Top all-time · #600
Alex Payne
Personal blog · al3x.netstartupsprogrammingculture
Alex Payne's personal blog at al3x.net covers startups, programming and culture. Since 2008, 101 different Hacker News readers have linked it 145 times, most often “A Letter to a Young Programmer Considering a Startup (2013)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Rarely recommended · 5 of 40 sampled comments recommend it, 4 are critical?
Why HN links it
HN readers cite Alex Payne's posts on startups, VC, Twitter, scaling and productivity, mostly as support for their own points. Single commenters call individual posts great, nice or worth reading.
- Recommended for · 5 comments
- a great writeup, a nice article, a nice set of links, a less sensationalized counterpoint, a read before a job offer
- Criticised for · 4 comments
- one commenter: overly pessimistic; one: assumes one mode is universal; one: makes things up; one: thought policing
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Homepage of writer, investor, and erstwhile technologist Alex Payne.
Most-linked posts?
- A Letter to a Young Programmer Considering a Startup (2013)7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2013-09-11
- How Not To Sell Software in 20124 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2012-02-29
- Alex Payne Joins Jacobin Magazine's Advisory Board4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2015-03-04
- The Case Against Everything Buckets3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-09-21
- Staying Healthy and Sane At a Startup3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-09-07
- Solving The Hacker News Problem3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-02-22
- What Is and Is Not a Technology Company3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-08-07
- Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-01-16
- Alex Payne — In Which I'm Not Alone3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2009-12-17
- Node and Scaling in the Small vs Scaling in the Large3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-07-27
What Hacker News says?
To anyone reading this after the discussion took place, there is a follow-up by al3x here where he clarifies his position: http://al3x.net/2011/03/18/not-a-waste.html
Comment linking /2011/03/18/not-a-waste.html
on “Entreporn, The Fallacy That Wastes Your Life”Submitted Letter To A Young Programmer Considering A Startup as a story · 643 points
HN discussionAny time I see something like this, I always think about writing a counterpoint. Then I realize it's been done by someone else. http://al3x.net/2009/10/04/so-youre-moving-to-san-francisco....
Comment linking /2009/10/04/so-youre-moving-to-san-francisco.html
on “What I wish I knew before moving to San Francisco”Submitted How Not To Sell Software in 2012 as a story · 466 points
HN discussionRelated: http://al3x.net/2012/02/29/how-not-to-sell-software-in-2012.... Wonder when companies will start to figure this out already?
Comment linking /2012/02/29/how-not-to-sell-software-in-2012.html
on “No way I am calling you for a price”Submitted Alone Together, Again as a story · 433 points
HN discussionI just remembered an article written by Alex Payne (al3x), former engineer at Twitter (and used to work in the API): http://al3x.net/2010/09/15/last-thing-about-twitter.html
Comment linking /2010/09/15/last-thing-about-twitter.html
on “Twitter to developers: no new Twitter clients”Submitted Solving The Hacker News Problem as a story · 407 points
HN discussionThis blog post sums up why I choose to live in Austin these days... and commute to SF a couple times a month for work. I just find SF overrated, crazy, dirty and unbalanced. This also reminds me a bit of al3x's post about San Francisco awhile ago... http://al3x.net/2009/10/04/so-youre-moving-to-san-francisco....
Comment linking /2009/10/04/so-youre-moving-to-san-francisco.html
on “San Francisco, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down”Submitted Dear Marc Andreessen as a story · 352 points
HN discussionMost of the article reads like a pr piece sugar-coating Marc and a16z, and the part about his wife is unapologetic celebrity gossip :). I also doubt that depictions of the workings of VC firms from this article should be taken at face value. To be fair, the author tries to ask some adversarial questions towards the end of the article, but for example Alex Payne's criticism (link: https://al3x.net/2014/06/17/dear-mar…
Comment linking /2014/06/17/dear-marc-andreessen.html
on “The Mind of Marc Andreessen”Submitted Staying Healthy and Sane At a Startup as a story · 254 points
HN discussionA bit off topic, but I'm wondering if anyone has any ideas about how to remember to do something like this? In specific, I mean as it relates to information management. E.g., a lot of things are solved problems for me, like using todo apps for todos, and some sort of "Everything bucket"[0] system for searching for information (per the link, I use the file system for this). But things like this, things you want to tr…
Comment linking /blog/2009/01/31/the-case-against-everything-buckets
on “How to make quitting your addiction easier”Submitted Moving On as a story · 216 points
HN discussionAgreed. Recommended reading to counter the entrepreneurial laissez-faire idealism, bombastic techno-optimism, and general Silicon Valley cheerleading: - Michael O. Church's latest: https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2015/07/18/technology-i... - Giles Bowkett on the decadence of the current consumer software industry with regard to QA: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2015/07/actually-no-stuff-u... See also his tak…
Comment linking /2013/12/18/bitcoin.html
on “Breaking Smart”Submitted The Very Last Thing I’ll Write About Twitter as a story · 213 points
HN discussionFor more info, here is a great writeup by Alex Payne on why he made a large donation to Jacobin and joined their board: https://al3x.net/2015/03/03/jacobin.html > Democratic socialist politics are my politics. I’m a socialist because I want to live in a just society. More than that, I want to live in a survivable society. The form of capitalism we live under does not present a viable future ecologically, economicall…
Comment linking /2015/03/03/jacobin.html
on “What Really Happened With the DNC’s “Datagate”?”Submitted Twitter's Alex Payne quits, heads onto something new. as a story · 213 points
HN discussionCorroborates a piece posted a few days ago on HN: http://al3x.net/2012/02/29/how-not-to-sell-software-in-2012.... Point #2 on the list: "Don’t make it hard for me to try your software. If I can’t play with a trial version or sandbox immediately, I’m moving on." Another piece of constructive criticism: promotional codes. I can't find the article now, but it argued lucidly that promotional codes are an obstacle to use…
Comment linking /2012/02/29/how-not-to-sell-software-in-2012.html
on “What happens after you interview at Y Combinator — and get rejected.”Submitted Node and Scaling in the Small vs Scaling in the Large as a story · 184 points
HN discussionI recently tried Natural Stress Relief (NSR) meditation per Alex Payne's suggestion ( http://al3x.net/2010/09/07/startup-health.html ). The technique requires carving out around twenty minutes for meditation twice a day (morning and evening). Even with a schedule as flexible as mine (i.e., extremely flexible), I found this virtually impossible to maintain; forty minutes a day may not sound like much, but it is, espe…
Comment linking /2010/09/07/startup-health.html
on “Changes to my life as a result of just four weeks of daily meditation”Submitted On Business Madness as a story · 157 points
HN discussionUsing Go (or Scala or Java or whatever) doesn't magically scale a large system. Scaling problems in large systems are rarely solved at the micro level, i.e. you don't "scale" by simply gaining the ability to run more operations in a single thread. This is always the problem with "language X is more scalable than Y" debates. From my experience scale has little to do with language, everything to do with how you use it…
Comment linking /2010/07/27/node.html
on “Open Sourcing Our Go Libraries (2014)”Submitted Not A Waste as a story · 155 points
HN discussionThe structural and core part of the issue gets muddled due to poor education/know-how among engineers (partly due to excellent marketing by VCs). See below an excerpt from Alex Payne's article at https://al3x.net/2013/05/23/letter-to-a-young-programmer.htm... " ... As a VC at a top-tier Sand Hill Road firm told me during a pitch several years ago when describing a conceptual feature in Simple that would let users ea…
Comment linking /2013/05/23/letter-to-a-young-programmer.html
on “An Engineer's View of Venture Capitalists (2001)”Submitted Bitcoin, Magical Thinking, and Political Ideology as a story · 152 points
HN discussionAlex Payne: https://al3x.net/2010/09/15/last-thing-about-twitter.html "Some time ago, I circulated a document internally with a straightforward thesis: Twitter needs to decentralize or it will die. "
Comment linking /2010/09/15/last-thing-about-twitter.html
on “Twitter, to Save Itself, Must Scale Back World-Swallowing Ambitions”Submitted On the iPad as a story · 143 points
HN discussionI've been doing Natural Stress Relief for about a month now, after reading about it on Alex Payne's post about staying healthy while doing a startup: http://al3x.net/2010/09/07/startup-health.html It's not only easy to do but I also found the scientific research comforting because I'm an atheist that never really warmed up to some of the other more mysticism-based methods.
Comment linking /2010/09/07/startup-health.html
on “Buddhism and Happiness: Sitting Quietly, Doing Something”Submitted Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms as a story · 136 points
HN discussion
