists drew

That's the point in that Lion King frame, though. They drew it planning for it to get washed out by the sunlight effect, and when it's not it absolutely ruins the "vast crowd" effect they were going for because you can clearly see there's no more animals in the background and it's just 20 guys standing there.
by hollerith | 2025-11-11 16:14:11+00:00
Have you known at least a few people who have taken psychedelics, then had a chance to see how they are doing in the years afterwards?

The harm is much more apparent to observers than it is to the psychedelic user him or herself.

If I'm wrong about psychedelics, I'm wrong in my claim that they routinely cause PTSD specifically, not about the claim that they routinely cause some kind of long-term harm. I admit that they also often improve people, including people whose psychedelic use was unsupervised. I.e., I'm making a statistical claim, not a categorical one.

I get my PTSD claim from Dr K of the "Healthy Gamer" YT channel, who is a Harvard-train psychiatrist. I can provide a citation if there is interest.

Tales of a person's life and level of functioning steeply declining after taking a psychedelic, then staying that way for years, are common, e.g., on this web site over the years. Here is one example, and yes, I realize that in the same comment section are people who claim to have been helped by psychedelic use.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44274746

If we ignore what people say about their own experience with psychedelics and focus only on what people say about people they have known who have taken the drugs, the reports are overwhelming negative unless the reports are by researchers and clinicians reporting on psychedelic use in which the entire experience is supervised by a skilled therapist (which I do not criticize).

P.S., benzos and SSRIs are both bad drugs that do more harm than good, IMHO, so your assertion that psychedelics are better than them is not saying much.
by sabatonfan | 2025-11-11 16:14:25+00:00
I am a straight man and I feel like some communities just become scape-goats

We have this us vs them mentality which some people use to collect power and influence at the costs of them

Ultimately I think that it is a very foolish thing because I think that as long as nobody bothers on my freedom etc., I should be in literally nobody's business bothering their freedom

> It's 2025, almost 2026 and we're still doing this shit. I don't care if you think I'm icky, I think other people are icky sometimes but I don't try to stop them from existing for it. People are entitled to be who they are.

I agree 100% with this message.

But one thing I have problem with (on the straight side of things) is that I have seen occasionally some extremely feminist comments which do try to impeach or try to have this very fundamental skewed problem that man are ALL the problem and its all man's fault etc. and I have seen the same in masculinity cultures as well and I feel like both of them are just radicalizing people to seize power and influence or sell courses or feel better about themselves.

I think that we sometimes forget that people are people and we should treat others with the same courtesy and kindness that we expect to be treated with, I guess. maybe we sometimes don't treat them that way or didn't treat them that way and I guess we should just apologize or try not to do that ever again. Mistakes happen but as long as we still have a mindset similar to doing good, I feel like things would be hopeful.
by netdevphoenix | 2025-11-11 16:14:28+00:00
> to put it all directly in the AI gold rush company

There are 3 facts here:

1. Softbank's nvidia stake sale has happened

2. Softbank has not put it all directly into the AI gold rush

3. 2 other investment entities have also sold most/all their stake in Nvidia

Do what these 3 facts as you will but these are ripples in the surface of the tech world
by alejo | 2025-11-11 16:15:31+00:00
I got a pair of Santoni’s leahther sneakers in 2017, for about $500. I still have them and while they worn out a bit, they are still nice.

The most comfortable shoes I’ve ever owned. I remember describing them like “walking in clouds”.

Never bought any of them and all the other pairs I got from different brands in the $200-$400 bracket have been awfully disappointing
by nosianu | 2025-11-11 16:15:34+00:00
> You seem to be suggesting

As soon as you start a response like that you should just stop. After all, this is written communication, and what I wrote is plain to see right there.

When you need to start a response that way you should become self-aware that you are not responding to what the person you respond to wrote, but to your own ideas.

There is no need to "interpret" what other people wrote.

Relevant: https://i.imgur.com/Izrqp7d.jpeg
Show HN: Durable cloud hosting for MCP servers
by haniehz | 2025-11-11 16:15:42+00:00
Hey HN!

We built a cloud platform that lets you deploy MCP servers (agents, tools, ChatGPT apps) to production instantly. Think Vercel, but for agents using the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

The problem: MCP servers are great locally, but running them in production is a pain. You need hosting, handle auth, manage secrets, deal with long-running processes, and connect everything securely.

With mcp-c, it's: uvx mcp-agent deploy

You get a production URL that works with Claude Desktop, ChatGPT, Cursor, or any MCP client.

What makes this different: - Durable execution (agents can run for hours without timing via Temporal) - Built-in secrets management - Full MCP spec support (sampling, notifications, logging) - Free during beta

Try this hosted ChatGPT Pizza example:

Pizza ordering agent: https://pizzaz.demos.mcp-agent.com/sse

We're the team behind mcp-agent (8K GitHub stars), and this is our answer to "how do I actually ship this?"

Open beta, free to use. Would love your feedback on what would make this more useful.

Link to docs: https://docs.mcp-agent.com/get-started/cloud
by munificent | 2025-11-11 16:15:56+00:00
> once that line runs

This is the key point. Some people have a mental model that algebraic syntax is describing a set of immutable properties. You are defining things and giving them names, but not changing anything. There is no notion of time or sequence, because the universe is unchanging anyway. All you're doing is elucidating it.

Then there is a model where you are molding the state of a computer one imperative modification at a time. Sequence is essential because everything is a delta based on the state of the world before.

You have the latter model, which is indeed how the hardware behaves. But people with a mathematical mindset often have the former and find the latter very unintuitive.
by jader201 | 2025-11-11 16:15:56+00:00
When I clicked the link, seeing it so high on the FP, I was 100% convinced they were finally re-releasing + rebranding the Mini.

Then I saw what it was, and was like “ah it’s an April Fools joke — but wait, it’s not April 1st”.

So now I can only assume people are upvoting it because it’s so ridiculous?

Are there people (on HN) that seriously think this is a good idea/are considering getting one of these hideous things?
by rdiddly | 2025-11-11 16:16:01+00:00
1) You projected that anticipated focus into the title. Not wrongly. But I for example did not. My slant was more about innovation. The title doesn't inherently imply or contain either one.

2) The small, practical thing the post is actually about does address at least part of what you wanted to hear, because declaring "Loading 1 item(s)" IS hostile to users.
by ang_cire | 2025-11-11 16:16:16+00:00
Though sand is actually becoming a problem commodity to source now, too:

https://www.clarknexsen.com/the-global-sand-crisis-examining...

https://scitechdaily.com/the-sand-crisis-no-one-is-talking-a...

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191108-why-the-world-is...
by rtkwe | 2025-11-11 16:16:21+00:00
At some point there's going to be on the ground fighting from either force invading the territory of one of the power poles in the conflict or their neighbors who are not aligned with the nearest pole; in US v Russia that would be happening somewhere in Europe in one of the NATO allies, US v China probably Taiwan/Philippines/Japan/Korea/India depending.

Wherever that happens to be will be a good candidate for the kind of warfare we see in Ukraine right now. There's basically no way it doesn't reach that at some point unless it's a very brief skirmish and even then for some pairings there's the inevitable border sparing even if there's minimal direct land conflict.

Drones for Ukraine provide cheap low material risk precision strike options that would normally be done by the US using precision artillery/missiles (expensive per shot cost and very vulnerable to counter battery fire) or airstrikes (relies on establishing air superiority which has proven difficult for Ukraine and Russia, anti air is long enough range it's difficult to strike so no one has fully knocked their opponent's system offline). Russia proved to be a bit of a paper bear but there's no guarantee the US would be able to establish the kind of air superiority we enjoy in all our recent conflicts (heavily punching down power wise) in a fight with China or maybe even Russia.
by rayiner | 2025-11-11 16:16:29+00:00
CNN’s fawningly positive coverage of this guy is nuts: https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/09/politics/video/syrian-preside.... He’s an actual Al Qaeda who violently conquered Syria. But now he puts on a suit and gets a haircut and suddenly CNN is smitten?

Yes, he looks good in a suit. I guess that makes people forget he’s a terrorist: https://nypost.com/2025/10/13/media/syrian-leader-appears-to...
by 9rx | 2025-11-11 16:17:01+00:00
> It's an action verb.

The difference is that it is an instruction. Conventional mathematical notation, while declarative by default, switches into instruction mode just the same with the "let" keyword. The usage of the "=" operator then becomes equivalent: e.g. let x = 1.

But as the aforementioned x = x + 1 comes from notations that are never declarative, where every statement is an instruction, the "let" keyword is unnecessary and redundant. You already know you are looking at an instruction.

> Should have perhaps insisted on x <- x + 1 or maybe better x + 1 -> x

While that would obviously work, it strays further from the conventional notation. Which doesn't matter to the universe in any way, but the topic of discussion here is about trying to stay true to conventional notation, so...
by NickC25 | 2025-11-11 16:18:12+00:00
>The US is worse than China in many aspects, from forever wars to climate over colonialism to fascism and support for an ongoing extremely violent genocide on over a hundred thousand civilians.

My man, the US and China are more or less the exact same here with the exception of forever wars.

Climate? China pollutes like crazy, and so does the US. Colonialism? Maybe not in the same vein but China does engage in actions to other nations, such as Macau, Hong Kong, and Taiwan that could be classified as colonialism. Fascism? Well yeah both countries are pretty much openly fascist right now. Support for an ongoing extremely violent genocide of over a hundred thousand people? Yeah the US and China are both complicit there. In fact, in China, you're speaking about the regime itself, with context to the ongoing genocide of Uyghur people.
by saghm | 2025-11-11 16:18:20+00:00
One amusing part of lyrics on Spotify to me is how they don't seem to track which songs are instrumentals or not and use that to skip the message about them not knowing the lyrics. An instrumental will pop up and it will say something like "Sorry, we don't have the lyrics to this one yet".

The only thing funnier than that is when they do have the lyrics to a song that probably doesn't need them, like Hocus Pocus by Focus: https://open.spotify.com/track/2uzyiRdvfNI5WxUiItv1y9?si=7a7...
by doe88 | 2025-11-11 16:18:36+00:00
The real breakthrough would be to build the capacity of building something at scale just in time instead of allocating big contracts to build or maintain an industry even if not needed at a given moment. A pipe dream of course. Moreover i fear these hardware (smaller in size, and with technologies evolving quickly) become obsolete sooner and are harder to upgrade to new standard (than say a F-35 - sic), and at scale.
by wat10000 | 2025-11-11 16:19:03+00:00
It's not that they can't. They want to make money. When given the choice between making more money and less money, they'll generally choose more. They think making a smaller device would make less money. The sales numbers for previous attempts back this up. There's an enormous fixed cost for developing a new model, and it's not worthwhile unless that results in enough additional sales. There's demand, for sure, but how much? They think not enough, and I suspect they know what they're doing here.
by stevenjgarner | 2025-11-11 16:19:13+00:00
Took me a long time to figure out what gets lost with Erlang is:

a) Ubiquity — everything understands HTTP. Erlang nodes only talk to Erlang (or a compatible runtime)

b) Because there are no middleware standards (REST, GraphQL, OAuth, etc.), you must build or integrate your own abstractions

c) Giving up infrastructure (reverse proxies, load balancers, CDNs), You handle distribution yourself or through OTP design

d) Interoperability with browsers and APIs, requiring bridging via something like Cowboy or gRPC gateway

setcookie secret in Erlang does not create or use an HTTP cookie, SSL certificate, or HTTPS connection. It sets the Erlang distribution cookie, a shared secret string used for node authentication within the Erlang runtime system (the BEAM VM).

Erlang’s built-in distributed networking subsystem allows them to connect to each other if:

1) They can reach each other over TCP (default port 4369 for the EPMD — Erlang Port Mapper Daemon — plus a dynamically assigned port for the node-to-node connection).

2) They share the same cookie value (here "secret").

The author's insight "No HTTP. No REST API", reframes the reality that Erlang moves things down the ISO OSI model - HTTP being on layer 7 and TCP being on layer 4. Erlang therefore misses the "benefits" of operating on a higher ISO layer, but gains powerful advantages of operating on layer 4:

i) True concurrency

ii) Transparent message passing

iii) Fault tolerance

iv) Soft real-time guarantees

v) Persistent cluster connections

Erlang’s design assumes a trusted, closed system of cooperating nodes, not a public Internet of clients. In other words, Erlang doesn’t live below Layer 7 — it IS its own Layer 7.
by bgwalter | 2025-11-11 16:19:18+00:00
Softbank is involved with Lutnick's Cantor & Fitzgerald in crypto deals:

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/cantor-nears-...

Masayoshi Son is BFF with Trump and Lutnick:

https://asia.nikkei.com/politics/international-relations/how...

There is more going on here than is publicly known. Investing in hot air is of course a specialty of the Trump admin.
by WorldMaker | 2025-11-11 16:19:36+00:00
There's an old proverb that the best time to add i18n support is today. It takes a bit of extra effort to build new stuff with it in mind, but that little bit of extra effort today goes a long way (and builds good habits) versus the large projects to add it tomorrow when it becomes tech debt and needs a full audit of every possible way a string might be formed for display to a user, because you just got a client/customer who needs it tomorrow.
by peterlk | 2025-11-11 16:19:57+00:00
I am so, so, so tired of hearing this argument. At a minimum, AI provides efficiency gains. Skilled engineers can now produce more code. This puts downward pressure on jobs. We’re not going to eliminate every software engineering job, but the options are to build more software or to hire fewer engineers. I am not convinced that software has a growing market (it’s already everywhere), so that implies downward pressure. The same is true for customer support, photography, video production (ads), paralegal work, pharma, and basically any job that involves filing paperwork.

Eliminating jobs has absolutely happened. How many jobs exist today for newspaper printing? Photograph development? Film development? Call switchboard operation? Technology absolutely eats jobs. There have been more jobs created over time, but the current economic situation makes large scale jobs adjustment work less well.
by yorwba | 2025-11-11 16:20:20+00:00
(I'm not an egyptologist.) The Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae has a breakdown of 𓅓𓂋𓄋𓏏𓏝𓊹𓊵𓏏𓅓𓇾𓂋𓇦𓂋𓆑 / jm.j-rʾ-wpw.wt-ḥtp.w-nṯr-m-tꜣ-r-ḏr=f / "overseer of apportionments of the god's offering(s) in the entire land" https://tla.digital/lemma/850281 with 𓇾 / tꜣ / "land" and 𓂋𓇥𓂋 / r-ḏr / "entire".

So we have most of 𓇍𓇋𓏭𓂻𓍘𓇋𓇾𓂋𓇥𓂋𓈐𓆑 / jy.tj-tꜣ-r-ḏr-?? / "welcome land entire ??" except for the 𓈐𓆑 at the end where I have no idea whether it's phonetic ḥr=f or a determinative https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%F0%93%88%90 or something else.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-11-11 16:20:28+00:00
It's stagnation in the headline, not decline. There's a massive difference. European GDP per capita has been roughly 75% of America's for the last 50 years.

Over that same period, American GDP per capita has more than doubled, even after adjusting for inflation.

Which means that European GDP per capita has also more than doubled. 75% of an increasing number is also an increasing number.
by torstenvl | 2025-11-11 16:20:36+00:00
I don't understand why you need to be so dishonest about this. It remains the objective and inarguable fact that Apple does not have a monopoly here. Period. End of story. It simply isn't true.

Whether their behavior is otherwise anticompetitive is a different issue. You are intentionally conflating them and it is morally repugnant for you to continue doing so.
by unixplumber | 2025-11-11 16:20:47+00:00
One really nice thing about a distributed version control system is that it lets me as a developer make commits to track my work without having to push them to a central location and pollute the global commit history of the repository. I can modify my commit history (to clean it up and remove all of my failed experiments, for example) before I publish it, so to speak. Or I can completely remove my commits without publishing at all if what I was trying didn't pan out.
by fennecfoxy | 2025-11-11 16:20:56+00:00
Oh yes for sure - but most of the domestic production is still "plugging drone bits from China together".

I think they're definitely working on more autonomy etc but I think it kind of proves that even the current ones are actually pretty effective. A well designed drone with AI/autonomous capabilities is terrifying. People could point to switch-blade but the cost per unit for the functionality you get is just absolutely insane.
by Pet_Ant | 2025-11-11 16:21:17+00:00
1) It's subsidised through cheap labor. The start-up whose founder live and work in buildings built by undocumented labor. Eat food grown by that labor, and served from food trucks run by undocumented labor. It's innovation subsidised by misery.

2) the brain-drain is unethical because it takes subsidised education of individuals without returning anything in return. Emmigrants should get a bill of the cost of their upbringing. It's really free-loading, especially for a country with such a poor public education system as the US.
by biophysboy | 2025-11-11 16:21:25+00:00
I regularly see comments on HN that worry about how our output is lower than China. Their population is 4x ours. They have long used financial repression to encourage industrial development. The incentives toward overcapacity, price wars, and domestic competition are so strong that they are actively trying to curtail it. Why should I endorse a defense strategy that is guaranteed to enrich ideologues in Silicon Valley, but not likely to achieve anything else?

A million drones is a rounding error in China. Increasing this number by orders of magnitude would require the state administering some pretty big pills, which I doubt the average American would want to swallow.
by bell-cot | 2025-11-11 16:21:33+00:00
(As a generality, "free speech" is a much shorter & stronger argument than "I am allowed to criticize Tim because [logic, more logic, therefore, yet more logic, QED]"-type stuff. Not that it matters much, in the current context.)

Your notions of propriety seem to involve lots of truth-telling, logical consistency, and courageously adhering to consequences of previous statements. (And smack-talking folks who don't follow those notions:)

Vs. 99.9% of real-world business and political leaders might freely say that they follow such lofty principals...but actually do otherwise whenever a cost/benefit optimization suggested less-lofty behavior.

In any case, "convince Tim Cook to defy the CCP" doesn't sound like a viable goal. If you're looking to improve things - maybe focus on pushing Tim to defy a relatively Elbonian gov't, or to ease back on the huge "SE => 16e" price increase for an entry-level iPhone?