megalomanu

I'm French and my son's name is Camille. It was exclusively a masculine name until the 19th century (Camille Pissarro, Camille Desmoulins, etc.) then gradually became feminine. By the 80s and 90s, it was overwhelmingly used for girls, but now it's pretty evenly split again, with boys starting to slightly outnumber girls. What i find fascinating is that i don't really like Camille as a girl's name but i love it for a boy! It conjures up completely different images in my mind.

There are many other popular unisex names in France right now: Charlie, Sacha, Lou,...

Thank you for your comment. I didn't intend to tell a feel good story. I'm just a seed startup founder, I'm not DHH! I'm just sharing a personal story that helps me navigating into the storm. There is no message here, I guess I hadn't been clear enough.

He just vibe-repaired cars!

Joke aside, it was not shoeing horses but also working on the carts, etc. Probably bikes too. So at least he reused some mechanical skills, and probably tools, he already had. Only the engine was really new.

And many people living in small villages back then had basic knowledge in many disciplines, including electricity. When you had a farm for instance, you needed to be able to repair yourself anything.

Author here! Thanks for all the comments. This post isn't meant as a lesson or a judgment, something to tell "just shut up and adapt like my ancestor did". The situation is hard, and I wasn't trying to dismiss anyone's anxiety. No one wants to hear "you'll be fine" when something bad just happened.

It's mostly a personal story. You can see it as a kind of tribute to a great-great-grandfather I never met, partly because I'd never heard a story like it before. It's banal but still a big adventure in the family. I find it fascinating that he grew up in a completely different world from mine and still felt some of the same doubts and anxieties I do today. And I'm really proud of him, because his "pivot" let my family stay in the village instead of maybe leaving to work in factories in the city. My father loved his job, and in a way that's thanks to him.

On my end, becoming a dad didn’t make me less ambitious, just more focused.

I was vp of engineering at a Series A startup when my kid was born. It was a challenging job, but one that felt increasingly devoid of any meaning for me (maybe also because I'd been there for 5 years). I was compensating by working on side-projects at night and on weekends. I even wrote a novel that took me 4 years to finish.

Then my son was born, and nights and weekends disappeared! Suddenly, all my non-father activity was dedicated to a job that was boring me more and more. So what did i do? I started a company, so I could decide what to work on during the day!. Basically, I took a side project and put it at the center of my working life. Now my days feel rewarding enough that when I disconnect, I can completely devote myself to my son and my wife and ignore everything else.

Of course, I don’t have side projects anymore. I barely even have hobbies: I completely stopped watching movies, which used to be the love of my life. I read books before bed and on the subway, and work out occasionally to stay sane. My life = my startup, my son, my wife. That’s pretty much it.

But I feel much more balanced than before, when I was always chasing something.

Congrats to the team! Fantastic editor, it really brought me joy after years of VSCode/Cursor. I love how it's crafted, you can feel the soul behind each decision.

What I love:

- the speed, of course

- the high consistency between features, tabs, and panes, while Cursor looks like a crumbly assemblage of plugins. At first I was worried about the lack of plugins, but Zed made me realize you don't need many

- the visual elegance: the padding, the proportions... It reminds me of the best of JetBrains (though I haven't used their products in years). It feels closer to the IDEs I used in the past (for Java or C#), in the sense that it seems to encompass everything you need, without the heaviness.

- the numerous keyboard shortcuts, often displayed visibly, which makes them easier to remember

- the transparency of their roadmap and their velocity: now that we finally have the vertical git diff as promised, my doubts are gone!

Truly one of my favorite pieces of dev software in 15 years.

Looks fantastic! Growing up on RollerCoaster (+Transport) Tycoon and SimCity myself, this is exactly the kind of project I'd dream about building, if only I had your dedication!

Never tried coderabbit, just because this is already good enough with Claude Code. It helped us to catch dozens of important issues we wouldn't have caught. We gave some instructions in the CLAUDE.md doc in the repository - with including a nice personalized roast of the engineer that did the review in the intro and conclusion to make it fun! :) Basically, when you do a "create PR" from your Claude Code, it will help you getting your Linear ticket (or creating one if missing), ask you some important questions (like: what tests have you done?), create the PR on Github, request the reviewers, and post a "Auto Review" message with your credentials. It's not an actual review per se but this is enough for our small team.

It is for generating a big nested JSON, quite complex from a business standpoint (lots of different business concepts). We didn't have good results with simple models.

We just tested magistral-medium as a replacement for o4-mini in a user-facing feature that relies on JSON generation, where speed is critical. Depending on the complexity of the JSON, o4-mini runs ranged from 50 to 70 seconds. In our initial tests, Mistral returned results in 34–37 seconds. The output quality was slightly lower but still remain acceptable for us. We’ll continue testing, but the early results are promising. I'm glad to see Mistral prioritizing speed over raw power, there’s definitely a need for that.

I highly recommend trying Qobuz! Artists are paid more, the catalog is rich and comprehensive (I recommend to early users who might have felt a lack of content to give it another try, as it's now much richer), most albums are available in Hi-Res Audio, the UI is nice, there is no fluff (just music, nothing more), and most importantly, content is curated, with many articles written by critics and journalists, artist interviews, and, for each album, a small review or a piece of text informing about the album's significance. Compared to the awesome but "industrial" recommendation system of Spotify, this is something more personal and curated which, in my opinion, better helps to understand some music genres.

If any French people happen to come across this thread, I recommend visiting the Observatoire des Baronnies Provençales. I went there this summer and really loved the experience. We observed various astronomical elements (the sun, planets, galaxies, stars, etc.) from 2pm to 2am. We used different instruments, from a large dome telescope to smaller ones, as well as a connected telescope for taking pictures—the eVscope, an amazing piece of hardware and software—and infrared binoculars. We also did other activities, like identifying an exoplanet with the astrophysicist in residence. Highly recommended for amateur astronomers. Places like these are unfortunately quite uncommon in France.

I live in Paris, the city with the most art house cinemas in the world. There are so much of them I have a hard time following what is showed every week. I made a simple crawler that looks at these cinemas and sends a digest of the week schedule by email, listing only the movies that went out one more than year ago (because these theaters also show recent films). Nothing fancy here but I use it every week.

Beautiful, congrats! This reminds me the final shot of Playtime (not a spoiler! at 2:07: https://youtu.be/anvhVINSFnE?t=127 )

I've developed my first video game ever in 2020 thanks to Pico-8 (and thanks to the COVID and the lockdown, too) I was impressed by how it was easy to learn. Once you understood that everything revolves around a big gameplay loop, you can really just focus on what matters (gameplay, art). I like that it encourages trade-offs and workarounds. I've never felt blocked or stuck too long.

Also, as a software engineer, I wasn't afraid of the development part of the game, but I was very skeptical of my capacities to draw characters or levels. Pico-8 helped me to achieve something without feeling ashamed. Because I knew that I was, by nature, limited in my sprites, it helped me releasing my inhibitions and drawing as if I was a 5 years-old boy proud of his drawings. Same thing for the music and sounds.

Another cool thing is that even when writing code, I didn't feel like I was doing the same thing as during the day. Just writing code, in a closed and stable environment, with a very modest API, and finally the ability to release and convert your game into a JS file in just one command is infinitely satisfying. After a day spent struggling with CloudFormation on AWS, it was a blessing!

Hello HN! Author here. I wasn't expecting so much comments! I would have chosen a less provocative title if I had known :)

Just to clarify: I founded a company a few years ago from a side project I had started three years before, and this year I released two projects, so I can say that I love side projects. I simply regret this tendency to start so many shallow side projects (which are little more than tutorials) just to build a portfolio instead of focusing on creating something really substantial, or something that at least you really like. It's a waste and an illusion to think that it could help to be hired. I know too many developers stuck into this pipe dream.

I must say I'm not as virtuous as you :)

I agree, but the main reason that I'm using Qwant myself is that non-English results on DuckDuckGo are not good at all. Qwant results are pretty convincing today, much better than a few years ago when it looked like an opportunist product.

The only thing I'm really missing from Google is the integration with Maps, Google Search is so convenient for finding a good restaurant, shop or bar around you. There were alternatives in the past (like Yelp) but Google killed them all, at least in France.

Love it! Really neat.

Even if landscapes are very urban, I like this feeling of driving that I don't really have anymore since I'm living in Paris. I'm often playing to Euro Truck Simulator just for getting out of the narrow streets and watching the horizon.

If you like videos like this, I recommend you this YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCK3HAx-5XIRrWzpFziOQY0Q The highways, the acceleration effect, and the acid jazz music will give Ridge Racer memories to some of you!

Hi,

A few weeks ago, I shared on the quarantine side-projects thread my idea of a recommendation engine based on famous directors tastes (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23185673 ). At this time, I was procrastinating, but your warm messages motivated me to complete it, so thank you HN!

I had for a long time this idea of a movie recommendation engine built not on the tastes of people like you or peoples you follow but on favorite film director tastes. I became a film buff with starting watching Tarantino movies, then watching movies of directors that influenced Tarantino (Melville, Godard, Woo), and so on. It helped me to become aware of all the phases, periods in film history and to develop a critical approach to movies. Conversely, I'm often frustrated by movies recommendation systems today. Most of the recommendations I get are often the same, too out of context, too cold. This is why I made this small website, to generate recommendations based on the favorite movies of the directors you like the most.

To use it, you just have to export your Letterboxd profile to CSV ("Settings" > "Export your data") and import it here: http://theylovepictures.com/

It'll generate you recommendations like this: http://theylovepictures.com/recommendation/33241372-cc7e-4fe... (they're mine!)

I also develop a Directors section, where you can access to a "family tree" of a director. For instance, here is Martin Scorsese's: http://theylovepictures.com/director/Martin%20Scorsese

Feel free to give me some feedback, but please keep in mind that I don't really plan to make it more than just a side project. I know that the UI/UX is very basic and that having to import a CSV is not user-friendly, and I don't really know if it will scale or if it will work for all kind of profiles, but again, it's nothing more than a toy project, and if it gives some good idea of movies to watch to a couple of film buffs, I'll be happy!

Thanks a lot moonfleet! Actually the reactions motivated me to complete at least a first version. I'm not a good frontend dev but the UI is important in what I want to do so I'm going to developing myself for now. But I'm keeping your email, in case I'd want to upgrade the UI/UX!