skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Has anyone quit their startup (VC-backed) over cofounder disagreements?
hey fam, i'm at a crossroads where i'm considering quitting my startup and taking a job or alternate paths and wanted y'alls opinion.

i've been working on a startup for the past 24 months with my cofounder - i'm technical and she's mostly focused on business side (with basic frontend skills). we got funded roughly 18 months ago for an idea i came up with, was excited about, and found some traction.

since then we pivoted away from it. we've roughly pivoted almost every month to something new. there is no longer any vision or clear problem we're trying to solve. each month is our team simply fishing for ideas in different industries and domains hoping to strike gold.

my cofounder and i don't see eye to eye on most things anymore and the relationship has also deteriorated significantly. my cofounder and i disagree upon what problems to focus on. for her, ideas only resonate if there are competitors who've raised $X million or hit certain revenue targets with no regard for interest or insights for a problem/industry. i'd much rather work on problems where i have some inherent interest and/or urge to solve the problem but it's hard to drive a shared vision between us both. this is a constant point of friction.

after 24 months of working together, i'm now considering quitting my own startup to either go do another one or take a job where i can find problems and a future cofounder. has anyone been through anything similar in the past? how did you navigate this?
They were both caught by "outsiders" in spite of holding extremely high titles at both institutions, which would ostensibly entail rigorous vetting. Gay is even still a professor at Harvard.
The error is named `H1UserAgentFontSizeInSection` -- makes it seems like it would only fire for an H1 used in a section?
My experience has been that you’re asked if you have anything to declare in some form when you go through immigration/passport control.
> It's not the parens persay, it's the fact that I'm used to reading up to down and left to right. Lisp without something like the clojure macro ->, means that I am reading from right to left, bottom to top - from inside out.

I’m not certain how true that really is. This:

foo(bar(x), quux(y), z);

looks pretty much identical to:

(foo (bar x) (quux y) z)

And of course if you want to assign them all to variables:

int bar_x = bar(x);
char quux_y = quux(y);

return foo(bar_x, quux_y, z);

is pretty much the same as:

(let ((bar-x (bar x))
(quux-y (quux y)))
(foo bar-x quux-y z))

FWIW, ‘per se’ comes from the Latin for ‘by itself.’
Have you considered socratic questioning and other forms of conversation, in order to affect more change?

See https://www.streetepistemology.com/ for content about this. It is possible to guide discussions in a healthy manner and with positive goals in mind.
IIUC cathedral-style development of open source projects (i.e., intermediate development versions aren't publicly available, you can only get official releases) is now very rare; Android is the only project I can think of off the top of my head that works that way. So in that respect ESR's perspective clearly won out. Of course an essay of that length makes any number of claims and some will have aged better than others.
I think the discussion originates from the fact that if you compare today's Europe to the USA of 20 yrs ago, today's Europe has less free speech.

Things is though, the same would apply to today's Europe vs Europe of 20 yrs ago - and the same if you compared Europe of 20 yrs (more) vs USA of today (less).

Both Europe and USA has lost a lot of their free speech privileges, both via social norms and actual regulations/application of law.

Now, wherever Europe or USA currently comes out on top os - in my person opinion besides the point: its bad either way.
Maybe somewhat, but it's not hard to get pathologically bad GC behavior out of generational GCs either. Pools / manual memory management will always have some reasonable use cases.
I'm not sure what it's supposed to be telling about, but it's probably not about their involvement in the war, which was hardly out of line for any german engineering company at the time. Ferdinand Porsche was arrested for war crimes, but never tried (which IS telling in its own way). Rather, the NGRAM just traces the rise of the company as it's known today:

Up until about 1948, Porsche was a pure development contractor mostly for the government. They only started manufacturing cars under their own brand in the early 50s (a few 356 built basically in a shed notwithstanding) after Ferry Porsche had taken over, and with the introduction of the 911 began a meteoric rise as a volume manufacturer for international markets.
Absolutely agree, trying to create a more user friendly site to learn vim called Vimgolf.ai

Eventually I plan on levels being ai generated and a bot being able to complete them to help users.
No bs, helpful stance. Patient. Polite.

And a good understanding of my shortcomings.
Probably not, since most of what we sent over was existing stock. The money had already been turned into weapons of war years ago. You can't really turn a gun or rocket into a loaf of bread.
it does not. all the state that you need to make "durable" needs to be explicitly committed in temporal via their sdk
You know nothing. Absolutely nothing. Medicare is EXTREMELY CHEAP compared to private insurance. You're comparing Medicare in a vaccuum when you should look at private insurance.

> we simply cannot afford to be yeeting historically unheard of levels of money at the elderly without raising taxes significantly on the middle-class, that is the rub of our current fiscal situation

Oh wow, we can't raise taxes on the rich? only significantly the middle class? Why not the rich?
And that is one of the more charitable political reasons that exist. I'm guessing Dolette and the like didnt drop enough campaign contributions. Betting in a couple months Tesla is gonna get a big fat contract.
How to repair the parts that explode in Lenovo Yoga laptops (2019)
I have the same with my banking app here in The Netherlands. I don't know if they try to be a super app, but since a year or two they put all kinds of annoying ads inside their app and unnecessary notifications on top of my account overview. Just show me the numbers, I pay for your service.
Popularity and vendor lock are not merit.
Nostalgically, yes, Windows 2000 was amazing. At the time of launch, on period hardware, it was the fastest and most lightweight OS released by Microsoft. And looking back, I always appreciate that I can look in Task Manager and immediately recognize all of the processes by name.

Windows 7 (except for the last few updates that introduced telemetry and ads) comes in as a close second. But everything after is just bloated crapware.
Peak doesn't mean that it's a monotonic decline without any steps forward.
AI has been getting better and better at sifting through large amounts of data. I would expect the US military to be already training AI and using it to some degree.
From economic struggles to culture wars: how GDP influences polarization
I wish Netflix and other streaming services had more information about a movie or show for me to base my decision on. I would like more text. Maybe, some reviewer snippets. The full major cast members, not just the top names. The director should be prominently displayed. Let me easily see what else that director has done, even if it's not on that streaming channel.

Apple TV is the worst, because it dumps you right into the program, and you have to back out in order to get more information.

They all just want me to trust them that I'll love it. I end up having to pull up reviews on my phone.
This is I think a narrow viewpoint that assumes the AI will ever get truly as good as a human artist. Will it get good enough for most people? Probably, but if not Adobe then four others will do the same thing, and as another commenter pointed out Adobe is the only one even attempting to make AI tools ethically. I think the hate is extremely misdirected.

AI tech and tools aren’t just going to go away, and people aren’t going to just not make a tool you don’t like, so sticking your head in the sand and pretending like it will stop if you scream loud enough is not going to help, you should instead be encouraging efforts like Adobe’s to make these tools ethically.
This is also true for 'big bets' that a company makes that gain enough momentum to stick around but haven't fully been realized or financially reconciled with the corporate strategy. Source: cloud engineering lead at a large financial.
Statistically most of ones coworkers will never have looked at and used to write actual code with a functional language, so it is understandable they don't get it. What makes me sad is the apparent unwillingness to learn such a thing and sticking with "everything must OOP" even in situations where it would be (with a little practice and knowledge in functional languages) simple to make it purely functional and make testing and parallelization trivial.
If you're talking about Criu then it's not just a claim it actually does work well in production. I know Google was using it in prod on their internal systems and probably many others. It even can migrate TCP connections for you via socket repair api in Linux
I use Nix extensively, but the Nix daemon doesn't do much of use that can't be achieved by building your code from a fixed OCI container with internet turned off. The latter is certainly more standard across the industry, and sadly a lot easier too. Nix is not a revolutionary containerisation technology, nor honestly a very good one.

The value in Nix comes from the package set, nixpkgs. What is revolutionary is how nixpgks builds a Linux distribution declaratively, and reproducibly, from source through purely functional expressions. However, nixpkgs is almost an entire universe unto itself, and it is generally incompatible with the way any other distribution would handle things, so it would be no use to Fedora, Debian, and others
In addition to the Project 2025 goals, understand that they are a cover for the enrichment of the two. I believe that the fascist agenda, like all fascist agendas, comes from a playbook used repeatedly (Germany, Spain, Italy, etc. ) as means to grab power and money ... at any cost to others.

See: Understanding DOGE as Procurement Capture -- Anil Dash

https://www.anildash.com/2025/01/04/DOGE-procurement-capture...

And in this case, privatization of government.

https://www.thenerdreich.com/reboot-elon-musk-ceo-dictator-d...

Silicon Valley Whistleblowers Warn Elon Musk ‘Hijacking’ Republicans to Control Entire US Government

https://bylinetimes.com/2025/02/07/silicon-valley-whistleblo...
Anyone know where we can hear such recordings?
I’m expecting every company to now pay less for their services because of this cut.
Very knowledgeable, always willing to teach, humane, recognized life came first and the work was only so important. Became my business partner and the best man at my wedding.
Maybe one change, but there is far too much going on and thus diverting attention. Pick something and fix it, not a million things and divide your attention and thus get nothing done. (not that other presidents were better, but part of that is good change is slow in many cases)
It feels to me like it's getting democratized in the same sense as to what happened to professional photography in the early 2000s with the introduction of digital cameras and high quality color inkjet printers. The barrier to entry becomes so much lower.

Instead of dealing with the costs associated with using, developing and printing from film, as well as the skills associated with knowing what a photo would look like before it was developed, digital cameras allowed new photographers to enter the industry relatively cheaply and shoot off a few thousand photos at a wedding at a relatively negligible cost. Those photographers rapidly developed their skills, and left studios with massive million dollar Kodak digital chemical printers in the dust. I know because I was working at one.

If you remember, this was in the time where the studio owned your negatives ostensibly forever, and you had to pay for reprints or enlargements. What were amateur photographers could enter this high-margin market, produce images of an acceptable quality, charge far less and provide far more.

I'm not able to say whether this will happen to software development, but the democratization of professional photography absolutely shook the somewhat complacent industry to its core.

In that case it had nothing to do with contempt for creative people, it was the opposite, anyone who wanted to be creative now could be.
Delightful software is still there and still being made. It's the industry that targets average Joe, who doesn't care about technology.
Sorry, but it does occur in the private. I recently worked at a company which pretty much did this. They fired all of the contractors and a bunch of employees because they decided change their focus. It is far from dying.
Count yourself lucky you can clearly demarcate the start and end of your system. You view this beautiful system moving in your mind in splendid isolation dancing in synchronized dare I say celestial harmony.

What I see is that same thing and then I zoom out and see it embedded in an endless barn full of pig shit with all sorts of oddly dressed people shouting at each other. In this pig farm your beautiful celestial system is a small pearl, lying somewhere on the ground in a corner.

Try to bring that into harmony.
No. It's deep philosophy on software design.
This deviated from the original topic, and I'm not following your metaphor flows. How does your post relate to consultants specifically? Is there an implication that consultants not part of the 'mess'?

You say "No automatic force... whether (the agencies) are achieving any progress)". Don't we have oversight agencies and committees? I'm not following your 'grow and grow'; can you provide evidence that all agencies just 'grow and grow' without achieving progress? If not all agencies, then be specific.

Also, what evidence is there of "stuff" that is "irrational, corrupt, and not serving the mission"? Which mission? What corruption? What evidence of this? Can you speak more specifically here?

Please provide evidence to claims so we can have an discussion around this.
I've never made a software usage decision because a product felt "too bloated" for us to use.
I like it for the same reasons. I just wish it supported high DPI. It, and Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion era OSX, at high res would be peak desktop usability.
Check out sysbox[0], it's a runc based runtime that allows you to run "system" containers without privilege.

[0]: https://github.com/nestybox/sysbox
They make great kids bikes, for the record. Not too heavy for them to lift.
Hard agree. The windows 2000 UI was peak UX and each step since has been a downgrade, (with a possible exception of windows 7)
That graph at the end is brutal. But perhaps not incorrect.

Tubi has a better exploration system and catalog than Netflix does but it’s still not as good as Netflix used to be.
Raspberry Pi cluster spotted inside $6k audio processor
Ditto. Without proof claiming that 50% of some department or other is waste, doesn't convince anyone
hey fam. i wanted to stop mousing around on Google. in turn, i accidentally made something i use all day every day

if you also like keeping your hands on the keyboard, give it a try; it could click for you, too (pun intended)
At what point does this get messy?
>95 Good

That's arguable, I thought it was poor at the time.
I think the opposite is mostly true. Linux packaging folks are carefully sculpting their toys, while everyone else is mostly using upstream packages and docker containers to work around the beautiful systems. For half the software I care about on my Debian system, I have a version installed either directly from the web (curl | bash style), from the developer's own APT repo, or most likely from a separate package manager (be it MELPA, pypi, Go cache, Maven, etc).
I'm sure there are lots of engineers who don't want to change but I don't feel I'm one of those. I use copilot every day. I'm leading integrating our product with different LLMs and playing with those regularly.

And yet I feel more secure in my job today than I did a year ago because I'm constantly hitting the limits of what a language model can do. I've realized that the decisions I make every day as a senior engineer aren't mostly about what lines of code usually come after each other.
Think of the other side of the coin. Through history the first thing slaves are denied are weapons. And there is many countries that allow weapons at home, US, Mexico, Latin America....
This is the most elementary hurdle a lisp programmer will face. You do indeed become adjusted to it quite quickly. I wouldn’t let this deter you from exploring something like Clojure more deeply.
you're conflating income with wealth. as programmers many of us have good salaries, but if those went away we'd have to dig ditches like everyone else.

miss me with the .1% salary stuff -- income is not wealth.
You could easily replace this by 'How to host web apps on Windows 11 Home'.

Yes, you absolutely can. If you're worried about availability, performance, or security, you probably shouldn't.
I recently re-installed and instead of installing rustup I thought I'd give the Arch rust package a shot. Supposedly it's not the "correct" way to do it but so far it's working great, none of my projects require nightly. Updates have come in maybe a day after upstream. One less thing to think about, I like it.
Social media has been a thing for 20+ years now. It's absolutely possible to achieve both: to "get engagement" and to post things that are genuinely interesting and useful and that people find valuable while you are doing it.

Adobe were really clumsy here, and that's why they got burned.
The painstaking effort that goes into crafting LookUp's Word of the Day
Container CPU requests and limits explained with GOMAXPROCS tuning
Ture. Then the Convenience folks don't understand why the rest of us don't want the things they think are so great.

There are good middle grounds, but most package managers don't even acknowledge other concerns as valid.
Let's not forget he SUED to get SpaceX contracts from the big defense contractors. The GAO was the one who upheld the protest due to the vast price disperities.

"but his ventures would not have survived without the government support he’s received."

Including firm fixed price contracts the company has won from the government for providing essential services is not a good argument. SpaceX's main customer is governments... thats how rocket companies work.

Comparing Tesla’s support to other industries reveals a double standard. The fossil fuel industry has received trillions in subsidies globally over decades (e.g., IMF estimates $5.9T in 2020 alone for fossil fuel subsidies). General Motors and Chrysler received $80B in bailouts during the 2008 financial crisis.

consumer tax credits benefit buyers, not Tesla directly, though they boost demand. Subsidies for infrastructure like Gigafactories are standard for large-scale industrial projects and not unique to Tesla.

It seems i can't be the one to talk you out of your mental model of hating elon.
This is obvious, the question here is why everybody traded security for convenience and what else has to happen for people to start taking security seriously.
The objective is 'train our AI'
When Win10 started, it was clearly Bad. No good reason for updates, invasive privacy-breaking telemetry, updates at random moments of the day, and everything was a little different but nothing was better. People flat out refused to upgrade when it was given for free. Microsoft had to force it trough windows update, and did multiple rounds of breaking software people explicitly installed to block the upgrade.

When did it become good? WSL and DirectX 12 were real changes, but all in all, my impression is that the user has been frog boiled over the years, with 2K,XP and 7 becoming distant memories.
It's not JIT, it's that planning works on months advance notice like you mention is in large part because the supply chain is global and shipping takes a lot of time. When digikey has a month lead time because some component is out of stock, it often means "It's going to take a month for this to arrive from the factory".

In China, you can just go down the street to the factory.

As for shipping overnight, it's incredibly common in R&D and repair.
When do you have time to work?
The only bad things I remember about Windows 2000 are that some software written for Windows 3.x and 9x had compatibility issues and it took an eternity to boot up. It was go take a coffee break as soon as you turn your computer on for the day bad.
If you'd bothered to read:

```This definition excludes signatures and some metadata and focuses solely on the payload of packaged files in a given RPM:

A build is reproducible if given the same source code, build environment and build instructions, and metadata from the build artifacts, any party can recreate copies of the artifacts that are identical except for the signatures and parts of metadata.```
> One of my laments is that there is no automatic equivalent force in the government. Agencies grow and grow, projects grow and grow, all totally decoupled from whether they are achieving any progress whatsoever towards the agency's mission.

A good metaphor here is apoptosis / programmed cell death (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apoptosis)
Cutting of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope [1] seems incredibly shortsighted and wasteful. It is set to launch in 2027, and is designed to answer basic questions about dark energy

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman_Space_Telesc...
Side note: I discovered by accident last week that uBlock Origin eliminates ads on Amazon Prime Video too. We don't often watch that service on anything other than our "smart" TV, but was watching one episode on a laptop with firefox while travelling and realized afterwards the very brief black screens were where ads would have been.
It would be awesome if that deno_varnish repo had a license to know who can use it under what circumstances
Always read from experienced developers praising lisps, but why is it so rare in production applications?
> she said, "my friends all said he was too short, but I told them he was taller when he was standing on his wallet". Some people laughed. I didn't.

Hey, as long as they are both up front and clear about what they are getting out of their relationship. They're grown adults after all. I knew someone who proudly would admit he was a "sugar daddy" and both he and his "girlfriends" would fully agree that their relationships were transactional and contingent on the money flow. I knew someone in college who was very open and unapologetic that her plan was to find and marry someone rich. There's no right and wrong.
If we look at their lives outside of work, can see where you're coming from (as mentioned, a few of my current and past roommates worked blue-collar jobs, and couple of them really had a tough time financially, and one of them emotionally). But if we're talking about the job themselves, as mentioned, seems like most blue-collar jobs are less demanding, and is stable at many levels, and doesn't require much training.

Yeah, at least to me in this thread, seems like we were referring to jobs themselves, not their overall lives.

But, I do agree, if we look at their lives overall compared to white collar, it seems like it can be just as stressful, especially because of the lack advantages growing up (growing up in a stable financial household, education, resources...).
It's a misspelling of Y'all by someone not from the south
This is the way. If I care about watching something in the future, I buy the Blu-ray and rip it. I already have basically all the music I could ever want in mp3 format. Plex (or Jellyfin if you prefer that) provides a pleasant UI, and I don't need those services any more.