Top all-time · #3265
Calvin French-Owen
Personal blog · calv.info · on HN as calvinfoprogrammingai
Calvin French-Owen's personal blog at calv.info covers programming and ai. Since 2012, 23 different Hacker News readers have linked it 29 times, most often “Lessons for Early Stage Founders”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-26, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Calvin French-Owen's blog for its heat pump explainer and calculator, and for older Node and Express tips. Commenters cite it in threads on heat pumps and Node backends.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Lessons for Early Stage Founders4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-12-01
- Heat pumps, more than you wanted to know (2023)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-02-10
- Reflections on OpenAI3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-07-15
- Node and Express Tips2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-08-06
- An Introduction to Node's New Streams2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-06-26
- You Still Need to Think2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-10-16
What Hacker News says?
I think this just further demonstrates the truth behind the truly small & scrappy teams culture at OpenAI that an ex-employee recently shared [1]. Even with the way the presenters talk, you can sort of see that OAI prioritizes speed above most other things, and a naive observer might think they are testing things a million different ways before releasing, but actually, they're not. If we draw up a 2x2 for Danger (Hi…
Comment linking /openai-reflections
on “GPT-5”Submitted Small Models Have Arrived as a story · 800 points
HN discussionDoing the actual refactor was probably 25% of the time investment here. When I saw the GitHub launch post about the new UI I started having a few ideas about how it could be improved, so I started hacking on it in Photoshop. Usually these kinds of things just end up in a trash folder somewhere, but I was digging where it was going so I kept at it. As for writing the article, we actually like to encourage each other…
Comment linking /an-introduction-to-nodes-new-streams/
on “Refactoring GitHub's Design”Submitted Reflections on OpenAI as a story · 771 points
HN discussion> Their attention apears to already be quite diffuse if buying a python package manager is an item anywhere on their agenda. According to the blog [0], their whole monorepo is in Python, their models are obviously trained using Python, their experiments are written using Python and core and CLI of their Codex is written using Rust. Uv brings both Python and Rust expertise. You’re talking nonsense because of your bli…
Comment linking /openai-reflections
on “Astral to Join OpenAI”Submitted How to sell a B2B product as a story · 643 points
HN discussionRelated: https://calv.info/heat-pumps
Comment linking /heat-pumps
on “Launch HN: Electric Air (YC W23) – Heat pump sold directly to homeowners”Submitted The Cost of an ACL Injury as a story · 272 points
HN discussionCalvin (Segment) and Baker (Plaid) also recently put together a nice up-to-date heat pump info page and a heat pump vs. existing HVAC calculator. https://heatpumpshooray.com/ https://calv.info/heat-pumps
Comment linking /heat-pumps
on “How a Heat Pump Works”Submitted Heat pumps, more than you wanted to know (2023) as a story · 263 points
HN discussionhttp://calv.info/node-and-express-tips/ Here's a link with some information.
Comment linking /node-and-express-tips/
on “Ask HN: Segment.io Backend Stack?”Submitted Lessons for Early Stage Founders as a story · 129 points
HN discussionSubmitted What 10gen nailed with MongoDB as a story · 109 points
HN discussionSubmitted An Introduction to Node's New Streams as a story · 76 points
HN discussionSubmitted Node and Express Tips as a story · 65 points
HN discussionSubmitted Upsides and Downsides as a story · 57 points
HN discussionSubmitted You Still Need to Think as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Coding Agent Metagame as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Lessons for Early Stage Founders as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted The real magic of GPT-3 as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted You Still Need to Think as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Lessons for early stage founders from Segment's journey as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Great products don’t require permission as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted The One-Trick Pony and the Empire as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Durable Objects Are Made for Agents as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted From Founder to CTO as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Visiting Quaise – ultra deep geothermal energy as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Lessons for Early Stage Founders as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Coding Agents in Feb 2026 as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
