Unlurker|About
Is Outbound Going to Die? (rnikhil.com)
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> Having a good Twitter/social media presence will become a compulsory pre-condition. The company owned channels (like websites, email lists or apps) where you have direct access to customers will become key demand generation pipelines. The ability to control their own media presence is what still makes me believe that ActivityPub has a future, but it depends on companies and marketers realizing that they need to be proactive about it; instead of just sitting on their hands and chasing the audiences wherever they think they are going.
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I would put a finer/pithier point on it: The "attention economy" is out, the "trust economy" is in.
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Sometimes I wonder if we as internet people are special in that it seems we can pretty immediately spot vanilla-LLM generated text. I'm sure others have noticed the same, but maybe 20% of my inbound recruiter pings on LinkedIn are straight from GPT and subsequently are immediately dismissed. I posted a job on UpWork last month and probably 60% of the replies were LLM, some of them seemingly automated as they came in moments after I posted. Obviously these were immediately rejected. Is this something we'll have to get used to? I got my first internship in 2015 by cold-emailing the CEO of a Waterloo startup that I thought was really cool. At the time, reaching out directly over email with a thoughtful and earnest introduction was a good way to set yourself apart. I'm not sure that's the case anymore.
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I've got the misfortune of being connected to former sales colleagues on LinkedIn, so I see the kind of posts they are liking. And I can't tell you how many of them are complaining when people complain about cold calling and mass sales emails. I've got a fairly even take on sales, but the absolute entitlement they feel about your time... Outbound can't die soon enough.
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I've been doing GTM for I dunno... 20+ years now, I'm told I'm excellent at it. Never liked outbound, I've never found it's a good part of a GTM, and tbh it's always something I've considered mostly belongs with the folks who think "growth hacking" is a thing...I strongly believe in the pillars of traditional, early 1900s GTM... that is, build real trust, have a credible brand story, get word of mouth going by consistently exceeding expectations, and let your delighted customers become your most effective marketing channel. If you're going to do outbound, go to events or find places real customers might be hanging out and not annoyed by you talking to them. Inbound marketing and community-driven growth strategies have always seemed significantly more durable to me. When people genuinely need and seek out your product, when the recommendation comes from trusted peers rather than relentless cold emails or hyper personalized spam, your sales become robust, resilient, and scalable in a sustainable way, the problems with sales is they're always chasing the next lead. Maybe outbound might yield short term wins...but personally I've always thought... if you want lasting competitive advantage, invest your energy in creating a brand people truly want to share, that's how I've always thought about it anyway, and people have always seemed to enjoy my brands. Outbound will never die, but fingers crossed lazy-ass sales and marketing does!
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I've always been a relationship seller. I agree that a lot of the AI hype surrounding outbound is going to be short lived. When everyone can do infinite outbound, no one will be able to break through. The AI arms race to get a slight edge on response rates is going to destroy that channel. I've been working on https://humancrm.io to scratch my own itch. A CRM that helps me stay focused on relationships. I'm explicitly not adding any AI or automation to it.
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This resonates with me; I hope you're ahead of the curve and we see a time when there's a non-AI valuation multiplier for products & companies.
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We can only hope!
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Whether it's crafted by AI or not, outbound is spam, and only scammy companies use it these days.
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Every enterprise SaaS company with a sales team uses outbound.
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Doesn't make it any less spammy/scammy
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So you agree then?
The Side Hustle From Hell (blog.jacobstechtavern.com)
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Well at least he took learnings from it
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Hahah it was probably just about worth it. Wouldn't if I had kids or it wasn't mostly in COVID time
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> In one Monster-and-Elvanse-fuelled night of passion, I was light years ahead of a build that had taken 3 years. They were sold. MY MAN!
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AuDHD represent :ok:
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Really cathartic read! Thanks so much for writing this. I really related to parts of this and the red flags you point out are very much the red flags I've also noticed with other startups. I almost feel like this could be "required reading" for some.
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I hope @paulg asks me to give this talk at demo day I can make it funnier!
I love this story. Why? Because it is the story of so many startups. I was so perplexed in the mid-90's when the dot com "boom" had started by people who wanted to do a "startup" but had no idea what that meant. Like the author, people with a feeling of Destiny that they would be some leader of something that everyone talked about. I had the same beliefs when I left Sun where clearly I would never be "famous" but by starting a company that became big? Sure anyone could do that. And in fact, a peer at Sun for whom I felt was not particularly qualified at anything, had gone on to a startup which had then gone public and made millions! And if he could do it, well it was guaranteed for me, right? Yeah, no. At the other end of my career and looking back it becomes possible to see things that you missed on the journey, the role of luck, the difference between talking hard and working hard, and the critical importance of the people involved. A million monkeys with a million typewriters won't eventually create Shakespeare's works, they will waste a lot of resources and create a bunch trash. I also discovered that there are people who, when they speak, you really want to believe what they are saying. Being able to step back and say "what's the foundation here? Why should I believe this?" can be very difficult.
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A million monkeys with a million typewrites will statistically have one lucky monkey who creates an extremely successful product which also looks very dumb and very unconvincing ("Srsly? You want to make money from random people hosting strangers in their own rooms?" Bang, AirBnB) The problem is selection bias. A startup is 3 monkeys tops, so the chances of that are appropriately low and if the product looks dumb and unconvincing, it probably is ("...but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.")
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There should probably be an entire chapter written on "Okay, but what if the product was desirable but not 'technically' legal, hmmm?" :-)
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Pitch: It's a replacement for Blockbuster. But instead of going and getting instant gratification and getting to watch the movie you want to watch tonight, you create a wishlist and we send you 3 titles off that list (normally the 3 least popular), which may or may not be what you want to watch right now, and add the convenience of injecting the United States Post Office into the process.
Very surprising that well-designed contracts (with well-designed exit clauses among other issues) aren't at the top of the 'ten red flags' list. This isn't just a problem with tech startups - business partners down the ages have been burning each other with flimsy contractual agreements and 'trust me buddy' rationales when questioned about the contracts. This is one of the best use cases for LLMs by the way - they can often explain contracts to you, or find flaws in contracts. Try pasting one of those long-winded click-through contracts from Apple etc. into any LLM and see if they can help you decipher the terms - then do this with your startup's hiring contract. Also, watch 'The Social Network' and pay attention to things like stock-split clauses and so on. Some claim the world is split between those who understand compound interest and those who don't but I think it's understanding contract law that matters more.
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> This is one of the best use cases for LLMs by the way - they can often explain contracts to you, or find flaws in contracts. I respectfully disagree. Just hire a lawyer. You don’t want your understanding of your contract colored by the opinions of an LLM. The lawyer carries liability insurance if he gives you bad advice. If you don’t have a few hundred dollars to spend on independent legal advice, you might want to reconsider if you are in a position to be starting a business in the first place. The amount of money you could potentially save is nothing compared to what it could cost you in the future if something goes wrong.
This is not true. There's plenty super friendly contracts that just happened to be written by lawyers who are into legalese maximizing. I can imagine that someone trying to screw you over might use obtuse terms to hide that, but the reverse isn't always true. Sometimes things are just obtuse for stupid reasons.
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in my experience it is 100% true, every contract i have seen with over legalese is created by people who expect to be acting on those terms
This is the classic dead-end startup story from beginning to end. It checks all the boxes: - 3 non-technical cofounders - Flurry of activity for everything other than acquiring customers - Attempt to outsource development followed by disappointment - Relentless scope creep - Zero go to market plan, just an incessant belief that more features in the app will solve all problems There is also one less obvious point that is buried in the article: > Simultaneously, my underpaid mid-level consultancy role passed me up for promotion again. I wanted out, double-time. I did volunteer mentoring for a while. Few people went all-in on unpaid startup jobs as their primary role, but many were tempted to do it as side projects. They always believe it’s less risky. The risk they don’t see is that it distracts them from their main job, either slowing career growth or risking a PIP or layoff. The common thread I kept coming back to was this: Ignore the side projects. Focus on career growth at your day job. Put your primary energy into growing your career or finding a job where you can. Something about the side hustle continues to lure people into thinking it’s a way out, until they burn themselves out and sabotage their day job while doing it.
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Excellent analysis. > Something about the side hustle continues to lure people into thinking it’s a way out, until they burn themselves out and sabotage their day job while doing it. Side projects are a way to assert control. The siren song is that you can build your own way out of corporate hell and have a shot at growth (be that financial/personal/etc) without needing 10 randos and 3 committee meetings from your company to sign off on a promotion. In that light, I think it is a very reasonable response. I think it's a symptom of how crappy and ambiguous leveling feels over the long-term. You're told that nothing's definite, just work hard and deliver results, and you'll make it.
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You can stop at - 3 non-technical cofounders
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> Something about the side hustle continues to lure people into thinking it’s a way out, until they burn themselves out and sabotage their day job while doing it. Sample size of 1 - Side hustle #1 funded my toy habit for a long time and gave me the confidence "I can build & support something from start to finish". - Got to C Level working for 'the man' (aka the board). But regardless of level you're never in control of your destiny, especially with the eventuality of PE. For some that's okay, for others that's not... - Which lead to Side Hustle #2. Left my day job 3 years ago.... Now have some of the best in our wee niche using our product, a number of team members, gradually growing it in bootstrapped fashion. No investors, no funding rounds, no chasing growth targets. As "pure" as it can get - adding features, capturing more market, getting positive word of mouth, picking up new countries, finding new edge cases, adding new package upgrades. I think we're around 40% of new clients are referrals/word of mouth..... In the first 6 months of turning billing on you're going "what the heck am I doing...." now I'm "oh I wouldn't give this up..." immensely rewarding bringing other new people into the business, and seeing that flow through to the finished product for our clients. At least in NZ, side hustles are the genesis of a lot of tech companies.
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"Flurry of activity for everything other than acquiring customers" In 16 years on HN this is one of the best pieces of startup advice I've seen. Default should be 10% of time on MVP and landing page, 90% on distribution until you smell PMF. Fight violently against any suggestion you invest more heavily in product until somebody is in tears about keeping up with demand for your MVP.
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Bingo. Tbh I have done personal projects where I am guilty of this.
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Side hustles can be very fruitful! While not tech related, I side hustled with a friend into starting a specialty wet wipe manufacturing business that we ran for 4 years and sold. The side hustle phase was done on PTO and weekends. We worked with the machine maker to get samples that we took to restaurant/hospitality expos to gauge demand. We made a deal with the machine supplier to send finished goods until the machines arrived. Four years later we sold it and I went back to corporate life. It was worth 100x an MBA.
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> The side hustle phase was done on PTO and weekends. Having a physical business and operating it on PTO and weekends is the cleanest way to keep it separate from work. The tech side hustle mistake is to get a tech job, then think you'll do some more tech work as a side hustle. Some people can keep a clean separation, but more commonly people slide into blurring the lines between day job and side job. Trying to build a startup MVP while working a consulting job is basically doing two tech jobs at the same time, with predictable outcomes for both.
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PIPs and layoffs happen to anyone, often randomly. A manager doesn't like you? Here, have a PIP. Good luck trying to seek justice in this situation. You could be working perfectly fine, but the company is complete trash with with hideous ethics. Side projects help finding a better job, or at the very least work on getting certifications or self-development to find a better job.
> unpaid startup jobs Unpaid job is an oxymoron. If they can't or won't pay you, it's either volunteer work, or a hobby. Why do charity work for a business that thinks it's going to be big; there's plenty of funding out there, let them find it and then they can pay you, and you can do work for them. If you want to do an hour or a day or maybe even a week of work for free, ok. Maybe that's fun and interesting and you get something out of that, but after that if you're not getting anything, why would you keep doing it?
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Because you need experience. At least in my country, unpaid internships are the norm; and you won't be taught anything, or held to a lower standard. You just do the job that you'd be normally paid for, just for free. And even then, I had a few friends that had to go for another few months of unpaid job (not internship) later on. Because nobody would hire them without experience, and some companies don't consider internship to be one.
It's easy to be naive as a dev in your mid 20s. It's easy to sell a vision of billionaire startup success to a naive person. Often we sell it to ourselves.
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Feels like there should be the equivalent of Matt Levine's "Certificate of Dumb Investment" for this scenario. 90% of startups fail. Your equity is statistically likely to be worth $0. You will likely grind for years with nothing to show for it except the experience, your network, and whatever cash comp you collected. Proceed accordingly. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24285305
Throughout my long career in the tech industry, from established giants like Oracle to a hyper-growth pre-IPO Airbnb, I've observed a consistent pattern: engineers rarely advance more than one level above their initial hiring position, regardless of their performance or tenure. The only exception were juniors who could rise to a senior. But senior to staff, or whatever you want to call it is almost unheard of unless you jump ship.
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It's a professional version of "a prophet is not without honor, except in his hometown and among his relatives." Familiarity begets being taken for granted, and undervaluation, which hurts one's promotion case.
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Over about 10 years I moved from mid level developer to director (through senior, team lead, engineering manager, sr engineering manager) at the same company. It was a small company that grew and the founders/high level engineers actually saw the value in retaining and growing people and had interesting enough work to keep people from getting bored, so we had high retention. Many of these promotions were out of cycle (because there was no cycle) and now that I’m at a bigger company I see how this would be much more difficult. There seems to be little interest in really retaining and growing engineering talent and all promotions are at the mercy of an entrenched HR org that doesn’t understand the work that anyone is doing. On top of that budgets are generally much tighter now than I’ve ever seen during my career. It may still be possible to do this at smaller companies, with the obvious caveat that there’s always the danger of title inflation, though now that I’m at a bigger company I feel like I see more title inflation around me than I ever did at the smaller company. There are also entrenched structures of power that are obviously working against the success of the company and are causing good people to leave. I do wonder if more companies embraced promotions it would lead to a healthier organizational culture in general since you’d have more people around who were involved in creating it.
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Yup. You get Bucketed and there is no growth
Amazing analysis. To be fair, I think there were a lot of reasons I was passed for promotion at Deloitte. I can grind like a mofo but am a terrible fit for client-facing roles (AuDHD).
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TIL AuDHD = "Autistm + ADHD".
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Same, I saw it on Twitter and just wanted to use it :D
Right? I literally can't even call it a proper warning because of how much I took out of it. My whole career was jumpstarted by my second startup (we only got to preseed but it was a great two years) and there's no way I'd have been as good a fit without this experience
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I think you nailed it here. >> I hope that by reading this story, I can protect some of you from 11 months of pain. That's not how experience works. What you really did was get an 11 month business education. And again, you can tell your story, but you can't pass on that education. I'm glad you moved on to better things. And I think you're saying that this experience prepared you for that, and you were a better overall entrepreneur because of it. Thats how experience works.
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But maybe he can compress someone else's terrible experience down to 6 or 3 months, or stop them from sinking their own money (or that of family/friends) into an obvious faliure. There's another failures to go around; we don't all need to life every one of them.
Reality Check (wheresyoured.at)
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The pivot of the article is this, at the end: "There are no other hypergrowth markets left in tech." That's the key. Tech is, at the moment, the only growth engine that prevents both the tech industry and the whole world economy to crash.
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Seriously, this opening! > people are babbling about the "AI revolution" as the sky rains blood and crevices open in the Earth, dragging houses and cars and domesticated animals into their maws. Things are astronomically fucked outside, It took me 20+ ranty paragraphs to realise that this guy is not, actually, an AI doomer. Dear tech writers, there's camps and sides here, and they're all very deeply convinced of being right. Please make clear which one you're on before going down the deep end in anger.
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> sky rains blood This reminds me of Neon Genesis Evangelion. Of course, no one realized (at least publicly) that it is a metaphor for "everyone claps at the end" (also the ending of the original series). Sound of rain sounds like an audience clapping. "Blood rain" means real claps, not some fake condescending simulacra of it. "So that is how democracy dies? With thunderous applause." is also a reference to the same metaphor. Both movies relate to the theme of sacrifice, worthiness, humanity survival. Are you guys are too much into giant robots to even notice those things?
Current AI could have produced this article in under 5 minutes. Does knowing a human wrote this article over days of mulling increase or decrease its value?
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I don't know. Neither do you. Stay long NVDA, somebody'll take the other side of the bet, and eventually we'll all be able to look back and see where we started finding out who'd called it.
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Dyson sphere is coming. Gen 1 test panels going up as early as next year. 2026. Thorium reactors coming online. Interesting times ahead.
Well, people have been saying Tesla is overvalued for years and it’s only just now started to come down. It’s still massively overvalued on PE compared to other car companies. GameStop is still trading at 82 PE. Insane valuation. Apple and Google are money printers and only trade at 20-30.
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As long as we're throwing bromides around, "how did he go bankrupt? Well, two ways: slowly at first, and then all at once."
I think the author might need a reality check. In almost every company the usage of AI is becoming more and more valuable. Even if progress in models freezes and halts, the current state is too valuable. I have talked to multiple people in multiple companies and LLMs are becoming indispensable at so many things. Yes chatgpt might or might not conquer the world but the enterprise usage I don't see decreasing (and I am not talking about customer facing LLM usage which might be very stupid).
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> In almost every company the usage of AI is becoming more and more valuable. It's certainly becoming more common, and there are lots of people who want it to be valuable, and indeed believe it's valuable. Personally, I find it about as valuable as a really, really good intellisense. Which is certainly valuable, but I feel like that's way off from the type/quality/quantity of value you're suggesting.
The author's tone is over the top, but I think this quote is true: > Large Language Models and their associated businesses are a $50 billion industry masquerading as a trillion-dollar panacea for a tech industry that’s lost the plot. There are very real use cases with high value, but it's not an economy-defining technology, and the total value is going to fall far short of projections. On bottom lines, the overall productivity gain from AI for most companies is almost a rounding error compared to other factors.
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Hopefully you are right, but I fear this is a very naive and premature judgement. At one point the internet was a $50B industry insisting it would be a $1T industry. It even had a bubble, bursting and burying entire companies. Yet, $1T was nevertheless a profound under estimation.
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Is it? There's certainly $1T of other businesses built with the internet, but the internet business, itself, was rapidly commoditized. The valuable things were the applications built on it, not the network. The argument here is that nobody's found the $1T applications built on AI foundation models yet, but OpenAI is valued as if they have, because their demo chatbot took off out of peoples' curiosity and people are extrapolating that accident exponentially into the future.
Show HN: Sim Studio – Open-Source Agent Workflow GUI (github.com/simstudioai)
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asdf
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> Building reliable, multi-step agent systems with current frameworks often gets complicated fast. In my experience so far it's not just complicated, but effectively impossible. I struggle to get a single agent to reliably & consistently use tools, and adding n+1 agents is a error multiplier.
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on our platform (for the providers that allow granular tool use control), you can actually 'force' certain tool calls and have the agent dynamically select others. this was a painpoint that we faced ourselves and were confused why any frameworks didn't allow granular tool use control if the provider allows it. try it out and let us know what you think
Congrats on the launch! Looking forward to playing with it. Do you mind elaborating on what differentiates Sim Studio from n8n, Flowise, RAGFlow and other open source flow based AI automation platforms?
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Thanks! The main difference between Sim Studio and other open-source AI agent workflow builders is the level of abstraction used when creating agents. For instance, n8n has a "memory" parameter, which is not an inherent parameter of LLMs. You can inject your agent's memories into the agent message history (or system prompt) - which is the most common scenario - but we give you control over that. We want to provide visibility, so everything that's exposed on the workflow canvas is exactly what's being executed in the background. Also, we think it's faster and more intuitive to get your workflow up and running in Sim Studio. I'd love your feedback, though! What do you think?
Show HN: A pure WebGL image editor with filters, crop and perspective correction (github.com/xdadda)
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Lol, I added a todo yesterday: "find or build good image cropper, ideally gl based" ;) Guess the search might be over, thanks!
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I'm so glad this exsist. I've been meaning to get something similar started, but did not due to one reason or the other. I'll definitely try to contribute.
it's the composition menu ... will rename it just select the area you wish to crop and then move to the other settings (colors, ...) to edit it
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I did this but when I hit download, I got back the original image instead of the cropped image.
Why Pale Blue Dot generates feelings of cosmic insignificance (aeon.co)
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Obviously, everyone generates feelings in different ways. However, Pale Blue Dot I would hope generates feeling that we're all on this rock together. We're all human and we should all be on the same side of working together for our species. Astronauts that have seen earth from afar get a profound feeling of love for Earth and humanity, and that we're all in this together (should be all in this together). There is a beautiful scene about this that articulates it well. It is a NASA documentary about a female astronaut that sees Earth from space for the first time. I wish I could find which movie it is.
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As is so often the case, the late great Douglas Adams had a relevant quote: "And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex — just to show her. And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it. To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion."
The Egyptian-Greek-Roman notions of the cosmos and their related Judeo-Christian-Islamic religious traditions seem to have a much harder time accepting the scientific revelations of the depths of time and space than Buddhist and Hindu philosophies, which have vast notions of time (though perhaps not space) baked in, eg: > "Imagine a great mountain of solid iron, one hundred leagues high and wide. If once every hundred years a man were to brush it lightly with a cloth, the mountain would be worn away before a kalpa ends. And yet many kalpas have already passed." (Buddhist Sutra description of a kalpa) As secularism became more prevalent in Europe and America, some new voices appeared - eg, HP Lovecraft, one of the first writers to really dive into the consequences of the discovery of the immensity of time and space. It's likely difficult for people who've been taught their entire lives that they're the entire point of existence and the most significant element in a cosmic story, to have material scientific reality make such a mockery of that notion, and indeed many have thus fled from that 'deadly light' into what Lovecraft called 'the peace and safety of a new dark age.'
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The description of a kalpa made me think of the "Heaven Sent" episode of Dr Who: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven_Sent_(Doctor_Who)
The other existential question I've asked is, "How do I know any of you are conscious?" It may be in fact, that I am the only one who is conscious.
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Other people will occasionally verbalize the same kind of thoughts that I've had yet never spoken aloud. That's enough to make me accept that we're at least thinking in the same way.
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The next question would then be why are you singled out? The lack of any reason for that makes it seem quite unlikely in my book :)
[flagged]
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" Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Unless you are a mod, please don't "dismiss shallowly" my comment by quoting rules to me. My comment was substantive.
I learnt it the hard way that not everyone appreciates the beauty of our cosmic insignificance. Most people are fully immersed in this tiny world we built and I sometimes envy them.
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We didn't build this world though. If anything it built us. And everywhere we look there's depth to it, whether we contemplate the stars, the worlds inside ourselves, or mundane earth events like a glance over clinked glasses when you fell in love... Here's some Borges: "Tennyson said that if we could understand a single flower we would know who we are and what the world is. Perhaps he meant that there is no deed, however so humble, which does not implicate universal history and the infinite concatenation of causes and effects. Perhaps he meant that the visible world is implicit, in its entirety, in each manifestation, just as, in the same way, will, according to Schopenhauer, is implicit, in its entirety, in each individual.
We're just upright spear monkeys. We're supposed to be immersed in this world.
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I fear that might be true for majority of humans. My problem with these immersed people of this world is that it’s like being residents of a terrarium, entirely at the mercy of the Lord to keep the A/C on. We need few people to wonder what is out there - who is maintaining the terrarium temperature?
Show HN: I built a hardware processor that runs Python (runpyxl.com)
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To reflash ch32v003 chips, I need to create bits of 250ns, so with 480ns it's not enough. Is there a way to make it faster?
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Up next: a processor that will directly execute your prompt
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genuinely not a bad idea
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This always mede think back to J1 Forth CPU https://excamera.com/files/j1.pdf
I'd like to invite any Python devs to go on a tangent with me: Can you give me the scoop on Python, the language? I see things like this project, and it seems very impressive, but being an outsider to the language, I don't "get" it. More specifically: I'm curious to hear thoughts on a) what made this difficult prior to now (with Python), b) why Python is useful for this, and c) what are your thoughts on Python itself? To add some more context: I know a lot of developers who work with Python (Flask); Some love it, some hate it (as with any language). My experience has been mainly via homelab/OSS tools that all seem to embrace the language. And yet while the language itself seems very straight forward and easy to use, my experience with the Python _ecosystem_ (again, as an outsider) has been... difficult. Python 2 vs 3, virtual environments, libraries for each version, etc. It feels as though anytime I've had to use it outside a pre-built Docker container, these issues result in throwing spaghetti at the wall trying to figure out how to even get it working at all. As a PHP/Go dev, it's one of the languages for which I could see myself having a real interest, but this has so far made me hesitant (and I don't want to be).
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The gist is that basic Python at its very core is - a) simple b) limited The language really took off when developers took this simple limited language and pushed it to its very limits using C extensions. The data science explosion opened up the language to a very wide user base. So to answer your 3 questions: a) Python is not a fast language by any means. There is a lot of overhead in every function call that makes it almost impossible for low latency/real-time use cases. b) I don't think Python is particularly the best language for this. This is just a demonstration of someone building their own custom toolchain to show what is possible with just pure Python. The author has highlighted why they think this is interesting on the website. c) I keep thinking Python will go away soon, and we will see a much better alternative. But the reality is Python is entrenched deeply just like JavaScript. Lot of smart people are putting in a lot of effort to make it better. Personally the ecosystem and packaging story does not annoy me much, but the lack of proper threading (GIL) has hurt my projects more than once. For your particular pain point, the current community recommended solution is to use uv ( https://github.com/astral-sh/uv ). There were several detours (pip, pyenv, pipenv, poetry etc.) the community took before they got behind this.
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Python is just brutally slow. Anything performance-sensitive has to be done with a native module and now that requires all the same compilation and build tooling that everything else does. The ecosystem is massive and the core team just keeps adding more and more dubious language features and syntax.
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Yeah python has become more and more version and deps hell. Honestly 3 was all cost and no benefit and we'd all be fine if we'd stuck with 2. There were also some early missteps in api design like async and pandas and matplotlib that we all now have to live with. I even ran into problems with PIL changing API for textsize recently. Just a thousand cuts. And yet for simple little standalone programs and notebooks, particularly for science, it is super simple and natural to turn to it.
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My impression was that if you had a problem with Python and then added Docker now you have two problems. I worked at one place where the data sci's had an amazing ability to find defective Pythons. Python is going in the right directions in terms of all the deployability and big issues but it should have been where it is now 7 years ago. Specifically, I sketched out a system that worked like uv but was written in pure Python, I didn't start on it for two reasons: (a) the bootstrapping problem that I couldn't ever stop devs from trashing the Python that it runs in, and (b) from lots of trying it didn't seem possible to convince most Pythoners that pip was broken or that it mattered... uv solved (a) by removing Python from the bootstrap and (b) by being crazy fast.
Back when C# came out, I thought for sure someone would make a processor that would natively execute .Net bytecode. Glad to see it finally happened for some language.
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The tl;dr (I spent lots of time investigating this) is that it just fundamentally isn’t a good bytecode for execution. It’s designed to be small on disk, not hardware friendly
Not yet — I'm currently testing on a Zynq-7000 platform (embedded-class FPGA), mainly because it has an ARM CPU tightly integrated (and it's rather cheap). I use the ARM side to handle IO and orchestration, which let me focus the FPGA fabric purely on the Python execution core, without having to build all the peripherals from scratch at this stage. To run PyXL on a server-class FPGA (like Azure instances), some adaptations would be needed — the system would need to repurpose the host CPU to act as the orchestrator, handling memory, IO, etc. The question is: what's the actual use case of running on a server? Besides testing max frequency -- for which I could just run Vivado on a different target (would need license for it though) For now, I'm focusing on validating the core architecture, not just chasing raw clock speeds.
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You can get cheap Zynq boards on Aliexpress, like old mining boards. I have a Paralella board here with a Zynq.
Good question — I’m not 100% sure. I'm not an expert on Ruby or JS internals, and I haven’t studied their execution models deeply. But in theory, if the language is stack-based (or can be mapped cleanly onto a stack machine), and if the ISA is broad enough to cover their needs, it could be possible. Right now, PyXL’s ISA is tuned around Python’s patterns — but generalizing it for other languages would definitely be an interesting challenge.
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I assume Lua would fit the bill then definitely.
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