I’m bootstrapping my company and my investments income/compounding basically paid me to do my own thing. Soul crushing work at tech company playing office bullshit (performative shit to get promotions and salary bumps) or just focus on doing something interesting I actually care about? I cared about the mission at my previous employers but day to day sucked the later stage the company went.
I’ll take funding if/when I need capital boost because it’s way more satisfying building from scratch. And my customers think it’s kinda cool and ofc AI helps me a lot for sure.
Imagine if I become the first person to do a solo billion dollar company lol. Me of all people, I would think that would be pretty hilarious.
hey man, first of all i empathize with your situation and wish you the best. What i say here is just my opinion, and since I don't know your exact situation this is just me trying to be helpful. if it isn't, feel free to ignore i mean no harm.
May I ask what interests you? And also, what do you see yourself doing in optimal (but realistic - don't give me you want to be Elon Musk or something) outcome?
if you're close with your parents, at your age I think you would probably want to be closer to them. i think being there for them as they get older is way more valuable than simply an economic improvement (unless it is magnitudes better, ofc).
what problems have you faced in your own country? do you have good friends around who might have various skills in similar situation or looking to do something different? maybe a gathering of imaginations and skills could result in something nice that you guys do and start small to keep busy and make money? for example, even offering your services via a consulting firm you form to people in foreign countries (USA, Canada, Euro the currency) could be good. If you get paid in foreign currency you could maybe kick the economic uncertainty bucket down the road.
but, if you do relocate to Europe i think you could look into getting cheap/free education there and improving your conditions. it is never too late to learn and do new things.
Here's the thing though, and with all due respect I say this as someone who has worked with offshore teams.
They were only as good as the input they were given. They rarely went above and beyond, and most of the time getting something "good enough" was challenging. Yes, time zones, cultural differences/attitudes, and their exposure/opportunities play a big role.
What I'm saying is that teams who had bad onshore employees got horrible results. Teams that had actual systems engineers and people who could architect systems usually got great results.
For example, we were building a bleeding edge (at the time) e commerce site for one of the largest companies in the entertainment space. I made sure to work with the best people I knew at the company to design the system from the ground up. Then, we made sure the actual "functional" pieces were digestible and written plainly that we didn't need to clarify words. Nor did we write a fucking 300 page technical document. We kept things simple and effective, and all the work was broken down into as atomic pieces as possible.
The end result was that we used a team distributed between Ukraine and India to build this in about 4 months. We'd do weekly sprints, and the team had great spirits too because we actually gave a fuck about them and ensuring their success. I'm sure they're used to being scapegoats because of some lazy fucks onshore.
Now I use agents daily and have great success. However, the whole "write a sentence and AI will do it for you" is obviously bullshit. I even asked HN why I got wrong results to test what people would respond (sorry for playing you) and as I predicted they blamed me thus proving that this broader sentiment that's so prominent by "thought leaders" is stupid as fuck. So, that's where we are.
People who can actually build great systems know that it requires careful planning, deep understanding, and ability to fill in the gaps.
You proxy those api calls yourself and have idempotency to cover you for those APIs that don’t have it. If you architect it right you won’t have more than a ms latency addition. You can avoid the race condition issues by using atomic records so if something else tries they’d see it’s in progress and exit.
This is exactly the approach I took. Proxy layer that:
- Uses atomic records (fence tokens) to prevent concurrent execution
- Checks external system first before retrying (the retrieval step)
- Records result for future lookups
The atomic records part is critical - I learned the hard way that just checking a DB flag isn't enough (process can freeze between check and execute, lease expires, another process takes over, both execute).
How do you handle the case where:
1. Process acquires atomic lock
2. Calls external API successfully
3. Process freezes before releasing lock
4. Lock expires, new process acquires it
5. New process calls API again → duplicate
Do you just accept this edge case (rare but possible)? Or is there a mitigation I'm missing?
yeah, this is a common edge case in this scenario and as you say it will be rare but possible.
however i don't think its that complicated (idk your system obv, so I could be off base) but i think your best bet is to not retry blindly and instead just query to see if already happened. If it already happened you're good and if not you handle it appropriately.
considering it will be rare i don't think handling it how i suggest it will affect you that badly. keep it simple should be your priority imo with these kinds of operations.
"Y'know, like, the thing is, like, y'know, here's the thing..."
I totally feel for people with speech pathologies or anxiety that makes it harder for them to communicate verbally, but how is this guy the public face of the company and doing all these interviews by himself? With as much as is at stake, I find it baffling.
My experience is completely the opposite. For generic, low-complexity CRUD tasks, Codex works fine. But when it comes to complex bug fixing, it completely fails, especially with middleware pipelines and complex authentication issues. Gemini also shines, codex is absolutely terrible for complex coding.
I’ve used Claude Code almost exclusively since its release. In the last week or two, I gave Codex a spin. So far, I’m impressed. It does seem to have reached parity. And, it doesn’t run out of tokens nearly as fast as the equivalent Claude plan.
I mean sure it might be wasteful (name one entity private or public that doesn’t suffer from assholes and corruption), but the quality of life here is far better than in Texas or any other state.
We have labor rights, environmental protection, hell even the ethical farming practices like how eggs are produced. Life here is objectively better for the people.
It’s obviously more expensive. There’s demand for people to live here. Even if some people leave more want to move here or wish they could. Shitting on California is 90% of the time some form of cope for many people. They know they could never make it here so the best they can do is complain about it from whatever **hole they’re in.
The major reason California is expensive isn't because of the things that make it nice to live here, it's because a faux-environmentalist love of sprawl and protection of single family zoning from denser, more sensible housing options for those that want them.
Instead, Californians with high incomes, but not enough to pay the outrageous price for ownership, pay outrageous rents to landlords that repackage unupdated 1970s starter homes at extreme luxury prices.
Once we stop letting landlords exploit productive labor by removing the regulatory capture, the quality of life will increase, merely through allowing more people to experience the higher quality of life. However, reversing that trend is proving extremely difficult, despite fairly widespread support among the voting population.
Single family zoning was implemented back in the days when California was a red state. California is still a very red state; there are more Republicans in California than most of the U.S. South combined.
Perhaps, but also it was Berkeley that invented single family zoning. There are some skeletons in the Progressive movement from a century ago, whether its eugenics or an idea of eliminating tenements, which enabled things like the destruction of the Urban Renewal movement in the following decades!
And for fixing the current housing problems, there are still a good chunk of Republican representatives in the state legislature and they are even more strident in defending zoning and keeping out apartments than the Democratic representatives. At the local level, though, I think that housing issues are an axis that is pretty non-partisan, with only small amounts of partisan influence on the beliefs of people. I think the YIMBY groups have tried really really hard to keep it from becoming partisan, because even if it does become a partisan issue and move some deeply Democratic places, it would then cement Republican places against the issue and it would be nearly impossible to make overall progress on the issue.
I don’t disagree with what you are saying. But the rise in spending per capita, even if you adjust for inflation or population growth or other factors, doesn’t make sense.
I agree the demand drives up certain costs like housing. But those are in the private markets. But I don’t understand is what the state government and local governments are spending all of the money on. And there are certainly some prominent wasteful programs such as the high-speed rail project or various programs for homelessness. I expect there’s more of those kinds of waste.
In the end, I think simply giving people money is an effective way to make society better. I’m not against the taxation as much as the low return for the additional spending that has happened in the last few decades.
It looks like the increase in spending has come from expansion of Medicaid, K-12 education, housing programs and homelessness programs.
I can't speak to the Medicaid expansion or K-12 funding that much, but I do know that the spending on housing programs have been a boondoggle, mostly to fund more first-time purchasers chasing after the same fixed supply of housing, driving up prices even more. And the homelessness problem is created by the refusal to allow housing to be built. Even the supposed successes, like SB 79, have been minor, and not allowed much more building at all. And in more conservative places like Southern LA, state laws attempting to force cities to permit more housing have been met with extreme resistance, even for the small gains that the state laws make.
For K-12 spending, that's been a disaster ever since Prop 13 gutted property tax systems and forced the state to step in to make up the difference. And Prop 13 is at the core of the housing problem as well, incentivizing underuse of land by giving such massive tax breaks to those who stay in a massive house after they have an empty nest (mostly fixed very recently), and inducing severe tax penalties to those who would like to stay in the same location but build a bunch more housing (like Greece's polykatoikias, which solved Athen's severe housing crunch...).
And high housing costs means that all labor is far more expensive than it would be otherwise, which makes building the housing expensive, which makes it difficult to expand the workforce to build housing, etc. etc. etc. Lack of housing is at the core of all rising costs in California, and the bad policies such as Libertarian Prop 13 and NIMBYs are most of it.
I’ll take funding if/when I need capital boost because it’s way more satisfying building from scratch. And my customers think it’s kinda cool and ofc AI helps me a lot for sure.
Imagine if I become the first person to do a solo billion dollar company lol. Me of all people, I would think that would be pretty hilarious.
That’s how I thought about it at least.
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