Henry Yates

Co-founder

[Henry Yates @HPY]

I am going to watch this every morning before I start work.
"DO WHAT YOU CAN'T" via @dolectures
https://t.co/2kYhlha7ul

[Henry Yates @HPY]

@paulg In the late 90s it was KPMG's tagline: https://t.co/sU6A4bF347

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

Replit CEO Amjad Masad on the “most gangster story in Silicon Valley”

In September 2021, Replit founder Amjad Masad tweeted:

“The most gangster story in Silicon Valley is Steve Jobs buying Pixar for $5m, investing $50m, operating at a loss for a decade — so much so he had to cut personal checks every month to make payroll and somehow turning it around to exit for $7B to Disney.”

He expands on this in his interview on the My First Million podcast:

“The thing I like about the Steve Jobs story is when he was lost in the desert for 10 years. He was fired from Apple, and then he created two companies that were failing the whole time. NeXT Computer and Pixar were literally failing, and he was investing more and more of his own money. At that pace he was going to go broke, but he kept going for 10 years. How do you do that?”

Eventually the success of Toy Story, the first fully computer-animated feature film, helped make Pixar’s 1995 IPO one of the the most successful of the decade. And Apple used the NeXt operating system as the foundation for macOS. But both ventures took the better part of 10 years.

Interestingly, the 12 “wilderness years” between getting fired at Apple and coming back was the most pivotal period of Steve Jobs’s life. His work with Pixar and NeXT helped him grow into the leader capable of taking Apple to unimaginable heights when he returned.

Source: @myfirstmilpod @amasad (Dec 2024)

[Henry Yates @HPY]

@acadictive @RetraceSoftware Definitely. I'll find you on LinkedIn

[Henry Yates @HPY]

Today we're launching Retrace: the first reverse debugger built for production CPython applications.

Record a failing execution once. Replay it locally in VS Code. Step backwards from the crash to the cause.
@retracesoftware

[Henry Yates @HPY]

@thedavidprice Thanks David, that’s the direction we’re excited about. The first step is making production failures replayable. Once you can replay the exact execution, you can start giving agents the evidence they need to reason about what actually happened rather than guessing from logs.

[Henry Yates @HPY]

Six years of work from @retracenate and the team.

Open source preview, Apache 2.0. Python 3.11/3.12, Flask, Django, requests, psycopg2, threading.

GitHub: https://t.co/0FpWUzVB5W
Blog: https://t.co/O8gILUGBUJ

[Henry Yates @HPY]

With the recording, you can do something normal Python debuggers can't: start at the crash and step backwards.

Step Back. Reverse Continue. Inspect any value at any point in the recorded execution. All in VS Code.

[Henry Yates @HPY]

@adamdawood @RatheeJaisal @PitchandrunLDN @PitchandrunNYC @AmardeepSParmar Come join us next Thursday 🏃‍♂️🌱🍹 https://t.co/V8svqFUmVf

[Tom Preston-Werner @mojombo]

At @PWVentures, we've been quietly building AgentCribs, a private community of founders and hackers building custom agentic coding/business/marketing/etc setups and sharing wins and losses.

Now, we're opening up the community a bit with our first event on May 6 in San Francisco! I'll be sitting down for a fireside chat with Peter Levine (legendary @a16z investor who sat on our board at @GitHub for many years) to discuss the bleeding edge of AI ideas and realtime insights on where the market is headed.

The evening will also include an update from the core AgentCribs team, demos and discussion from people building with agents, and an invitation to participate in ongoing collaboration.

If you've been hacking on your own real-world agentic workflows, built your own harness, 10x-d Claude, or just want to know what the future looks like, you belong!

[Henry Yates @HPY]

@archaeologyart https://t.co/WIsDBqBBq9

[Henry Yates @HPY]

@L1AD Reminds me of that old joke.

AI engineers keep building a better and better AI, asking the same question: “Is there a God?”

Eventually, the AI answers: “There is now!”
Quoting @elonmusk

[Henry Yates @HPY]

@paulg @davidcrawshaw My dad's Omega. He was a private GP. In the 60s and 70s his patients from the Middle East gave him lots of watches. This was his favourite.

[Mr PitBull Stories @MrPitbull07]

The history books quietly bypassed is that Barack Obama, during the most pressure-saturated nights of his presidency, would retreat alone to the Treaty Room on the second floor of the White House residence — not to strategize, not to take calls, but to handwrite personal letters to ten ordinary American citizens every single night, a practice he maintained with almost monastic devotion across all eight years, selecting the letters himself from the 40,000 that arrived daily at the White House, and his longtime correspondence director Fiona Reese confirmed that Obama would often weep privately while reading certain letters, folding them carefully before writing responses so personally detailed and emotionally present that recipients frequently described the experience of receiving them as the most significant moment of their lives, with one Ohio steelworker writing back to say that Obama's letter had physically stopped him from making a decision that would have permanently altered his family's future. What makes this practice almost unbearably moving is the detail that surfaced later — Obama never used a computer for these letters, always a black felt-tip pen, always legal yellow paper first as a draft, always rewritten onto White House stationery by hand a second time, because he believed, as he told historian Doris Kearns Goodwin in a rare private conversation later recounted in her 2018 work, that the physical act of pressing pen to paper forced a quality of attention that typing simply could not replicate, a philosophy rooted in his years as a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago from 1992 to 2004 where he developed the conviction that democracy only functions when its leaders remain genuinely, uncomfortably close to the specific gravity of individual human suffering rather than processing it from behind the insulating distance of institutions and screens."

[Henry Yates @HPY]

@karpathy @Newaiworld_ 200 lines of code, millions of operations at runtime. The simplicity makes it beautiful. But the interesting questions are always in the execution.

[Thorstrike @rospigge60559]

I live in Sweden.
And I work more than half of my time in the United States.
I know both systems — not from headlines, but from daily life.
Sweden has a capitalist market economy.
Private ownership. Competition.
Global companies.
We also have social reforms: healthcare, paid parental leave, paid vacation, and social security.
This is not socialism.
This is not communism.
It’s capitalism with guardrails.
The market creates wealth.
Society prevents bad luck from becoming a life sentence.
Our freedoms are intact.
Our economy is competitive.
And no — this isn’t theory.
I live it.

[Henry Yates @HPY]

@GarettJones @paulg hard to square with UK school data.

Disadvantaged pupils from "MENAPT" backgrounds in London often have significantly higher Progress 8 scores than the White British working class.

If they are failing fiscally later, it’s not for lack of academic potential

[Tom Preston-Werner @mojombo]

New achievement! Preston-Werner Ventures (through which I did my angel investing) has become PWV™ (https://t.co/FJ7VGqwv3A) and I’m raising a venture fund targeting $100M to lead pre-seed and seed rounds in today’s most exciting software- and AI-driven companies.

[Matt Mazzeo @Mazzeo]

Saving this for when my 3 year old daughter goes out to raise venture capital

[Paul Graham @paulg]

In Venice you don't go to see the thing. You're in the thing.