100%. I had to drop about half my interests and hobbies after having kids, to remain sane (trying to continue juggling all of them was plainly just going to lead to never doing anything, really), and adjust all the others to fit better with kid-having.
If you can't hire "help", it's like losing 20 waking hours from your week, at least, just for the not-at-all fun or "quality time" parts of having a kid (extra housekeeping [so... very much more], extra shopping, taxiing the kids places, extra household planning, basic hygiene stuff, et c). And on top of that you need to spend "fun" time with them, too, like that part may be more enjoyable but it's non-optional and a lot of stuff an adult might want to do or accomplish doesn't integrate well with it.
Slice ~30-40 hours off the waking hours of both adults in the household, on top of 45-50 hours of work and other stuff necessary for work (commute, et c.) and... yeah this is just bullshit if you can't hire help.
[EDIT] Oh, this reminds me of a certain genre of LinkedIn post that I especially hate: the CEO bragging about how they find time for family despite having five jobs. The real answer to this mystery is that zero of those jobs are actually full-time work, and, the part they never mention, is that they pay others to do tens of hours of work per week that normal people have to do themselves, like lawn care, housekeeping, fixing broken shit in their house, shopping, keeping track of and making appointments and such, et c.
This. Don't forget that HN is extremely biased towards High income/net worth viewpoints. The reality for a lot of parents is much worse than most commenters here
Relevancy is a big point here. HN readers work in tech or are super interested in tech, YC companies do very technical things so hiring posts or launches tend to blend right in for the most part.
A lot of great open source comes out of startups because startups are really good at shipping fast and getting distribution (open source is part of this strategy). Users can try the tool immediately, and VC funding can put a lot of talent behind building something great very quickly.
The startup model absolutely creates incentive risk, but that’s true of any project that becomes important while depending on a relatively small set of maintainers or funders.
I’m not sure an acquisition is categorically different from a maintainer eventually moving on or burning out. In all of those cases, users who depend on the project take on some risk. That’s not unique to startups; it’s true of basically any software that becomes important.
There’s no perfect structure for open source here - public funding, nonprofit support, and startups all suck in their own ways.
And on the point you make about public funding being slow: yeah, talented people can’t work full-time on important things unless there’s serious funding behind it. uv got as good as it is because the funding let exceptional people work on it full-time with a level of intensity that public funding usually does not.
That's fair, and I don't really blame anyone for taking the startup route. It's often the only realistic path to working full-time on something you care about. My point is more that it shouldn't have to be. The more public funding flows into open source infrastructure, the less that tradeoff becomes necessary in the first place. Korea being almost entirely absent from that picture is part of why I feel this so keenly.
I cannot agree more though I have little experience in open source. I knew that Korean environment for open source software would be touch before coming back from Europe, it seems much easier to target international traction rather than focusing on domestic interest.
Personally, I'd like to know, since you have been active in Korea, if there is any groups that I can attend to.
Seems like in this new AI world that the word sandbox is used to describe a system that asks "are you sure".
I'm used to a different usage of that word: from malware analysis, a sandbox is a contained system that is difficult to impossible to break out of so that the malware can be observed safely.
Applying this to AI, I think there are many companies trying to build technical boundaries stronger than just "are you sure" prompts. Interesting space to watch.
Less guardrails, more like highway lane dividers. The only thing stopping you from crossing a yellow divided line is that someone once told you not to.
I think there are some primitives for agents that need to be built out for better security and being able to reason about them.
Agents run on infra, they have network connectivity, they have ACLs and permissions that let them read+write+execute on resources, they can interact with other agents.
To manage them from both an infra and security perspective, we can use the existing underlying primitives, but it's also useful to build abstractions around them for management, kind of like how microservices encapsulate compute+storage+network together.
I think of agents as basically microservices that can act in non-deterministic ways, and the potential "blast radius" of their actions is very wide. So you need to be able to map what an agent can do, and it's much easier to do that if there are abstractions or automatic groupings instead of doing this all ourselves.
Right, those abstractions and controls already exist in the Kubernetes ecosystem. I can use one set of abstractions for everything, as opposed to having something separate for agents. They are not that different, the tooling I have covers it. There are also CRDs and operators to extend for a more DSL like experience.
tl;dr, I don't think the shovel analogy holds up for most of the Ai submissions and products we see here.
As a psychiatrist, this problem reminds me of something we studied for a long time.
Patients get worse in areas we are not measuring, but the numbers we record still look normal.
We learned that checking results catches things that checking process cannot catch.
The PvP was so deep too. You would go 4v4 or 8v8 and coordinate a “3, 2, 1 spike” on a target so that all your damage would arrive at the same time regardless of spell windup times and be too much for the other team’s healer to respond to.
Could also fake spike to force the other team’s healer to waste their good heal on the wrong player while you downed the real target. Good times.
Data point of 1: Having hired juniors as a startup founder, I need more generalists than AI/ML specialists. AI application work right now is basically standard software engineering - you’re finding clever ways to supply the right context to a model within certain constraints.
No one knows what’s going to happen in the future. Yes there already are fewer SWE jobs than before because of AI, and yes the days of companies hiring new grads in droves at $300k+ packages are likely over. IMO all you can really do is study what you’re interested in, learn it deeply, and do good work with cool people. If unsure, it’s possible to go back to what you were doing before if the new path doesn’t work out.
“On the other hand, what kind of wimpy ambition do you have if it won't survive having kids? Do you have so little to spare?”
reply