The Startup (Medium)
medium.com/swlh · Group blog · on HN since 2015
The Startup was a Medium publication with articles from many authors on programming, startups, and technology.
What HN saysCommenters link it for individual technical posts, such as a classic queuing theory post on FIFO versus LIFO, RISC vs CISC, and Godot GUI apps.
1.2KHN people shared it
236linked it in comments
1.9Kstories submitted
12Kstory points
3 months agolast shared
2015people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot14 people · 565 points · first shared 2020 · 250 comments on HN
- 2How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds – From Google’s Design Ethicist10 people · 10 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 3The Secret Apple M1 Coprocessor7 people · 163 points · first shared 2021 · 104 comments on HN
- 4How I got a game on Steam without anyone from Valve ever looking at it7 people · 111 points · first shared 2016 · 32 comments on HN
- 5Why Let’s Encrypt is a bad idea6 people · 17 points · first shared 2019 · 5 comments on HN
- 6How to Hire6 people · 12 points · first shared 2016 · 1 comments on HN
- 7People used to love Google: what happened?6 people · 6 points · first shared 2019 · 2 comments on HN
- 8Accounting for User Growth6 people · 6 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN
- 9We’re lucky Mark Zuckerberg is in charge5 people · 14 points · first shared 2018 · 2 comments on HN
- 10Flutter vs. Native vs. React-Native: Examining Performance5 people · 14 points · first shared 2020 · 2 comments on HN
- 11What Does RISC and CISC Mean in 2020?5 people · 6 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 12Understanding the agpl the most misunderstood license 86fd1fe912755 people · first shared 2020
- 13YC, not Lambda School, is unbundling education4 people · 124 points · first shared 2019 · 100 comments on HN
- 14Unsplash 4.04 people · 34 points · first shared 2016 · 2 comments on HN
- 15Alternative Funding Calculus: A Quant Comparison of Tiny, Indie, and Earnest4 people · 34 points · first shared 2019 · 6 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
cmrdporcupine · 2026-06-11
Reminds me of this other queuing theory blogpost classic https://medium.com/swlh/fifo-considered-harmful-793b76f98374
TLDR LIFO (stack, not queue) is often a better choice for many workloads, despite violating our sense of fairness.
swozey · 2023-08-04
Hmm. By tooling are you referring to things like jq and other "uncommon" cli/tui apps I use to work against a code base locally? I think that's what you mean.
One of the best practices when using docker-compose to develop is actually to mount your code base as a volume. This lets you modify the code locally without requiring a complete rebuild of the container each time code is modified.
You might have to no-hup a service or run it not as pid1 (init container or supervisord) so it can restart without killing the container but that depends on the work being done.
I'm trying to find a good example to show you but I'm not finding much. If you have a medium account this might be decent, I don't have one but it starts off going through the process https://medium.com/swlh/tutorial-how-to-use-docker-volumes-to-code-fas…
cachvico · 2023-06-18
Saved this great article from a couple of years ago, https://medium.com/swlh/what-does-risc-and-cisc-mean-in-2020-7b4d42c9a…
cpeterso · 2023-02-06
The Godot IDE is itself developed in Godot, according to https://medium.com/swlh/what-makes-godot-engine-great-for-advance-gui-…
flyingsky · 2022-11-07
This blogpost by a self-taught engineer at Uber gives a framework for deciding what to blog about that I really resonate with.
"As a rule of thumb, any topic that passes any of the following litmus tests is a good candidate for a blog post or conference talk:
1. The most senior engineer you know would find the information and subject matter compelling.
2. People who read the post think: “Wow, I can’t believe they managed to <something really hard or difficult to figure out>. I really wish we had someone like that who could help us with <thorny problem>”.
3. The subject matter is deep in a way that readers are unlikely to be able to obtain the same information anywhere else."
https://medium.com/swlh/from-coding-bootcamp-graduate-to-building-dist…
socialdemocrat · 2022-08-09
One unusual alternative you may not have thought about is using Godot Game Engine. Before dismissing it, consider this: Godot engine is shockingly small for what it does. The download is about 30-40 MB. The GUI designer tool is second to none, and you can make highly interactive advanced GUIs using a language that looks very much like Python called GDScript. It is very quick to learn.
It does make GUI which are native to the platform but you get a small native binary which renders OpenGL.
Is Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot the Future? https://medium.com/swlh/what-makes-godot-engine-great-for-advance-gui-…
throw1234651234 · 2022-07-26
Same problem. Someone I used to work with wrote an article about it and you run into the same problem with A/B tests / canary deployments / etc - need to account for different DB schemas:
https://medium.com/swlh/worthwhile-modern-deployment-strategies-a-full…
petethepig · 2022-07-22
There's not much about it online. They do mention it in the docs, they call this "prefix compression" [0], so you can search for that. This article describes it [1], although it is somewhat high level.
They only use this for indexes. It works really well for internal mongo ids (they all start with timestamps if I remember correctly). It also works well for compound indexes. Pro tip: for compound indexes always go from low-cardinality attribute to high-cardinality attribute to get the best results from prefix compression (it's also good for speed of queries).
[0] https://www.mongodb.com/docs/manual/reference/glossary/#std-term-prefi…
[1] https://medium.com/swlh/mongodb-indexes-deep-dive-understanding-indexe…
PainfullyNormal · 2022-06-18
Are you talking about this article[0]? That's interesting. I'll have to do some experiments with that. Thanks for sharing!
https://medium.com/swlh/what-makes-godot-engine-great-for-advance-gui-…
busymom0 · 2022-05-12
I don't think that's accurate. Seems like native apps have the best performance but Flutter comes a close second. React native on the other is much slower:
https://medium.com/swlh/flutter-vs-native-vs-react-native-examining-pe…
chrisMyzel · 2022-05-06
Interesting discussion. Trying to get to render high performance graphs in the browser and it’s a chore to find good libraries.
Found this article about advanced GUIs with godot https://medium.com/swlh/what-makes-godot-engine-great-for-advance-gui-…
lucraft · 2022-03-26
This is related, and has a couple examples down the bottom
https://medium.com/swlh/what-makes-godot-engine-great-for-advance-gui-…
mcswell · 2021-08-26
I'm sure it's koans like "Don’t underestimate the value of doing nothing, of just going along, listening to all the thing you can’t hear, and not bothering", or "Well, what I like best," and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called. (Excerpted from https://medium.com/swlh/12-winnie-the-pooh-philosophies-to-help-make-s…
Qwertious · 2021-06-27
>The other escape hatch is electron; which looks "web", but is even _more_ bloated, but at least it doesn't set off the scanners. Instead it just gobbles CPU cycles, memory, and is slow and horrid.
I keep wondering if something like Godot could win out in GUI-land. https://medium.com/swlh/what-makes-godot-engine-great-for-advance-gui-…
diplodocusaur · 2021-06-21
the best ELI5 for a ZKP I've found follows
[0] https://medium.com/swlh/a-zero-knowledge-proof-for-wheres-wally-930c21…
maga · 2021-04-20
WASM has its moments, as you can see in this[1] benchmark it outperforms JS and native addons on certain tasks.
Since the bottleneck with native addons is usually data copying/marshalling, and we have direct access to WebAssembly memory from the JavaScript side, using WebAssembly on this "shared" memory might become the best approach for computationally heavy tasks. I wrote about it a bit here[2].
[1] https://github.com/zandaqo/iswasmfast
[2] https://medium.com/swlh/structurae-1-0-graphs-strings-and-webassembly-…
blunte · 2021-03-11
This essay really sums up the greater problem and impact of the modern rent-seeking economy. It applies to domain parking, ticket scalping, mass property buying for holiday/airbnb renting, etc.
https://medium.com/swlh/the-economy-is-broken-rent-seeking-broke-it-c1…
chunkles · 2021-01-14
An article from earlier this year that's worth a read on this topic is on Medium titled, "Is making advanced GUI applications with Godot the future" by Eric Engheim
https://medium.com/swlh/what-makes-godot-engine-great-for-advance-gui-…
arooaroo · 2020-12-18
IntelliJ is great, PyCharm is good. But RubyMine is the one I’ve used daily for years and it’s a bit of a dog’s dinner and I think getting progressively worse over the years.
I’ve been summarising issues lately:
- https://andyroberts-uk.medium.com/rubymine-code-insights-or-distractio…
- https://medium.com/swlh/rubymine-more-distractions-part-2-24805fe337d0
tomerico · 2020-12-17
If you want to read more about how shady sellers abuse the system, and why it's so hard to deal with it, I recommend this well written medium article:
https://medium.com/swlh/unaccountable-chinese-retailers-threaten-ameri…
ivoecpereira · 2020-10-17
Thank you both! A Friend Link without Paywall :) https://medium.com/swlh/why-you-shouldnt-use-offset-and-limit-for-your… Let me know if you have any suggestions on it, would love to know about them!
One of the things I've learned is literally don't "impose" anything to your readers. What I've written is mainly cited by big sources (and I have included the sources in the article!), but people rather prefer to point the finger if they do not agree with you.
I believe the article title is a bit "imposing" on the reader, but so do are all the other "click-baity" titles we see everywhere, and in this case I am able to prove my point of view, being it through an explanation or a PoC that I do provide as well. But people are mean :)
geomagilles · 2020-10-16
Hi Andrew, I'm Zenaton's cofounder and you are right Temporal and Zenaton follow the same "workflow as code" pattern. I've written an article recently about it (https://medium.com/swlh/code-is-the-best-dsl-for-building-workflows-54… - Note that Zenaton is closed now (not enough commercial traction) and I'm working on a new open-source (well Common clauses) implementation of a workflow-as-code engine - similar to Temporal - but with different technical choices (cf. https://medium.com/@gillesbarbier/building-an-event-driven-orchestrati…
tlack · 2020-08-22
It all depends on the nature of your application. A video editor and a command line utility are so different!
Sounds like you already know the big players so I won't repeat them. Instead, here are some off-kilter ideas:
1. Casual use, general interest, notification-requiring, simple single-file data requirements, tolerant of desktop / mobile split sessions? Try making a chat bot for Telegram, FB, Discord, Slack..
2. Dynamic, visualization-focused UI with simple options that need to be tweaked interactively? Try Imgui[0] or Godot[1]
3. Scientific or data-centric stuff pulling in data from here and there, but meant for interactive exploration? Try Wolfram / Mathematica or an IPython notebook / GoogleColab
[0] https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/wiki/Software-using-dear-imgui
[1] https://medium.com/swlh/what-makes-godot-engine-great-for-advance-gui-…
Avamander · 2020-07-05
I recommend you check out the PineTime project and Lup Yuen Lee's tutorials. It might give a nice starting point.
https://github.com/lupyuen/pinetime-rust-mynewt
https://medium.com/swlh/sneak-peek-of-pinetime-smart-watch-and-why-its…
anigbrowl · 2020-06-28
Re-upping this blog post (sadly overlooked when first posted to HN) which asks the reasonable question 'why not just use Godot for general-purpose applications?'
https://medium.com/swlh/what-makes-godot-engine-great-for-advance-gui-…
aylmao · 2020-06-22
Having different shapes is also great for recognizing items quickly.
Sigh, here comes a trove of white-background icons to macOS. Relevant: https://medium.com/swlh/let-s-talk-about-white-app-icons-ce2e83b9eb86
tobiu · 2020-06-02
In case you want to jump into a lovely #opensource project and make an impact on the way UIs are getting created, now is the time.
Step1 => Follow the tutorial:
How to create a webworkers driven multithreading App — Part 1 (published by "The Startup" and officially selected by Medium into JS)
https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-create-a-webworkers-driven-multithreadi…
fwouts · 2020-02-06
A colleague of mine who I value as a good tech lead recently wrote some tips based on his experience: https://medium.com/swlh/two-lessons-youll-learn-in-your-first-year-as-…
He also just published another article about quality technical communication, which I'd highly recommend both you and your team read through: https://medium.com/@tpagram/a-guide-to-improving-your-technical-commun…
roywiggins · 2020-01-15
For extra fun, fill them up with polyglot files!
https://medium.com/swlh/polyglot-files-a-hackers-best-friend-850bf812d…
BenoitEssiambre · 2019-09-21
This was great.
I wrote some thoughts on a subset of what is discussed in this article, the knowledge moat:
How to Make a Good Secret Sauce:
https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-make-a-good-secret-sauce-8773cd0216ce?s…
And follow up: Product Market Crossfit: https://medium.com/@b.essiambre/product-market-crossfit-c09b019188f3?s…
I'm not sure I do a good job of laying out my thoughts. I'm interested in feedback.