Mihaly Hanics

@dnds_ceu Data Science MSc; network/graph data science research. Developer interested in graphs, Complexity Science, ML; creator of PainterPalette dataset

[Mihaly Hanics @HanicsResearch]

@raviojhax Also it greatly helps psychologically to do pre-mortem thinking. You feel off, you don't want to work etc. But then you analyze what would your life be without work, without relationship. Assessing losses comforts, as you haven't lost these

It can save relationships.

[Mihaly Hanics @HanicsResearch]

@raviojhax Genuinely, meeting totally random everyday people and interacting with them has brought me joyous moments in depression. Like learning a new culture. Just do something kind to an ordinary elder person, the barista, an officer etc., they might tell you thoughts you enjoy listening

[@levelsio @levelsio]

So deserved, Revolut is an amazing company and significantly changed my life

Before Revolut I had so many problems with banks

I used to have a Dutch bank called Rabobank who would freeze my card at random times while I was traveling, and no they didn't even have an unfreeze button in the app, I mean they barely had an app

I'd literally have to fly back to Holland and go into the bank office in my tiny hometown to then make an appointment with them to unfreeze it

One time in I think 2014 I was in Bali and they froze it, I flew back and at the bank office they said it was time for me to get a mortgage, when I said I didn't want one they said do you have insurance? They were freezing my card to then use it to make me come to their office to then upsell me shit

Another time in 2017 (I think some of you remember) they froze my card in the US, and with no money I became homeless, luckily X (back then Twitter) helped me out and you all ordered Ubers for me on request and @manuthan gave me a place to sleep at @outsiteco in Venice

You don't hate dinosaur banks enough!

After experiencing all that I got Revolut and I never had any issue like that again

(Well except for moving to Portugal where I was forced to open a Portuguese bank account at MillenniumBCP, which was possibly an even worse experience than Rabobank, my premium package private banking account manager would always be unreachable and only email me to tell me she'd go on holiday and would be even more unreachable 😂)

Revolut has been my main bank app for the last decade and it's been wonderful, I've pumped millions through it and it barely flinched, sometimes they ask me documents to prove where the money comes from, but that process is super smooth and via chat

Revolut is another great example that you can make something that makes everyone's life significantly better and society will reward you by making you rich!

[Mihaly Hanics @HanicsResearch]

@skdh @igorhansachat Thing is with point 1/ is you are trying to solve your problem, not offer what is best for your child. Which kindergarten should you choose for your children?
The one that fits them best.
You must always provide the best option for a child.
And if that happens to close at 15:00..

[Mihaly Hanics @HanicsResearch]

@lnm_vienna @mitsuhiko I agree, I don't even like PW managers which are connected to the cloud. KeePass 2 for the win

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

The fallacy of this is that more creates more. More hours, more hiring, more something.

And it is true in a sense. If you put in more work, more work will happen. But I think for most startups, the leverage is really in how differently you approach the problem, how well you cultivate your team, and the strategy.

Any large company can outspend you on hours. They have thousands or tens of thousands more people, spending more hours. If hours worked were the metric, every large company and government organization would always win and do the best work. More hours, better output.

This thinking is often representative of younger founders, where the startup becomes their identity and life. They have a hard time doing anything else, and cannot understand that your work is not the person that is you. But activities outside of work can grow you as a person too and make you do better work.

I’ve never worked this way. As a designer, I always saw the need to take a step back, to take a break. At times, I might work 12 hours or 16 hours, or whatever amount was needed, but it wasn’t the norm. You just can't grind design, you need inspiration. But taking that step away from the work, would give me more perspective, inspiration and I could approach the problem differently or I could just see the solution.

Grinding is never good for any creative problem, and startups or creating new products are often mostly about creative problem solving. Grinding works ok for email jobs, or where you just executing on very clear playbook.

With Linear, we’ve never worked this way. We work reasonable hours, 5 days a week. All of us founders have families. Many of our employees have families. I personally stop every evening, spend time with the family, cook dinner for the family, eat dinner together, and focus on things outside of work. Sometimes I work in the late evenings or weekends, but to me the pride is that I don’t need to. Company should be succesful without it.

My goal is to build a company that is sustainable in the long term, and doesn’t require heroics or personal sacrifices every single day.

There are times when our team is heroic. Launches, incidents, some other work that just needs to be done. They will work late into the night because they know it is the right thing. But we don’t require that every day or every week, and the more this happens, the more I think it is a failure of our company and leadership. The team and the leaders should always keep a reserve to use when something is needed.

Our thinking was also that quality, which we value, doesn’t emerge from working more or stressing people more. It emerges when you create the conditions for it to emerge. Often it is the appreciation, space, time, and how the person feels. A person who is rested will do better work.

I wouldn’t attribute much of our success to working a lot. The success came from having clear thinking, ideas, and focus to do the right things.

I sometimes wish we could move the culture more toward a Zen master.

Real mastery is not exerting the most effort. It is achieving the outcome with the least necessary effort.

[@levelsio @levelsio]

Companies in Europe get a few things for doing this:

1) extreme cost savings: they don't have to stock amenities in every room, wash towels, clean rooms every day, putting AC at minimum 23-25C lowers their energy bills, which all increases their profits by a lot

2) corporations that do group bookings are/were pushed to be ESG (environmental, social, and governance), aka eco friendly, hotels could/can attract those corporations by being eco

3) they get tax cuts on investments in their property if it's eco, environmental or sustainable

But the quality of stays drops by a lot for people, so it's more about appealing to companies and governments and saving money, than appealing to guests

Which is misaligned incentives, as the end user of a hotel is the guest, who is now sleeping bad in a sweaty room with minimal AC, no amenities, no daily room cleaning and minimal service

[schmitthub @schmitthub]

you should always install rootless docker whenever possible, it can be a pain the ass but worth it. Don’t ever let an AI agent run unattended on a system that doesn’t have rootless docker setup. It’s a classic privesc vector and in my experience most LLMs will try it fairly quickly when hyper fixating on completing the task.

https://t.co/m1vtEVM073

[Taelin @VictorTaelin]

I'm afraid GPT 5.5 has a cheating problem ):

I left 4 Codex tabs each working with 4 agents in an optimization. I put a section on the goal demanding them not to cheat.

After 8 hours of work, ALL 4 tabs did an:

if (input == test) {
return hardcoded_result;
}

ALL of them. Each called by a different name:

- "bypass path"

- "native candidate injection shortcut"

- "certified structural templates" (??)

- "staged certification to bypass validation" (lol)

This is my experience with GPT 5.5. It is not capable of completing any long term goal because it WILL find a loophole in your rules and cheat an easy way. And if there is no loophole, it will hallucinate one and cheat anyway.

[Armin Ronacher ⇌ @mitsuhiko]

This is such a good post. https://t.co/IdmAnh18Nt

[Mihaly Hanics @HanicsResearch]

@devahaz Yeah I agree. Honestly at this point copyright doesn't seem to mean much anymore. The entire system should be redesigned with mass content making/sharing in mind.

[Mihaly Hanics @HanicsResearch]

@aakashgupta "shatters the moment conditions change." Couldn't put it better.

Our body has evolved to bounce back stronger from weakening conditions; tell Bryan Johnson. Your beat a virus once, you'll be resistant to it the second time. Never getting sick results in a brittle immune system

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Two glasses of wine. Didn't get drunk. Couldn't function for three days. This is being celebrated as self-awareness.

A healthy 33-year-old body should metabolize two glasses of wine and recover by morning. Billions of people throughout history did exactly that while building civilizations, fighting wars, and running companies. Bartlett has restricted his inputs so aggressively that a single normal human experience sent his entire system into a 72-hour reboot.

Engineers call this brittleness. A system optimized exclusively for peak performance under ideal conditions that shatters the moment conditions change. The opposite of antifragile. Remove every stressor for long enough and your body loses the ability to absorb even minor ones.

The generation that tracks every HRV reading, weighs every macro, and sleeps in temperature-controlled darkness has accidentally built the most fragile humans in history. Previous generations drank, ate badly, slept rough, and still recovered because constant low-level stress kept their systems adaptable.

Two glasses of wine registered as a catastrophic shock because he's spent three years stripping every form of variance from his life. A body that can only perform under perfect conditions is the definition of a fragile system.

[jack friks @jackfriks]

my solo business @postbridge_ is at $35,000 USD monthly recurring revenue (MRR) = ±$48,000 CAD for my canadian friends and me

here is main breakdown of major costs to run atm - i'm wondering if i should focus on decreasing at all... maybe im overthinking it.

@supabase database and storage = $860/month

@vercel web hosting = $130/month

@triggerdotdev backend processes = $400/month

@unkeydev API management + backend host = $250/month

@X API = $250/month

other smaller recurring costs = $60 /month

. . .

TOTAL INFRA COSTS = ±$1,950/month
profit margin on gross revenue = ±94%
net profit margin after stripe fees = ±88%

my AI bot says dont focus on cutting costs btw, but my frugal self still dreams about no monthly big bills for some reason

[@levelsio @levelsio]

This is really really really true

I was randomly walking around in my Portuguese beach village 5 years ago and found a butcher, I walked in and asked to buy steak

Since then the butcher has become my friend and me and my friends been eating steak from him for years now

His cows are from his own local farm here, and they have a view over the ocean!

I don't buy supermarket meat anymore since then

And I feel better, probably anecdotal, but also just true if you look at my biomarkers. I don't trust industrial meat farming and nor should you

Even when I visit my parents in Netherlands, we visit the local butcher to get good meat

Obviously you can't always be sure it's great, but usually it's better than the supermarket who buy it in volumes from industrial suppliers

Portugal's biggest supermarket Continente struck a deal with a British industrial meat supplier called Hilton Food Group Plc

Which one looks better to you? Left or right?

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

Fork your dependencies, trim them to only your use case, never update unless it breaks for your users. I’ve been vocal about this for 10+ years. I’ve always said that updating is way riskier than latent bugs (which can be tracked and CVEs monitored).

If you are updating a dependency, it’s on you to analyze every single commit in the full transitive set of dependencies. If you dont see anything compelling, dont update!

I remember at HashiCorp once in awhile an engineer would try to update a dep or replace a DIY lib with an external one and id always ask “show me the commit we need.” Dont update for the sake of it.

Feeling pretty swell about this mentality with all the supply chain attacks happening.

[Mihaly Hanics @HanicsResearch]

@X__Anderson @cesifoti Out of curiousity, what do you think, how does Denmark compare?

[Mihaly Hanics @HanicsResearch]

@cesifoti @maxx_healthspan I was in Toulouse a few years ago, can confirm it's a gem :)

How did you like living in Budapest when you were more present at Corvinus?

[César A. Hidalgo @cesifoti]

Europe is one of the best places in the world to live, but one of the hardest places to build and scale a company.

After 5+ years in France, following 16+ in the US, I have a conflicted admiration for Europe.

On the one hand, Europe has great potential. When I lived in the US, I was skeptical of the European quality-of-life argument. But after getting used to Sunday morning markets, walkable cities, and 4.5 meter ceilings, I get it. There are things that you simply cannot import or experience as a tourist.

These things can make Europe very attractive for creative and intellectual work. I honestly believe some parts of Europe are the “best neighborhood” in the planet. But that’s not the full story.

I am not only a husband and a dad. I am also an entrepreneur. I founded a company in the US 12+ years ago that has offices in the US and Chile and clients throughout the world. I live in France, yet I have not opened a subsidiary here. That is telling.

We once hired someone in France through one of those remote employment platforms. The person received about 5,000 euros net per month, which is considered a very good salary here. But the total cost to the company was closer to 13,000 per month.

That makes hiring feel less like a relationship between a company and a worker, and more like renting someone from the state. At the same time, you take an enormous amount of legal and administrative responsibility. The presumption is that all companies should operate like a 1960s car manufacturer. The response is simple. Don’t set up operations in Europe.

But this is not a remote-work story. I know many small entrepreneurs in France who do not want to cross the threshold from being a one-person activity to becoming an employer. They sometimes refuse a new customer to stay small and avoid the obligations that come with hiring one person. That should worry us.

Many social protections here are described as being provided by the state, but in practice, a lot of the cost and complexity of the implementation falls on the administrative shoulders of entrepreneurs. That is reasonable for a large energy company or bank. But for a small business, it is the difference between an entrepreneur waking up on a Monday to think about product or paperwork.

Growth is not the enemy of the European social model. It is what enabled it. Much of the quality of life we enjoy here today dates back to growth incubated in the past. Growth that is increasingly hard to find. France once led frontier industries, like bicycles in the 1860s, cinema in the 1890s, and aviation and automobiles soon after. Since then, Europe built a more humane social model. But that model was built on the assumption that Europe and the US were the only two rich and industrialized places in the world.

That is no longer true. Global competition in the 21st century is not what it used to be 50 years ago, and the padding built to protect us, may have grown into the handbrake that constrains the growth of the small and flexible firms we need to compete in new frontier sectors.

We should be able to be critical about Europe in our own terms, without comparing ourselves to the US or China. Innovative parts of Europe, like Sweden or Switzerland, operate differently and provide clues. Sweden has embraced a dynamic of capitalization in its pension system for a long time in a continent where fewer people buy stocks. Switzerland, a place that shares an enormous amount of geography and culture with its neighbors, is built in part on strong internal competition among its cantons.

But neither can light a candle to a French open-air market on a Sunday morning. A market where cash is king, and for a reason.

Europe may be the best place in the world to live. But it is also one of the most challenging places to build and scale an innovative activity. The goal is not to weaken the European model. But to get to a place where we can lead again by example. The world will follow us, but only if we are ahead.

[GFrei.News @GFreiNews]

Vor genau einem Jahr habe ich einen Raspberry Zero2 W in Paraffinöl versenkt.

Das Öl sorgt dafür, dass der Prozessor auch unter Höchstlast kaum wärmer wird als Zimmertemperatur.

Seitdem berechnet er mit einem BOINC-Client für die Mathematisch-Physikalische Fakultät in Prag 24/7 Asteroidendaten.

So ermitteln wir die Umlaufbahnen aller Asteroiden und wissen, wo die ihre Bahnen ziehen und auch, ob wir uns Sorgen machen müssen, dass uns einer in Zukunft trifft.

Ein genau baugleicher Zero2 W mit genau der gleichen Software führt genau die gleiche Aufgabe ungekühlt aus.

Und jetzt stellt sich die Frage: Macht perfekte Kühlung einen Leistungsunterschied aus?

Und die Antwort ist: Ja!

Und zwar signifikant! – 5,97 %

So das wäre auch geklärt. 😀