"When you have to pick fine grained tasks, you are forcing yourself to actually figure out what steps you are going to have to take."

That process isn't free. For many features, it's the largest share of the work.

It's also the most valuable part of the entire article, and is true whether you're using waterfall, scrum, Extreme Programming, Kanban, or whatever. It's also the only thing that reliably works - the better you are at breaking down your work the better your estimates will be. As you said though, breaking down the work is oftentimes the largest part of the work because it requires _starting_ the work in the first place.

It's the opposite of free, it's valuable.

Even for features that stay on the cutting-room floor. Especially for features that stay on the cutting-room floor.

I find that 80% of the time the assumptions i made doing detailed planning are invalidated when doing the actual work.

Usually whole subtasks need to be junked and others created.

Americans pay a pretty hefty health insurance penalty when they leave steady employment to start their own business. There have definitely been better times to be an entrepreneur in this country.

Finding investment is harder than usual in this current economic climate, too. At least in some industries like mine.

> Finding investment is harder than usual in this current economic climate, too. At least in some industries like mine.

If I may ask, what industry are you referring to?

Game development has been seeing cuts on the order of 10k+ jobs/year for a couple years now and investment in studios/titles has dried up. It's extremely competitive now and the deals being signed are for smaller amounts of money with worse terms.

Europe/ (Anecdotally India, I have seen some good health insurances for what 50$ here?) might have a better time for being business owners as well.

One of the issues in these countries is usually Funding. I am unable to understand how people get money to fund the projects & have people be willing to pay when there are alternatives which will cut you down as well probably burning through their funding in the first place.

Suppose, I want to create a cloud provider, A) ownership costs went up due to ramflation, B) there are now services which are using VC money which will burn insane amount of money to give users for free.

As a person without VC money or without wishing to seek VC money to simply burn it, (I personally much much prefer seedstrapping and bootstraping), the idea of business ownership becomes difficult as well.

Plus don't forget the fact that the idea of getting a customer becomes hard in the first place given how organic mediums are being overwhelmed (like Show HN etc.) and personally the idea of marketing doesn't really click with me of things like paying for this as if its a rent to the overlords like google and facebook smh but I guess if someone's a business owner, they might be forced to play this game.

I'm not familiar with this pentagon trick. Care to elaborate?

The ratio of the length of the diagonal of a pentagon to one of its sides is the golden ratio -- easiest visualization is with similar triangles. Draw a regular pentagon (sides of length 1 for simplicity) and pick a side, make an isosceles triangle with that side as the base and two diagonals meeting at the opposite point. Go one side length down from the opposite point and mark that (F below). Convince yourself that triangle DCF is similar to CAD (symmetry gets you there).

Now we wish to find the length of, say, CA. From similarity CD/CA = FC/DF, and CD = DF = 1, and CA - FC = 1, so the ratio simplifies to... CA^2 - CA - 1 = 0 which yields the golden ratio.

            A
           .'.
         .' | `.
       .'  | |  `.
    B.'    | |    `.E
     \   F|   |    /
      \   |   |   /
       \ |     | /
        \|_____|/
        C       D

I pulled beanstalkd into a legacy PHP/MySQL application several years back and was very pleased with it. It's probably not the right choice for a modern Rails application, but if you already don't have a framework, it's a straightforward solution to drop in.

I genuinely went looking for an "off" button, and was very confused when the snowflake icon changed the background color instead. I didn't even notice that the snow stops being generated until I read your comment and tried again. I'm both impressed and annoyed.

The article is specifically about the decline of Adwords, not the company as a whole.

ChatGPT makes the content visible and the author invisible. Why should anyone optimize for AI consumption?

Are you seeing anything interesting happening in this space with Zig? I've been dabbling a bit (after seeing so much about it on HN), but TigerBeetle is the only successful project I can name. I know a few embedded developers, and they all seem pretty content with C.

I wish I were more connected to the rest of industry. Most deep embedded (ESP32/stm32 and smaller) is still in C. There’s some Rust going on (Aura Ring for example).

Once you get up to embedded Linux basically any language can be used.

I have a really smart colleague who is interested in Zig but I’m hesitant to make such an investment without (1) the stronger guarantees of Rust and (2) the larger embedded dev community around Rust.

At the end of the day we don’t usually write our own peripheral drivers anymore, so it’s important to have good BSP support for your language. So whatever you use, you usually have to wrap the C. This is even true of using C! The vendors libs are usually pretty bad and need wrapping with safety checks, or to be made so you can run more than one instance, etc.

The article actually addresses these questions. It's way more than just a donation announcement. It lays out the various reasons that Zig is the language of choice for TigerBeetle.

Do what makes you happy, but don't pretend that reading "difficult" books makes you morally-superior to the rest of us. I read fiction for fun, and non-fiction for personal growth.

> I read fiction for fun, and non-fiction for personal growth.

You could read fiction for personal growth and non-fiction for fun as well.

This is mostly how I do it.

Some people find Dark Souls style games fun, I assume this is the book reader's version of that. I don't get it, but whatever floats their boat.

There's always that person who needs to make a knee-jerk inferiority feeling into the author's problem. The author never made value judgments about people. In fact, he starts by pointing out that he thinks those kinds of judgments either way are silly.

The first paragraph labels me a "social media poster who identifies as a reader", based on my reading preferences.

It doesn't, really. It labels a person a "social media poster who identifies as a reader" based on them passing negative judgment on difficult books ("fundamentally fraudulent") and those who read them ("anyone who would read such a book must be pretentious, phony brodernist snob").

Sure, there is the middle part ("books are supposed to be fun and the world is so awful why would you want to suffer"), but I took the bit about negative judgment to be the main thing the author was complaining about.

Given the way he framed it, if you somehow will admit to fitting his scarecrow of a reader who considers these "fundamentally fraudulent because books are supposed to be fun and the world is so awful why would you want to suffer and anyone who would read such a book must be pretentious, phony brodernist snob" then I'm not sure what sympathy you are expecting here? Yes, the author laid out a comically philistine portrait of an anti-intellectual and you're like "yeah that's me I'm mad!!!", so yeah maybe think about that and why you think it's ok.

For sure; engaging in any particular difficult hobby (be it reading hard books, lifting heavy weights, or playing an instrument extremely well) is unrelated to how moral a person is.

I’ll do as I like.