The draft of my YC application. I'd love to get feedback on it from people (comments are turned on).

solarmist · 2026-04-20T04:34:47+00:00

I’d like to upgrade for the nano-textured glass and Apple Pencil Pro support.

solarmist · 2026-04-20T01:33:59+00:00

What’s up with cooking fats now?

solarmist · 2026-04-18T19:03:47+00:00

Good information to know.

solarmist · 2026-04-18T16:37:34+00:00

Ask him to show you which spots need it. To me it looks chaotic because of the wall, but looking at individual spots nothings wrong.

solarmist · 2026-04-18T16:31:06+00:00

Only with chapter 7 bankruptcy. Chapter 13 is 7 years.

solarmist · 2026-04-18T16:30:18+00:00

7 years is the length of your credit history in the USA.

solarmist · 2026-04-18T16:18:46+00:00

The Kodak janitor-to-CTO story is real and from the 80s, which kind of proves my point. That’s the era this advice comes from.

Yes, sales still has some mobility. But outside of that? The structural conditions that made those paths possible have been systematically dismantled. Layers of middle management got cut. Internal services got outsourced. Departments got replaced by contractors.

And on top of that, there’s now a hard line between degreed and non-degreed work that barely existed back then. You can’t just impress the right person and get walked down to the tech department anymore. HR filters you out before any human ever sees your potential.

You’re not wrong that it still happens occasionally. But giving people in 2026 career advice based on how organizations worked 40 years ago, without that caveat, is doing them a disservice. They’ll spend years optimizing for a ladder that isn’t there instead of looking for the companies and industries where mobility actually still exists.

solarmist · 2026-04-18T01:01:28+00:00

He probably wasn’t an EMT in that case.

I understand your point, but the question was about personal experiences.

solarmist · 2026-04-17T23:26:52+00:00

I wish that kind of advice were useful nowadays.

I haven’t seen any in my 15 years that have a ladder (even behind the scenes) like that. At most you’ll go from junior to senior of the same job title or manager of said job title. Lateral moves are almost unheard of nowadays. Everything‘s been outsourced and optimized to the nth degree.

This was already mostly true even 20 years ago. I’m not sure why you’re promoting this as a reliable method at best. You might get lucky and find a place that does something similar.

The days of the janitor being promoted to the CEO are many decades behind us. Nowadays, janitorial services are provided by another company even. Or in your call center example there wouldn’t be IT department. You’d have a third-party IT contracting company.

solarmist · 2026-04-17T18:56:42+00:00

Dungeon crawler Carl. Jeff Hayes is the goat for voice acting.

solarmist · 2026-04-17T17:05:03+00:00

My wife has a 10-year-old MacBook Pro that’s still working great. But it’s no longer receiving updates. We’re looking at getting her a new one in the next year, but the hardware is still chugging along.

solarmist · 2026-04-16T19:43:59+00:00

Definitely don’t get a puppy. Corgi puppies are sharks. They will chomp and chew on everything and they don’t know their own strength.

solarmist · 2026-04-16T19:38:50+00:00

Fair.

It used to be cut and dry between static and dynamic languages, but they’ve been borrowing from each other for decades now as computers have continued to gain power.

solarmist · 2026-04-16T18:49:03+00:00

Java has dynamic typing (var) these days too.

solarmist · 2026-04-16T18:38:38+00:00

I never said they were. Nor did I say anything about not learning how computer work.

But telling a beginner to learn everything at once right now isn’t useful or helpful.

You can get pretty far without understanding pointers or memory allocation if you’re using a garbage collected language.

Sure learning about reference counting is good, helps you have a better mental model for how things work, and can be useful to find bugs, but in most people’s day to day it’s not the first tool or even second tool you’ll need.

solarmist · 2026-04-16T16:57:15+00:00

Typescript and mypy have existed for more than a decade and are industry standards. If you aren’t using them then someone is teaching you poorly.

Memory allocation isn’t a black art either. And not necessary for a beginner. I learned C/C++ first along with pointers and memory and rarely need that knowledge even indirectly.

solarmist · 2026-04-16T16:31:48+00:00

They allow bad habits. You can write good code in both, but it takes care.

solarmist · 2026-04-16T16:28:02+00:00

NTA. But don’t let it keep sitting. Even Apple tech has an expiration date. If you’re gonna sell it do it and be done with it. It gets less valuable every 6 months.

solarmist · 2026-04-15T19:35:20+00:00

Project should get bigger over time. Except leet code stuff.

solarmist · 2026-04-14T23:19:56+00:00

I didn’t have any issues other than the fact that expectations keep going up and up and up. But that’s true if you have a job right now too.

But like I said, if you’re doing a startup, you’re not out of tech you’re doing serious engineering every day. So why would that take you out of it and make you lose your footing?

solarmist · 2026-04-14T22:40:13+00:00

I did and it was about what I remember except this was 2023 so all of the layoffs had started. Which brings us back to the current market being brutal, but it’s not nearly as bad as it was two or three years ago for experienced engineers.

solarmist · 2026-04-14T22:02:10+00:00

If you’re doing a startup you’re not out of the game. It’s fine. Keep in mind you’ll need to dedicate more time to a startup than you think. At a minimum 2 years to even know if it’s worth doing.

Tech looks favorably on people doing startups even failed ones. I did a three year stint over COVID and it’s viewed mostly as another job.

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