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Nine Rules for a Programmer

Hacker News - Sat, 04/19/2025 - 10:29pm
Categories: Hacker News

Every web application that may need scale later should be a distributed system

Hacker News - Sat, 04/19/2025 - 10:03pm

If you know your web application will not need scale ever, then you don't need a distributed system.

However, learning distribtued system design is not that complicated unless you are an entry-level developer.

I guess people who tell others to not care about scalability for a software startup are probably marketers, hustlers, or financiers who consider product building as someone else's responsibility and are willing to discard failing products and hire developers for a new product. They typically try to fail quickly, discard companies, and start new ones. That's why these types love starting with agency businesses which don't require product development. You can learn a lot from them, but if you are a solo software entrepreneur, product development is your responsibility, and you should learn distributed system design before writing code or starting a business. You wouldn't hire entry-level engineers for your business, would you?

I think it's valuable to learn distributed system design and basic software engineering techniques like unit tests and documentation and functional programming and simplcity-oriented software design(rich hickey's simple made easy).

After you learn basic software engineering and distributed system design, you can reuse these design patterns over and over for the rest of your life and move quickly as a solo software entrepreneur.

It's a one-time cost that pays for the rest of your life. Design is cheap. Fixing a production system that has a fundamentally broken design that can't scale is very expensive. Solo software entrepreneurs should start with a solid distributed system design instead of trying to bolt scalability and solid software engineering practices onto production web applications. Many other online businesses suffered scalability issues so that you don't have to. You don't have to learn from your own mistakes when you can learn from other people's mistakes.

You can be a marketer or a hustler as a solo software entrepreneur once you learn distributed system design and basic software engineering.

Solo software entrepreneurs shouldn't try to copy marketers and financiers who have money to hire quality engineers.

I also recommend not using SaaS frameworks because the cost will snowball if you try to grow. AWS lambda isn't really free of infrastructure management. If you use SaaS, use ones that you can easily migrate away from. You don't want to be locked into specific vendors.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43741015

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Categories: Hacker News

Layered Design in Go

Hacker News - Sat, 04/19/2025 - 9:58pm
Categories: Hacker News

A curated blog for learning LLM internals: tokenize, attention, PE, and more

Hacker News - Sat, 04/19/2025 - 9:15pm

I've been diving deep into the internals of Large Language Models (LLMs) and started documenting my findings. My blog covers topics like:

Tokenization techniques (e.g., BBPE)

Attention mechanism (e.g. MHA, MQA, MLA)

Positional encoding and extrapolation (e.g. RoPE, NTK-aware interpolation, YaRN)

Architecture details of models like QWen, LLaMA

Training methods including SFT and Reinforcement Learning

If you're interested in the nuts and bolts of LLMs, feel free to check it out: http://comfyai.app/

I'd appreciate any feedback or discussions!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43740813

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Categories: Hacker News

Subnanosecond Flash Memory

Hacker News - Sat, 04/19/2025 - 9:13pm
Categories: Hacker News

SteamNix OS

Hacker News - Sat, 04/19/2025 - 9:01pm

Article URL: https://github.com/SteamNix/SteamNix

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43740739

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Categories: Hacker News

Ractopamine

Hacker News - Sat, 04/19/2025 - 8:46pm
Categories: Hacker News

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